I finally got around to replacing the stupid CPU fan in my server this morning. For the last few months it has been crazy annoying. Replaced it with a CoolerMaster unit I got for about $12 off newegg.com. I even got a free 10ft Cat6 network cable which is nice. While it was open, I figured I would take a few pictures of it in it’s new case I got for it a few months back. It’s a nice Antec case, which I completely forgot the model number of it or I would tell you. Its very well built considering the price. Anyway, what I was saying before about pictures, here are some of them:

I need better pictures, I am aware but its hard doing freehand non flashed pictures with a Point’n'Shoot.

You may be wondering what I have done with the server since the last time I posted about it. It may seem like a lot has changed. Well, it has. I moved it out of the 1U rack server case into the Antec ITX case (as I stated before), ditched the 2 320GB Seagate drives in favor of a 32GB OCZ SSD, and added a 250GB 7200RPM Seagate Laptop drive as a scratch drive. So far this has made a Huge improvement over the last 2 drives in SW RAID 1. Also, the Drobo received an upgrade in the form of 4 2TB WD GreenPower drives which now give me a storage capacity of 5.8TB. Plenty of space. I soon hope to get better pictures for my Pics and Info page about my server, since it needs an update bad.

Here are some pictures of me unpacking my new Bioshock 2 Special Edition box.

It comes with a 33 record with the musical score, a CD with the same thing as the record, three art deco style posters with places in rapture, a 160 something page book with concept art for the game in it and the game at the bottom. As is I already ripped the audio off the album.

Finally was annoyed of always having to update my iTunes db with the new music I add so I looked for a new solution. I now have a DAAP media server, called MT-DAAPD (Project Site), running on my Linux File Server. So far it’s working as it should but I noticed that on iTunes end, it sort of sucks. I like how when iTunes has local files, it sorts all the music into Albums using Album art and whatnot but using a media server doesn’t do that. It just shows up a giant list of every song in alphabetical order of artist which is very hard to navigate. It’s not all bad because iTunes is smart enough to order it by album in the artist sort. What I mean by that is if I have two artists, Ex. Arcade Fire and Silversun Pickups. What it will do is first sort the two bands out in alphabetical order. Than it will sort the albums out for the artist in alphabetical order within the artist. Anyway, now my next step is to find out how I could do how a local DB for iTunes handles files for the server, if that makes any sense.

I had a problem at first trying to get it all setup. Ubuntu refused to let it start throwing up errors and such saying my avahi-daemon (mDNSresponder) (Project Site) was not using the howl layer for some reason and the sqllite3 database could not start. Tried recompiling newer version of avahi-daemon from source but all I got was missing dependencies which I could not install since I have 8.04 LTS. I ended up finding a nice little compile attribute that will compile MT-DAAPD that made it work.

This would be:

./configure --enable-avahi

As soon as I did that and did the usual:

make
make install

and it worked perfect. Than I found the next problem. For some reason the init.d scripts did not want it to start. At all. It would say it would start but it just wouldn’t. So I did the next best thing, made my own. I opened nano and made:

#!/bin/sh
exec mt-daapd

I than saved it in the /etc/init.d directory as mt-daapd.sh. Ran:

update-rc.d mt-daapd.sh defaults

and everything worked after that. Now it up and running for the time being. I will rewrite the script at some point that will enable to be used at different runlevels and support the start|stop|restart commands.

That’s all I got for now. I hope this helps someone.

Nothing unusual. So, I finally got around to building and setting up my new ITX Linux server. I got the board last Monday and started the setup that night.

Step 1:

First problem I ran into was the board mounting into my server case. It turns out that since it uses laptop memory and the 2nd card slot is on the underside of the board, it does not want to mount fully to the cases actual mounts. At first I did not think of this and just drilled all four screws down. This caused a small problem when I went to start it up for the first time. Nothing, that was all I got at first. thinking I plugged in a cable the wrong way or like my PCI riser card isn’t compatible. No, turns out that it was the screws holding down the front of the board to the case. This means that it is not actually fully mounted and only attached by two screws. But anyway, I got everything mounted and connected and up an running.

Step 2:

Here is the fun part. So when I try to get Ubuntu 8.04.2 Server installed, I ran into a few problems. First off, I could not get partman to build my RAID array right. How I wanted it was to setup two RAID arrays using mdadm (Linux software RAID) with one array as 10GB for the OS and programs and the rest of the of the drive as another RAID array. So I setup partitions on each disc with two 10GB bootable Linux Auto RAID type and something like 290GB for the 2nd RAID for the data storage but as soon as I went into the option to setup the actual RAID devices, it ended up taking the whole drive over for itself and destroyed everything I setup. For a whole day I worked on that and lucky for me, I ended up just doing it manually. What is nice about the Ubuntu setup is that you still have a root console during the setup. This saved my ass during this setup.

What I had to do was hit Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get into the console. From there I ran fdisk -l to list all the available drives and partitions so I can manually add them. I won’t get into the specifics of everything I did with fdisk but I will tell you that I ended up with four total partitions. Than next was the actual RAID building. The next command I ran was:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

This built my RAID 1 array for my root drive. Now that this was done, all I needed to do was go back into partman in the setup and, what do you know, the device /dev/md0 appeared and the correct size. All I did than was partition that as a root device and went on with the setup. The rest of the install went exactly as planed. So at least that is all setup now.

Step 3:

Now was the really fun part. My Drobo. I got a Firewire 800 card for the server to utilize the speeds of Firewire over USB. Well it seems that was a lost cause. It didn’t want to read anything over 2TB which I had my Drobo setup with a LUN size of 8TB because of expansion. I ran dmesg to find an error with, well I don’t remember exactly the error but I’ll have to try it later and post it on here. After fighting with that for a few hours, I ended up switching to USB. Started the format and I never thought formatting an 8TB volume would take so long but what did I know? After that, I started copying all 1.2TB of data back from my other external drive to the Drobo. Let that run overnight and though the next day since it is 1.2TB of data. After the copy was finally finished, it started giving me read errors. I unmounted it and tried to remount, <code>Wrong fs type</code> error came up. Crap, I hosed my file system and let’s just say I am lucky I did not format the other external.

At this point I was getting frustrated. Looking all over the internet doesn’t give much info on using a Drobo under Linux with ext3. I don’t remember what site or I would give him credit but he said something about it only being able to support a 2TB LUN size. Not exactly what I wanted to do but at this point after 3 days of formatting and partitioning, I said “why not. If it is going to work, Ill have to deal”. So that is exactly what I did. It turns out that was the trick. For some stupid reason, the Drobo does not want to let ext3 format over 2TB. What sucks about the 2TB LUNs is that now it shows up as two 2TB drives, since I have 3.1TB worth of drives in it right now. I know its not working because of after I copped everything back to the Drobo, all the data is still readable. Now if only I could work up the courage to erase all the data off the 1.5TB backup external and place that in the Drobo. 4.5TB, here I come.

Step 4:

All I did after that huge fiasco with the data on the external drives and such, was install all my programs and setup them up. I have VMWare Server 2 installed running my VPN server, APCUPSD for my UPS, Samba for windows shares, hddtemp to monitor the temperatures of my hard drives (internal), smartmontools to monitor smart, and drobo-util to manage my Drobo. All of these programs are free which is why I mainly use Linux.

So thats my short but sweet story about my new server setup. Soon, if I ever remember to do it, is take pictures and add redo my ITX server info page located at My Server Page.

I started work on another web page for a new endeavor that Biggs, Ialacci, Krass, and I are working on. We are working on setting up a new computer repair business. Biggs is the one that came up with the plan but we are still deciding on basically everything. Anyway, so far I started a template for the web site for the business located at http://BanksHouse.org/Test. It is all written in PHP (as usual) but I started to try to learn something new.

What I did was setup the title tag for each page to use a the file name to write the correct title to the page.

Download it by right clicking and save as: title.php

That’s what I have now but I would like to clean up the code a bit but I don’t know what to do. If you know, please comment with a way to fix it.

Check out my new toy.

Yea, that’s right, it’s a 1984 Apple IIe with DuoDisk and 9 Inch B&W composite monitor.

It turned out to be quite a nice evening. Well not during the time I was over my aunts house, but more like an half hour before I left there. I drove my grandma home and we had a nice long talk like we usually do. My grandma and I are quite close, plus she knows more about accounting than I do. When I got home my dvd rip was complete. I was ripping the second season of “30 Rock” to .mkv files so I don’t need to use dvd’s or dvd images like I have. My cat was chillin with me all night and is now currently sleeping on my bed. That’s all I can think about for now. Back hurts and very tired.

I reinstalled Windows Vista Business x64. So far it’s done nothing but freeze up and just not work with most programs, even its self. It’s sad how they made people use this garbage OS. I am still going to try running it as everyday computer but I don’t know how much more I can take with it. I know it’s not my ThinkPad that is slowing it down. Anyway, I’ll keep updating my (probably bad) experiences with Vista.

Windows 7 is finally here. I grabbed an ISO off TorrentLeech.org and installed within a virtual machine using VMware. Wow, what a difference. It just works so much better in alpha than Vista with SP1. It’s kind of said that it turns out like that. My friend Andrew will soon be posting his review on this very soon (He is slow) so look forward to that.

So today is the day I get my BlackBerry. Well I hope I do. The reason is that the rep at the AT&T store quoted me a price that was higher than the site’s price. I know usually it does work out like that but he said “No it shouldn’t be lower. The computer tells me this price.” BS. I printed out a screen shot of the price online and I am going to show him. I hope it works out. Wish me luck.