Looks like the startup I work for is going to possibly be very unstartup soon, so depending on the next week or two I may be looking to move on. It’s always fun surfing job descriptions for Sys/net admin. jobs because it seems like they take a list of every technology they have in the office and list it as a requirement. Fortunately this is Seattle, so there’s some reasonable folks out there especially on craigslist who write listings that amount to “must be a motivated linux geek”. Which I’m totally in agreement with. I come from a background where I learned a lot by leveraging my skills and open source to do great things for cheap for small companies that knew little about linux and pals. but knew they didn’t have any money to spend. In these situations and many that have followed the situation was such that a business person would provide a need, and I’d find a solution. Anyways, props to people who have been in the trenches and value experience making shit work. Back to working on the resume and linkedin.

I picked up a Netgear sc101 a few days back as it was on sale. Turns out everyone hates it. Theres been some reverse engineering work, likely from Google SoC. But for the most part it tries to be a really cheap SAN. Avoiding the SAN vs NAS argument, it has a proprietary protocol and filesystem and requires windows drivers that just provide a drive letter. The aforementioned sc101-nbd code isn’t compatible with these drives, but does give linux access to the disks. In the end the simplest solution is sharing the drive via windows box with smb/cifs, which is of course, very lame. Mostly it’s supposed to be slow and sometimes blows up from the complaints I’ve read. But i had a couple 250gb ide drives in a loud server in my bedroom that I’d prefer to leave off, so it should serve as an acceptable house for those.

My long time friend Matthew is in town visiting since I’ve been out sick for a bit due to my motorcycle accident. He said he had used one and it ended up sucking so he got a a WD MyBook. I had seen one at Fry’s the other day but it was $$$. We stopped by Best Buy looking for some parts on Friday and they had a 1TB My Book World Edition II on clearance for about $300 after tax. This is nice because it’s dual 500gb drives which can be set to raid1. I don’t know what filesystem it uses yet so I don’t know about out of band disk recovery but it provides smb/cifs access which is certainly slick. There’s a bunch of small business features like proprietary remote access technology that I certainly won’t use but Matthew uses and says is great. It’s got ACL shit that’s configurable via web, but again, this is only useful for real small business solutions. It has a USB port and there’s bits in the web interface that talk about sharing USB drives. If I can hang one of my many external USB drives off this rather than my windows box that’d be great.