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.

Well not completely new but now at a new home. I recently switched it to Bluehost.com. So far it is running much better on here than the other host. We will see if i actually post on here.

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.

So as you can tell, I have been quite the busy bee. I have not had the time to post in quite awhile. Currently, Biggs, Ialacci and I have been trying to get a small bidness running. (Ialacci calls Business Bidness for no real reason. I think it is more that he can not spell it.) Anyway, it’s been that, school, work, and just random other adventures in my life holding me back from posting on this site. So here is my almost month old update post.

Thursday, me and Ialacci went to check out a “Virtual Office” off Motor Pkwy and the east bound service road off the LIE. When we first walked into the building, I swear that we both almost, well, I think you get the idea. The whole place was completely new; it was only built like 4 months ago. If you look on google maps, its still under construction. But hey, most places close by are like that. If you look at Island 16 off Nicoles Rd and exit 62 off the LIE, half of the movie theater is under construction and the other half is done. That place has been there for quite a while now. Like a good 6 years or so. Well anyway, this place we found is completely amazing. It comes with everything we would ever need plus the whole building is completely biometric. I can go on for hours about the features and amazingness of the place but I have much more to talk about.

I am still using Windows 7, build 7057, on my laptop and boy, is it amazing. I have to admit, I hate Windows and this is the first Microsoft product that I actually like, a lot! It has a quality feel to everything it does and it runs much faster than Vista ever will. There are still a bunch of bugs that need to get worked out and driver support is still not up to par but what do you expect to a beta product. I think I will actually buy a license for this when it gets released.

I am again working on a new server. In the past 3 weeks, I actually already have rebuilt my server. Right now it has a E6600 Core 2 Duo with 8GB DDR1066. I thought it was complete overkill and using to much power for what it is doing. So I went Newegging. I bought a Jetway ITX socket AM2 board with a AMD Athlon x2 4050e 2.1GHz and 4GB DDR800 Ram. I figure that I will only be using about 60-70 watts average. I am mostly doing this to save space and make my mom happy with the power bill. I got all the parts except the board so I really can’t do anything about it right this second. The one thing I am doing is changing my Drobo from HFS+ to ext3 so I can use it on my server instead of having it on my iMac. I figure that it would be better since it will always be shared over the network and I don’t need to worry about my iMac having to be running. As an added bonus, I also bought 2 more 1.5TB drives for the Drobo for a total of 4.5TB. I mean I do actually need it. Right now I am currently using over a TB and I still have about 200GB more to move on to it. Ill give you updates on how that is going when I get to it.

My mom is selling the family camper. It is sort of sad to see it go. I did not really spend much time in it since we are always busy doing something. One person is doing that when this person is off and vice versa. My mom needs the money so I do understand it but it is still the point. My mom just a few days before said that she would like to take it to Massachusetts for a weekend or so. I am all up for it since I like driving around with the car and such but hey, its not my disission.

Also, I got my new sneakers for my Bora. I don’t know if I have already posted a picture of it on here yet but I might as well do that now. I have had them on it for a few months already.

Also, I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out why my blog page is unhappy near the bottom of the page. If you look, the background is all not right and the sheets overlap and underlap. If you can, it would be great.

I now have a small public FTP for me to share files with you, if needed. It is located at Bankshouse.no-ip.org. Give it a try every once and awhile. You never know what might be on it.

I love my simple gym class for me to just to get my credit. It is a bowling/badminton class for my second credit.

In other news my RAID array with the three 120Gib drive in RAID 1 begain to beleave that it was using only two of the drives in RAID 1. This means I lost all the data on it, which was both mine and Krasses torrent server. This sucks bad because that was my only backup (hence the RAID set.

To try to get my mind off of this disaster, I sent to Apps with the friends and such. Ill give you updates on the file rebuild.

I finally set something new up for my computer network. Recently, I thought about the idea of trying out VMWare Server 2 since it is free and all and it’s easy to run. How it works is that you have to have a machine with either Windows or Linux in either X86 or X86_64. All you do is run the installer and after you configure it, you log into the web interface to control everything vmware wise. It works amazing and it is easy to figure out. If you want to try it, sign up and download from here “VMWare Server”.

So for my server, I built a system from my old AMD 64 machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 x64 on it. The hardware I used for this project was:

• Board: BioStar T-Force SLI
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 +3500
• Memory: 2 Gig DDR400
• Hard Drives:
  1. Seagate 20Gib IDE – OS
  2. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 1
  3. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 2
  4. Hitachi 250Gib SATA – Extra Storage (Not used yet)
  5. Hitachi 500Gib SATA – Soon to be RAID array with another 500Gib
• Case: Antec Sonata 1st Rev with 380w PSU
• Network:
  1. No name brand PCI Realtek 8169 Gigabit card
  2. Zonet Realtek 8169 Gigabit card (File server)
• Video: EVGA MX4000 PCI card

I have the two RAID drives in RAID 1 using MDADM and it works perfect. The 250Gib drive is empty but it is there just in case I need more storage. Also, I am in the process of setting up another RAID 1 array that will hold my servers files on it using two 500Gib drives from my new Drobo box (I’ll explain in a bit). What that means is that I am going to be moving my main ITX server into a virtual machine to run on my VMware server but using it exactly as it is setup right now so I won’t have to start all over again setting it up. On the plus side I get to use my ITX server as a small machine for my living room. Mostly so there is a computer for my mom to use to work on school work in the living room instead of her desk which is quite small. Another plus is the fact I will be gaining more space on the server since it will have the new RAID array.

Next up I have a new file storage device called a Drobo. They call it a storage robot that essentially is a non-RAID RAID array. They have their own system called BeyondRAID which is RAID like but not true RAID. How it works is place any size drives you have in it. From them it will completely build a new drive from all the drives. No need to match size and brand, it just builds it into an array. When you run out of space on it, you just pop a drive out and install a new one. It will automaticly set-up the drive and rebuild the array. So far I love it, even though it is quite on the expensive side hovering around $450. As of yesterday (1/25/09) it now has 2x 1.5tb and 2x 500gib drives totalling 2.3tb and it is fully backed up.

Now car news. I am still modifying my car. Now it now has a BORA and euro 1.8T emblems, German plate with replica registration sticker, and it will soon have black euro VW emblems. Also I ordered and received the matching German “HN F1744″ plate for when I finally have the money to get a genuine VW BORA trunk lid with the wide plate opening. For now it is going to be chillin on my desk waiting for the day to be mounted.

Well that’s it for now. Finally I get to post this post. Hope your happy and if you have any questions on how to do any of this or about something else, just sign up and post a comment.

Stuck in class and nothing to do. Ill probably be updating my Christmas list and looking for car parts. I’m happy that ECSTuning is shipping out my timing belt kit today so I should be getting it sometime tomorrow or Monday. He is still looking for what the best plan is to repair my engine. We have not decided if he is going to rebuild my current one, used one or, (I hope not) a refurbished head from VW which would cost a good $2,300. We both don’t know how much it would cost for the other two ways but it will be much cheaper than the refurbished one.

I reset all the cables plugged into my gigabit switch so it all corresponds with IP addresses I use in my house. It turns out that somehow I am using twelve out of sixteen ports of my switch. I did not realize how much crap I have plugged into it.

If I did not mention already, I was going to try a new blogging program called “Habari” but my host, again causing problems, does not have the PHP version that Habari needs to work. I have no plans to switch to it anyway but why not test it. If you want to check it out, the link is This. It probably not going to work if you look at it but check out there website and try out the demo.

I can’t understand why my cat does this stuff to me. Last night my cat was was jumping, standing and using me as a pillow on my own bed. I actually woke up with him standing on my chest with his nose almost in my mouth. It freaked me out a whole lot. Than he did this for the next few hours till about 7AM when I woke up. Mind you, this started like 2:30ish AM this morning. He does not make much sense at night at all.

Also, the timing belt cover that I was painting. Yea, I sort of destroyed it yesterday trying to get back into the car and now I have to find another one to paint again and hopefully not break this one.

I am still having problems with my hosts e-mail server. I e-mailed a blog post with something everyone should like about two days ago and it still did not post so keep an eye out under this post for the next week or so. It will eventually pick it up, but who knows when.

I received my new La Fondera a few days ago and forgot to post it. I know, how did I already get it? Don’t ask me. It said like 2-3 weeks delivery when I got it in two days. Well of course the first thing was rip the box open, check to see which model I got, and put it back into the box and back on my shelf. I don’t know when I am going to set that one up but it will happen at some point. The old FON is completely dead. I got the serial cable from e-bay two days ago or something. I tried testing it out and what did you know, nothing at all showed up on the terminal. I was looking up about JTAG ing it but it seems like it is very very hard to get it to work right. That is a future project. Right now I have to much going on.

Krass and me now have a plan, or should I say will have one since I didn’t even give him dimensions of anything in my room, to build my new desk. If I did not tell you, my desk is way way to small for me. I can barely fit my 20″ iMac on it, let alone my second monitor. HUMMM. That just gave me another idea of what to do when this new desk is done. Ill try to remember and post it later on but ill let you all suffer (Like anyone actually cares enough) for awhile.

Wow! This is some random tangent I went of to tonight. I think the 13 hour work day completely got to me. Um, i’m going to just shut up now before I make this a full page.

I finally figured out why my “e-mail to post” system is not working. It turns out that my webhost is having plenty of problems with their mail server. Well atleast I know whats wrong and I hope that it will be addressed very soon.

Update: It seems that right after I posted this post, out of no where two of my meny test posts from my BB posted. I’m getting confused what the F is going on with that.