NAS Adventures, take two

I've given up on the previous NAS - trying to put together a toolchain is proving to be too much hassle, and while I could blow away the custom firmware and put a stock Debian install on it the internets suggest that the Debian kernel doesn't support DMA at which point your performance drops through the floor. Plus it has a dead hard disk and a noisy fan.

So over Christmas I picked up my dad's other old NAS, a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo v1. Like the Thecus it's also Debian-based, but Netgear are running a real full-fat Debian install. And they provide an official addon to enable root SSH access at which point I can log in, download Debian's already-built toolchain, and use that. Simples!

Plus it also has two working hard disks and a much quieter fan :)

( Making PHP and mod_rewrite behave )

Next challenge: trying to wring more performance out of PHP! It's a bit sluggish, probably because it only has a 400MHz Sparc processor.

Shiny stuff!

Anyway, enough incomprehensible rambling about computers! Time instead to post pictures of shinyness!

See, way back in April last year I spotted in an email from Nintendo that a bunch of my stars/points/whatever that you get for buying games were going to expire, and I thought that rather than just letting them evaporate (as I've done with most of them) I may as well actually spend the virtual not-money on something. So I spent a chunk of stars and a couple of weeks later this turned up:

( Shinyness! )

Fast-forward until last week and I had another chunk of stars about to expire. Plus having bought that 3DS the total balance was looking pretty healthy so I browsed through the catalog, looked a few items, and eventually decided to splurge almost my entire not-money balance on more shinyness:

( More shinyness! )