Archive for the 'geekery' Category

transmission bt

Published on 30/8/2008 in geekery. 0 Comments

Transmission “is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client”.

Pretty nice. Faster than Azureus, well faster to start up. Can still block bad IPs, encrypt and set upload/download limits. That’s pretty much all I need.

transbt.jpg

Uses about the same CPU as Azureus, but 3 times less memory. About 28MB vs 150MB.

Pretty happy so far, well, not totally convinced yet though, it might be a bit slower on the downloads than Azureus. Need to do some more tests.

finally, my zfs server

Published on 20/8/2008 in deep geekery. 0 Comments

OK, this is for Google, as I found it so hard to find info on different boards. My hardware for my OpenSolaris install:

Asus M2N-VM HDMI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+

Rest of the hardware here.

However, that’s the motherboard that my mate said he had and it all worked. Of course, given my luck, it didn’t. He’d told me the wrong board. He had the Asus M2A-VM HDMI. So that one works. The M2N-VM HDMI doesn’t. Not totally.

The problem is with the network on the M2N-VM, and, if I’d done proper research, I would have found out. I did try this guy’s fix using some 3rd party ethernet drivers, but that didn’t work for me. So I popped out to get an Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter and switched off the onboard LAN on the M2N-VM. Worked fine.

So I’m all set up. Copied over all my media and still got around 1TB spare:

# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 906G 919G 28.0K /tank
tank/backup 62.9M 919G 62.9M /tank/backup
tank/pool 906G 919G 906G /tank/pool

# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
tank 2.72T 1.33T 1.39T 48% ONLINE -

Jay - I went with a CIFS mount as it was faster (30-40MB/s vs 20MB/s for NFS).

Name, um, inspired by Private Dancer Doris:

dusky-zfs.jpg

run of bad luck

Published on 15/8/2008 in geekery and personal. 0 Comments

Terrible. Sorry, much geeking ahead and more bullet points:

  • External 1TB hard drive failed.
  • Couldn’t find the motherboard I wanted for OpenSolaris box, so got another, apparently compatible one.
  • New system would not display on my Apple monitor. Worked on my TV though.
  • OpenSolaris 2008.5 wouldn’t install (weird PBR error on boot).
  • Tried to get community edition - the website refused to let me download (too many tries apparently).
  • Searched Bittorrent, found a svn_93 image, installed fine.
  • New ZFS pool shared via NFS and Samba was too slow. 2MB/s. Other people get 50MB/s or above.
  • Tried to get community edition - using sun downloader - failed giving me filesize errors.
  • Tried community edition svn_95 - no difference, (didn’t like this version BTW).
  • Tried zeroing all the drives (was a tip that worked for someone). Took 7 hours. No difference.
  • Bought new gigabit router and cables - no difference.
  • Changed BIOS config between SATA/IDE and native and legacy settings. Install for each permutation taking about 2 hours.
  • Mac Pro video card started playing up and overheating.
  • Bought new graphics card for my Mac. It wouldn’t work. Just wouldn’t boot!
  • Took Mac to shop - got ticket from a motorbike copper for stopping on double yellows. I was there for 30 seconds.
  • Mac has kernel panicked twice lately, once before new graphics card, once after.
  • Tried Linux, to see if the problem was with the OpenSolaris SATA drivers. Used Fedora. Lovely, perfect, until:
  • Could not, for the life of me, get the Linux NFS share to work properly on my Mac via Directory Utility (spent about 3 hours on this - it worked fine for OpenSolaris). Samba works fine and gives me 50MB/s. So it’s not the drives or network. It’s the OpenSolaris SATA drivers for the ICH9 chipset.
  • Bought SATA card with different chipset. svn_93 couldn’t recognise it. Bug fixed in svn_94.
  • Found workaround, but that didn’t work. Resulted in driver misconfig error. Decided to get source code to compile but then changed mind. Toooooo far Tony.
  • Gave up, decided on using hardware RAID5 on mobo, and Fedora Linux
  • RAID setup program didn’t like my keyboard. Press left/right arrow and it crashes. Have to set to SATA in BIOS. Boot. Set to RAID. Boot. To get back into the setup program.
  • Finally, Fedora Linux cannot mount the RAID partition. “Could not stat device” error. Not many of those on Google.
  • Had a look at my Time Machine harddrive. For some reason, only had 2 days backups on! Turns out Time Machine backs up the Trash folder and I’d put a few hundered GB in there. Time Machine came along, saw it needed to back up a sheeeeet load of data, checked the space on drive and cleared down enough space! At least I think that’s what happened. And get this, I needed it. I was looking for a file I knew I had changed 3 days ago. I had 2 days of backups. FFS.
  • Bought some new trousers, first day wearing them at work, I stood up, caught the pocket on my armrest and ripped the pocket off.

 Ahhhhh! Options:

  1. Spend (on new mobo and CPU), wait (can’t get mobo until tomorrow), rebuild, reinstall, hope.
  2. Go with sotware RAID5 on a Fedora 9 linux install.
  3. No RAID, just go with ext3 in a big LVM on a Fedora 9 linux install.

  I’m going to try option 1. Big thanks to Simon. He’s been very helpful!

still geeking

Published on 9/8/2008 in deep geekery. 2 Comments

Well it should be pretty straight forward installing OpenSolaris. But it’s not. Not for me anyway.

First off, it wouldn’t display on my Apple monitor.
I plugged it into my TV and at least I could see what was going on.
I thought it had hung during the boot from the DVD, but it just took ages. Eventually booted up and installed, but it wouldn’t boot from the hard drive. Bad PBR signal was the only message. Whatever that means. Tried a few more times (each time takes an hour). No luck. I was using release 85. Couldn’t get 95, so tried 93. This time it booted. All good. Set up the zfs pool, shared it, eventually mounted it on my Mac, fiddled around with the user ids and permissions, and could eventually read and write …. very slowly. About 2 MB/s. Other people get 40 MB/s and more depending on their network. So copying all my media would take 4 days. Okkaaaaayy.

Had to figure out if it was the network - don’t think it is, as writing a file direct to the drive gets 2 MB/s. So … the SATA driver? The drives in the right mode? IRQ conflicts? Nooooo idea. I’m learning all sorts of Solaris commands, but not really getting anywhere.

Google helped a little. So dude had the same hardware and same issue. He zeroed out the drives and reinstalled and it seemed to help. So I’m trying that right now. But it takes hours to zero out 3TB of drives.

dead drive

Published on 8/8/2008 in geekery. 2 Comments

I was right, the 1TB Lacie Drive just died. It made a beep, then started making a kind of clicking noise.

It was pretty much full. All my TV shows and movies. Luckily, I’d copied everything over to other drives.

Anyway, don’t ask me about OpenSolaris install. It’s almost 1am. Still not even installed. A few hiccups along the way!

zfs

Published on 7/8/2008 in deep geekery. 4 Comments

Major geekery alert!

I have 2.1TB of hard drive space in my Mac Pro, and 1.5TB in my external Lacie drives. However, there is no redundancy built in. No RAID5 if you know what I mean. If one of those drives fails, then I’ll lose what’s on it, unless I have a backup.

I have backups of my main drive (system, user files, music, photos), via Time Machine, which has saved my ass twice already, but my other media (mainly movies and TV shows) on a specific drive would be lost if that drive failed. My 1TB Lacie drive has started making funny noises, and Firewire on the Mac is a bit dodgy I think. Or my drive is already dodgy - always unmounting and remounting.

So, I’m going to build a home fileserver. I’m just going to follow those instructions and use ZFS on OpenSolaris.

Why ZFS?

Stolen directly from the link above - mainly:

  • Simple administration
  • Ability to create large, redundant data storage pools with one command
  • Built-in data scrubbing to enable ZFS to self-heal ‘latent failures’ (bit rot etc)
  • Is designed upon the assumption that disk hardware should never be trusted, so solid checksumming, transactions are used
  • Designed to use cheap, commodity SATA disks, not expensive SAS disks
  • RAIDZ1 can survive 1 drive failure, RAIDZ2 can survive 2 drive failures
  • Failed disks can be replaced and substituted with one command (if no hot spares are available)
  • ZFS data pools can be shared via NFS, Samba/CIFS and iSCSI
  • Sun Solaris OS and ZFS are free and open source

So I just bought some hardware:

Total cost was HK$9500, with $4700 of that being the 3 1TB drives. If I went AMD and 4 x 640GB drives, I could have got the system for about $7000, but I couldn’t find the AMD motherboards supported by OpenSolaris and with enough SATA ports. So, it was a little more expensive that I had hoped. It better work!

So, this evening, I will mainly be geeking. Installing OpenSolaris, setting up the zfs pool and filesystem, then sharing it over the network and auto mounting it on my Mac. Then I need to transfer all my files.

iphone update

Published on 4/10/2007 in geekery. 7 Comments

The dudes at the shop managed to get it to boot, and it was unlocked! I did not fail! However, I’d already bought another, so I still lost $2k after selling this one.

So, this is what my desk looked like:

applemadness.png

That’s a 2nd gen nano, a 160GB Classic, a 16GB Touch and two iPhones. More money than sense apparently. However:

life-lessons-flowchart.png

BTW: predictive text on the iPhone knows sahib, fucking and fuckup.


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