JB's Blog

I’ve been experimenting using FreeNAS for some online archiving systems.

I put together a cheap AMD64 system for a client with less then $300AUD of parts (excluding harddrives).  It was an attractive alternative from something like a Drobo, because I could use NFS easily and not be limited with how many drives we could stack in one box.

Shock horror though, the server kept crashing with panic: kmem_map too small errors.  I thought initially it was having only 2Gig of RAM in the machine so I stole another 2Gig from an accountant’s desktop PC.

That didn’t work, so then I disabled ZFS compression, and still had the same results.

Then I realised I’ve mistakenly used the 32bit version of FreeNAS, so I lazily used UNetbootin to create a new USB thumbstick install with the 64bit version.

So what I’ve learnt is…

+ Minimum 4gig for ZFS compression
+ 64bit Freenas for ZFS

Googling around I saw quite a few people mention that if you want to use ZFS with FreeNAS then 64bit is the way to go.  Makes me feel safer knowing the data is being stored with ZFS voodoo!

I have a few customers who have massive Spam traps and Catch-all email accounts.  These accumulate an enormous amount of email, and like any good tree need to be pruned.

I was going to write a small PHP script, or some crazy sieve scripts but of course someone has been there, done that, and compiled the source already for me.

An easy solution is to use archivemail - http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/

archivemail  --delete --days=60 imaps://spambox:hereismyawesomepassword@lansmash.com/INBOX

Archivemail will let you delete emails older than a date or time and works with IMAP, POP3, etc

So how can you measure how much water is in a tank?

There are a couple a ways that are quite simple, like plugging a hose on the tap (with no pump); turning on the flow and then hold the hose up until the water stops flowing.

Or if it’s a metal tank you can sometimes feel on a hot day where it is cool and guestimate where there water is. Even shock horror, climb up the tank and stick your head in to see where the water level is.

All of these methods are boring and don’t involve enough electricity. So I took it upon myself on a wet Sunday afternoon to electrify the tank.

I swear there is nothing in this world that a little bit of CAT5 and a lot of luck won’t solve.

Location:Evans Rd,Salisbury,Australia