The symptoms were hard to notice at first: downloaded files would sometimes be corrupted, especially large files; attempts to fix those downloads (using par2) would more often than not fail. Then it became bizarre; calculating the checksum of those files would sometimes, but not always, result in different values.

With 0.8 just out the door, I began thinking about 0.9. That version will focus on fixing Greyhole’s greatest bug creator: the rename operation! There has been, and probably always will be, problems with the current implementation that Greyhole has to handle file and directory renames. I have some ideas on how to fix them all, once and for all, but this will need some non-trial development, clean up and regression testing.

I just built and uploaded version 0.8 of Greyhole on Google Code. This version doesn’t change much of what is normally visible to the end users (except the regular bug fixes). Instead, 0.8 focused on improving an area of Greyhole that has always been messy: the communication channel between Samba and the Greyhole daemon.

This week, I created a new website for Greyhole. This website centralize all the information one could want about Greyhole: A presentation of what Greyhole is (homepage) Links to download the latest version Links to past versions downloads Links to the code repository, issues tracker & wiki (documentation), all hosted on Google Code Link to “Fund a Feature | Donate”, hosted by fundry.com RSS feeds for Greyhole news (which you really should subscribe to if you’re reading this!

So, I’m now happily using Greyhole. Good for me, you say? Not long ago, a 1 TB hard drive that was part of my storage pool died (my fault really, handling it while it was powered up). Greyhole handled this beautifully, re-creating duplicate copies of the files that were stored on that drive to continue protecting all my data. But I didn’t have enough free space on the other drives to allow all the duplicates I want to be created.

(Some background info on why I created Greyhole can be read in my previous post.) Update: Greyhole has matured quite a lot since I posted this. You can now learn about Greyhole on the official website: www.greyhole.net. There. I did it. Greyhole is now available to all avid enthusiasts who would like to try it. What is it? It’s Windows Home Server Drive Extender concept, but open source, running on Linux.

[Update] I did it. Read about it here. I do like Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology. It allows oneself to aggregate a bunch of various-sized hard disks into one big storage pool. You can then define a number of shares that will share (!) that storage pool dynamically. AND you can define which shares you want duplicated, which basically mean that DE (Drive Extender) will make sure that all the files on there are on two different physical hard drives, to safeguard those files against hardware failures.