Binary Brew

So, when we goto Port Discovery, they have this exhibit called “WOW - Wonders of Water”. This exhibit has a really neat feature where they have a low pressure water flow and varying lengths of PVC pipe, elbows, tee’s, etc. Its a blast every time we go in there. So I decided to build one for the kids, here it is:

I sketched out a rough diagram of what I wanted and took the kids to Home Depot to pick up the parts. About an hour later we returned with all the supplies needed to build our own “Backyard Splash Park!” I built the frame with 1″ PVC and the connections for the kids to play with are built out of 1/2″ PVC. I purchased a pond pump from Lowes to feed the water and “Tada!” we have a self contained re-circulating “Backyard Splash Park!” The best part about this contraption is that we aren’t wasting tons water in the back yard, the kids can just play with the water from the pool.

We spent 4 days in lovely New Bern, NC, Fairfield Harbour actually. Its a great little secluded time share resort with lots of elderly people. The weather was perfect, about 70 degrees with a slight breeze each day. We ventured to the beach on Sunday, but the wind was blowing at a steady 20mph so it made the day rather chilly and sandy but we still had fun. The highlight of this trip was “Barnacle Bob’s Boat Rental”

We rented a pontoon from this company and had a blast tooling around the Neuse River and Trent River. We tried fishing a bit but had no luck, the houses on the river, more like mansions we neat to look at, we also saw several Osprey’s protecting their nests.

Retrurning the Pontoon.

This was a great trip, the day on the water ended with late lunch and Morgan’s Tavern and Grill, where I had the best Cheese Steak I have ever tasted. If you are ever in New Bern, I suggest you try out this place. The food and service are superb and the prices are very reasonable.

Morgan’s Tavern and Grill

Our yearly vacation to New Bern is always great. Its relaxing and exhausting at the same time. This year we brought our bikes and the trailer so we were able to explore more. I was hoping to actually catch some fish this year, but nothing seemed to like our Night Crawlers this year, so maybe next time.

So, if you are looking for a nice place to vacation with the family that is close to a beach, close to a river with lots of fun and relativly inexpensive things to do, I suggest heading to New Bern, NC. Btw, its also the birth place of Pepsi!

I just installed a Thumper, a Sun x4500 last week. Aside from the hours it took to install from a virtual CD using the iLOM interface, it took about 30 minutes to configure 32TB of usable storage in a RAID2Z configuration with 4 parity groups. In that thirty minutes I was also able to build a filesystem from the pool with 5TB reserved and exported for NFS use and compression enabled.

There are several blogs out there that I referred to when configuring this beast and that helped immensely in planning the deployment of this box. Next week, after my vacation, I plan on installing SAMBA/CIFS and seeing if I can make this 48k$ 48TB Raw ( thats 1$ a GB ) out perform the several NetApps that we use. I have trunked the 4 copper GB interfaces using dladm and LACP so we should be able to see some incredible performance out of this machine.