I'm looking into a RAID setup myself for a video-on-demand system at home using MythTV. (I want to rip my DVDs of television shows to the hard drive so I can watch them without having to flip discs.)
Having recently built a 2.8TB RAID 5 array for home use, I wrote a long Usenet post on this very topic.
Backups of that seem kind of funny - I have a DL DVD drive, but it's going to take almost as many discs as the original DVDs if I leave them in the MPEG format.
As I wrote elsewhere in the resulting thread, I'm not going to worry about backups for my array; it's simply too expensive and impractical.
Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven and the longtime head of the astronaut corps (i.e., the guy with the final say on flight crew assignments), pushed hard to use an airliner-style crew system for the shuttle. That is, have a small group of pilots and mission specialists that would fly repeatedly together, with one-off payload specialists handling mission-specific duties. He'd seen how frustrating life was for the later '60s astronaut classes that only saw a few members fly, and sometimes not for decades. And this was back when NASA genuinely believed each shuttle would spend as little as two weeks before launching again.
Instead, we got the worst of both words: A launch schedule in which four shuttles did at most a dozen launches a year together, little likelihood of even that annual figure in the three remaining shuttles' lifetimes, and an astronaut corps that numbers in the hundreds with new inductees coming in every two years. That's just crazy.
Bah! Everyone knows that the so-called "tadpoles" are actually living sun creatures. Fortunately, they're unlikely to attack Earth again because the Superfriends defeated them after Lex Luthor foolishly tried to strike a deal with the creatures.
[W]hile I have just as many problems as y'all do with the government, I still like the freedoms afforded me, especially when it comes to access of information.
But . . . but . . . I thought we Americans lived in a fascist imperialist warmongering state led by Bushitler who sends his Ashcroftian secret police to raid the homes of those who dare to defy the RIAA and MPAA's edicts! Or something like that. You mean the United States might *not* be the worst place in history to live in?!? Impossible!
Far more common is the configuration this board has, with one 64/133, one 64/100 and one 32/33. Realistically, for your scenario, that should be more than adequate.
How about something like this? Assuming I can find two four-channel PCI/66 ATA controller cards (two-channel PCI/66 cards are easy to find, I know). I'm not necessarily looking for the ne plus ultra of performance, but rather some reasonable combination of price, performance, and stability that will let me serve HDTV streams and below. This machine is appealing because of the cost, the Intel motherboard, the dual processors. The company is local to me too, so I'd save on the shipping too.
Why use RAID50 instead of RAID5 ? You're not going to get any meaningful performance benefit and you're "wasting" a drive that could be otherwise used for more space or a hotspare.
You're right; I'm planning to go with RAID 5, not 50. I neglected to make that clear.
I would suggest using a motherboard with multiple PCI buses. Basically, look for something that's got two (or more) 64 bit PCI-X slots, as these boards nearly always have multiple PCI buses. It will be in the detailed specs - you want at least three 64 bit/66Mhz (or faster) buses on the board - one for each slot and one for "everything else" (onboard network, USB, video, any other PCI slots, etc). Added to this, I'd go so far as to strongly advise buying a genuine intel "server" or "workstation" board.
Would something like this qualify? It has two PCI-X slots, but I don't see any mention of multiple PCI buses per se.
I'm very interested in this subject, and recently began a Usenet thread on the topic with this post:
BACKGROUND:
Inspired by http://www.finnie.org/terabyte/, a few months ago I started a thread to discuss the idea of building my own 1.5TB storage array using software RAID50 to hold video files.
The main hitch keeping me from going ahead was that I had trouble finding eight 250GB drives at the price I wanted. Clearly, I wasn't thinking big enough; just before Christmas, I lucked out and bought nine Seagate *400GB* drives at $230 each (plus a $30 rebate on the first one) from CompUSA. I now have 3.6TB of raw storage sitting in a shipping carton in my apartment. Even with RAID 5 and keeping a drive as a spare, I'll have 400GB*8-400GB=2.8TB of space.
PURPOSE: Video files (episodes of TV shows I already watch and enjoy, plus rips of TV shows on DVD sets I own). I'd like to build a MythTV system too, but the storage array comes first. No games.
PRIORITIES, in order: * Stability. I'm very much in favor of build-right-and-leave-it-be as opposed to constant hardware tinkering. * Minize heat/noise. I have a studio apartment. * Price. I've already spent a fortune on the drives; I don't want to spend more on the rest than I need to. * Performance. Not that I'm against a fast machine, but I know that a storage server doesn't need the latest-and-greatest in terms of horsepower.
PARTS: Advice is always appreciated. All prices are from ZipZoomFly.com unless otherwise specified.
* Case: Antec SX1040BII, $92. I almost went with an Antec PlusView1000AMG ($72), but decided that a) the SX1040BII's 430W power supply might be enough for my purposes and b) if it isn't, a quality Antec supply for $20 that I can use someplace else is hard to pass up. * Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 Rev 2, $98. I'm building a system with *massive* amounts of PCI traffic, and I'm hoping a Nvidia-chipset board will prove more stable than the hordes of Via-based models out there. * CPU: AMD Mobile Athlon XP 2400+, $89 at Newegg. The 2200+ is $10 cheaper but they're both rated at 35W. If there's a sub-35W processor that supports a 266-MHz FSB I'd like to hear about it. * CPU heat sink: I'm lost here. I've had a good experience with a Thermalright SLK-800 I installed three years ago, but current Thermalright heat sinks all seem to specify Athlon 2500+ and up. What gives? * CPU fan: A leftover Vantec 80mm fan. Loud but effective. * Memory: One 512MB DDR PC3200 DIMM. $80 at Crucial. My leftover 256MB PC133 168-pin DIMMs aren't going to work with the motherboard, right? * Power supply: Thermaltake PurePower 560W, $102. In case the Antec 430W supply mentioned above proves insufficient. * Drives: Eight Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB ATA drives plus one cold spare, $230 each at CompUSA without rebate; currently $230 each after $70 rebate. Lite-On DVD+-RW drive, $60-100. Leftover Maxtor 13GB ATA drive for booting. * ATA controller: Two Highpoint RocketRAID 454, $87 each at Newegg. Unlike Ryan Finnie I am *not* planning on doing hardware RAID features; rather, I'm simply looking for high-quality ATA controller cards. If anyone can recommend high-quality non-RAID controller cards with four channels (or more) on each, I'd like to hear about it. For that matter, if four two-channel ATA controller cards are doable with my motherboard setup, I'd like to hear about that too.
Another reader points to ground-based monitoring stations detecting a surge in cosmic rays at the time of the flare.
Oh no! Reed Richards, his wife Susan, brother-in-law Johnny, and test pilot Ben Grimm just took off in Dr. Richards' rocketship! They didn't know about the solar storm. I hope they'll be all right!
Freeman and Goldin both said that after Summers' mentioned the "innate differences" hypothesis, he explicitly told the audience: "I'd like to be proven wrong on this one."
By that point Hopkins, a renowned cancer researcher who last year was inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, had left the conference room. She said she was concerned that it would be "rude" to get up midway through Summers' speech, but "it was just too upsetting" for her to stay.
[...]
Freeman said that Hopkins' decision to take her concerns to the press was "very bizarre in my view." Summers said he had not expected that the comments would be published.
"If I disagree with you, I should tell you why I disagree with you and what the evidence for my point is. It shouldn't be that I leave the room and call up a reporter and complain there," Freeman said.
What I want to know is, how well would the Mac Mini work for MythTV? I know MythTV on OS X isn't quite ready for prime time yet, but what about running Linux on it instead?
What good are all those billions we spend for NASA's budget, when we don't even have a single hydrogen bomb-carrying spaceship? Can we trust the Space Administration to be able to dig up even a single team of expert oil drillers to blow up Machholz once it's inevitably revealed as the Texas-sized planet killer it surely is? I think not.
-You don't get a "real" IP address. It's a 10.x.x.x address going through a NAT. Be sure that any firewalls or admin tools can cope with that.
Dial 611 on the phone to talk to T-Mobile customer service and ask to change your Unlimited Internet service option to the VPN Unlimited Internet option. If the customer service representative you speak to doesn't know what you're talking about, call back until you find one that does. The VPN option gives you a real IP address.
-Given the odd screen size and intermittent connectivity, screen will become your best friend.
GNU screen is always your friend. Next to emacs, it's the most ginomously useful piece of software ever written for anyone who logs into a shell, remotely or not.
I finally managed to win Raid on Bungeling Bay years after the fact (late 1990s), using VICE (and its keyboard-based joystick emulation) on a Pentium 133MHz running Linux. And yes, it really was quite satisfying.
Just d/l the iso's to a second partition (I keep mine at the minimum required to fit all the isos, so like 2.5 gigs), then d/l the boot kernel, set it up to boot in grub or lilo, restart, and select that kernel to boot to.
I was wondering how to do this exact thing. I'm comfortable mucking with grub, but where, exactly, is the boot kernel to be used here? The 5MB.iso image?
The last shiny widget I acquired was my SonyEricsson T610. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to be suckered into a two-year contract (which I am only halfway through) for the pleasure of owning it.
I lucked out; I got *paid* $200 by T-Mobile and Amazon for taking a T610, and only had to sign a one-year contract that, come to think of it, expires next month. I'll probably keep the phone for a while longer; I used its predecessor for more than three years.
I feel guilty for bringing this invasive technology into this guy's life.
Your post is the funniest *and* most poignant comment I've read all week. I appreciate your posting it.
PS - You mentioned an "an asteroids-type space shooter." Almost certainly Maelstrom, which has since been open sourced and ported to multiple platforms.
Ah yes, that upstanding BBC, with its long tradition of unbiased reporting.
Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.
They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.
Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."
Disingenuous. Mass challenges have never occurred because there's never been a mechanism, or even motivation, to do so. But the Help America Vote Act of 2002 supplied the motivation; it is the law that provides for the provisional ballots BBC's Palast mentions above.
* Black GOP voters in FL had their votes "not counted" (in the Democratic activists' definition of the term) much, much, much more frequently than their Democratic counterparts. * Hispanics and whites showed up in error on the ineligible-to-vote felon list more frequently than blacks.
He also points out what is unquestionably the single most unambiguous (and, naturally, the least-reported) case of "voter suppression" in FL in the 2000 election:
Florida polls were open until 8 P.M. on election night. The problem was that Florida's ten heavily Republican western-panhandle counties are on Central, not Eastern, time. When polls closed at 8 P.M. EST in most of the state, the western-panhandle polling places were still open for another hour. Yet, at 8 Eastern, all the networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and NBC) incorrectly announced many times over the next hour that the polls were closed in the entire state. CBS national news made 18 direct statements that the polls had closed.
[...]
Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded Mr. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the panhandle after Florida was called early for Gore. Another survey of western-panhandle voters conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling company, immediately after the election estimated that the early call cost Bush approximately 10,000 votes.
Naturally, in Palast's 70 pages of the usual innuendo and bogus charges (coupled with the typical overseas cant of "U5 V0T3R5 AR3NT 5331NG TH3 TRUTH!!!1!11!!!"), the word "Panhandle" never appears.
Besides the UMN site already mentioned above, I highly recommend everyone regularly visit RealClear Politics (whose rolling averages have become a de facto barometer for journalists), The Horserace Blog (Jay Cost crunches the numbers in a way that puts the mainstream press' attempts to shame, and explains every step of his analyses), and Daly Thoughts (the best single state-by-state analysis of poll trends).
Slashdot Mirror
"Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo"
Having recently built a 2.8TB RAID 5 array for home use, I wrote a long Usenet post on this very topic.
As I wrote elsewhere in the resulting thread, I'm not going to worry about backups for my array; it's simply too expensive and impractical.
Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven and the longtime head of the astronaut corps (i.e., the guy with the final say on flight crew assignments), pushed hard to use an airliner-style crew system for the shuttle. That is, have a small group of pilots and mission specialists that would fly repeatedly together, with one-off payload specialists handling mission-specific duties. He'd seen how frustrating life was for the later '60s astronaut classes that only saw a few members fly, and sometimes not for decades. And this was back when NASA genuinely believed each shuttle would spend as little as two weeks before launching again.
Instead, we got the worst of both words: A launch schedule in which four shuttles did at most a dozen launches a year together, little likelihood of even that annual figure in the three remaining shuttles' lifetimes, and an astronaut corps that numbers in the hundreds with new inductees coming in every two years. That's just crazy.
Bah! Everyone knows that the so-called "tadpoles" are actually living sun creatures. Fortunately, they're unlikely to attack Earth again because the Superfriends defeated them after Lex Luthor foolishly tried to strike a deal with the creatures.
But . . . but . . . I thought we Americans lived in a fascist imperialist warmongering state led by Bushitler who sends his Ashcroftian secret police to raid the homes of those who dare to defy the RIAA and MPAA's edicts! Or something like that. You mean the United States might *not* be the worst place in history to live in?!? Impossible!
How about something like this? Assuming I can find two four-channel PCI/66 ATA controller cards (two-channel PCI/66 cards are easy to find, I know). I'm not necessarily looking for the ne plus ultra of performance, but rather some reasonable combination of price, performance, and stability that will let me serve HDTV streams and below. This machine is appealing because of the cost, the Intel motherboard, the dual processors. The company is local to me too, so I'd save on the shipping too.
Honest, I just don't see the connection between these hippos and aquatic mammals!
You're right; I'm planning to go with RAID 5, not 50. I neglected to make that clear.
Would something like this qualify? It has two PCI-X slots, but I don't see any mention of multiple PCI buses per se.
Oh no! Reed Richards, his wife Susan, brother-in-law Johnny, and test pilot Ben Grimm just took off in Dr. Richards' rocketship! They didn't know about the solar storm. I hope they'll be all right!
Based on tons of evidence, I didn't know Japanese culture had anything besides robots!
Not a bad rule of life to live by in general.
What I want to know is, how well would the Mac Mini work for MythTV? I know MythTV on OS X isn't quite ready for prime time yet, but what about running Linux on it instead?
BBC: Prepare to be pwn3d!!!!11!!!1!!
Sincerely,
Scrip T. Kiddie
What good are all those billions we spend for NASA's budget, when we don't even have a single hydrogen bomb-carrying spaceship? Can we trust the Space Administration to be able to dig up even a single team of expert oil drillers to blow up Machholz once it's inevitably revealed as the Texas-sized planet killer it surely is? I think not.
Dial 611 on the phone to talk to T-Mobile customer service and ask to change your Unlimited Internet service option to the VPN Unlimited Internet option. If the customer service representative you speak to doesn't know what you're talking about, call back until you find one that does. The VPN option gives you a real IP address.
GNU screen is always your friend. Next to emacs, it's the most ginomously useful piece of software ever written for anyone who logs into a shell, remotely or not.
I finally managed to win Raid on Bungeling Bay years after the fact (late 1990s), using VICE (and its keyboard-based joystick emulation) on a Pentium 133MHz running Linux. And yes, it really was quite satisfying.
Neat trick, considering that no Florida county uses Diebold e-voting machines.
I was wondering how to do this exact thing. I'm comfortable mucking with grub, but where, exactly, is the boot kernel to be used here? The 5MB
I lucked out; I got *paid* $200 by T-Mobile and Amazon for taking a T610, and only had to sign a one-year contract that, come to think of it, expires next month. I'll probably keep the phone for a while longer; I used its predecessor for more than three years.
Your post is the funniest *and* most poignant comment I've read all week. I appreciate your posting it.
PS - You mentioned an "an asteroids-type space shooter." Almost certainly Maelstrom, which has since been open sourced and ported to multiple platforms.
Disingenuous. Mass challenges have never occurred because there's never been a mechanism, or even motivation, to do so. But the Help America Vote Act of 2002 supplied the motivation; it is the law that provides for the provisional ballots BBC's Palast mentions above.
In any case, as John Lott pointed out in 2003:
* Black GOP voters in FL had their votes "not counted" (in the Democratic activists' definition of the term) much, much, much more frequently than their Democratic counterparts.
* Hispanics and whites showed up in error on the ineligible-to-vote felon list more frequently than blacks.
He also points out what is unquestionably the single most unambiguous (and, naturally, the least-reported) case of "voter suppression" in FL in the 2000 election:
Naturally, in Palast's 70 pages of the usual innuendo and bogus charges (coupled with the typical overseas cant of "U5 V0T3R5 AR3NT 5331NG TH3 TRUTH!!!1!11!!!"), the word "Panhandle" never appears.
Would the Boston Globe count as a "respected/non-insane paper"?
Besides the UMN site already mentioned above, I highly recommend everyone regularly visit RealClear Politics (whose rolling averages have become a de facto barometer for journalists), The Horserace Blog (Jay Cost crunches the numbers in a way that puts the mainstream press' attempts to shame, and explains every step of his analyses), and Daly Thoughts (the best single state-by-state analysis of poll trends).
Was your dad a Mission President in Peru?
Yeechang, a fellow four-digit Slashdot ID holder whose dad was head of the Korea Taejon Mission '92-'95