The first thing I did with the new volume was scan the receipt from Fry's onto the new drive - a new, fast, 2-sided scanner will scan in all the bills and similar stuff I can't manage to switch over to electronic delivery. The files in the drawer beneath the array will hopefully go away as everything moves from paper to (backed up) electronic storage.

These two large, inexpensive hard drives make me wonder if it's worth running Mac OS X Server on the LAN for any but educational purposes. In the old days pre-Mac OS X, an AppleShare server was a relatively fragile, crash-prone server that was nevertheless dead easy to set up and administer. Reboot once a month (or after a crash) and you were good to go.

Mac OS X Server (I'm running 10.4.x) is like most other server OS environments: it's powerful and stable once set up and debugged, but complicarted and hard to set up, and administration, especially when troubleshooting is involved, can be onerous. The Mac's server utilities put pretty faces on the underlying UNIX-like processes, but DNS, permissions et al. are just as hard to understand, much less administer. The WD's are plug-and-play, and have a simple password setup. The terabyte array, ready to plug-and-play, will cost less that the OS X Server software alone...
Comments 3:35:53 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures