Laen Aggregated

..This is a veggie wrap from a place I used to eat at in Florida.

1 eggplant, thinly sliced
1 yellow squash, thinly sliced
1 green zucchini, thinly sliced
1 red pepper
1 green pepper
5 ounces goat cheese
1 ounce sour cream
2 large spinach tortillas

Lightly grill eggplant, squash and zucchini. Blacken peppers on grill, place in paper bag for a few minutes, then remove the blackened skin, seeds and slice. On a sheet of plastic wrap layer eggplant, zucchini, squash and peppers. Mix goat cheese and sour cream and spread a thin layer on top of vegetables. Roll in a spinach tortilla. Refrigerate for up to two hours. To serve, slice into 1/4 inch pieces.

Yield: Serves 8

This is an approximation of the “Zuppa Toscana” soup they serve at Olive Garden. It’s sooo goood, and really easy to make.

1 lb. spicy Italian Sausage – crumbled
1/2 lb. smoked bacon – chopped
1 qt water
(2) 14.5 oz cans chicken broth
2 large russet potatoes – cubed
1 medium onion – sliced
2 garlic cloves – crushed
2 cups chopped kale or swiss chard
1 cup heavy whipping cream
salt and pepper to taste

In a skillet over medium-high heat, brown sausage, breaking it into small pieces as you fry it.  Drain and set it aside.

Do the same with the bacon.

Place water, broth, potatoes, garlic and onion in a pot. Simmer them over medium heat until the potatoes are tender.

Add the sausage and bacon to the pot. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Add kale and cream to the pot.  Season it with salt and pepper.

Serve.

I spent the weekend loading Nexenta on my two home PCs.

Nexenta is basically Ubuntu on an OpenSolaris kernel.  This gives you all the awesomenes of Ubuntu (apt-get, gnome, kde, GNU tools), with all the awesomeness of OpenSolaris (zones, ZFS, DTrace).

Some cool things:

• The opensolaris packages are available via apt-get.  I wanted to set up some zones, so I did an “apt-get install sunwzoner sunwzoneu”.
• “zoneadm -z zone1 install” fires off debootstrap and creates a Nexenta Zone.
• The install is super-easy.  Just boot off the CD and answer a few questions.

So, now I have two Nexenta boxen, with about 1TB of storage online.  Which brings me to why I did this in the first place:  ZFS.

I really hate Linux Software RAID.  I hate it so much that I don’t use it.  This meant that my home storage was more or less unprotected, which sucks.  I don’t have anything irreplacable on these servers, but still, it’s good form to RAID.

Creating a mirror is as easy as:
# zpool create -m /storage zstorage mirror c1d0p0 c2d0p0

Adding another mirrorset to this pool is as easy as:
# zpool add zstorage mirror c3d0p0 c4d0p0

..Which gives me 560GB of RAID10 storage with two commands.   Now I have room for a complete nightly backup of my laptop, including incrementals (thanks, ZFS snapshots!), plus a backup of my “every photo I’ve ever taken” directory.