My first step was to review the major services we wanted to use on Amazon. They have a massive set of services available for use and some are not easily replicated without a major infrastructure and skill set to manage it. To give you some idea of the number of services here is a summary of the services and a quick reference as of August 2013.

This blog has been neglected quite a bit so I’ll catch you up on what I’ve been doing in the last several years. I worked several interesting places including the NC Department of Revenue for five years. Before that I worked for a couple of places that are less memorable. I finished up ten years of state government service and left the public sector for private.

My sister-in-law lived with us for awhile with my niece and nephew while my brother divorced her. That made for some drama but the kids are doing well and life moves on. I’m back to talking to my parents less again. The less said the better.

I have recently been posting to another blog of mine called “Something Completely Different” that talks about my technology hobbies. The Seagate BlackArmor NAS is favored heavily in the last several months and some Android programming stuff.

In my regular life, we are in the middle of a major renovation/addition to our house. A first floor master bedroom, master bath, sun room and garage with bonus room are coming together. Living in the house as the work happens has been a challenge on occasions. Part of doing the renovation included doing all the phone and network wiring myself so I’ve probably over done the cabling.

I got a job at SAS Institute about six months ago working for their OnDemand Validated Hosting group. I’m liking it quite a bit and learning lots of things in lots of different areas of technology. The above renovation was partly due to my proximity to my job being biking distance. My commute is really nice and I’m looking forward to walking it when I get in better shape.

Those are some highlights. I’ve completely skipped talking about the kids and my amazing wife as those would take a whole post each.

Hajo on the BlackArmor Forums has an older posting about getting Debian Linux 5.0 (Lenny) installed on BA NAS 110/220/4x0. This is not a port that includes the kernel but simply a minimum install that gets the system setup to install binaries out of the Lenny EABI ARM platform. The kernel that comes with the BA NAS is compatible with those binaries. The newer kernel for the Debian 6 or higher is not compatible with the BA NAS. This has some limitations but offers a way to get to some newer software pre-compiled. I don’t want to loose the existing functionality on my test system but the draw to DLNA services is pretty strong right now.

To top it off, Debian has a nicely setup cross-compilation setup documented for people working on non-Intel platforms. This offers a way to compile newer software without killing myself anymore on building the entire compiler and supporting software myself.

The goal has always been to make the NAS device useful and I want to play my movies off it to my TV upstairs so this might be the next thing I play with on the development NAS.

I was reading a bit more on DLNA servers and found that someone had gotten miniDLNA working under the Debian port for the BlackArmor NAS. NickolasZev looks like he is enjoying his Debian install on his BA110. He is documenting his Debian initial install, adding miniDLNA, a webserver, bittorrent and download manager. I’m not interested in putting Debian on mine and want to stay as close to the vanilla firmware as possible but it is nice to see that someone has it working on the hardware.