Run Forrest, Run!

Finally, I broke the 3 miles limit: 3.36 miles (around 5.41 kms!!!).

No picture this time: just click here.

P.S. And the Best is yet to Come! .

La Rimonta del Cornuto

Qui ci sta bene questo:

Title: Dalla Parte Del Toro
Artisti: Caparezza
Year: 2006

Via Repubblica.it.

I was on my way to the office (yes, on Sunday: I have stuff to do ), when I see something that doesn’t look correct or “in the right place”. A Fox in the middle of Boundary Row!!!

A Fox in Boundary Row O_o

I don’t know, probably was bringing to my desk Firefox 3 RC1
Yes yes, I know: Firefox is not a Fox, but a Red Panda!!!.

After some playing with Unslung on my Linksys NSLU2, I realize it was a “very limited solution” for our needs. We need to share 4 (sometimes 5) NTFS (or others) volumes, where everyone of them is 500GB: this is too much even for the modified firmware of Unslung, unable to read the full directory trees (and the contained files) of my massive movie’s collection.

The Debian/NSLU2's Reign

So, I came back to the Debian/NSLU2 solution. This time, with all the intention to make it work.
It’s quite pointless to report here all the things I did to make it work in the way I want/need. I’ll just write down the most important bits:

• Memory Optimization:
  • remove unused kernel modules (blacklisting in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist)
  • remove unnecessary services/daemons (like exim4 or nfsd)
• Mount volumes “by-label“, to avoid messes in mounting if the /dev files associated with the particular devices changes (reboot, unplug/replug, etc.) (take a look at this page for more info)
• Use the noatime option in the /etc/fstab file to avoid the system to update the “last-access” field in the i-nodes: this is very important to reduce I/O on Flash memories
• Reduce the swappiness of the kernel (reduce the I/O)
• Install fuse and compile ntfs-3g by hand: on Debian stable it’s not available yet (I could have used stable-backports but no one compiled ntfs-3g for ARM )
• Configure one Samba share for Disk. This avoid the problem of Samba calculating “free-space” when the sub-directory of a share is the mount point of a different disk.
• De-underclock the NSLU2: the CPU (XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5l)) is soldered to the board with a pin configuration that makes it run half of is speed. I just removed the Resistor that realize that particular configuration. More info here and here.

This time the main topic was about “Developer Productivity“. It was one of the most funny I have ever attended: a couple of speaker were just “crazy” (but in a good way)!

If interested in knowing more, here is a transcript of the event: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dm58hwb_5f93zjrcd.