I'm studying for 70-646, the 2008 Server Admin test. Read about Storage Area Networks (which offer fast iSCSI access behind file servers) and Network Attached Storage (which basically is a file server and offers access directly to workstations).
A free SAN OS, OpenFiler, looks really cool. I want to try it out. Started reading a discussion about it here. OpenFiler is said to be fast and comprehensive - it's also the only free SAN platform that I'm aware of.
A free NAS OS, FreeNAS, looks quite slick and very current/active. It does offer iSCSI. It also supports the ZFS filesystem, which is targeted at very, very large storage arrays where silent errors have a statistically higher probability of occurring. ZFS offers online disk repair (unlike CHKDSK), checksums for all disk writes, a certain amount of roll-back via copy-on-write, and tremendous volume sizes. I decided this is not relevant to my life right now, but FreeNAS and OpenFiler both are. Sometime it would be worth coming back and reading this short overview of building a small SAN.
12/30/11
9/18/11
2011: Week 37
A few notes from this past week:
1. On 9/17 I ordered a Lenovo T520 to replace the Latitude D800 that I've had for 4+ years.
2. Had a Windows Server (2003) this past week that freaked out after I modified some permissions in the registry. Fortunately their Backup Exec had been faithfully saving the System State, so I restored the registry files to an alternate location, booted up off of an Ultimate Boot Disc CD, and restored clean registry files.
3. An Elastix phone server was going offline repeatedly. I could not ping its gateway, although I could ping LAN devices...and Windows workstations could ping the same gateway just fine. The problem was an IP conflict, and that was determined by running arp -a 192.168.1.1 to see that a working PC was using the real gateway's MAC address and the phone server was using a Linksys Access Point's MAC address.
4. When trying to uninstall Sophos Antivirus on an XP Home box, it told me to become a member of the SophosAdministrator group...but XP Home doesn't have groups, right? Wrong. Running net localgroup lists all the groups, and running net localgroup SophosAdministrator /add
1. On 9/17 I ordered a Lenovo T520 to replace the Latitude D800 that I've had for 4+ years.
2. Had a Windows Server (2003) this past week that freaked out after I modified some permissions in the registry. Fortunately their Backup Exec had been faithfully saving the System State, so I restored the registry files to an alternate location, booted up off of an Ultimate Boot Disc CD, and restored clean registry files.
3. An Elastix phone server was going offline repeatedly. I could not ping its gateway, although I could ping LAN devices...and Windows workstations could ping the same gateway just fine. The problem was an IP conflict, and that was determined by running arp -a 192.168.1.1 to see that a working PC was using the real gateway's MAC address and the phone server was using a Linksys Access Point's MAC address.
4. When trying to uninstall Sophos Antivirus on an XP Home box, it told me to become a member of the SophosAdministrator group...but XP Home doesn't have groups, right? Wrong. Running net localgroup lists all the groups, and running net localgroup SophosAdministrator /add
