I should have also added...

there is "scripting yourself out of a job", and there is "enabling someone else to do my current job, so that I can move up to something bigger/better/nicer/etc."

In the (fortune 500) company I work for, if you make yourself irreplaceable by way of being the only person capable of doing something, you're still just as likely to get fired. The people in charge of the hirings/firings are too "stupid" to avoid any associated pain. And being the only person capable of doing something that is scriptable just means that you're limiting yourself to your current low-level responsiblilities.

Yes, but this is basically a more polite version of the classic broken window fallacy.

It may keep people employed, but those same people could be much more usefully employed addressing other better problems. both now and in the past.

and in typical slashdot fashion I posted the first link I found. here's his whole 3-4 minute long video, that shows his ride prior to the cop pulling him over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK5bMSyJCsg&NR=1

I know I'm a day late to the conversation, which means it's probably dead. I know someone mentioned this briefly, but it's really worth watching the biker's video of the stop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHjjF55M8JQ

If you watch the video you'll see how off-base most of the comments in this discussion are. I know, I know, slashdot, new here, etc. but those of you who think this was some regular traffic stop by a uniformed officer should now be able to see just how far FAR different it actually was from anything reasonable or sane.

Even if it's not 1/30, your math still seems suspect.

I have a 200k mortgage note on my home. I bought it early in 2004, so let's assume it's not overvalued too badly(not quite as bad as those 2007, 2008 mortgages). My monthly payment, with PMI, taxes, etc: 1700$. (thank you FHA first-time home-buyer plan)

1 year's mortgage payments: 20,400$.

that's still 1/10 the price, even lower if we didn't figure in PMI, taxes, etc. For a home that had only been in foreclosure 1 year, that still seems way higher (or lower) than the typical 30-50% discounts I hear foreclosures are going for these days.

From building two or three of these at home myself, my practical experience for someone wanting a monster file server for home, on the cheap, consists of these high/low points:

1. the other poster(s) above are 100% correct about the raid card. to get it all in one card you'll pay as much as 4-5 more hdd's, and that's on the low end for the card. decent dedicated PCI-E raid cards are still in the $300+ range for anything with 8 ports or more.

2. be careful about buying older raid cards. I have 2 16-port and 2 8-port adaptec PCI-X sata raid cards that are useless. why? they only support raid arrays up to 2tb in size. "update the firmware", you say. sure, let me just grab the latest, from 2005, I'm sure that fixes it. oh, wait, my raid cards already have that, and it doesn't remove that limitation. 8 drives, 16 drives, even, and they hard-code a limit of 2tb? lame.

3. I've seen nothing in a home-budget price range that performs as well as linux software raid. My 1.5 yr old 500$ tyan workstation mobo(S5397, in another computer) has dedicated SAS raid that can't seem to do better than 10mbyte/sec throughput. reading data from drives that individually bench out at 50-60mbyte/sec.

4. which leads me to: use linux software raid. It's much more configurable than any hardware raid card, both in supported raid levels and monitoring capabilities. raid disks/arrays can be easily moved from one machine to another, one controller to another, etc. I've moved most of my disks between machines and controllers at least once.

5. I've come to believe over time that what you're really looking for is X SATA ports, not "controller capable of doing raid over X disks". Use SATA "mass storage" cards, or raid cards that will let you use them in pass-through mode to access the individual disks directly in the OS. here you have to be careful you don't get bit by #1, 2, or 3 again, since some raid cards don't behave well when not actually doing raid (I'm still looking at you, Adaptec). this makes it easier and much cheaper, you can mix and match lower-capacity cards to get 8-20+ sata ports for raid.

5.1 "hw vs sw raid tangent" : what happens on a dedicated raid card when you run out of ports? you usually can't span raid cards, unless you get multiple identical fancy (aka expensive) raid controllers from the same manufacturer. all linux needs is hard drives recognizable by the BIOS.

6. when using software raid, buy a decent CPU. You don't need some quad-core beast, but you don't want to be waiting on the CPU to finish your raid calculations. any 2-2.5ghz C2D is probably more than adequate...I've drawn the line with anything under 2ghz.

7. kiss backups good-bye. the price of any decent backup system capable of covering this much storage is WAY over the price of this whole setup. Anything I really don't want to lose gets saved multiple places outside of the raid array, otherwise I factor the potential for data loss as a risk of operating this way. Personally I don't really see how you could do otherwise in a setup like this.

8. be prepared for bottlenecks. you're doing this on a home budget, you probably won't get 300mbyte/sec reads off of your array, no matter how many drives configured at what raid level. I can only get 10-20mbyte/sec across my gigE network going to/from my raid 5 array. This is probably due to the cheap PCI sata cards I'm using. I willingly make this trade-off to obtain the capacity I have for the price I spent.

If any of these points is an overriding concern for your intended use, then you'd have to re-evaluate the importance of all the other considerations.

For me, stability, capacity and price are top three, leading me to research linux-stable cheap sata expansion cards (which is just a nice way of saying, I buy and try probably 2x the # of controllers I actually use, to find ones that won't corrupt data, time out on random drive accesses, or simply not display the real drives to the OS, etc), and compromise by waiting a bit longer for network transfers. Usually the waiting consists of starting a big transfer and then multi-tasking other things in the foreground/elsewhere. local same-machine use of this raid array is a consideration I've never entertained, but should be included in the list for anyone who's thinking about building one.

Not sure if you care, since it's not Ubuntu directly, but Fedora has done this for at least the past 6-12 months. They have since version 9: https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/

you might be able to use an ubuntu livecd image with it...?

you said you're not in the market for server hardware, but have you considered 1 or 2 generation older stuff?

you can pick up single and dual socket motherboards for well under 200$. 2ghz chips for 50-100$ each(that's a pure guess, they may be even cheaper), 1gb ram sticks for about 10-15$ each.

I've got tyan s2895 and s2892 boards, both work very well with windows or linux, vmware esxi will install without any fuss if you use a sata drive, and, if you so desire, I hear they make a mean hackintosh. my s2895 has 2 2.6ghz chips and 4gb of ram, running about 6 (mostly idle) linux vm's that all feel as responsive as my desktop machine.

you can get opteron 240-246's or higher for pretty decent prices, possibly even dual cores.

the only downside is they run a bit warm.

that, or I'd suggest a core 2 quad. those can run a little warm too, in my experience. your ram and motherboard will be cheaper than the opterons, but I have no idea how they play with osx or vmware.

This is anecdotal, so the standard grain(s) of salt apply, but I feel compelled to reply to this "people out in the country will be even worse off now" meme I see so many of us throw around:

My brother lives out in what most would call the country, he's 1.5-2 hrs southwest of Chicago(at least 45 min S-SW of Joliet), 20 minutes away from the nearest interstate, 5-10 minutes from the nearest "town".

They've got a big directional antenna up next to the house for TV, pointed at the Chicago stations(the next closest broadcasting area is about as far in the other direction, and being more rural doesn't pump out with nearly as much power). They could only get 2 analog stations with any halfway-tolerable picture quality. I'm not talking "no fuzz", I'm talking "the fuzz doesn't bother me enough to turn it off, and I can still make out major facial features".

After getting their digital converter box, they can now get every Chicago station(and the -2, etc alternates/extras), in crystal clear quality. He loves it.

I swore one time that my Windows 95 machine got hosed up, nothing worked right.

this was right after playing a bit of the original Half-life, sometime between 10pm and midnight, after my brother had gone to bed, with nice thick headphones and a pitch-black room. I had hit one part that was startling enough that I jumped, slamming the mouse into the keyboard out of surprise.

strangely, half-life wouldn't work right after that. I quit, and windows wouldn't work right. I rebooted, still nothing.

10-15 minutes of silent cursing and wondering what the hell just happened, I happened to look at my mouse, and see that the 4th button, on the side, the one I had bound to the backspace key in the control panel, seemed to be stuck in "clicked" mode, wedged under the side casing of the mouse.

I pried it out, and magically, windows starting working fine again. half-life too.

that one always makes me smile, how half-life scared me so much that I accidentally "broke" my computer.

this isn't directly related to support, just my personal anecdote about this 2nd-guessing you've explained so well:

A few years back I had a girlfriend. really. and I bought an original xbox because she liked video games.

We were playing some game, Hunter, I believe, because it had a redhead on the cover(take a guess at that one)

as most of us know, sometimes, sometimes quite often, when you kill someone in a video game, they may drop a weapon. and, depending on the game, or the situation in the game, they may not necessarily drop a weapon. either way, this is usually very visible on screen.

well this girl stumbled across a weapon on the ground after killing someone, and then decided she must run over every single killed enemy's body for their weapon, even though she'd only seen this with a very small percentage of the enemies we had killed so far(like maybe 25% at best), and could visually look to know whether or not there was a weapon on the ground anywhere on screen.

despite my going to school for and being employed as a computer programmer, despite my having played hundreds more hours of video games than her, despite clear visual evidence within the game itself, no suggestion, no explanation, no comment of any sort on my part could convince her that only SOME of the characters we killed would actually drop a weapon. She just HAD to check every single dead body for a weapon, not by looking on screen, but by running over their dead body with her character.

needless to say, it made the game take quite a bit longer, and killed any desire I had to play video games with her, or try to carry on any rational semi-intelligent conversation. if you don't have that, man, then you've really got less than nothing when the sex runs out ;-)