Building KREEANNE

Here we see KREEANNE's hardware laid out. The Wraith Prism chip cooler might seem like overkill for an Athlon II, but it will run near-silently. For better or for worse, its cute little light-show will be wasted. The motherboard was a bargain purchase even though the four sticks of mish-mash RAM it came with (totalling 6GB) didn't run. I subsequently installed two sticks of 4GB Patriot that I bought second-hand several years ago.

The F8 will be the side fan but the duct in this photo was subsequently replaced with a shorter unit. Arctic F8s and F12s run quietly at 7V (+12 for pos, +5 for neg). F12s move a surprising amount of air at this voltage, and the F8 moves just enough air to softly bathe the chip cooler with 'outside' air. At 5V, F9s are virtually inaudible and they will be moving just enough air to keep the spinners cool.

The new Samsung 850 EVO 120GB drive has been mounted onto a 'mongrel' mount for a big bay. this is because the tower case I bought second-hand in 2014 has only four HDD slidey-things.

Video comes courtesy of the Gigabyte GT 610. I've owned it since new and I am always thrilled to give an old piece of hardware a new job. The PATA DVD is one I bought, new, some years ago. This is its first job.

Here we see the fans, SSD boot, and IO plate installed. In the background, we see WALLABY (XP quad-core at 3.5GHz)

Here are the kids—ready for fitment. (And one spare.)

The excitement of logging in for the first time.

During the install, I had to leave the network cable unplugged until part-way through the DCHP configuration (as per Erwego's suggestion of February, 2020).

It's hardly Cable-Management-R-Us, but it's rock-solid. The uppermost spinner softly 'kisses' the chip cooler during slip-in and slip-out.

Using an empty Foxconn tower as a pedestal. Pleasingly, KREEANNE is no louder than a quiet desktop computer.

The view from KATHENA (Win-7 quad-core at 3.9GHz) as openmediavault creates the RAID10.

With my Win-7 PCs, I log in to KREEANNE using "kevin" and [password]. With WALLABY (XP), I have to use "kevin@kreeanne" and [password]. That gets me as far as the "Public" folder. If I wish to access the "Private" (password-protected) folder, I am greeted by another login request and nothing seems to work. From what I've read online, that's roughly what I should expect. Typically, I will be accessing KREEANNE only from KARETTA (Win-7 hex-core at 3.5GHz) and KATHENA.

In the meantime, here is WALLABY shortly after she copied most of my folders and files into the "Public" folder from an outboard SSD.

KREEANNE, one week on.

Whether I'm in the lounge room (Win-7 browsing PC is KARETTA; XP companion PC for GMX, gmail, and streaming MSNBC is WALLABY) or in my 'Library' (KATHENA and KRAEGA, both Win-7), I now access a single source of files. I no longer need my 'U-drive' (Samsung 860 EVO 500GB hanging off a USB SATA tail) to keep my most up-to-date version of daily-use spreadsheets and documents handy for use in any PC. I no longer have a disjointed mix of out-of-date files and folders in the D-drives of various PCs—including KATRORA (spare Win-7 browsing PC) and TANENA (spare XP companion PC).

Here is KATHENA (top) and KRAEGA resting throughout the hot January of 2021 (this room is cheap to heat but has no A/C).

If I wish to burn a YouTube to CD for the car, I no longer need to U-drive it into WALLABY (I'll talk more on that later). Also, I no longer need to use my rotary-switch clunk-o-matic data switchbox to cut KARETTA/WALLABY's access to the modem and connect them to BELLBIRD (offline XP) to access her shared folders—my now-redundant pseudo NAS.

Yes, I still need to do my clunky backing-up routine without the benefit of differential file-copying (not image) software, but it is now taking about a tenth the time. I used to spend hours shuffling folders and files but now it has already happened in real time. And once I start a backup running (using KARETTA'S outboard SATA facility), I can then get on with whatever else I was doing.

In no particular hurry, I am still exploring file-copying options (similar to Vice Versa Pro) but they must accept PayPal.

In the SMB/CIFS, I have allowed Guests in the "Public" folder (login to KREEANNE is still required obviously), but I have not allowed Guests in the "Private" folder. The reason I have set a two-tiered system is so when I have a friend over, they can log in as "user" and look around the "Public" folder; but only "kevin" can access my sensitive files.

For reasons I don't understand, the Guest setting means that XP is unable to access the "Private" folder no matter what I try. This means I can't use WALLABY to do the backing-up, but that's not important—I will fit KATHENA with a 'tower-top' outboard SATA facility. This will ensure I always have at least two PCs available to perform the weekly backup to a SAMSUNG 860 EVO 1TB and a WD Black 500 (I currently have only 155GB of data).

This is an old picture of KATRELL with a 'tower-top' outboard SATA facility (in this instance, for interchangeable boot drives).

Access from WALLABY is generally to facilitate burning a downloaded YouTube (.mp4) of less than eighty minutes to a CD (as a .cda) using Nero 6, which supports only XP. My car supports only CD (remember them?). The fifty-minute drive down the freeway is more relaxing when I'm listening to a lecture or a stand-up or a short concert. The "Vids" folder is in the "Public" tree so it all works perfectly. Nero 6 can't browse the network but it does allow for files to be 'dropped in' to its timeline from Windows Explorer; and even with the burn speed dialed down to 32× for safety, Nero 6 seems to be the fastest way to do this job. Just today, I used this procedure to burn a Morrissey concert from KREEANNE to CD for my drive to work next Monday morning.

These are all simple freedoms that I never experienced until now. For nearly ten years, I have wanted a NAS or a server but always regarded them as either too expensive or beyond my technical ability to build, configure, and service. openmediavault has been developed to such a stage that even a dummy like me can bang some bits and bobs together, click the mouse a few times, and it's running like a Swiss watch.

I think openmediavault is sensational.