Over the last few months I’ve been doing sporadic volunteer work for an organization called Outside the Lens, a nonprofit outreach program that aims to teach literacy through the arts. They operate a media lab where kids can come to learn digital photography and movie making through projects designed to give a real life context for environmentalism and diversity.

The issues OTL is having are pretty typical for IT: their files have built up over the years, they don’t have a good organization system (most of their users are temporary volunteers and children), they have duplication from file-level backups, and they have a bunch of external hard drives that are filled up and difficult to manage.

They asked me to build a NAS for them, so I installed linux on a donated pc, threw in a 120GB drive, and configured a samba share. Getting it to autoconnect at logon for 10 accounts was hard enough, but the bigger problem was how to get the kids to actually start using it…

The next step: they’re starting to do more video editing, so they’re going to need at least 2-3 TB for everything to fit on one server and it’s my job now to build it for as cheap as possible without it being unreliable. I am thinking 8x500GB 2.5″ drives in linux sw-raid, then we wouldn’t need to get an expensive controller card.