The book is guide to the FreeNAS software and teaches you how to turn a PC into a Network Attached Storage server.
This book will show you how to work with FreeNAS and set it up for your needs. You will learn how to configure and administer a FreeNAS server in a variety of networking scenarios. You will also learn how to plan and implement RAID on the server as well as how to use Storage Area Network technologies like iSCSI. The standard FreeNAS documentation walks you through the basic configuration, but this book will tell you exactly what you should do to plan, work, and deploy FreeNAS. This book has a comprehensive troubleshooting section that will point you in the right direction whenever you need help.
Also when you buy this book you are also supporting the FreeNAS Open Source project through Packt Publishing’s Open Source Project Royalty Scheme. In this scheme when Packt sell a book written on an Open Source project, they pay a royalty directly to that project. Therefore by purchasing this Learning FreeNAS book, Packt will have given some of the money received to the FreeNAS project.
The iPhone will become available on the 22nd August in several new countries around the world. This is part of the grand Apple roll out of iPhone in over 70 countries.
I watch the original announcement by Steve Jobs said the iPhone 3G 8GB model would sell for $199. He said “We think the iPhone 3G will be affordable to almost everyone.”
He then added “In almost all these countries the price is a maximum of $199″
Great! Excellent, but it isn’t true…
I live in an EU country and today I got an email from Orange with the prices for the new iPhone 3G coming out on Friday.
If you have a contract with Orange already and you don’t want to change your contract then the iPhone will cost 469 Euros which is the equivalent of $692. That is 347% more expensive.
If you get a new special iPhone contract for 46 Euros ($67) per month then the iPhone will only cost you 409 Euros ($602) with a 1 year contract and 249 Euros ($367) for a 2 year contract. That is 184% more expensive.
Over 2 years you will pay $1608 dollars in monthly subscriptions and 367 for the phone giving a grand total of nearly $2000.
The cheapest possible price for getting a handset is if you go with the 70 Euro ($103) a month subscription (with a 2 year contract) and then the iPhone will only cost 179 Euros which is $263. The total you pay over 2 years would be $2735.
Following the success of the RAID5 FreeNAS tutorial video this next video is a sneak preview of ZFS which is coming in FreeNAS 0.7.
ZFS is a file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. ZFS is open-source software and has therefore also been ported to FreeBSD the OS behind FreeNAS.
A traditional file systems resides on single hard drive and if you want to use more than one hard drive they need to be combined either with RAID or with a volume manager.
ZFS is different, all ZFS filesystems are built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A zpool is constructed of virtual devices, which are themselves constructed of physical hard drives (or indeed files or hard drive partitions).
Hard drives within a virtual device may be configured in different ways, depending on needs and space available: non-redundantly (similar to RAID 0), as a mirror (RAID 1) of two or more devices, as a RAID-Z group of three or more devices (which is similar to RAID 5), or as a RAID-Z2 group of four or more devices (which is similar to RAID 6).
FreeNAS 0.7 is only an alpha release from the nightly build system and ZFS is considered experimental, but it does give us a sneak preview of what is in store for FreeNAS.
The video will also be uploaded to the LearnFreeNAS.com website.
John Martellaro of MacObserver writes, “Linux just doesn’t have the cool factor to make switching worth the risk, but the Mac does. That’s why Linux works in the enterprise where cheap and boring is okay, but not with consumers who have come to expect more.”
Yes, it may be less expensive to install Linux in a “consumer desktop”, but it isn’t going to work as well, or be as intuitive, because it simply doesn’t offer the consumer the applications they want and need. It doesn’t work well with the iPhone or the iPod. And on top of all those practical reasons, Martellaro says, “it doesn’t have that hard to define cool factor.”
The suggestion is that the tipping point is also about the difference between “cool” and “lame”. Is “good enough, and cheaper” really what the consumer wants? It’s sad, really, that we’ve all come to expect little more than “good enough” from most of the companies we shell out our money to. Maybe the continuing growth in customer-shift from PC to Mac is about the fact that the average consumer no longer wants to accept ” good enough”. They want quality, they want dependability, they want design, and yes, a little bit of “cool” goes a long way when thrown into that mix.
As you all probably know Linux is not limited to just desktops. It’s far reaching, actually. Not that you’d have a Terminal app on it or anything, but you could. Some of you may have a mobile phone running Linux and you probably don’t even know it. The most popular phone in the world runs Unix. That’s right. The iPhone runs on Unix. Are there any other cool devices out there running on Linux or Unix? Of course there are:
MacUpdate has partnered with 10 Mac developers to bring us the MacUpdate Parallels bundle.
The Deal: When you purchase bundles now, you’ll be the immediate owner of Hazel, Art Text, MenuCalendarClock, Leap, StoryMill, Typinator and DVDRemaster Pro. Then when the Mac community spreads the word and reaches 5,000 bundles sold, Sound Studio will be unlocked into the bundle for free. People that purchase the bundle before each unlock milestone will have the unlocked products automatically added to their accounts for free. Because of the superb success of the Mac community in the last 2 bundles, we fully expect to reach all 3 unlock milestones during the 2-week span of this event.
1,135 bundles had been sold at the time of writing and there are 12 days left…
I’m a great fan of the Apple adverts commonly known as “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” in which two actors play a Mac and PC and they discuss the relative merits of either platform… Being as they are adverts made by Apple the Mac tends to come out better… Anyway I just found some Japanese versions on YouTube and I found one which I haven’t see in English and I think it is quite funny… Don’t worry there are subtitles! It is called Artist.
I’ve got together with a few friends of mine and we have started a technology blog called the Hi-Tech Squad.
We are officially launching it this week but as with all web ventures it will take time to grow in popularity, reputation and content… Come visit us if you are interested.
A friend of mine asked me to install an extra hard drive in his machine and reinstall the OS from scratch. The hard drive was easy enough and the Windows XP installation went easy. But… There is always a but… The graphics card driver wouldn’t register… It is a GeForce 4 440MX and I downloaded and installed the driver from nVidia several times. The driver installed and didn’t report any problems but XP continued to report the card as a standard VGA and the nVidia control panel didn’t appear. After lots of hours of bashing my head and installing and de-installing and swap graphics card etc I had a brain wave. Maybe the motherboard needed an AGP driver… The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-6VXE and guess what? When I downloaded the motherboard drivers and installed the AGP driver it all worked!!!
