I have a lot of data to work with, and I want to do it with just my mismatched bunch of servers, desktops, SSDs, and spinning disks. My equipment is old, so I want a filesystem that is robust not only to the failure of any drive, but also to the failure of any one machine. My preference is to build a hyper-converged system, where each machine hosts data in addition to working on compute jobs. Following are reviews I found on the main open-source distributed filesystems out there:

• Gluster
• Lustre
• BeeGFS/FhGFS
• OrangeFS
• LizardFS/MooseFS
• Ceph/CephFS
• Tahoe-LAFS

Kickstarting is a convenient way to install an operating system on multiple machines without the need to manually interact with the installation process. After a few hiccups I was able to get everything to run from my router with no other network servers necessary.

I’m building a lean research operation, and I don’t really have need of a high-end firewall, along with the associated licensing costs. So, I’ve decided to try firmware-modding a retail router. I’m hoping it will be an inexpensive way to increase security and get a few more features than a typical WiFi router.

After a bit of reading, I settled on the Netgear Nighthawk R7000, partly because it was in stock at Walmart. Right on the box, it promotes a firmware-modding website run by Netgear. It is compatible with DD-WRT, which has some nice features.