Exposure to the Raspberry Pi platform

Earlier this year, we had a project that revolved around the Raspberry Pi / Raspbian platform, which essentially is a low-cost computing architecture, not terribly dissimilar than some of the stuff I saw being engineered for the projects like "one laptop per child".

Of course, when someone first mentioned it, I had not heard of it, and thought they were talking about some kind of edible pie.

Turns out, that these little kits (they tend to be sold as assembly kits) are quite interesting. Sort of like coming back to the old Heathkits; except no soldering is required. Kits tend to come with a mainboard/chip (small form factor), and have pluggable slots for keyboard, HDMI for a screen, 4 USB2.x ports, power, and one ethernet port. At least the one we ordered from Canakit has these, as well as a plastic case that the board can be seated in.

I see there's an entire community around these "disposable computing" devices, ranging from academic projects and use cases to commercial uses.

I should subscribe to some of the periodicals.

Network Attached Storage - Synology

Somehow, through all these years, I managed to somehow evade all things network storage related. Until this week, when I found a couple of NAS devices sitting on a shelf. One was a Buffalo, and I could not get it to boot up due to errors on certain disks.

The other, a Synology, worked perfectly. I had to go to the web, but found a program called Synology Assistant which installed on my Windows 7 laptop. I configured this device to the network, configured RAID 10 on it, set up some shared folders, and configured the SCSI partitions (in SCSI they call them LUNs).  We then loaded a bunch of virtual machines on it, and had an ESXi server use those Virtual Machines. Pretty cool stuff.

Linux - NFLog and System Tap

I used nflog with iptables to count packets for a specific user (I will edit this later and add more info).

Later, I was told to investigate System Tap for this same use case, but never had time. So I'll write more about System Tap when I have time to investigate this.

I created this blog as a place to park notes and comments about things I have heard about (or am working on). We'll see where this goes.