Illusory Follies

I’ve been somewhat annoyed by PHP recently. For an example, see the script running the sidebar that shows the sunrise/sunset. Now granted, it’s an odd script to include in the main PHP libraries. However, if it IS included, I really wish it would work correctly. It’s really odd because it fluctuates between the correct time and 1 hour offset from the correct time. I have no idea what it is doing. I’ve also found quite a few ways to break it and make it return bogus output. It’s kind of annoying.

On the home front, I finally got my RAID solution in place. I went cheap and got two 500GB hard drives ($145 each) and a HighPoint RocketRAID 1740 RAID 0/1/5 4 channel SATA 3.0 GBps card ($110). I set the hard drives up (went smoothly) and then after only a little bit of a struggle, reconfigured my Gentoo kernel with the rr174x driver. I’ve had so many bad experiences with poorly written linux kernel device drivers but this one was fun.  I did a make patchkernel on the device driver and then a make menuconfig on my kernel. I had wanted to clean up some junk that was currently being compiled into my kernel so this was an opportunity to do this. Recompiled the kernel and rebooted and voila, I see /dev/sda1 ready to go. I went ahead and formatted it with XFS and shared it out to my local network as a Samba share.

I also wanted to configure the RAID Management daemon in order to monitor the health of the RAID array. I thought this was going to be hard but it seemed to work just fine. I downloaded the RPMs provided by HighPoint on their website and just did a rpm -Uvh –nodeps on them (it was listing some bogus dependencies so I had to ignore them — I’m not sure why this is). Both the daemon and the CLI installed like a charm. I had to remember my ISP’s SMTP settings (always a pain) and although their mail server is SLOOOOW, it appears to be working.

I also went ahead and installed smartmontools in order to check my non-RAID hard drives on the system. Might as well make sure everything’s working nicely!

Down the road, I may go ahead and upgrade this array to a 1.5TB RAID 5 array. For now, it’s a lowly 500GB RAID 1. I think for now, 500GB is plenty for my needs. I have a lot of other hard drive space, so the 500GB is only for the stuff that I can’t afford to lose. My bet is that when 500GB becomes too small, they will have dirt cheap 1 or 2TB drives that I can use in place. Then again, who knows how long SATA II will be a standard…?