Prior to using any Debian derivatives, I was a RedHat fan and hence
heavily favoured Fedora/CentOS/RHEL over other distributions. Over the
last few releases Fedora has been a disappointment and I was stuck
between using Gentoo/Ubuntu. Hell I even gave FreeBSD a shot (sucked
for me). Gentoo was my favoured distribution about 2-3 years ago but
the excessive kernel recompilation was really getting to me. To go the
more stable path I decided to give Debian a shot. Debian lenny is an
amazing release, except it sucked as a desktop OS for me. Random sound
issues, flash taking the whole system down and poor 3D acceleration
really ruined it for me (couldn’t play quake live even with
proprietary drivers).

At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867.

In this post, we’ll share how to make one of these storage pods, and you’re welcome to use this design. Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us. Evolving and lowering costs is critical to our continuing success at Backblaze.

A fourth standard girl from rural Tamil Nadu has become the youngest to qualify the Microsoft certified professional examination.

I think it’s high time they changed the course material for MCSE. A quick google search will show that the youngest was 10 years old (A Pakistani girl) and many more 10-15 year olds had probably had a go at it too.

9-year-old TN girl cracks Microsoft exam

On the other hand, the youngest person to crack the RHCE is 12 years old, which makes you think. Also the little boy in question did flunk the first time, which leads me to believe that RHCE is slightly more challenging.

Fedora 10 released

I can hardly wait to test it out. Was released at 10 am EST today. Get your copies while they’re hot!!

Fedora torrents

Whats up, dog?

I have this weird hobby of amassing USB sticks/pen drives. My latest acquisition is a Corsair Voyager Mini 4G. I’d heard great things about the Corsair Voyager so I decided to pick one up. The voyager mini is really tiny and packs 4GB of storage.

My experience with it was quite unfortunate though, as I had to get the drive replaced twice (my work system refuses to copy large files to it). I just got the latest replacement today, seems to be working fine. Here are the HDTach scores if you care. I was quite impressed with the burst speed of 28.4MB/s. Plan to install and run the latest Fedora 10 preview. Let’s see how it goes.

A bucket

Cluttered eh?

On the 4th of July, the TrueCrypt team released version 6.0 of its amazing product. I am generally quite excited by new software releases and can’t wait to try them out as soon as possible. From the web-site, some of the new features in the TrueCrypt version 6.0 are:

Parallelized encryption/decryption on multi-core processors (or multi-processor systems). Increase in encryption/decryption speed is directly proportional to the number of cores and/or processors.

So a friend wanted to implement some sort of NAS setup on his old, decaying PC. The friend in question has quite a large amount of legitimate ahem data. I recommended that he use Openfiler. I found the rPath version first and so I decided to check it out. I keep hearing that rPath builds very good task specific Machines, so I decided to give it a spin. rPath linux describes itself as a meta-distribution. God knows what that means, I was too lazy to look it up.