Linux has a long way to go for the common man. People buy computers with Windows or OSX installed, not linux. If they get linux accidentally, as we already saw with netbooks, they return it. There is so much easy-to-install software available for Windows, the methods while using it are familiar, they're heavily entrenched with the OEMs (and corrupt enough to fight with them over linux if need be), have a lot of money to spend on advertising and legal fees, etc, etc, etc. Moms, dads, and grandparents are never, ever going to download an Ubuntu ISO and try to install it. Why not instead focus on what linux IS good at? For instance, a while back I needed to serve up subdomains that had SSL security enabled for each one on the same IP address. IIS does this with a little metabase hackery, but Apache is completely incapable of it. Keep Windows down in the server market. There aren't any really stand-out "Small Business Server" equivalent distros, either, which is especially maddening considering most small businesses would love a free, stable OS for the services they take for granted.

That's something about the support environment I've worked in that I enjoyed, as well. I think managers who don't meddle with employees all the time and back them up are doing the right thing, and performance becomes peer/pride driven. Sounds like you guys have a good work atmosphere and management.

I flashed my 500GB ST3500320AS with SD1A, and it was rendered useless. After following the Seagate forums on this issue for a while (and noticing the firmware had been removed from the KB article), I decided to call you guys to report mine, since I figured you could use all the data in this situation. First, I was really happy to get an American English speaker who was actually from a city 1 hour away from me. That was very, VERY refreshing, and will likely keep me buying Seagate drives even after this debacle (which vendor hasn't put out a bad batch?). Second, he was really knowledgeable and wasn't condescending or rude about it, even given the enormous workload I'm sure you're all under right now. I do blame Seagate for not testing the SD1A firmware with the 500GB drives, but personally, I was only using mine to test Windows 7, and don't really care about the fresh install. The only negative I see in this situation is that Seagate hasn't provided a link to an ISO for the people who updated to SD1A to roll back to their previous firmware release. To sum it all up, I think it's great that Seagate has identified the issue, and was trying to get us a proactive firmware update before the drives went kaput, and the support folks have been really great, from my perspective.

BigDog was the only one of those that really made me sit up and think, "That thing CANNOT become sentient, or we are DOOMED!"

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES.

The high price of Vista Ultimate (the only one that would have been acceptable for my typical home use) was prohibitive. They also need to ditch the retail installation limits, for those enthusiasts among us who might install Windows again several times.

Since we're playing the "my anecdote beats yours" game, I have a K8WE Thunder (S2985) in a server that is absolute crap. An Asus board at half the price is more reliable and less buggy than the Tyan. So bad, I had to buy a PCI USB card because the on-board USB won't connect devices on boot, nor with the secondary PCI Express x16 slot work with a 1-lane card with SLI disabled. It also will not allow you to use RAID without enabling it for all the SATA ports, not just the 2 you might want to use for RAID (undocumented "feature").

Remember, though, that FreeNAS is still not stable software. I had trouble with it not remembering settings and a few other things. Great concept, but I can't wait for them to iron out a few wrinkles.

After reading horrible reviews about set-top NAS boxes, I built the client a PC and threw Debian and samba on it. I use Acronis True Image Home on their PCs, and have it set to use no more than 100GB of share storage for backups. It worked great for a while, but then there was a power issue that zapped the power supply and got most of the components in the machine, and now I'm trying to get it all working right again.

In retrospect, if I had it to do all over again, I would have gone with a cheap Dell server with a warranty or something rather than building the machine myself. I believe the extremely cheap components I used were a contributing factor in the failure. Which leads me to another lesson learned: always talk to the customer about their price expectations! Don't always assume they want it as cheap as possible! In my case, I talked the customer out of manually backing up to a USB drive with a few computers into instead using imaging software to make backups to this NAS. Therefore, I assumed they would be shocked at a high sticker for the PC used as a NAS, when comparing it to the cost of a USB drive. Later, they made a comment about cost along the lines of, "Don't worry about how much it's going to cost, let's just get it working." That kind of threw me for a loop.

On the plus side, such a configuration can be used to add value later, and the customer has asked for a light website that would provide their customers with the ability to upload files that are too big for email. The server should be able to handle that small increase in activity just fine.

Keep in mind that most of the small business/home office sites don't have incredibly stable power infrastructure. Make sure that the NAS has a UPS, and a daemon running to monitor it and shut down if necessary. In my case, it's an APC 800VA UPS and the NAS server runs apcupsd.

Is it bad that I automatically assume I'm being pranked now when someone posts a tinyurl?

Hopefully this gets off the ground before retailers, which obviously do not want in-store competition, find a way to kill it.