The moral of this story is that if, in an interview, you're asked "have you ever enslaved a civilization?", you probably don't want to work there, regardless of whether or not they're affiliated with scientology.
Of course, unless they're game developers or recruiting Bond villains.
Hold on... Are you telling me that corporations can't get married?
Corporations can get married, just not in states with "defense of marriage" laws, because it's impossible to prove they're of opposite genders.
If performance is your goal, don't look at the "buy-it-at-Frys" level of NAS, or at "roll-your-own."
If you build your own, you'll end up bottle-necked by the performance of the particular OS you use, plus SAMBA or NFS (depending on your needs.) Plus, there's the time factor in putting it together, tuning it, and maintaining it. Granted, this isn't a lot if you're already a tech-head, but your time isn't free.
If you buy one of the consumer-level NAS boxes, what you're getting is the equivalent of building your own, without the ability to tune it, since most are based on the same open-source software you would use yourself. Pretty much every NAS device I've ever seen has the same cyclical bursty transfer profile as a build-it-yourself.
If you want better performance and buzzwords, every major PC vendor now has a SAN solution. You get the benefit of a team of people whose job it is to maximize disk performance, and a nice management system. However, your system head still has the same problems as before - using a general purpose OS and/or open-source software.
If you want pure performance, look at Network Appliance. They've been in the game for a long time, and their hardware/software combination allows them to control/tune the whole environment. To a first approximation, all the cool things in ZFS were done ten years ago by NetApp. You get the benefit of a whole company whose job it is to maximize disk and network performance. You can look at a performance review from earlier this year showing about 30k SPC-1 IOPS.
Personal anecdotes:
Note: My only relation with NetApp is being a very satisfied customer.
Don't use anything not in Bourne shell, for example $(), lest you someday have to fix a problem on an older system that predates bash and you are unable to remember how to do it properly.
I could also say "Don't use any command not available in a miniroot," but then I'm really dating myself... either that, or opening up more "stupid unix tricks," like Identify 3 ways to get a directory listing where the only commands you have available are shell builtins, echo, and dd
I once was a sysadmin at a company where official policy was "every user has the root password."
Since I didn't want people wandering through my pr0n^H^H^H^H work directory, my home directory was empty except for a single directory: "my/directory". Yes, a single directory with a slash embedded in the name.
Only one other user at the company was smart enough to figure out how to cd(1) into the directory. Fortunately, he doubled the size of it.
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
