This is not the hot party I was expecting...
A while ago, I finally bought myself the Logitech Squeezebox that I've been talking about for ages, to coincide with finishing off the ripping to FLAC of all my CDs. The squeezebox is a nifty bit of kit, which is basically a network-connected MP3 streamer with nice menus and nice software. You can either talk directly to the internet (via the SqueezeNetwork portal) and use it as a fancy radio, or you can connect it to your own PC and run Logitech's SqueezeCenter software.

The SqueezeCenter software is quite nice - it indexes all your music and all that usual stuff, but it also has a nice web interface that lets you control multiple players, and even synchronise them. There's a good plugin development community offering extra goodies like clever searching, and last.fm scrobbling. It installs nice and easily on Windows, and there's a port for FreeBSD (it's open source, and written in perl).

So, with all that going, I wanted to get a smaller quieter NAS-like thing to store all my tunes on. I did look at actual NAS boxes, since a few of them have SqueezeCenter as a package. The general impression was that they were a bit gutless processor-wise though. So I landed with something based around Sun's ZFS filesystem, which promises decent performance RAID-like features. It's available on a few platforms - FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and of course, Solaris. However, it's read-only on OS X, and I couldn't find anything talking about the FreeBSD or Linux versions that didn't mention terrible performance or "random data loss". Those seemed like bad things for a filesystem. It had to be Solaris.

Having found a couple of articles about building Solaris-based NAS boxes, I settled on a dual-core Intel Atom board, a laptop drive for the system, and a 1TB WD caviar green drive for the data (to be come 4 drives at a later date), with OpenSolaris 2008.11.

OpenSolaris is reassuringly familiar to anyone who's installed CentOS or Ubuntu lately - it has just the same Gnome look&feel - but it's a rather different under the surface. It has it's own package manager, service manager, and pretty much anything else manager. It comes with DNS turned off by default. It comes without compilers by default. The hardware compatibility list is rather short.

I've actually got as far as a networked CIFS (windows sharing) server now, although I still haven't gotten to the bottom of where Sun have mangled up perl so that CPAN only sort of works. The Atom hardware is nice, small and quiet. The Sun software ranges from pretty annoying to just OK, with the one exception of ZFS. If only it worked on FreeBSD reliably, I would have been a lot happier...