April 3, 2022

FTP Update: Please Read

FTP will be down for a few days as I data wrangle files from old drives to new ones. In the meantime I can only ask for your patience.

Read more details below:

A RAID 5 was setup on a recently acquired Mercury Elite Pro Quad. It is populated with four certified (via OWC SoftRAID) 4TB Toshiba N300 drives. Going forward this will act as the main data driver for the FTP Server. The data on the old drives in a YottaMaster enclosure are being transferred to the Mercury. In the near future Carbon Copy Cloner will be purchased and deployed to ensure the Mercury is regularly backed up to a yet to be purchased hard drive. I contacted Bombich to understand how to best conduct backups in this configuration.

Specs on the FTP server

• MacMini 2018, 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3 and 8GB RAM running FTP (plans to upgrade RAM are being considered)
• All .DS_Store files have been purged using find . -name ‘.DS_Store’ -type f -delete and the following command was issued to prevent them from spawning, defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE. This shouldn’t matter too much in the way of performance or even having to cope with seeing these files as the FTP software already masquerades them but these files are not necessary.
• I also decided to turn off Spotlight. This has no direct impact on the service but it does help minimize disk activity while I migrate data. I may turn it back on once data is migrated.

More plans

• Copy the contents of over 1000 optical discs to FTP
• There is a truly large collection of vintage Apple .iso discs that were sourced by Andreas. Many, if not all of these .iso files were uploaded to archive.org. For some reason the collection appears incomplete on FTP so a mirroring from Andreas’ side is planned.
• Very preliminary, request sent out to mirror unna.org.

If you have any comments, suggestions or other ideas please reach out.