The best progress is that my QNAP is now working, fixed by a firmware upgrade at QNAP’s behest. This surprised me as I was convinced the problem was in MacOS, as I believe was everyone else. It is now running on 3.3.1 Build 0720T.

The upgrade itself was a bit hairy. The first time it bombed out with an error at 28%. The second time it got “stuck” at 10% for several minutes, then proceeded into the 20s and announced it was finished. The subsequent reboot took ages to finish and I was beginning to think it was broken. A reminder that patience is required in this game. Anyway, Time Machine is now backing up to it which is good.

Also managed to resurrect my Centos build on my lab machine. It’s actually a Xen build with Centos as Dom-0. For some reason I described it before as Centos with KVM. This is what happens, I reckon if you work too late. Of course, that means I still have to try the KVM hypervisor, which people have been telling me is the more popular of the two.

At least that’s two things off the immediate list so I can get back to concentrating (I use the term loosely) on seeing if I can get a VMFS datastore installed on a USB key to use with ESXi.