Of keyboards and storage
I'm looking for the ideal keyboard. So far the best I've found would be either the Unicomp EnduraPro, Das Keyboard professional or the various Cherry mechanical-switch keyboards - though the Matias Tactile looks pretty nice too, in a glossy-plastic Apple-circa-PowerMac-G5 way. Well, those, or the classic IBM Model M, which is an awesome piece of engineering. I do have a 24 year old Model M, still working, used as the main keyboard on my SGI Octane. The snag is, though, I'm unreasonably enamored with shiny little extra-functions keys, like those offered on the Sun Type 5/6/7. If I could just get a Sun Type 7 with mechanical keyswitches or buckling-spring action, possibly with a thick plastic or metal reinforcing plate, I'd be in heaven. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the Type 6 and Type 7 as it stands - they're some of the best rubber-dome keyboards out there - but buckling springs are so much nicer.
Then there's the storage server project. For a little background - I live in a complex of flats with a bunch of friends. (Although I'm deployed overseas right now.) All our flats are wired together with Category 6 cable, so I've bunged a gigabit Ethernet switch down in the wiring closet so that we can more easily network all our various computers without resort to slow, insecure, unstable wireless. So between the lot of us we got the idea to build a central storage server to keep all our files on. Well, we also have about 600 DVDs, between about 6 of us. It would be so much easier to have all these stored on one central server. So, I'm gathering up the parts to build it, and it'll be my big project upon return.
Specs are as follows, for now:
- Tyan Thunder K8WE motherboard - eBayed for less than $90.
- 2x AMD Opteron 250
- 6GB RAM
- 8x 750GB and 4x 1.5TB SATA disks (Seagate Barracuda series)
- 2x Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA disks for the OS
- Adaptec 31605 PCI Express SAS controller
- Intel 2-port PCI-X gigabit ethernet card
- ATi Radeon 9000 PCI graphics
- Antec 800W energy-efficient PSU
- Norco 4u server case with 20 hot-swap SATA/SAS bays
- Sun Solaris Express community edition b100 or later OS (for ZFS)
The budget to build this was split 6 ways so it wound up pretty cheap, and some of this was pre-existing kit or cast-offs from other upgrades. The storage will be allocated as 6 RAID1 blocks, striped, making a RAID 10 array. Eventually we'll add 5 more 1.5TB disks and a 250, 4 for data (two more mirror sets) and one hot spare for each zpool. I'll be using ZFS for volume management. If you've never played with it, it's downright cool. Maybe not quite as slick as Veritas VxVM, but a whole hell of a lot cheaper! It also includes end-to-end checksumming to shield against data corruption.
Is that kind of hardware overkill? Yeah, you bet your asteroids it is, but why not? I figure, we build this thing once and it'll still be purring along nicely 5+ years from now - with some disk swaps, obviously, but hey, that's the point of ZFS + RAID10. And while I'm at it, I'll figure out some of the pitfalls and tricks to managing a proper storage server, rather than just a too-old gaming box pressed into service as a jimmysquidded file dump.
I have to have projects to keep me sane - even if I can't poke at them for another 4 months yet.