Finally we have some new hardware worth writing of and also spending money on. I have been using an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X based build for some time now and so far I am really liking it, the CPU is marvelous considering the pricetag and felt like a worthwhile upgrade from the Xeon E3-1241v3 I was using before; it is basically twice the cores clocked at pretty much the same speed. Awesome. There are a couple of points worth spending some words on tho. …

This does not really works, read this: https://uwot.eu/monitor-hard-disk-smart-status-in-python/ First of all install smartmontools, it has the same name on pretty much every distro: $ emerge -a1 smartmontools Proceed to edit its configuration file, at the bottom of the file there is a quick explaination of all the available parameters: cat/etc/smartd.conf --- DEVICESCAN -H -R 1 -R 5 -R 7 -R 10 -R 11 -R 196 -R 197 -R 199 -R 200 -m user@domain.tld -n standby,10,q Parameter -H tells smartd to check the result of overall-health self-assesment test which is pretty much useless, -R is used to specify a single SMART attribute, if its value changes a mail is sent to user@domain.tld. To send emails a MTA must be installed, in centos that is sendmail, in gentoo it is not strictly necessary to have a full fledget MTA installed, nullmailer will suffice. If it is not already installed: …

Btrfs is fairly stable and with the latest kernels it is becoming even a better alternative to the most commonly used EXT4 and XFS filesystems. While not being always better or faster it brings to the table a huge amount of improvements that makes it by far the best filesystems for storage. XFS itself is moving in the very same direction and will probably have in the near future some of the features Btrfs already has (e.g. copy on write). No MDADM or partitioning is needed, to create a RAID10 with 4 HDD just type (where /dev/sd[X] is the disk whole disk, not a partition): …