Fred Cirera

I am running two NTP servers for the project pool.ntp.org, one located in France, the second here in California. I am monitoring my servers with Munin. Munin comes with plenty of plugins to monitor the temperature of your computer, your disks, your CPU, etc, etc. It also comes with plugins to monitor your NTP daemon, but there is no plugin to monitor how much your NTP server is used. Since I am running open servers I was interested in finding out how much my servers where used.

For the few last day I’ve been working on a project to turn a Zonbu machine into a NAT Server for home and small business settings.

The Zonbu machine is a small diskless computer, with 512MB of ram, and six USB2 ports, sold by Zonbu, Inc. for only $99. For that price and the addition of a few external disks, you can make a nice little NAS Server, to store, and share your videos, music, and important documents.

The NAS appliance I am building is based on the latest FreeBSD version FreeBSD-7.0. I am planning to use ZFS for volume management. That will allow the user to configure their disk with any kind of RAID, from RAID 0 to RAID 5. You will be able to share these disks on the net with any computer from Unix to Windows.

I haven’t completely definitively defined all the features this home sever will offer yet. I guess I’ll define them ad the project advances and I get feedback.

The geeks who are interested in this project can view the configuration for the kernel I am using to boot my Zonbu machine.

I am giving some of my resources and some of my time to the community. I have setup and I am now managing two times servers for the pool.ntp.org project.

One is located in the San-Francisco Bay Area [us.time.bsdhost.net], and the second one is in Paris France [fr.time.bsdhost.net].