Debating the QNAP TS-209 II vs building a PC
So I’m at a point where I feel like I need a good solid server in my apartment again. Something that I can use for the following:
- Media storage for serving to PS3/xbox
- Backup storage for photos, files, and whatnot
- Version control system for website development
- ssh server for tunneling back through my network connection
- Download machine for large files and torrents
- General Windows machine for video conversions and and other CPU/harddrive demanding tasks
I have basically two options to go with in my eyes: Build a solution or buy a prebuilt one.
Build a solution:
Pros:
- Completely customizable
- Upgradeable
- Limited only in price
- Can reuse existing IDE drives
- My choice of operating system (dual boot?)
Cons:
- Significant time investment
- If it breaks I have to troubleshoot
- Possibly overkill for what I need
- It’s been awhile (5 years?) since I built a machine
Buy a solution:
Pros:
- No building and only minor configuration needed
- Technical support available
- Minimal time investment
- Cheaper
Cons:
- Limited in hardware
- Not customizable
- Probably stuck with a custom linux distro
As far as building a solution, I quickly spec’d out this setup.
- It has both IDE and SATA ports so I can use old harddrives and new ones
- It’s a pretty decent system as far as CPU is concerned
- It will be large and probably loud
- It will consume a significant amount of power
And for buying, I was thinking of going with the QNAP TS 209 II (feature lists)
- It’s preconfigured with just about everything I need (except version control) and has ipkg to install whatever else I need
- It’s small, quiet, and consumes very little power
- It’s a wimpy machine under the hood
- It seems to do everything I think I’d need and then some, and I don’t have to set everything up manually
For those not following along, my life right now is kind of busy as I juggle a job, a web business, a relationship, and a fire arts group. At this point I’m more willing to spend money than time configuring something, so the QNAP is looking enticing. But the thought of paying a few hundred more, putting in a bunch of hours, and having a much more powerful machine is tempting.
Thoughts/opinions/criticisms? Any other suggestions?
ShagOS is not the partition type
Filed Under Geek, Hardware, Old Hardware |
Once upon a time, many many years ago Ed bought a motherboard that didn’t support large harddrives. Apparently Ed installed some software called Dynamic Drive Overlay to get around this and was able to drop several 2-300gb drives in the machine. Now that it is finally time to move to a new machine that does support large harddrives in the BIOS, I really regret that decision oh so long ago.
See the thing is that Dynamic Drive Overlay fakes things via software so the entire drive is accessible. This trickery however requires that the DDO is installed, and apparently writes some nasty stuff to the MBR. After several hours of battling with the installation of Windows consistently failing, I realized this. I was getting odd error messages like:
“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Turns out there’s not really a way to “uninstall” the DDO, so I ended up formatting the entire drive by writing zeros to it using Seagate’s SeaTools. That was great, I didn’t have any data on there anyways, so I was up and running in no time. Then it came time to drop one of the 300gig drives in the machine.
This 300gb drive (a Maxtor) shows up in the Disk Management in Windows, but is an “Unknown” but Healthy partition. Further exploration with various disk tools reveal that this drive thinks it is formatted in the ShagOS partition type. I had never heard of ShagOS before, but turns out it’s an operating system that was in the works over 10 years ago. Needless to say, I had never formatted this drive as a ShagOS partition.
So I’m stuck now, and hoping that maybe someone on the internet has some answers/suggestions/etc. I’m assuming at this point that it is in fact the DDO that’s causing the trouble, but it is entirely possible that it’s something else. This drive was working with zero problems in the old machine, and has never been recognized in the new one. I thought I might be able to use GetDataBack for NTFS to recover the data as the drive is really supposed to be NTFS. But GetDataBack doesn’t recognize it as an NTFS partition, so no go there. *sigh* I’m hoping that someone out there may have run into a similar problem in the past and has suggestions.
Macbook Pro Resurrected!
Filed Under Apple, Apple - Bad, Apple - Problem, Apple - Solution, Geek, Hardware |
It is back from the dead! Upon suggestions from a couple of friends and some vague posts on random forums, I swapped out the new 4gb of RAM I bought with the original 2gb that came with the machine. My Macbook Pro then booted without problems. *sigh* Looks like this RAM is headed back to Crucial. For anyone else that’s trying to figure out why their Macbook Pro is showing a grey screen and the light is blinking on the front 3 times, pausing and then blinking again, check your RAM! While trying to find out a way to test RAM, I finally found this page from Apple. I don’t know why I wasn’t able to find this page in any of my searching before. I guess it’s not well indexed for the search terms I was trying. So, this link is for Google to find the page when some poor unfortunate soul that ends up in the same predicament as I did, wondering what the heck three blinks means:
Macbook Pro grey screen, light blinks three times
Griffin Evolve Wireless Speakers Review and Unboxing
Filed Under Apple, Gadgets, Geek, Hardware |
A few weeks ago a set of Griffin Evolve wireless speakers arrived. I had been needing to get a decent solution for listening to music when hanging around the house and my laptop speakers weren’t cutting it. I wanted something that would work with my iPod since that’s where my music lived and something that I could use anywhere in the house. The Evolve wireless speakers seemed like just the solution.
What are my thoughts on the speakers? I love them. Being able to come home and pull the iPod out of my pocket and plug it directly into a set of speakers and continue listening to the same song is a nice convenience. In addition to that I can grab one of the speakers and take it into any room I want. They’re small, light, and the sound quality is pretty good. I was mostly concerned that the sound quality would be crap, akin to my experiences with FM transmitters, but I am pleasantly surprised and have no complaints about sound quality. They don’t have a whole lot in the realm of bass, but for their use (background music) they’re fine and I’m sure my neighbors are appreciative. They do get really loud though. For the audiophiles in the crowd that spend hundreds of dollars on cables, these probably aren’t the right solution. But if you’re a casual listener (especially if you’re still using those awful iPod earbuds) that just wants to have some nice background music in the house with the convenience of playing from your iPod, I highly recommend these. The selling points for me:
- They accept my 80gb video iPod in its protective case without needing an adaptor
- I don’t have to worry about screwing up my last.fm stats since all my music plays from my iPod
- They’re black and look nice
- Charging them is simple and easy, just set them on the base
- Range extends to anywhere within 150ft
- Additional inputs on the back so I can use any audio source
- Remote control is wireless and works anywhere the speakers work
- iPod charges while docked
- Switch on the base that changes from Stereo to Mono in case you want to have only one speaker in a room
My only improvements/complaints:
- No way to control song playback other than using preconfigured playlists and Next/Back
- It would be awesome to have a small LCD on the remote to view/control the iPod
- It would be nice to have a 5.1 version for use with my media center too
- A bit pricey
- Not a whole lot of bass
- While they aren’t nearly as bad as my PS3, they do gather some dust well
- I worry that the dock might snap off because I’m not using an adaptor since my protective case doesn’t fit in with the adaptor
All in all, I highly recommend them if you feel like you need a wireless solution for casual music listening. I may even buy another pair of speakers to add to the set in the future. You can find pretty low prices from different sellers on Amazon
Nintendo Light Zapper + Wiimote
Filed Under Fun, Gadgets, Hacks and Mods, Old Hardware, Video Games |
I told you how the old school Nintendo Light Zapper works, but now cyberpyrot over at AcidMods shows you how to modify one for use with the Nintendo Wii. Pretty simple, yet slick and a nice merging of old school with new school.
Error #1520: External attribute header mismatch
Filed Under Hardware, Software, Windows |
Yay for Partition Magic 8.0. :(
PM is such a fickle utility. In some cases it works beautifully, in other cases it’s like a plane crashing into a train when someone left a semi on the tracks. This time I was lucky though, and it was a quick fix.
I decided late one night that I should merge the two partitions I had on one of my 200gb drives. In the past I had it setup with two partitions, one for an operating system, and one for storage. Now this drive is just pure storage, so there was no point in the two partitions. So I loaded up Partition Magic 8.0 and told it to merge the partitions, putting the files from one partition into a folder on the primary partition. I then rebooted so the changes could be applied when Windows started up. Watching the percentage slowly creep I decided to get some sleep while it worked.
I woke up the next morning to see that the operation had completed 100%, but I had an error. Error #1520: External attribute header mismatch. While I have a background in computer science and know basically how file systems work, I didn’t want to have to sit down and learn the ins and outs of NTFS just to get my 40gigs of music back so I just started poking around.
At first the drive wouldn’t show in Windows. A reboot or two and it reappeared for some reason. The drive was browseable and I could see the directory that the files from the secondary partition should be in. Unfortunately when I tried to open that directory I received an “Access Denied” error message. My first step was to run “chkdsk e: /f” on the drive. Sure enough it found and fixed several errors. But still, access denied. I had assumed there was something up with the allocation table, or maybe an actual hardware issue. However, thinking it was a slim chance, I checked the permissions of the directory, and changed the ownership to myself. Boom, files are back. Rejoice.
For anyone else that runs into this, right click on the folder that Partition Magic created, select Properties, select the Permissions tab, does it say SYSTEM here? Click on the Advanced button, click on the Owner tab, select your user name and check Replace owner on subcontainers and objects. Click Apply and OK to the warnings and then wait as the new owner is applied to the files. Once it’s done, things should be fixed.
How does the Nintendo Light Gun work? (with video)
Filed Under Hardware, Old Hardware, Video Games |
Ahhh the old Nintendo Zapper, aka the Nintendo gun. An object of great joy and entertainment from our childhood. Something we played with day in and day out, but most of us had no clue how it worked. We’d make up stories about it shooting lasers off the tv or it changing the TV screen so that it knew where the gun was pointing, and accepted one of these highly uneducated explanations and continue with the game of Duck Hunt on the old NES, wondering why we could never shoot that stupid dog when he laughed at us.
In the past I’ve read explanations about how the Zapper actually worked, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to see what was inside that plastic shell. So I found some tiny screwdrivers, exacerbated my mild carpal tunnel removing them and managed to get the thing apart. But before we get to the gory, err geeky pictures, a quick explanation for those that are still curious about how it works.
No, the gun does not shoot light. In fact it receives light. When you pull the trigger, the video game quickly changes the screen, so fast that most people don’t even notice it. By using the alterating of color and white light from the tv, the gun uses a photodiode to detect whether it’s scored a hit or not. So in short, the gun decides if you hit your target, not the Nintendo system. Here’s a brief explanation from Wikipedia:
When the trigger was pulled, the game blanked out the screen with a black background for one frame, then, for one additional frame, drew a solid white rectangle around the sprite the user was supposed to be shooting at. The photodiode at the back of the Zapper would detect these changes in intensity and send a signal to the NES to indicate whether it was over a lit pixel or not. A drop followed by a spike in intensity signaled a hit. Multiple sprites were supported by flashing a solid white rectangle around each potential sprite, one per frame.
So, with that said, here’s the picture of the gun mostly dismantled. Click on the image to jump to flickr to see the parts identified.
And here’s a video of what’s happening inside with that familiar “pang!” when you pull the trigger:
What is my hard drive doing?!
Filed Under Hardware |
Ever wondering what goes on in that box as it makes little noises and the light flash? LeTheOnline.net took the top off one and turned on the computer to show you. And another video showing a demo of a harddrive with a little more educational content:
Traffic Logging with WRTbwlog
Filed Under Internet, Linksys WRT54G |
I’m a stats junkie, I’ll be the first to admit it. Ever since the first few days at college on a T1 line I’ve wanted to keep an eye on how much bandwidth I could burn through. With a few additions to DD-WRT on the Linksys WRT54G router you can see where all your bandwidth is going. The WRTbwlog page has some great info on setting things up, but we ran into a few snags so we thought it was worth a post. Here’s how to test it out to see how you like it:
First, we’ll assume you’ve already purchased a Linksys WRT54G router and flashed the firmware to install DD-WRT. We’re working with DD-WRT v23 SP1 Final (05/16/06) std.
Next you’ll need to go and get a copy of WRTbwlog. As of writing this the version of WRTbwlog that’s actually available on their site does not work with the latest releases of DD-WRT. But never fear, krikkit over on the DD-WRT forums fixed it. You can read all about it in this thread. So we’ll use this copy of his fixed version. But wait, let’s save us some trouble and just download it straight to the router.
Go ahead and ssh into the DD-WRT router. (how to enable ssh) Copy and paste the following commands:
cd /tmp
wget http://www.geeked.info/wp-content/files/wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
tar -xzf wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
rm wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
cd bwlog
./start.sh
This should startup WRTbwlog. If you grabbed krikkit’s version, you’ll probably see a message that says:
ftpget: Unable to connect to remote host (192.168.1.100): No route to host
You can either ignore it or you can download our fixed copy.
Now, from a desktop load up a web browser, hit a few of your favorite websites to generate some traffic, and then go to http://192.168.1.1:8000/traffic.cgi and marvel at the stats. (If your router isn’t 192.168.1.1, replace it with the appropriate IP address obviously). Go surf some sites, download some things, and then go back and refresh the traffic page. Pretty slick, eh?
Only one problem at this point, you’d have to execute the commands above every single time you rebooted your router. If you’re like me, that’s once every few weeks, but it would still be a pain. So let’s get bwlog installed permanently on the router. It’s painless, I promise.
Log into the web interface for DD-WRT and go to the Administration tab->Diagnostics Tab. Most of you can probably just click here.
We’re going to add something so that WRTbwlog is automatically installed and started, but first a comment. If you can, please download the .tgz file and host it on your own server. It’ll be faster for you (and cheaper for me in bandwidth costs). And then replace the obvious text below
In the Commands box paste the following:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20;
do
sleep 5
cd /tmp
/usr/bin/wget http://www.YOURWEBSERVER.com/PATH/TO/wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
/bin/tar -xzf wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
rm wrtbwlog_cust_exp.tgz
cd bwlog
( ./start.sh & ) &
done
(source)
Click “Save Startup”
Reboot your router, and check http://192.168.1.1:8000/traffic.cgi and hopefully smile. You’re all set!
If you want to take the extra steps to save your traffic logs across reboots you’ll need to look into setting up an FTP backup. Unfortunately with the latest versions of DD-WRT necessary components (ftpput) are missing and this isn’t possible yet. But when it’s fixed, you can check WRTbwlog’s page for more info on this and the rest of WRTbwlog’s features and settings.
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