Do Epic Shit

I love this post and it's followup Think Big, Act Small.

Doing Epic Shit is what we all want to do right? If only it wasn't so much work. So with that in mind, I would only add one thing to this: Do Epic Shit People Care About. I mean, if you're going to put the work in to Do Epic Shit, you'd probably be better off Making Some Shit Epic that people would care about.

Also let me suggest a companion phrase, Give Other People's Epic Shit Props Too. No one likes a self obsessed jerk.

FreeBSD 7 and the SiI 3114 SATA150 controller

Well, it turns out that the issue with my ZFS box was only that my SiI 3114 SATA card hard outdated firmware. FreeBSD 7 with ZFS has been running solid for a few days now while under moderate load from Samba.

I discoved the solution after having the exact same types of problems with my setup and a Debian software Raid-6 configuration. After a bit of googling for "SiI 3114 debian timeout" I found my answer. A firmware update and a FreeBSD reinstall later, everything was peachy.

I'll pick up where I left off with the media server part of the project soon.

I'm sorry FreeBSD...I'm moving out and I'm taking the Raid with me

Well, at least I managed to figure out the issue with FreeBSD not booting. Unfortunately, I can't get it to stabilize with ZFS and it looks to be the fault of the ATA driver. It's sad but it seems like the community has lost much of it's luster of the last few years. My questions in the freenode irc channel fell on deaf ears. It appears I'm not alone, even in the newsgroups many well documented questions go unanswered unless very simple. Have all the helpful gurus moved to other operating systems?

And so I've moved to debain with md raid-6. It's not quite everything i'm dreaming of, but at least it works. Hopefully, in a couple of years when I build my next home raid, ZFS will be mature on a platform that will work on my old hardware. My home server is always my previous desktop.

Update: the problem is fixed and ZFS is running without issue.