felixOrg Structure
You can read about the tragic romance of Peter (Pierre) Abelard and Heloise in a number of locations on the net. Suffice to say that it is a story involving great intellectual prowess, a beautiful young student, and castration. Hopefully, none of these characteristics can be found inside the felix.org domain. Especially the last.
It is an interesting name, though, for a machine. The felix.org domain was first hosted on gumby, then okapi, and then janus. When janus suffered a stroke recently, I cobbled a temporary replacement together from odd parts and began planning for a new, better day. He would have drives, lots of drives in a RAID5 configuration. And memory, enough to choke a horse. And processors, more than you can count on one finger. Enough capacity, in other words, to last at least a few years before he needed to be put out to pasture. My storage price point was $.50 per gigabyte. Once I could achieve that, I'd build the new and more capable replacement for janus, codenamed abelard.
Finally, about June, I found 250Gb SATA drives available for $109 apiece. Eight drives, an ASUS K8N-DL dual Opteron motherboard, and 3 GB of RAM later, abelard was ready to be loaded with LINUX.
Hah. One of the main reasons I chose the ASUS K8N-DL motherboard was for its eight SATA ports, four powered by the central NVidia NForce4 controller, and the other four by a separate Silicon Image 3114. As I would have known if I had done more homework, the Linux Nvidia SATA drive, sata_nv, is "immature," meaning that the Linux kernel will not even boot with drives attached to this controller. The Sil controller, sata_sil, supposedly works. However, when four drives were attached, multiple access errors resulted, and Linux RAID died every time.
I finally gave up. I'm sure that if I were to wait six months, the drivers would mature, or if I were to dig into the drivers myself, I might be able to diagnose the problem. My time is needed elsewhere, though, so my Gordian Knot solution was to purchase a separate 3Ware RAID controller. The eight drives will appear to Linux as one 1.5 terabyte drive, and with hardware RAID, I should get good performance.
You can spend all your time working on the tool rather than working with it. I'd much rather work with it.
Photo Albums
Finding a good, integrated photo album system has been one of my ongoing pursuits. Ironically, the best capability I had was with the old (3.x) version of OpenACS. I had written a quick random photo access system, and it ran without a hitch during my mobilization on gumby. It was a real comfort, as it presented me with a reminder of home every time I logged in.
Once I "upgraded" to the OpenACS 4.x and 5.x systems, though, there was no equivalent system. Plone looked like a possiblity, and I implemented it on old janus, but it had other weaknesses. It was a disappointment that Drupal didn't have a mature photo album system, but I was willing to wait. I experimented with Gallery2 and its integration with Drupal, but that was really more than I wanted to use.
Thus, it was a most pleasant surprise when the Acidfree module popped up just days after I had installed Drupal. I think it will be the next-gen system I've been waiting for.
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