I recently finished my desk project by adding the perfboard backing between the two computer cabinets. This had always been the plan after I finished the bookshelves, but it took me awhile to get around to doing it. Adding the perfboard allowed me to get the tangle of cables off the ground, sorted out, and tied down so they wouldn’t work themselves loose. When I first installed the perfboard, however, I had two problems: the network cables were tangled up in a really bad way, as were the power cables to all the systems. In order to not knock out the house’s internet connection for an hour while everyone was home and using it, I just pushed those cables to the side and decided to deal with them later.

Yesterday was later. While everyone else was out, I shut everything down, took it all apart, and rerouted all the cables in sane ways. It’s still not pretty, but it’s far better than it was. I also took the opportunity to make sure my Mac and the fileserver with the iSCSI volumes on it were on the same switch – and not the Airport Extreme. The problem being that every time the network goes away, the SNS iSCSI driver kernel panics the Mac, and every time you make a networking change to the Airport, it reboots, shutting off the network connections. Not exactly a recipe for a healthy computer. I’m using iSCSI because I don’t have a fast enough physical drive for my Aperture library to maintain decent performance, and because you can’t launch an Aperture library from a network volume. iSCSI appears to be local from the Mac’s perspective, and I get to use the benefit of the ZFS caching structure when working on photos. It’s so much faster, I’ll live with the annoyances of iSCSI, at least until 256 GB SSD’s are less than $100.