The USS Quad Damage

I’ve got a linux server (a no-fan PII), which is doing a lot of my P2Ping, TV show recording, and more recently asterisk. I use it’s puny 120GB HDD to keep all my stuff on. It’s OK as long as I’m not out for more than a week. I find that I don’t refer to my old stuff enough that I can keep it all on DVD, but I’m only just finding out that DVD isn’t a great format, if only because giving people stuff can take a long time if by DVD.

If you think about it from the perspective of giving people stuff to leech, you may find DVD a bit wanting as well. I find those little laptop drives do well, considering most people don’t want to leech more than 40 GB off you at a time. I haven’t found a good use for LVM, and I don’t manage to accrue all the crap that other people manage to accrue.

I use nathan’s backup solution: give it all to friends, and they’ll magically keep the good stuff and delete the crap. If I ever need it again I just ask around. In a more structured sense, P2P is really a good solution for this. Keep all the data you want in a P2P shared folder, and when the HDD dies, just look it up on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is that of the buddhist zen master: throw it away to prove your disconnection from the data.

One problem I have is I somehow mangaed to take about 70GB worth photos, so I want to use VLM so I can use RAID without wasting space because I have different size drives and so forth.

It’s so much easier to find things if they’re on a HDD rather than hidden away on some disc somewhere, I suppose my problem now is I can’t organise my backup disc properly.

How did you have your asterisk server setup? It sounds useful, just that the hardward to support it properly seems too expensive.

Photos is a good reason. I’m having trouble figuring out how exactly I’m going to save all my video footage without keeping it on the DV tape itself. The big problem with that is that you can’t keep all the metadata — the project files, the audio, and the rest of the artifacts from making a short film. I don’t want to lose it, but I certainly don’t want to buy a new HDD for every Brazier we create.

LVM for RAID is an excellent idea (if it works, I don’t know). I’ve never really thought about doing that. RAID only appears to ever really be useful on the local box, though, not on NAS (at least, I can’t think of anything I’d need quick network disk access over).

As for the asterisk setup, in short, I haven’t set it up yet. The biggest problem is dealing with NAT (second being security). I’m using a SIP trunk to free world dialup as well as to iinetphone, which is pretty much the only free (ie: no minimum usage) SIP provider I’ve found. Hardware is a bit of a bitch, but I’ve had friends set up the hardware without too much trouble. You may need a sound card on your box, though.

The hardware itself is actually pretty cheap, something like $40 – $80 for the line cards (if I remember correctly). I haven’t bought it because I don’t really want to play with my real phone line

Video? Ouch, those files are huge, I thought the best way was to keep it on the tape and store the metadata on something else.

Oztell seems to be one of the cheapest VoIP companies, you still need to pay a few dollars a month to get a SIP number though.

My problem with line cards is, for a little more you can get a self contained VoIP unit, sure it doesn’t do as much, but I like having a seperate unit to handle my phone calls when I’m rebuilding my server.

I thought NAT was easy enough to get through using SIP proxies, let us know how that goes.