Luke Sheldrick’s Blog

In addition to moving my dns, to my self hosted infrastructure, I am also moving quite a few things away from hosting on Windows.

I eventually want to get rid of my Exchange 2007 server, as to be honest it is so much of a resource hog, and for a small user implementation, it’s far too OTT. I need to find a suitable alternative to sync all my devices with however (Laptop(s), iPhone, various Windows Mobiles) I am sure there is something out there that will do the job.

As for this blog, it was hosted on a Windows 2003 Server, the same one as the Exchange server, where performance isn’t great. So now it’s hosted on one of my Linux (Fedora) servers. I am quite happy with the transition, other than a lot of the asp back ends, now have to be re-written in perl or something similar… effort.

I am not too sure if it’s performance has been improved… let me know

Finally, some clever geek type person has writen a set of tools to be able to mount these horrid things under *nix.

I bought mine a couple of years back, bud didn’t realise you had to use a horrid sluggish windows app to be able to mount the thing.

Netgear use a tool called “Z-SAN” under windows.

However you can now mount the drives under *nix, there are a few draw backs however, you first have to partition te drives under windows, not a huge problem, as my desktop is a dual boot.

Secondly you can’t use passwords on the device. Again not a huge problem, I just stuck it on it’s own vlan, and restricted access to it, so only my linux NAS server could see it.

Then on my NAS server (FC9 + NFS + SMB) I used the utils the toolset provides, mounted the two drives, formatted, and mounted. Bob is your mothers brother it all works.

I just share the drives out now using my existing NAS (NFS + SMB) and supprisingly works really well.

Time will see how stable they are.

If you want to do this too, the code can be found at google code:

http://code.google.com/p/sc101-nbd/