After watching this video and reading this blog post, I decided to have a play with the new btrfs (ButterFS) filesystem.

So I downloaded OEL6u2 and made a minimal install in VirtualBox (which doesn’t even include wget or scp!)

I decided not to use LVM, but to use LUKS encryption for my 8Gb ext4 /, a 500Mb ext4 /boot with no encryption, and no swap partition.

Upon first boot I installed the Base Yum repo from here which is essentially just what’s on the DVD, and also the beta repo from here. I then installed the Unbreakable2 kernel and btrfs:

I finally figured out how to get Full-HD to play on my Revo, that includes .m2t files from my HD-PVR card, not just .mkv files. Add this to ~/.mplayer/config

[default]
# Write your default config options here!
vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,
demuxer=lavf

It forces VDPAU on for h.264 files, and falls back to X11 for DivX etc. Also LAVF as the demuxer seems to help with audio syncing. It’s not 100% smooth like 720p or below, but its 90% there.

The final version of sun-jdk-6 in Debian Wheezy before it was removed was 6u26. The latest from Oracle (excluding Java7) is 6u30, so I decided to manually install it myself.

In fact it couldn’t be easier, all you do is download the jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin file and run it, which extracts it to a directory called jdk1.6.0_30, which you then rename to java-6-sun-1.6.0_30 and move to /usr/lib/jvm, you then delete the java-6-sun symlink and recreate it to point to the newer directory:

Today I have been mostly installing Junos. Well actually I’ve wasted most of the day trying to get Junos 10.4 to work in Olive under VirtualBox. I understood that it required FreeBSD 7.1, so tried installing it under 7.1 and 7.4 to no avail.

In the end I cloned my Junos 9.0/FreeBSD 4.11 VM, allocated 512Mb instead of 256Mb and installed 10.4 as an upgrade, which also meant I didn’t have to bother removing checkpic.

I fitted my new SSD to my fileserver yesterday as it was a rainy Sunday afternoon. Oddly enough the new 2.5″-to-3.5″ drive rails I got don’t fit in a floppy bay – well they do but the screw holes won’t line up, so I fitted it in my one remaining hard disk bay.

Anyway I was surprised how quickly I replaced the Ubuntu 9.10 setup with Debian 6.0.3 without losing any functionality. I decided to stick to Squeeze+Backports as Wheezy like on my desktop machine is way too much maintenance for a fileserver – I can’t cope with the “apt-get upgrade” fear! 😉