Setting up a nas

A couple a weeks ago I bought some spare harddisk (2 500 Gig ATA). I had a spare computer lying around and wanted to build myself an small nas. I already knew 2 distros who’s idea it is to become an easy to use nas solution. Openfiler (Linux based) and FreeNas (BSD based), so I gave them a go. One of them crashed during gui installation when choosing the timezone. So I had to finish it in text mode. But that’s not a big problem only a shame you have to restart the installation.

But after installing it seems that OpenFiler doesn’t support a local user db. You have to setup an LDAP or AD, but for me on my own a LDAP or AD is a small overhead imho. So openfiler was a no go. Then FreeNas, this supported a local user db but after setting up and publishing an SMB share it seems that the security is isn’t that great. I can’t make a share private for my user. So if I wanted someone to copy something to my nas he would have access to my whole share. So FreeNas was no go as well.

Finally I installed the ubuntu server, apt-getted smb,ssh,… I created a software raid using the raid tools and made some shares on this raid folder. Now I have my own small NAS of 500 gig on the network.

So people who want a nas and are looking for a solution. Maybe just go with a normal distro and set it up like me. It only took 30 minutes max extra than using the formerly mentioned distros.

Most important setting when using Dojo

In our current application we use dojo. Only for a small amount of the application at this moment, but for the new version we are planning to include a lot more functionality using the dojo toolkit. I was testing this on an older machine (p3 1Gig) and the application took really long to display the page. So I asked around on irc #dojo and they pointed me to this really nice setting:

<script type="text/javascript">
	djConfig = {
		parseWidgets: false
	};
</script>

Dojo waits until page has loaded and then starts scanning for the dojoType attributes, you can imagine if you have a lot of data this will take a while. With this simple setting you tell dojo don’t do this.
Then for every dojo widget you want to use, just add

<script> dojo.hostenv.searchIds.push(id)</script>

Dojo keeps all the ids and only tries to create a widget out of the ones you push out. So no page analysis afterwards.

Sweet 2

Radeon Xinerama

Yesterday I put a new graphics card into my desktop machine (a CGA-P1652 RADEON X1650PRO 512MB) . I hooked my 2 big screens on it and rebooted. My ubuntu dapper couldn’t start gdm (ffcourse). So I apt-getted the ATI drivers and did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org, still couldn’t boot. So I started searching, after a while I found the aticonfig tool, one word sweet. I ran it witht he option for dual screen setup and he made a template xorg.conf file.

After adding the Xinerama option and setting the resolutions, I now have a nice widescreen view of my desktop and I can drag my windows over both of them. Life is great! I really believe that multiple screens do increase performance. I also liked the fact that my dapper box now has the ability to modify my screen resolutions using the gnome tool. The last time I did the dual screen setup with ubuntu, the app crashed, guess it wasn’t ready for dual screens. Now it works like a charm!

So people out there with radeon setup problems, one tool : aticonfig