Everything technical

Well, a six month release cycle make me wonder, so instead of keeping my home server up to date with fedora, I decided to give Centos 5.3 a try.

It went…well, apart from a known issue with my motherboard network card. CentOS 5.3 installs all right without complaining, but every few seconds the network card delays the response.

Given that I use the little beast for dhcp, DNS and iscsi, this is not what i was looking for. Luckily enough, after searching for a while, I found the issue (module r8169) and built the r8168 with dkms provided by rpmforge.

Now all is going well. Another addition to the setup, I bought a Western Digital MyBook Studio II for backup and safety purposes. Two disks, one terabyte each, raid 1 setting.

Exported part of it through iscsi for the mac (storage of all digital photos through iPhoto, thanks) and the rest is for me. Connection is fast (esata2), and, anyway, I am using it mostly through WiFi, so anything could be fast enough (except USB 1.1, i think).

Happy? Yes, now I am confident my backups will survive a disk failure. I did not find iscsi-target (IET implementation) in a CentOS 64 bit package, through.