Goodbye FreeNAS, Hello Ubuntu Server
I’ve finally given up on FreeNAS. What was initially a great and simple system has turned out to be quite problematic. The two show stoppers for me where:
- The hard drives, either went missing, wouldn’t mount, would sometimes mount, then later fail. It was completely random, and the error log would literally say “error mounting”, nothing more. This isn’t very helpful for diagnosing the problem.
- It wouldn’t shut down properly. It was more of a reboot in that it would power up again! It worked initially but then would randomly stop working. I’ve no idea why.
Converting AVI’s to SVI’s for the Samsung YP-P2
* If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty please read all the way through the article as there are updates at the bottom.
* For Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), please read/use my latest updates to the YP-P2 action.
I watch quite a few movies on my Samsung YP-P2, so am always having to covert the AVI’s I currently have to SVI’s. An SVI is still an AVI, just a different extension name and a few key points, which include not having any b-frames, the video being 480×272 in resolution, and a few other things.
Anyway…I’m an Ubuntu (not Windows!) user so I firstly started encoding my videos using Avidemux. Which is an excellent an easy to use GUI for converting videos into whatever format/specifics you need. However, it’s still a pain to have to open it up, load a video, check all the settings etc…
Securely Deleting Files in Ubuntu
*Update – the below article applies for installing nautilus-actions, but I have since updated my shred action.
Simply pressing delete on a file or folder won’t remove it from your hard drive. The reference will be removed from the file system but it will still exist on your hard drive until the space it occupies is used and it is overwritten. This can pose a problem as people can recover potentially sensitive information.
There’s an application called “shred” (installed by default) in Ubuntu for securely deleting files. It overwrites where the file is located many times, ensuring it can’t be recovered. Shred can be integrated into Nautilus easily using Nautilus Actions.