Recently in the "Tech" category...

I’m a huge audio geek, but just prior to the house move last June, I upgraded to Vista. I’ve been very happy with Vista - it’s worked well.

But with one exception.

I can’t get any of my audio gear to run with it.

This hasn’t been a problem up until now, as I’ve been way busy with other stuff. I’ve been letting my podcasts lapse and just noodling around with my guitar and other audio gear offline, not recording anything. But now, my esteemed amigo and I plan on collaborating long distance on some song writing.

This means I need to get it all running again.

The hub is the EMU 1820 which I use to get all audio into and out of the PC. First of all there weren’t any drivers, but now the drivers exist but bluescreen my Vista box during install. I’ve never managed to get drivers installed for the UAD-1 either. I haven’t even tried to get Cubase running.

Which leaves me with a conundrum.

Do I just downgrade to XP? I know it will all work, but I do love the UI in Vista. Do I actually use Vista though? Nope. Just a few games, Skype and Firefox. For everything else I use my MacBook Pro and my Linux box.

Downgrade I go… See you on the other side…

Now at 15Mbps down and up into the home.

Mmmmm, bandwidth…

I think this is it - the Canon Vixia HF10.

I’ve been looking for an HD camcorder to replace my trusty, and seven year old, Canon Elura 2 and this looks like the right one.

Any thoughts?

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I’ve just completed a rebuild of my home linux server which had a fatal hardware failure. You can find the posts here:

1. Server Meltdown - A Tale Of An Upgrade
2. Server Meltdown Part Two
3. Server Meltdown Part Three - Where A Monitor Is Not Your Friend
4. Server Meltdown Part Four - Where The NIC Hates You
5. Server Meltdown Part Five - Where Spare Hardware Is Your Friend
6. Server Meltdown Part Six - It’s Alive!
7. Server Meltdown Part Seven - Where We Finish Up And Get Samba Installed

And what did I learn?

1. Having good backups are a life saver.
2. Never trust integrated components, neither graphics controllers nor network cards. I actually knew this, but had forgotten…
3. Debian is easy to set up when you’ve done it a couple of times already :-)
4. Sometimes, just starting from scratch and dealing with the pain is faster than trying to recover and reinstall configurations from backups.

Your mileage may vary.

In the spirit of spending as much free time as possible, I’ve moved this blog and my other sites to Media Temple.

Hopefully you didn’t notice a thing change except for a decrease in latency - the ping times have dropped from 80 milliseconds to 40 (at least from my house). The servers also appear to be a lot more speedy.

The other advantage (I hope) is an increase in availability. My old server was forever getting crushed by comment spammers - Media Temple’s grid stuff should be able to take the punishment.

Let me know if you see any issues.

So it was finally time to get Samba running on my home system.

The plan was to just copy over all the entire installation from backups and just run it. But, of course, things never go to plan.

First up, this is an x64 installation and of course the ppc binaries won’t run. No problems thought I. I’ll just apt-get install samba and all will be well.

No joy. The supported installation of samba in the latest version of debian is actually older than the version I was running on my old machine.

Ok, so we’re building from source again.

Build, build, run.

Nope. I could variously get my desktop joined to the domain, then the NAS. When I finally got them both joined, I ran into the dreaded NT_STATUS_NO_LOGON_SERVERS problem. Again.

So, thought I. Lets just create a fresh domain. This was actually the best solution. My only worry was losing access to data on the NAS due to permissions problems. Handily, the latest firmware upgrade to the Infrant NAS can give you (via an add-on) root shell access to the NAS, so I figured I could fix it up later.

I then brought up a fresh domain, joined all the machines and all was well. Pretty easy really. I fixed up all the permissions problems on the NAS by just ssh’ing in and running chown -R steve.”domain users” share/* on all the shares in /c. The only minor other thing I had to do on the NAS was move my home domain share from /c/home/OLD_DOMAIN/steve to /c/home/NEW_DOMAIN/steve and then chown -R steve.nogroup /c/home/NEW_DOMAIN/steve.

And then all was well in Casa Del Lacey…

Now that the shiny new linux system is up and running, it was actually relatively easy to bring it online as my home server, replacing all the functionality of my now dead system.

This post will deal with everything except the installation of Samba (which provides Windows Domain Controller services) - those details will be in an upcoming post.

First up, some basic stuff. I need to be able to log into the box from another system as it’s going to run headless and I want the monitor that it’s currently using back on my Vista box.

Basic Setup

While logged in as root on the console, add my user account (created during setup) to /etc/sudoers using visudo.

Next, edit /etc/apt/sources.list, removing the cdrom entries as all further package installs will be using the net and I don’t want apt-get complaining that it can’t access the cdrom drive.

Make sure the system is up to date:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get upgrade

Now, I want to be able to perform the rest of the setup remotely, so install ssh and friends in order to ssh into the system.

apt-get install ssh

Joy, now I can login and perform the rest of the installation remotely rather than at the console.

Network services

The clock needs to be set right, so:

apt-get install ntpdate
ntpdate time.windows.com

Yes, I used Microsoft’s time server - it’s the only one I can remember off the top of my head!

Next, I need to get the network time service (NTP) running on the machine. It will be providing time services to all other machines on the network and periodically setting it’s own time against the root time servers.

apt-get install ntp ntp-doc

You’ll need to edit /etc/ntpd.conf and then /etc/init.d/ntpd restart to get it to notice the changes. Note that pretty much everything I talk about here has either a config file in /etc or it’s own directory of config files, also in /etc. They’re pretty self-explanatory - just take a look at the config files themselves and the related documentation. Everything also has a script located in /etc/init.d to control it’s operation.

For this reinstall, I just diff’d my backed up config files against the newly installed files to make sure there wasn’t anything new that I needed to be aware of and then just copied my old files over and restarted the service.

Next up, bind - the DNS server. I have a local DNS domain in my house that all the clients have an entry in, the linux box serves up that domain and caches domain requests so that the only nameserver the client machines need to know about is this linux box.

apt-get install bind9 bind9-doc

Bind is probably the hardest thing to configure. Handily I had all my backups (yay, me!). I’ll probably write up a post dedicated to that at some point, though one thing did bite me a little: if you’re restoring your configuration files from backup and get an auth error when trying to restart or reload the server, just killall named and start it up fresh as the authorization key in /etc/bind/rndc.key probably changed when you copied across the old data.

At this point, edit /etc/resolv.conf and point the nameserver line at the localhost, 127.0.0.1 so that client binaries on the system itself use your shiny new nameserver.

Next up DHCP. This is a little service that client machines use to get an IP address. In a home environment this is normally handled by your wireless or broadband router, but I prefer to have the server do it as other useful information, such as name and time server information is also passed to the client. Configuration is fairly simple - check out the documentation.

apt-get install dhcp3-server

Sweet! The base services are now all configured. At this point it’s probably a good idea to reboot the server to make sure all these services come up nice and cleanly.

A Few Other Things That I Do

I like to be able to mount drives from other machines on the linux box. For example, my Infrant NAS exports a “backup” share that the server backs itself up to. I use autofs for this.

apt-get install autofs

Edit /etc/auto.master and un-comment the line for auto.net. The backup share is now available at /net/blob/c/backup. FYI, ‘Blob’ is the name of my Infrant NAS box…

After that it was just a matter of reinstalling my crontabs from backup and then this blog and a few other things are automatically backed up to the NAS. Cool. Safety is back…

Another thing to mention is that I use Amazon S3 to backup my photos and videos. The scripts that do that are written in ruby, so that also needs to be installed.

apt-get install ruby rubygems

I need rubygems installed as it brings with it the openssl ruby package.

The last thing (modulo Samba), that I need is dynamic DNS updating. I use dyndns.org so that I can have a friendly DNS same to connect to the server when I’m not at home. The linux box handles updating the DynDns database with whatever IP address Verizon happens to be giving me at the time of update. I use inadyn to accomplish this.

apt-get install inadyn

Unfortunately, inadyn doesn’t come with any form of script to get it started, or any useful documentation whatsoever. So I just copied an existing script in /etc/init.d and got it going with a few minor modifications. Let me know if you’re interested in a copy.

All in all, the entire process took me about an hour to get everything setup once the base linux system was successfully installed.

Next up - Samba!

At the end of yesterday’s post I was planning to take a trip to Fry’s this morning to purchase a new ethernet card for my new machine. This morning’s realization is that the new machine actually has two spare standard PCI slots and I have a load of PCI ethernet cards sitting in boxes and dead machines. One of those spare cards happens to be old trustworthy Intel Pro 1000.

I disabled the motherboard integrated ethernet adapter, installed ye olde Intel card and rebooted.

Everything works.

Joy!

Now that I have a working network during install, package configuration during Debian setup is working. I just installed the base desktop package as I’ll manually install and configure everything else later and write up the process for my records and your reading pleasure.

Later, dear reader…

It appears from reading various threads over the net that the Linux sky2 driver in conjunction with the Marvell 88E8056 Gigabit ethernet controller results in a steamy pile of poo.

I can confirm that this is indeed the case.

Again following up from my previous posts, the next step in home linux server resurrection was to attempt to install Ubuntu 7.10 ×64 edition on my shiny new machine. This didn’t get very far. A boot from CD ended up in a wedged machine no matter how I tried to run the install.

Hmmm, I think I’ll go back to the trusty Debian distribution. I downloaded the latest stable (Etchy) net install disk. Boot. Joy! It all runs. Except the net card. Lots of kernel errors regarding the ethernet driver followed by a fatal crash.

Suck.

Maybe I’ll try Lenny, the “in test” release.

Same thing.

Tomorrow I think I’ll be buying a vanilla net card for this puppy. Something made by Intel. For now I think I’ll just install Etchy on the machine with the ethernet disabled and let the machine burn in.

Sigh - three days into this and it seems like the box isn’t going to be up and running before my next trip. I thought this was supposed to be easy?

More as it happens…

Continuing the saga of yesterday, I took the new machine back to Hard Drives Northwest early this afternoon where they very helpfully plugged the machine and watched it boot fine. They were very helpful and suggested that it might be a power problem - I had been powering the machine through a UPS.

So I went back home, plugged the machine directly into the wall and watched it fail to POST again.

Just a flashing cursor.

Then I had a little brainwave. It’s plugged into a 24^” monitor. Could that be it? Surely not - it’s connected via VGA.

Unconnect video cable. Power on. Wait 10 seconds. Plug in video cable. Success!

Being an ex-Graphics guys I’ve a ton of old video cards lying around, so I plugged in a spare ATI PCI Express card, plugged the monitor into that and I’m off to the races! The machine at least POSTs now and I can get into the BIOS.

In summary (and to capture this post in search results for others to find), connecting a Dell 2405FPW 24^” monitor into the onboard Intel Extreme Graphics of an Asus P5K-VM motherboard appears to cause the motherboard to refuse to POST.

Next up - install!

Following on from yesterday’s post about my home server’s meltdown, let’s just say that the day didn’t exactly end well. At around 11pm, the Debian install onto the second PowerMac hung when setting up some component. It was time to give up for the night.

This afternoon I decided that I’d had enough of trying to build a central service from recycled components and gave Hard Drives NorthWest a call. I’ve had a number of good experiences with these folks in the past, so I thought I’d just customize one of their standard systems. I picked a Core 2 Duo based machine with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB drive. Not bad for just over $500.

Anyhow, on with the install.

9.22pm - Everything unboxed and plugged in. Ubuntu install disk at the ready. Boot!

10.31pm - The machine won’t even post. Just a single flashing cursor on the screen. I tried reseating the RAM, draining the CMOS. All to no avail. I can’t even get it into the BIOS. Back we go to Hard Drives Northwest in the morning.

Sigh. This shouldn’t be this hard. It never has been before and I’ve built plenty of machines. Maybe it’s just that now I’ve turned 40, technology hates me.

To be continued. Again.

Today I came home to find that the linux box that provides all services to the machines around the house was wedged. I powercycled it, but it wouldn’t come up - the drive had suffered some kind of fatal failure.

Oops.

Now, this machine is pretty central to operations here at Casa Del Lacey. It provides NTP, DHCP and DNS services as well as acting as the Windows Primary Domain Controller via Samba. Handily everything else can limp along without it, but it’s not pleasant.

Good job everything backs up nightly to the Infrant NAS.

Anyhow, for a while I’ve been thinking of replacing the hardware that the server runs on. It’s a PowerMac G5 running Debian linux, but the fact that it’s a PowerPC machine rather than an x86 machine has increasingly become a pain.

Handily I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 (64bit Xeon) sitting around that’s been switched off and gathering dust for almost two years.

Don’t ask.

So, with the PowerMac’s hardware meltdown and the fact that I’ve got a reasonably good x86 box sitting around, it must be time for an upgrade. I have an Ubuntu 7.10 ×64 desktop install disk in my hand, the kids are in bed and it’s time to start!

9:00 pm - Disk in drive, power up!

9:42 pm - The damn thing won’t power up. Das blikenlights claim a power supply failure. Poo. Not to fear! I have yet another spare machine. Last time I tried it there were “some issues”. Yup. Issues are still there. Poo².

9.43 pm - Grab a cold beer.

9.45 pm - What the hell. I have a spare PowerMac G5! Let’s go with that. It powers up! Now I need a Debian PowerPC disk…

10.18pm - ISO downloaded and burnt.

To be continued…

Talk about serendipity…

I was just talking about using EC2 and S3 for backups and along comes a solution to actually make it easier to build.

Without persistent storage, it would be hard to persist the backed up data to S3 as you’d have to do the file to S3 mapping (I think) by yourself. With this feature, you effectively create a blob of S3 storage and use it as a drive in your EC2 machine instance.

Nice.

Actually, that’s how I thought it worked all along, but was weirded out earlier today when I found out that it didn’t.

Well, as of 9pm tonight it does.

Serendipity.

Previously, I’ve been backing up all the irreplaceable household data (movies, photos, etc…) to my colo’d server using Scott Ludwig’s most excellent Link-Backup script.

Unfortunately I’ve been running out of space on that server and am thinking about decommissioning it, so as the first step of the decommission I need to move my offsite backups somewhere else. The obvious place appears to be Amazon’s S3 service as the price of storage seems very cheap - $0.15 per gigabyte. There are also transfer charges, but in the general case it’s upload only, so I’m ignoring that. I have about 100GB to store, which works out at $15 per month.

Very reasonable.

The next thing to figure out is “how do I perform the backup?” I initially thought that the easiest thing to do would be to continue to use Link-Backup. All I need to do is bring up and EC2 instance every time I need to backup and then use Link-Backup as I had been doing previously.

The big problem with this was that bringing up an instance is not trivial. Relatively simple, but not trivial. Also, the EC2 tools require Java 1.5 to run and it’s not available on PPC Debian linux. Sigh.

I then dig a search around and found Jeremy Zawodny’s excellent blog post on the subject which provides a nice roundup of the available solutions. I decided to go with the ruby based s3sync.

Set up was pretty simple. I first created an AWS account, collected the required data and configured s3sync. I then created some scripts as suggested by John Eberly and I was off to the races!

I ran some tests to make sure I could:

1. Backup a small directory that had some hierarchy in it.
2. Restore that directory.
3. Make some small changes to the local directory and make sure that only the changes were synced.
4. Pull back a single file using the included s3cmd script.

It all worked perfectly, so now I have ~70GB of photos syncing up to S3.

Sweet!

Next steps:

1. Add everything else (home movies, etc…) to the backup
2. Rebuild my little webapp using Google’s AppEngine.
3. Move my blogs somewhere else (maybe Media Temple - an opinions? I need to run MovableType and MySql).
4. Decommission server.
5. Use saved cash to buy more toys.

Sounds like a plan.

A friend of mine at Microsoft, Andy Pennell, has been working on HD-DVD from day one. Over on his blog he details his personal history with the product.

Diary of a High Definition Format War

It’s a good read. Andy - my commiserations…. You should come to the pub quiz tonight for a beer…

If it’s any consolation, I believe you were robbed.

I just received a couple of stickers from The Daily WTF. Yey! My laptop now has a new decorative item.

Never heard of the site?

Well, if you’re a developer, it’s a must-read. Amusing and sorta-instructional in a “no way I’d ever do that” kind of way.

Recommended.

Is this the year that I finally switch the last bastion of Windows in my house over to Apple?

Fastest Mac Ever—Eight Processor Cores Standard

The new Mac Pro features the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors based on state-of-the-art 45nm Intel Core microarchitecture running up to 3.2 GHz, each with 12MB of L2 cache per processor for breakthrough performance and power efficiency. With a new high-bandwidth hardware architecture, dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses and up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory, the new Mac Pro achieves a 61 percent increase in memory throughput.

Pretty cheap too, though it’ll need a RAM (and maybe a video card) upgrade.

I realized recently that I do pretty much all my video and photo editing on my MacBook Pro these days, and it’s a little slow. The desktop in my office is mainly for browsing and running iTunes. I’d like to be more productive with it - it’s a nice machine, with lots of nice peripherals attached, but I think it might be time to finally switch it to the shiny newness.

You get your moneys worth with this post…

As I posted a little while ago, I had finally had enough of the piece of technological rubbish that is the Comcast HD DVR box and purchased a TiVo Series 3 through Amazon. All that was left to do was actually have the two shiny cablecards installed by the “qualified” Comcast technician.

To be quite honest, I have no idea what they mean by “qualified” as he took a couple of hours to plug them in and sit on the phone chatting to a friend back at base while said person back at base kept pressing a button to send a signal to activate them.

My present and non-present technicians quite happily took ages to attempt this feat of technical brilliance and also failed to actually achieve it.

You see, it took my “qualified” guy eight cablecards to find two that actually worked and then left telling me that it was all working.

Well, at least it appeared to be working.

Later that day I figured out that you couldn’t have both tuners set to channels 118 or above. One would work and the other would just show a black screen.

Uh oh.

It actually took me a while to figure out which of the cards wasn’t working correctly, but once I did I called up Comcast and spoke to a sharp lady who actually appeared to know what she was talking about. She had me pop the duff card out of the box and read her the physical serial number.

Two of the digits were transposed between the actual serial number and the number that they had in their database.

Hmm. So my original “qualified” technician, didn’t really check anything at all. I wonder if those other six, duff cards were actually ok, that he just couldn’t read and that he just gave up?

Anyhow, I thought that now Comcast had the right serial number they would now be able to send the correct activation signal and all would be well?

No.

I had to take the card to the local retail store and exchange it for another one. I have no idea why and couldn’t get anyone to explain it to me.

I did as I was bid, wrote down the serial number of the new card and called up Comcast again.

“You’ll have to bear with me as this is the first time I’ve done a cablecard pairing.”

Oh joy.

After thirty minutes I was told that I was all set and the new cablecard should be activated within ten minutes.

No joy after another thirty…

So I call up again and speak to another seemingly intelligent Comcast droid who looks at my account, says “Umm, the signal was never sent. Hang on a second.”

Bing! All channels received!

Thank you, mysterious Comcast technician…

And as for the actual TiVo itself? What more can I say, this thing is exceptional. Snappy and beautiful UI, gobs of storage (with the ability to add more via USB), lots of online features, the ability to move recorded shows around the net, etc…

And so far, the best thing is Amazon Unbox. Order TV shows and movies via the TiVo itself or via the web and have them show up almost immediately via the internet is a thing of beauty.

At the moment, the wife and I are heavily into Heroes (which we missed the first time around). All delivered via Amazon Unbox.

Highly recommended.

Back in 2000, I moved into Nabila’s town home and was astounded by the tiny TV and less than basic cable. I know that A/V systems weren’t high on the lovely lady’s priorities, but something had to be done! Along with me, came by 32” TV, so her 27” was relegated to the bedroom. Next up - what to do about the pitiful amount of available channels?

Public access TV can only yield so much amusement.

A couple of years prior I got on the local cable company’s digital cable beta program. The company was TCI (then AT&T, then Comcast). The main reason for this was access to BBC America and the fact that it was “digital”. All that really meant was crappier picture quality.

Anyhow, I set up a time for an install for digital cable and crap loads of channels at Nabila’s place.

They never showed.

I rescheduled.

They didn’t show again.

I’m done. Time for some drastic action.

I’d heard good things about DirecTV, so I bought one of the basic Sony units, a dish and a drill. I then set about drilling holes in Nabila’s house, mounting the dish and really enjoying the new picture quality.

A few months later I heard that TiVo had teamed up with DirecTV to produce a TiVo unit that recorded the stream direct from the satellite - no re-compression which had been the main thing keeping me away from TiVo. Anyhow, I picked one up and was hooked on TiVo for the next seven years.

Prior to our move to the new house earlier this year I had an HD TiVo and loved it and the DirecTV service apart from two niggles:

1. As an early adopter of the DirecTiVo and HD DirecTiVo, I was the last person to see any of the new features such as folders. Things like TiVoToGo and network access totally passed us by.
2. Locals in HD had to come in via an antenna.

When we moved to the new place, I decided to go back to cable and see what I was missing. The channel lineup looked good; they provide the boxes; you pay month on month - no contract. If it didn’t work out, I could also go back to DirecTV.

What I missed was that the HD DVR box completely sucks!

Laggy response, bugs, crappy UI, shitty scheduling, etc… And that was before they downgraded the box from Microsoft’s software to the even more shitty Comcast software.

I’d had enough. I want my TiVo back. Even Nabila green lit the idea!

Today my shiny new Series 3 TiVo arrived via UPS. I lovingly unpacked the box. I caressed the classic peanut remote. I fell in love with the unit. I’m going gooey inside with the thoughts of TiVoToGo, sleek UI and cozy nights in.

It feels like a jilted lover has returned home.

On Wednesday the cable guy arrives with two cablecards to consummate the relationship.

I can’t wait.

I just arrived at my hotel in Mountain View and skyped home to chat with the family.

Ain’t technology great?