MCS Press

I was reading a post by slmingol off of his blog, lamolabs.com, about bash variables. I thought it was really good and it should be shared.

Here is the link to his post: [one-liner]: Special Variables in Bash

I was able to find his blog by subscribing to the Linux Plant blog RSS feed.

- Ken

The idea of being a Geek is actually a cool thing these days. Everyone is driven by technology. Lots of people have smart phones or travel with a NetBook or laptop everywhere they go. When traveling people will have a GPS with them so they will not miss the next toilet stop along the highway. With this wealth of technology at our finger tips, you better be a person that is on pace with it or if your not you will be left in the dust to die with the dinosaurs.

When I say that you have to be on pace with the moving technology arena, I am not just talking about ponying up the cash for the hottest tech toy. I am talk about actually knowing what that tech toy can & can’t do. It is about educating yourself so you can become a smart consumer and a smarted user of technology.

If you are a parent, this is doubly important. As a parent myself, I know that I am going to be the first teacher of the world to my kids. I don’t want to rely on someone else or have my kids rely on themselves to learn about technology. Granted I am a skilled user of technology, but I don’t see this as any different then a person who is a mechanic, a carpenter or any other skilled trade. Most skilled trades man/women are going to tech their kids how to do that job or at least understand it. The is all I am doing.

So that this why I have started my kids out early in their technology education courses. With my first daughter, PJ, we had to get her a computer for herself so my wife and I could do our computing in piece. I put together a simple system when she was 18 months and we bought her a good amount of software that was fun and entertaining for her age [Reader Rabbit, Sesame Street, etc]. Many of our friends couldn’t believe that our 18 month old child was able to play computer games by herself and truly understood what was going on. All we had to do was ask her what game she wanted and load the CD. She was able to do the rest.

Now 7 years later, PJ has been the computer assistant in kindergarten & 1st grade. She is the kid all the other kids [& sometimes the teacher] turn to when they don’t understand what is happening on the computer. It’s actually funny & scary to hear that she has become a mini IT person for her classes.

With our second child, MJ, she is chomping at the bit to be able to use a computer. She just turned 1, but has had a computer keyboard in her face since she was born. It is hard to keep her away from our laptops and other other computer in the house. Cause she loves to play the, “I’m going to touch your Backspace button while you are typing or surfing the net” game.

But we already have the plan in place for MJ. We kept PJ’s old computer and when MJ is about 18 months old I will set it up for her. We still have all of games PJ used and have learned about many web sites over the years of educating PJ.

It is going to be a lot of fun to have MJ on a computer also. I know PJ will have a blast teaching her lil sister the ins & outs of the games and web sits. It will be hard to keep PJ out of MJ’s way, but I know they will work it all out.

I can’t wait to see where PJ & MJ will be in the next 6 years. PJ will be 14 & MJ 7. I bet we will all be sitting around the house on our computers mirco-blogging to each other about how good dinner was that night.

Thanks to ThinkGeek for helping me show the world that my littlest one will be a geek when she goes up. Here is a link to the Onesie

-Ken

For the past while I’ve been itching to build a storage array and/or a NAS. The reason for the need & desire for a storage solution is that between my wife and myself, we have hundreds of gigs of photos, home movie, music & ripped movies spread across 3 computers, multiple backups and some of stuff stored on DVD-Rs. Basically our current data storage & backup solution is CRAP!

So, I’ve tossed back & forth the idea of getting one of the off the shelf NAS devices by Thecus, Netgear, LaCie or Buffalo. I am mostly considering one of the Thecus devices. I believe they are running Linux, which I really like. Plus they provide a long laundry list of features amoung their devices. I have been looking at one of the N4100 serious or the N5200. The N4100s supports 4 SATA drives and the N5200 holds 5. Either would work. They all support RAID 0, 1, 5 and JBOD. The networking options are pretty nice to.

The other option I have kicked around was using an existing machine, loading it with SATA disks and then using FreeNAS or rolling my own solution with Linux to manage the data store. Doing it this way adds some limitation. One limit is the bus speed. In my existing system I only have standard PCI slots. Then in my box of extra motherboards, processors & parts I am still limited by only having PCI slots. It would be nice to have a system with PCI-X for PCI-Express slots, but to go out and upgrade a full system to gain that level of bus speed is not economical.

The next limit I have is cold hard cash!

OK, I am not truly limited on the financial side, but I do prefer to be on the cheap side. I don’t like to spend too much on items that I know I can get similar functionality from a less expensive items. The cost of a “true” hardware RAID card is way out of my mental budget. I can’t see paying over $200 for a damn expansion card. That means I am looking at RAID enabled cards that are providing software RAID, a.k.a. Fake RAID. The software RAID provided on the expansion cards can be a step above the “fake” RAID provided on most modern motherboards. That doesn’t sit all that well in the pit of my stomach. Not after recently talking with a co-worker that lost a lot of personal data because the RAID on his motherboard failed & corrupted his hard drives. He was running a 1+0 RAID across 4 drives. He should have been pretty safe against failure, but he wasn’t. I am looking at running RAID for the reliability factor. After that story I am over all worried. Myself, I would not run anything but RAID 5.

So knowing that I am not going to put out the cash for a full hardware RAID card & I am still not sure if I am going to do an external NAS system. I am left at looking at rolling my own solution using the software RAID provided by a sub 200 dollar SATA RAID card or buying any cheap SATA card that provides 4 to 8 ports and using the RAID capabilities built into the Linux kernel. This final solution doesn’t scare me too much. I am pretty damn sure that the reliability of the Linux kernel’s RAID is good. I would bet most of the software RAID cards are running embedded Linux anyways and using the RAID stack within the card.

So now the research and testing starts. I have purchased 4 1 terabyte SATA II hard drives. I still need a SATA controller to drive the hard drives and a raid cage to hold the hard drives. I am currently scowering newegg.com, Tiger Direct and other sites for highly rated SATA controllers that work well with Linux. Once I buy the controller and start my testing I will post the next piece of RAID to the AID.

-Ken

It has been a while sense I have posted on this blog. Life has been hectic and other projects have taken precedence. I do have a few blog posts in the works and I hope to have those out this week.

The projects that have taken all my time are related to other web sites that I am launching with my wife. I have been working on a theme for this site that needs some fine tuning. And now I have to do a web site for my next family reunion in 2010.

If you are subscribed to my RSS feed, I want to thank you for following. I will try to keep this blog active.

ks