James D. Stallardblog

It's been a surreal few days...

On Sunday, I went to Hyde Park to see Aerosmith. After standing in the rain for 6 hours, the crowd were getting a bit feisty and few fights broke out. The chap in front of me (presumably seeing this has his cue) pulled out a pot of Houmus and some cheesy biscuits and started handing them around. A few minutes later (while half a dozen of us were contentedly chewing away) he pulled out a carton of cranberry juice and some plastic cups - and again, passed them round.

On the way to work this morning, I was cut up by two lorries; tailgating each other in the outside lane at just over 80Mph. Each lorry was a large, flatbed and was carrying around 200 propane gas bottles.

I was recently in the market for some more storage as my secondary disk array is starting to get full since I bought the new 3Tb primary array. I store a large amount of data for clients and relatives and all of it is currently copied to a secondary array with RoboCopy jobs - this allows me to be selective about when and what I backup and helps to keep my backup to under 200Gb a night - and hence well within the 6 hour window I have allowed.

For a long time, the secondary array consisted of a collection of SATA disks inside an old DELL tower. This has been fine, but I need more space than I can fit into 3 drive slots and SATA drives don’t yet go to 1Tb!

I considered another HP MSA20 to go with the first, but even at the price I was able to get, it’s still looking like a £2k investment - too much for the secondary store. I eventually settled on the LaCie Ethernet Disk 2Tb. I only actually need about 1.6Tb so this gave me a little extra capacity. I chose the LaCie for the following reasons:

. It’s big (2Tb RAW).
. It's small (only 1U in the rack).
. It's quiet (I have enough fan noise in here).
. It's tough (it’s made of metal!)
. It runs Windows XP Embedded.

The last point is the most important. Windows XP Embedded means the innards are based on a standard PC and can probably therefore run Windows Server 2003 R2. The overall goal of the exercise is to move away entirely from traditional file shares and convert to DFS-R. DFS-R will allow me to automatically replicate data from the primary to the secondary stores while at the same time not being tied to a particular server for either store. In other words, we go from Primary/Secondary Store to two Multimaster stores.

The box finally arrived the other day and the first job was to hack past the rather natty (but unwanted) LaCie interface. This was achieved by inserting an AT job into the Task Scheduler to run CMD.EXE. That got me the Windows Explorer and the Computer Management snap-in and I was able to verify that the machine was indeed a standard PC inside. The rest was as easy as installing a USB CD drive and booting from the installation disks.

4 hours later and the data is still copying in, but what I have now is a Windows Server 2003 R2 box with 2Tb RAW storage presenting the first half of a shortly-to-be-100%-resilient DFS-R root. The real bonus is that the whole solution has cost me under £650 - i.e. about 30% of what I could have spent if I'd bought an entry level Windows Storage Server Solution of similar size from DELL or HP.

Sure, I could expand the RAM from 256Mb and the disks are spanned rather than RAID'd, but don’t forget; this is a secondary array and if all you're doing is serving DFS-R you don’t need more RAM. The solution is perfectly fit for purpose and works a treat. The last bonus is the proof of concept, which now means I can finish the zero-admin branch office design works I'm doing for a client at the moment.

Those of you that know me personally, are aware of my penchant for the occasional bout of dangerous sports. This has resulted in some of the most amazing experiences of my life, but has also had the unfortunate side effect of a number of broken bones. Well, on Monday I managed number 13.

Usually, when I bust something, I'm doing something that in hindsight I can rationalise to myself was worth it. For instance, I would never have experienced the tunnel vision you get on a superbike at 170Mph, if I hadn’t been prepared for the consequences - those being four broken ribs and a write-off of said superbike. The same goes for the free-climbing, fast cars, paragliding and when I was a kiddy, the BMXing.

This time, however, was frankly a little embarrassing.

While at the office the other day, ambling down the stairs, I slipped off the bottom step and hit the ground to the resounding crack of another bone going. What a numpty!

Four hours later, the nice doc in West Middlesex A&E informed me of a broken left cuboid bone and the advice that it would be six weeks to heal. Thankfully, with the aid of some excellent painkillers, I took 2 days working from home and was back in again this morning for my usual 06:00hrs start. Amazingly enough, I reckon to lose the limp in a couple of weeks, so I really got rather lucky!

In the words of Murtaugh (the venerable sidekick of Riggs in the Lethal Weapon films), "I'm getting too old for this shit".