Wasn’t it annoying that FreeBSD never had a volume manager which allowed to resize volumes including the contained filesystem on the fly? Well, it was possible to use gvinum in conjunction with UFS’ growfs tool to make filesystems bigger at least. But that’s not as flexible as Solaris’ ZFS. Moreover, UFS does not support snapshots as well as ZFS does. But finally we have a solution: Since FreeBSD 7.0, ZFS is part of the OS! Although it is still considered experimental and lacks some of the original’s features, it works quite well. Also, it is possible to use ZFS as a boot partition! See this great article.
Apr 25
As the company I work with has to store many media files, backups, rapidly changing documents and so on, they used to run a NetworkAppliance FAS2020 storage machine, which is quite neat. Unfortunately, the current setup does not allow to scale the volumes any more. So we needed to find an alternative.
Apr 24
Generally it is quite easy to sync calendars between one Mac and a Nokia N95 (or any other model). All you need is iSync and the Nokia iSync Plugin. The setup is quite straight-forward. But as the computers store the synchronisation information, conflicts are very likely to happen. So we need another solution to keep two (or more) computers and a mobile phone in sync.
Apr 24
To be honest, three months ago I could not imagine that I would fall in love with Mac OS and/or Apple’s products. I considered them way too expensive and did not understand the hype, because technically they do not differ much (any more) from i386 hardware. But as my new employer offered to provide a MacBook Pro for my daily business, I thought: “Why not?”
Apr 24
Yes, another more or less useful blog, I know 
In fact, this blog is not about one certain topic only. It will represent “snapshots” of my work and experience as a Systems Administrator, clearly focused on Linux/BSD and Mac OS X (the latter rather from a user’s than a Systems Administrator’s point of view). I should have started this blog years ago. Anyway, it is never too late to contribute to the community. If there are any other bloggers out there, who are interested in linking this blog, please let me know.
