Build Your Own NAS, the saga.

I don't have pictures yet, but I do have an update for you.I took the VIA board and dug around until I found a desktop case that would hold it just right. I was going to use the mini-case I had from an old all-in-one webserver Lori and I had years ago but the case is too small, so I settled on a desktop.I got it mounted and have a pinout of the VIA board to match up with the case and power supply wiring. Soon I will be able to boot to the flash, I hope. I do have an old CDROM to install from, and a couple of known-good hard disks to use to get it running.

After a little fact-checking I realized that most PCI-X is backward compatible to 32 bit PCI, so I may be okay with a PCI-X adapter. I'm waiting to hear back from Adaptec, but now that I've had reason to look it up, I'm hopeful.

This project got a little disrupted by the standard "emergency" issues that everyone has. My workload was a little much over the holidays, we lost a NAS device (see below entry), and we have been having problems with water in the lab - not that there IS water in the lab, but an alarm telling us there could be soon keeps going off. Lori has been handling this, but it does consume time trying to insure that if we go in one morning and everything is a little wet, we'll be okay. Most stuff is off the floor a good six inches, so the entire building will have trouble if any of our critical gear gets fried. Except our Cat 6500, which last I saw was sitting on the floor... Anyway, things seem to be moving again, I'll get the NAS booted in the next few days and then check back with you about the trials and tribulations of installing an OS on non-standard hardware. Needless to say, I'm hoping that post is short because all went well ;-).Until then,Don.