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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.

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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

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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