…I am rather proud of myself. Yesterday I spent a number of hours hacking on the computers comprising our home theater setup. When Rachel came home that night and wanted to watch TV, it “just worked.”
Over the course of those hours I tweaked some motherboard settings to significantly reduce the fan noise (and hopefully power consumption as well). I figured out how to install FreeNAS 8 onto a flash drive from Windows, allowing me to upgrade the OS on Tess by simply swapping drives.
FreeNAS 8 is a significant reworking of the operating system compared to the 0.7.2 version, meaning that a lot of the configuration changed and some of the old features have been removed. I managed to get file permissions set decently well, even manually installing some of the old features. Some things still need tweaking, like my remote access setup. As far as I’m concerned, the crowning glory was already achieved when Rachel came home to find the computers finally cleaned up and properly arranged, wires hidden, and a TV that did what she needed.