New NAS Server... Yay

My new server arrived. It is a HP Prolient DL 320S and has 12 drive bays in the front.

Unfortunately it only came with 3 drive caddies that will hold drives. There are 3 open spaces and the other 6 spaces are filled with blank things. Presumably to maintain proper airflow across all of the drives all the time. Unfortunately because of that they cannot be used for putting drives in. This means that for RAID 6  I need at least 4 Drives. Particularly if I want to keep my 2TB drive in there that I have at the moment I will need at least 6 more spaces for drives. So I need to get at least 2 more bays.

This is my precious. A 2TB SATA Hard Drive. This is really wat I have everything that I really don't want to lose on. As I said above I would like to move to a RAID 6 array for storage. However for now as long as I still have the space I can live with no redundency for now.

It boots !

It even has a GUI. Surely the first thing I have used in a while that has a GUI for system management stuff.

However the first problem I have found with the software I'm using. The GUI only shows support for Ext2. The 2TB drive has my data on it in an Ext4 partition. This is my only drive this big. Thankfully there is less than 1TB of data on it which means that I can use my external Hard Drive. Unfortunately it is currently also formatted Ext4.

So with the 2TB drive plugged into my only other computer that can plug into it, I have also connected my external drive and am reformatting the external drive.

This would be only a little bit dodgy. However apparently formatting a drive in Windows Vista takes a long time. It's been a few hours but it is still only at 20% so this will be sitting until tomorrow afternoon. Such is life.

But I have found a new home for the NAS. For now anyway.

It is on the floor but I don't think it will be a problem. It will probably be moving a fair few times yet so this won't be the last place it lives I dare say.

So the beginning for a very exciting project. But still a little way to go before I am happy with the way it is set up.

Cheers,
Rex

Epson Printer Drivers

Hi, Just a quick post, mostly to remind me when I go to do this again.

I was having trouble printing to our Epson NX430 TX435 from my laptop (Running Debian Linux) over the wireless connection. The solution? Download the latest drivers from Epson of course. This is the link I used. If you open that link and do a search for the model of printer it will give a list of downloads for Linux operating systems.

The "latest" tag wasn't correct, but going from versions and dates it was fairly easy to establish which download was for the latest version. I installed this with no problems and the jobs that had queued up started to print immediately.

I hope this helps you, but it will probably help me when I forget.

Cheers,
Rex