FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.
The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall.

FreeNAS - The Free NAS server - Home

General and Solaris instructions here: Toby's Memestreams

(Most of the rest pulled from user toby's instructions as well)

Download latest lzo library from http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/

# cd lzo-2.02
# ./configure
# make install

Download latest openvpn 2.0.x from http://openvpn.net/download.html

# cd openvpn-2.0.8
# ./configure
# make install

Download & install tun driver: http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~nissler/tuntap/

Create openvpn client config directory and copy 5 supplied files into it (substitute the right names for your cert and key files):

# mkdir -p /etc/openvpn/
# mv ca.crt ta.key local.conf mypc-vpnclient.* /etc/openvpn/
# cd /etc/openvpn/
# chmod 400 ta.key mypc-vpnclient.key.pem
# chmod 444 ca.crt mypc-vpnclient.cert.pem
# chown -R root:wheel .

(Note the two private key files are confidential)

To connect:

# /usr/local/sbin/openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/local.conf --daemon

To disconnect:

# kill `cat /var/run/openvpn.pid`
or
# killall openvpn

To set openvpn to init on boot, do this:

http://openvpn.net/archive/openvpn-users/2005-12/msg00424.html

The second string in that example is the path to the config file. The other paths are to the directory that file and the keys reside in.

How to setup openvpn on OS X, and Solaris

After these simple tests, I next performed a check of PBXT’s performance by using my favorite graphical benchmarking tool – Quest’s Benchmark Factory. Whenever I need to personally test a new or enhanced storage engine, I use this tool because it easily lets me put the MySQL database through its paces with minimal effort on my part.

I did a simple scaleable benchmark test, which tests CPU, read, insert, and update-intensive loads, along with a mixed workload at the end. My test machine was a small single-CPU Linux box running Fedora Core along with the MySQL 5.1.15 beta. For a comparison, I ran the same tests against InnoDB. As you can see below, PBXT held up pretty nicely:

MySQL AB :: A Look at the PBXT Storage Engine

We (PAE - Performance Engineering) recently completed a study to understand database performance with ZFS. Read on more details and recommendations. You can also read Roch's blog on the same study

Databases stress the filesystem in unique ways. Depending on the workload and configuration, you can have thousands of IO operations per second. The size of these IO is usually small (database block size). All the writes are synchronized writes. Reads can be random or sequential. Some writes are also more critical than others. Depending on the configuration, Reads are cached by the database program or the filesystem (if supported/requested). In many cases where filesystems are used, the IO is spread over a few files. This causes the single writer lock to be very hot under certain configurations like Buffered UFS.

Neelakanth Nadgir's blog : ZFS and OLTP

Creates a loading image, however you want it to look, an animated GIF for use in your applications. Neat!

Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator

(Verified using MySQL 4.1, assumed for other MySQL versions, given that this is a platform architecture issue.) When using the InnoDB storage engine on Solaris 10 for x86_64 architecture (AMD Opteron), it is important to to mount any filesystems used for storing InnoDB-related files using the forcedirectio option. (The default on Solaris 10/x86_64 is not to use this filesystem mounting option.) Failing to use forcedirectio will cause a serious degradation of InnoDB's speed and performance on this platform.

MySQL InnoDB and Solaris/Opteron forcedirectio (Performance Tuning Tips)

When using the InnoDB storage engine on Solaris 10 for x86_64 architecture (AMD Opteron), it is important to mount any filesystems used for storing InnoDB-related files using the forcedirectio option. (The default on Solaris 10/x86_64 is not to use this option.) Failure to use forcedirectio causes a serious degradation of InnoDB's speed and performance on this platform.

InnoDB tuning issues on ZFS...

MySQL AB :: MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual :: 14.2.11 InnoDB Performance Tuning Tips

I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like "if value = 4 do not increment." In this case, the value wasn't 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black.

Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black.

Screens in front of me and behind me go black.

The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!

After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played.

How to crash an in-flight entertainment system | CSO Blogs

Need to link to a New York Times article from your weblog? Enter your link here, and we'll give you the weblog-safe link.

What does "weblog-safe" mean?

If you look at the URLs of each of the stories, you'll see that there's information encoded after the question mark. Here's an example. The special coding tells the Times's server that the link is coming from a weblog, and now and in the future, this link will work without a fee to access the archive.

There's also a bookmarklet, but I can't include the link here (directly). The source code (in Python) is available. Basically they're just doing a database lookup.

With this, perhaps MemeStreams could normalize NYT URLs as they are blogged, so that the click-throughs continue to work later on. Alternately, they could be used on click-through, in conjunction with the redirect function.

For example: if you visit this page from 2005, entitled "A Film Offers Buckets of Blood in Three Designer Colors", you're hoping to see a review of Sin City. If you click through, you hit the walled garden and are served only the abstract. If you pass it through the link generator, you get a link that takes you through to the full text, complete with images.

New York Times Link Generator

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

The most impressive web charting I've seen.

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization