Andrew McCluskey’s home on the web

I’ve been very slack with the posting and my excuses include: playing Oblivion, house sitting, starting to play with a game engine, fixing my electric guitar, watching Dexter, and generally being lazy.  Completely unrelated is the band Beirut, who are awesome.  Here’s a sweet video of theirs I found on youtube while showing them off to a friend.  Enjoy!

My aspirations to build a Solaris fileserver have finally been realised and I now have 2TB of networked storage sitting beneath my desk as I type this. Now that the server is built and working, I figured it was time to share my experiences with the world.

The Requirements

Put simply, I wanted a fileserver to host all of my music, movies and other files in a central location that was networked with the rest of my house. Not only did I want to store my files, but I wanted around 2TB of actual storage so that it would last me a while, as well as some sort of protection against an inevitable drive failure. Unless you want to run some sort of backup software, which I don’t, then RAID is generally how you protect against drive failures.  So RAID it was.

After some research, I decided that a dedicated box with RAID was definitely going to meet my needs the best. I also decided that RAID 1 (a simple mirror) was inefficient as it sacrifices too much drive space. As cheap as storage is these days, I’m still a poor uni student. So, something like RAID 5 is what I wanted. Once this was decided, it was time to look at filesystems. It didn’t take long to see that Sun’s ZFS with raidz was probably the way to go. This made the choice of operating system simple, as ZFS means Solaris unless you want to run your filesystem in userspace. To be honest, I’m not sure how much this would impact performance, but a chance to get acquainted with a new OS was too good to pass up, so Solaris it was.
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Just a quick post to show off this cute video of my friend’s dog playing with another friend’s cat. For the geeks out there, this was shot on a jailbroken iPhone using Cycorder and then transcoded to h.264 using iMovie.

A few nights ago I was setting up my new fileserver (post to come soon) when I heard something like fireworks on my street. Upon further investigation I saw big flashes which were going off in time with the exploding sounds. After a little while I saw that people were down on the street watching whatever the show was, so I went down and got some footage. For the record this was in Kenmore Hills some time around 2-3am on 14 Jan 2009. If anyone knows what this is, please let me know via email or in the comments.

I’ve been looking into converting a bunch of OGG files to MP3 files for a friend using BASH.  As the files are organised in a directory structure, I need to traverse the directory structure, and run lame against each file to convert it.  Having a look around for BASH scripts to traverse a directory structure, I found someone with a similar problem who solved it using the “find” command.  I’ve taken their solution and added filtering by file extension.  This solution traverses a directory structure, filters the results using a regular expression, and then executes a command against each of the filtered results.  In general the command works something like this:

find /home/music -iregex ^.*\\.ogg$ -exec mysweetcommand '{}' \;

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