10km PB 2 days in a row! #nikeplus #nike #running #runners #pb #10k #legburn #fitness #health #healthy #distance #training
Farthest run so far, legs are on fire! šŖ#nikeplus #fitness #health #run #running #road #race #legs #runner #runningman
It was our first, but definitely not our last!
Smashed my KM and Mile records!
Messed up my legs a little during Mudrunner!
Last weekend I completed my first Mudrunner! It was really hard work, but so much fun. Canāt wait to do it again soon!
Managing my Server
Itās been a couple of weeks now since I first got FreeNAS up and running on my home server. It wasnāt quite as easy as advertised, I came across a couple of issues (one of which is still unsolved) but for the most part things are now running smoothly. You can read about the build and getting FreeNAS running, here and now, Iām looking at how I can improve the current set up, getting the most out of it.
Plex
There were two main goals of having my own server, the first of which was moving my somewhat huge1media library off my personal rig to free up space and make all the movies/TV shows I have more available throughout the house.
The way FreeNAS handles Plex made the transition really simple. I install the Plex Media Server plugin to my instance of FreeNAS, created a jail which allowed me to set a disk quota (Iām currently only running with 1TB of space so donāt want it run in to any issues), created a user/group combination for security purposes and was away!
To make things slightly easier for myself, I also enabled a Windows Share to the designated media folder which my Plex Jail was pointing to, meaning I could mount the Plex Server as a network drive and simply dump all my content straight in! In future, Iāll be adding a Bluray Writer to my server, allowing me to rip films directly, but for now Iāll still need to use my desktop as a go-between.
All setāāāIād freed up a huge amount of space on my personal rig and had the new Plex server running on all clients in the house! Next, I needed to get my backups running. Having learned many mistakes from not properly managing my backups in the past, I felt it was only right that I had all the machines in the house backing up to the new server, as well as an off-site backup. Charleigh and I both have Macbooks and so setting up Time Machine was the first task on my backup list.
Time Machine
Setting up Time Machine on the server was only a little more complicated than Plex. Thereās no plugin as such since the server isnāt actually required to do anything, other than store data. The first thing I did was create a new jail specifically for Time Machine. Iād decided beforehand that Iād have all Macs in the house backup to one location, rather than giving each user their own ādriveā. Itās important to note that Time Machine will over time, basically use up however much space you give to it and as a result I needed an easy way to manage disk space and user access.
Hell, itās only the two of us.
Once Iād created the jail and given it 500GB to work with, I needed to designate an AFP3in order for our Macs to pick up the new shared drive for Time Machine to use. I then loaded up both laptops, ignored a few folders from the sync and ran the first full backup on each machine. This has to be the only time in my life that Iād wished my Macbook Air had an ethernet port.
In total I think it took about 11 hours to fully backup both machines to the server, in the process, I came across an interesting issue that Iāve not yet resovled. For some reason the Macbooks occasionally lose connection with the server and I have to refresh their network lease in order to reconnect the server and continue the backup. I have both machines connecting to and mapping the network drive on boot, which seems to work, most of the timeā¦ But I need to work on a permanent solution to this.
Windows Backup
Once Time Machine was running (somewhat successfully), I moved on to getting my Windows PC backed up as well. This presented quite a challenge for me. The last time I ran any major backups on a PC, outside of manually copying files/folders to some external hard drives, windows had itās own backup protocol and tools. Those have seemingly vanish in Windows 8.1, or rather, changed to the point that they donāt function quite like I was expecting.
Anyway, I decided for the short term to use File Restore and Windows Scheduler to automate the process of backing up some of the more important files on my PC whilst I looked in to alternative methods of backing up the entire machine. On the FreeNAS side of things, all I needed to do was create another jail to manage access and disk space, then create a Windows CIFS4Share so that I could map the jail as a network drive.
One final task whilst creating all the jails and shares on FreeNAS was to create something of a media server. Not really to serve content, more as long-term storage for my growing catalog of photos. I had however, come up against a slight issue with the amount of remaining space on my 1TB drive and was forced to put this on hold for a short while.
My media library is currently stored on my personal rig, tied in to Dropbox (not ideal I realise, but a legacy of moving away from my Macbook Pro and needing somewhere quick to drop a couple of hundred gigabytes of images). Once my new set of hard drives arrives, Iāll be moving away from Dropbox as a storage medium and then start looking towards off-site backup solutions.
Upgrades
The first couple of weeks of living with my new server, moving all our backups and content to it and trying to get over the initial hurdles I faced during itās setup, have left me with a short list of upgrades to work on in the near future.
Storage
I absolutely need more storage. I bought the Fractal R5 case specifically because it allows me to house 12 hard drives, I need to take advantage of the physical storage space and make sure I move to a neat RAID array for drive redundancy.
Memory
The server is currently running on 8GB of Kingston Hyper X DDR3 (Non ECC) RAM. Itās a disaster waiting to happen given that FreeNAS essentially runs from the system memory. But itās also causing a slight issue with Plex content. Whilst 8GB does meet the minimum requirements, itās not quite enough to stream 1080p content over the network, flawlessly. Ideally Iād like at least 16GB of ECC RAM, but that is fairly costly and if I was going that route this early, Iād probably have gone for a server grade motherboard and XEON processor to match.
In all, Iām really pleased with how the server has been running so far. Iāve a few changes to make to it in the short term and Iāve already learned a number of lessons in how to best manage my storage and systems locally. Hopefully I can continue to improve on itās performance and begin pushing more itās way!
Attempting to Set Up FreeNAS
Backups have always been a double edged sword for me. Ā I either didn't back up frequently enough, or poorly planned my redundancy. Several times I've ended up losing data all together, through my own bad backup habits. A few years ago I'd pretty much resigned myself to pulling a full hard drive backup every couple of weeks, splitting it across a couple of drives (just in case) and repeating the process for each of my machines. That was until, I started using Dropbox.
With Dropbox loaded up on all my machines, a 1TB storage limit and unlimited bandwidth, I pretty much ran my entire life from the /Dropbox folder of each of my computers.
This was great, it saved me a lot of pain, time, and regret when my ill-planned backup schedule failed and I was left with 500GB of nothing on my Western Digital Elements drive. One thing it wasn't great for though, was backing up the other computers in the house and our ever-growing media collection. To make sure everything was covered, I decided to invest in a NAS.
After a fair amount of research and poking around, I ultimately decided I really wasn't willing to part with the best part of Ā£500 if the only benefit I gained from the likes of a Synology/Drobo style box was storage space. I wanted the ability to control backup schedules, manage my own RAID arays of drives as I continued to add them, and future-proof the machine to the extent that I could justify the hefty cost. With that in mind, I ended up switching gears slightly and began researching the idea of building a home server.
I had a number of spare parts lying around from my most recent PC upgrade so immediately I was on to a winner with building my own server. After double-checking the requirements for a decent home server and some reading in to FreeNAS (at the recommendation of Tested.com) I decided to get to work.
Build Specs
The rationale behind the build I put together for this home server is fairly straightforward. I needed a clean build with decent airflow, low noise, and I needed an easy way to add/change storage further down the line.
Case Fractal Design - Define R5
Power Supply Corsair CX 500W Modular
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H
CPU Intel Core i5-4590 3.30GHz
Memory Kingston 8GB
Storage Western Digital Green - 2TB
The Build
Putting this machine together was really easy compared to my gaming PC rig. Once the new CPU arrived, I harvested the motherboard from my older, shelved, gaming PC, I had my current rig donate 8GB of it's RAM, attached the stock CPU cooler (It would do to start me off) and carefully loaded it in to my brand new Fractal Define R5.
At the time of writing this, I only have one hard drive to load in to the machine, so it seems a little overkill right now, but I know it's going to save me a ton of time later. Plus, it looks sexy as hell.
After I'd loaded the parts in to the machine (I didn't test run before putting the machine together, I was a little eager to see the finished product), I dropped in my 2TB drive, plugged in all the peripherals and booted it up to see it was all OK.
Thank fuck for that.
Installing FreeNAS
Everything I'd read about FreeNAS lead me to believe it was to be a fairly simple process. I have a ton of USB drives lying around so quickly formatted a couple of those. Loaded one up with the install files, left the other blank and booted straight to the install menu.
Initial Install
The install went well, three fairly easy to navigate menus, a couple of on-screen prompts and I was golden. Once I was in to the GUI, I followed the set up wizard, secured the box, created my users, and began setting up several volumes to split among the computers in the house.
This is where things started to get a little interesting.
For some reason, I wasn't able to create any volumes or jails (a FreeNAS specific way of partitioning a drive for a set use), larger than 11GB. I knew there was something wrong as there was plenty more space than that available, for sure. I went back, deleted my volumes, booted in to a copy of Ubuntu I have on another USB drive and checked the partitions were all set up correctly.
Something was definitely wrong.
After some searching and eventually running back through the initial install sequence, I discovered that I had actually installed FreeNAS on to my 2TB hard drive, rather than the seconday USB drive I had prepared earlier.
Re-install
I went back to square one. I formatted all the drives, downloaded a fresh copy of FreeNAS, loaded it's install files to a USB drive and followed the install process from the beginning. At this point the system runs a reboot to load you in to the OS, rather than the install files themselves.
Problem.
After the reboot (and every subsequent reboot), I was left with an error message, and forced in to the shell.
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!
SMP: AP CPU #2 Launched!
SMP: AP CPU #3 Launched!
Timecounter "TSC-Low" frequency 1650033691 Hz quality 1000
Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default []...
init: not found in path /sbin/init:/sbin/oinit:/sbin/init.bak:rescue/init:/stand/sysinstall
panic: no init
cpuid = 2
KDB: stack backtrace:
db_trace_self_wrapper() at db_trace_self_wrapper+0x2a/frame 0xffffff8000258850
kdb_backtrace() at kdb_backtrace+0x37/frame 0xffffff8000258910
panic() at panic+0x1ce/frame 0xffffff8000258a10
start_init() at start_init+0x27a/frame 0xffffff8000258aa0
fork_exit at fork_exit+0x11f/frame 0xffffff8000258af0
fork_trampoline() at fork_trampoline+0xe/frame 0xffffff8000258af0
--- trap -, rip = 0, rsp = 0xffffff8000258bb0, rbp = 0 ---
KDB: enter: panic
[ thread pid 1 tid 100002 ]
Stopped at kdb_enter+0x3b: mov1 $0,0xd04732(%rip)
This bring me up to now. I've spent the entire day researching this error with the limited knowledge I have on FreeBSD. My machine meets the minimum required spec, as do the USB drives I'm using to install FreeNAS. I can't find any similar errors online and currently have no idea how to fix this. I'm somewhat hoping someone will see this and scream at their screen for how simple an issue this is to fix, but until then, I'll keep plugging away.
Side note: If you do know how to resolve this, I'd love to hear how!
Update
It looks as though there was an issue with FreeNAS 9.3 (Actually released the day I was having these problems). I downgraded my instal files to FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 and it worked immediately!
I'm now in the process of creating my volumes, setting up our new Plex Server and this afternoon I'll be getting our computers all backing up automatically!
Update #2
I finally have my FreeNAS instance running on the most up to date version of 9.3. I'm yet to ascertain exactly which files were missing from the initial install or what may have caused it to fail. Technically speaking FreeNAS doesn't support my set up, since I'm not running on ECC memory and am using a desktop grade motherboard/CPU combination. I'll continue to work on finding out what the issue was, should anyone come across it in future this post may prove to be useful.
In the meantime however, I'll continue working with 9.3 and see how I get on over the next few weeks. I've now got all our backups running smoothly across all devices, shared drives up and running and Plex is running fantastically (Although it would probably benefit from 12GB of RAM instead of just the 8GB it's currently working with). Next on my list is to build in extra redundancy, move to a RAID array of multiple drives and try to get rsync set up to replicate individual, important files!
My Trip Pack List
As far as everyday use is concerned, I’ll still be taking a large portion of my EDC with me, hell, that’s the point! That said, there are some things that won’t be of much use to me whilst we’re away. I would usually be wearing my Moto 360 (I’m still utterly loving it), but given the travel we’ll be doing and the amount of other devices I’ll have with me, I won’t be able to guarantee charging it anyway. So instead I’ll be wearing my Daniel Wellington Watch.
I don’t plan on having any time for listening to music on my own, so won’t be taking my headphones with me. Instead if I manage to catch a spare moment, I’ll be taking my Kindle Paperwhite for entertainment. I’m hoping though really, that I won’t have any time to read, as we’ll be too busy sightseeing. For that, I’m going all out and will be carrying both my Canon 6D and GoPro Hero3+ Silver. I just recently bought a GoPro Clip to try out but will also be catching some footage in the car as we go from Country to Country using the GoPro Suction Cup Mount.
To mitigate any risk of losing SD cards, corrupting backups or harddrives, I’ll be taking my Macbook Air 11" with me. That way I can dump all shots from the day and at least try and get them backed up to Dropbox back at the hotel.
On top of all this, I’ll also have my Moto X (2014) with me at all times. Thanks to 3’s “Feel at Home” plan, my unlimited data is free all across Europe (Actually, it’s free in the US and Australia too, so I’m looking forward to more trips to take advantage of that!) That means I’ll be able to take advantage of Google Map’s when driving and still be able to make smaller updates throughout the day to whichever social network I’m feeling at that particular moment. Likely Twitter, I’m hating everything else it seems recently.
To keep all this safe I’ll be using my Incase DSLR Pro Pack. I won’t be able to hold my Canon 6D all day, it also means I don’t have to risk leaving my laptop/anything else, back at the hotel.
We started a large portion of the packing today - Had to pick up a whole load of baby food, nappies and medical supplies to store in the car and just about got clothes all packed and ready too. My Marcs Austin Overnight Bag is being put to good work there!
You know, I said I make too many lists, I wasn’t lying - Here’s the list I used to write this short post. A full breakdown of what I’ll be taking with me!
EDC Gear
- Macbook Air 11"
- Moto X (2014)
- Kindle Paperwhite
- Supr Good Slim Wallet
- Daniel Wellington Watch
- Maglite Solitaire LED Torch
- Jeff Banks Glasses
Cameras & Accessories
Bags
We're Going on an Adventure!
London, Paris, Singapore, Melbourne - Just a few of the places Charleigh and I have been (with/without the kids) in the last few years, but not once have we been on holiday together!
This year however, things are different. Our tickets are booked, the car is in order, the hotels have been warned - We are coming for you, Italy!
As with a lot of things in my families life, this holiday is going to be a little far left of normal. Whilst we have booked flights and hotels, only half of us will be flying - and we haven't booked one hotel, we've booked six!
We decided when moving back from Australia that we would make the most of the time we have here in the UK and try to travel as much as possible, really taking advantage of everything Europe has to offer. Neither of us has been to Italy before, and both being huge fans of Dan Brown's superlative descriptions of the Country in his amazing series of Robert Langdon novels, we thought that it would be a great place to start.
Given my propensity for driving long distances and eagerness to drive as many miles as possible, Ellie and I will be driving to Lyon, France and meeting Charleigh and Tyler at the airport. We could have driven all together, but with Tyler still being so young, we would likely have had to stop every hour or two for nappy changes and feeding. Whilst it still would have been loads of fun to all travel together, it would have meant our holiday would be cut short before we actually managed to get to Italy. This way round Ellie and I can cover the miles through France and all start our holiday together in the south east of the country, have our fill of croissants and make our way to the Italian border!
To make sure we get the most of Italy whilst we're there, we've put together an itinerary of places we want to visit and solidified all of that with a string of hotel bookings.
Unbeknownst to Ellie, we may be making a slight detour for her - She's absolutely desperate to see the Eiffel Tower and I think it's only fair we break up that long drive from the middle England to Lyon!