Tag: hardware

Computers under my command – Issue 1: shion

Picture of the "real" Shion Uzuki

After yesterdays fun with one of my servers, I thought I could maybe blog about some of them – especially when they are kind of “special” to me.

Of course, the first machine I’m looking at is my PowerPC Mac mini which I called “Shion”, after the girl Shion Uzuki of the Xenosaga trilogy.

I don’t really have a very advanced naming scheme for my servers, but the important ones get names I tend to remember.

First it was people from Lord of the Rings (with Windows servers having names belonging to the evil people). Then, after I ran out of names, it was places in LotR and after I run out of those too, I began naming (important) servers after girls in console RPGs.

And of all the names, I guess shion is a very fitting name for a server. In the game, Shion is a robotics engineer and the inventor of that android called KOS-MOS.

And in my network, shion has a special place:

I initially bought the machine to run a SlimServer on it as my previous NSLU solution was not really usable as hardware for the heavy, perl-based slim server.

After I replaced the slim-server, I obviously installed a samba server on shion to serve the non-music files as-well. Back then, I only had one external drive connected to the server.

Next thing to get installed was OpenVPN which I used for quite a nice configuration allowing me transparent access from and to the office.

Shortly after that, I finally found a USB ethernet adapter which made shion replace my ZyAir access point. I also had to buy a USB hub back then and I decided to use the remaining two ports of that to plug in additional hard drives, leading to shion’s current disk space capacity of roughly 1.2 TB.

Then I installed mp[3]act (I’ve also blogged about it) and shortly after replaced it with Jinzora due to mp[3]act being quite bug-ridden and not in development any longer. (update 2013: links removed – mp[3]act is now pointing to a porn site and Jinzora is gone)

In all that time (one year of operation), shion never crashed on me. Overall, the stability of my home network went through the roof since switching all tasks over to her: No more strange connection losses. No more rebooting router and cable modem when lots of outgoing connections are active. No more inexplicable slowness in the internal network.

Shion does a wonderful job for me and I would never ever go back to any less flexible or stable solution.

Lately, I thought about maybe ditching her for a more powerful intel-based Mac Mini, but in the end shion is fast enough for my current purpose and I could never ditch a machine as nice as this one.

Flexible, Stable, Fast, Quiet and quite inexpensive. A machine worthy of being referred to with a name and a female pronoun.

RAM for my MacBook Pro

Today, another GB of RAM for my MacBook Pro arrived (I bought it at Heiniger AG. It’s no original Apple RAM, but it’s about a third as expensive as the original).

Installation was very easy to do (I link the instructions for the 17″ model because that’s what I found on the web – it works the same for the 15″ model).

And I tell you: This is the best thing to ever happen to a computer of mine performance-wise.

While the system feels a lot snappier in “default mode”, it shines even more when I’m running Parallels Workstation in the background (at full screen – using VirtueDesktop).

I’m inclined to say that the parallels-thing just got usable with this upgrade.

Funny thing: When you are working with Windows XP, you won’t notice as much as a speed increase in normal operating mode when you upgrade your RAM from 1GB to 2GB. I guess the memory manager of OSX is just more eager to swap out stuff if RAM gets scarce. And as we all know: Swapping kills a system.

Powerbook runs XP

It’s done. The contest has been won.

Windows XP is installable on a MacBook Pro and it even boots from there after the installation.

This solves a big problem I’m having: In the office, I’m using a 30″ cinema display connected to a Windows XP box which I had to custom-build because no out-of-the box systems have graphics cards with dual-link DVI ports which is needed for all resolutions bigger than 1920×1080 (technically, the limit is even 1600×1200, but 1920 still works somehow).

Now, custom-built boxes are nice, but they have two flaws: The first is the noise. Even though I got it to run very quiet despite the kick-ass graphics card I had to put in, it’s louder than your average laptop (it was even louder before I unplugged the chipset fan. As it’s working stable since more than a year now, I guess it doesn’t matter). The second problem is the problem of data redundancy:

If you prefer and have the ability, like I do, to both work at home and in the office, you are dependant of having current data at both places. Version control systems help a lot here, but they don’t solve all the problems (unfinished revisions which I don’t like to commit and binary files). In the end, the only way to have your data where you need it is to maintain it only at one place at a time.

This is the main advantage I’m seeing in laptops (beside the quietness).

Looking at the current laptop pc market, it’s even worse in respect of dual-link DVI outputs: Usually, you don’t even get single-link DVI. And custom-building one is no option unfortunately. There are some barebones, but what comes out of such an operation is a loud, badly manufactured “thing” with short battery life.

So, hardware-wise, powerbooks were always perfect because all of them have my direly needed dual-link DVI port.

The problem was the software. I’m dependant on Delphi for my daily work. Even if days can pass without me actually using it, it still happens that I need it. And when I do, it must be quick.

The other thing is multimedia. No matter what you are now going to tell me: Nothing on the Mac matches the perfect architecture of DirectShow which allows media players and codecs to be developped independently. Core Media Player with the right codec pack is unbeatable in performance, usability (at least for me) and versatility. Sorry Quicktime (only quicktime and maybe DivX). Sorry MPlayer (always uses 100% CPU, awkward GUI). You just don’t beat that.

Also multimedia related is my passion for speedruns and superplay movies in particular. For the latter ones, you need the emulator and the original ROM and especially the emulators (some of which are patched for the movies to work) don’t run on the Mac Platform and if they do, they only do with some limitations (like pausing the emulation stopping the playback of the movie in Snes9x).

If I want a single computer to work both at home and in the office, it must do both: Provide an environement to work with and an environement to play with.

OS X allows me to do some developement (TextMate comes to mind), but not all. It allows me to do some multimedia (XVid works sometimes), but not all. Thus, OS X is currently not a solution for me. At least not the single one (I’d love to work in TextMate for PHP and Ruby, eclipse for Java, but I can’t do Delphi or Windows CE).

So what I need is Windows (where the software does everything I need) on a Macintosh Laptop (where the hardware does everything I need).

Up until today, this was not possible.

Now it is. This wonderous hack (which is not completely disclosed yet, but I have a very good idea how it works) solves my problem in allowing me to combine the optimal software (for me. I know lots of people who can be perfectly happy with OS X) with the optimal hardware (for me).

Needless to say that I’ve ordered a MacBook Pro at our hardware distributor. They even had 13 on stock, so I’ll be getting mine tomorrow.

I hope the hack gets disclosed shortly, so I can do that nice dual-boot configuration :-)

Or maybe Virtual PC just works good enough for delphi and the speedruns…

Update: A howto with needed tools is now ready to be donwnloaded

Snom 190

The Snom 190 is a SIP hardware phone which I have ordered recently to continue my asterisk experiment.

Yesterday it arrrived.

I have to say: I love that device. Contrary to those proprietary PBX phones, the Snom 190 is easy to use, provides a big heap of features (complete remote managability, web interface, dialing over http-request (outlook-plugin – here I come)) and does not cost more than what the other companies ask for their lowest entry level phones. The Snom even looks good!

Like many other devices today, the Snom 190 runs Linux (2.4), though this time I have not tried to hack it yet. All the sources including the developement environement are available at the website of snom.

Contrary to the somewhat crappy ZyXel 2000W which I have tested too, the Snom 190 is ready for productive business.

This makes implementing VoIP at our company seem more and more likely every day.

The greatest gadget ever

Recently I though: “well… having this iMac as server is all nice and well, but what about having all that a little more like embedded? What about not having to have this iMac running all the time? After all, it is not always as silent as I would have whished it to be. And I really wanted to have something more “hackish”

So I went after the Linksys WRT54G. There are two ROM’s you can flash on it: On one hand the more or less proprietary ROM by Sveasoft and on the other hand the ROM by OpenWRT, the last one being the only one actually allowing to install packages.

I bought myself one of those linksys-thingies and I was less then pleased. The ROM by Sveasoft worked well by adding some extended features to the device, but not allowing me to install anything (or even change configuration files). OpenWRT fixed that readonly-thing, but I could not get WPA to work.

After all, the device is of limited use as a home-server. The storage you have at your disposal is just too limited, so I went out to fix that problem.

The fist thing that came to my mind is one of those “Network Harddrives” – poor mans NAS.

I went to one of those big retailers and found the Linksys NSLU2, which enables externally plugged USB-drives to be exported via CIFS (or SMB or SAMBA or whatever you call it).

Before doing anything with the device – having in mind Linksys’ relation to Linux, I googled around a bit and found NSLU2 Linux

After getting it installed (the root-password thing was a bit tricky, but consequent RTFM helped here), I was slowly getting very, very impressed.

What you get is the usual down-stripped linux-distribution, but the root-fs is writable, so you can change the configuration in-place. Then, you can use the attached harddrive as storage for additional software, thus working around the single problem I’ve had with the wrt54g: In-extensibility

After you install the basic distribution, there’s little more than 1 MByte of free space on the flash-rom of the device itself. But there’s this script, unslug that enables the device plugged to the first USB-port as storage for additional software. And additional software, there’s plenty of.

After installing the package unslug-feeds (with ipkg install unslug-feeds) you gain access to this repository containing software like Apache, PHP, Postgresql, a bittorrent-client, cups, perl (for Slimp3),… just all you need on a decent linux distribution (and more less-useful stuff like OpenLDAP). You even get asterisk – and there’s a way to install additional USB-drivers. If only AVM would provide kernel modules for the ARM-kernel running on the device. Then, the NSLU2 would be the smallest PBX on this planet.

The best thing is: While the firmware by linksys does not allow it, with the improved version, you can plug an USB-Stick into the first USB-port and use that as target for additional software installation.

This allows for installing a complete linux distribution on a device with no mechanical parts whatsoever. No PC you’re going to build yourself will even be so silent. Neither is my iMac. Finally a home-server not making any sound at all. This is great.

Because I have no USB-stick at hand, I have not run unslug yet, but I will tomorrow.

Then I’m going to plug my newly bought external 250GB harddisk to the second USB-port and use that for storage for a bittorrent client I’m eventually going to install on the USB stick. And for my MP3’s which a Squeezebox-Server installed on the USB-Stick will serve. So, when I’m not asleep, I turn on the HDD to serve MP3’s to the Squeezebox. When I’m going to sleep, I just turn the HD off, keeping the rest of the server running.

This little device is so extremely great. I really really like it so far and I can’t wait to see it to work at it’s fullest potential.

This is the best CHF 150.- I’ve ever spent in my whole live.

QTek S100

I have been talking about mobile phones quite a lot on this blog.

I’ve always been on the lookout for the optimal phone for my needs, which I finally thought to have found in the combination of the SonyEricsson K700i and the iPAQ hx4700 by HP. I used the phone (good usability, small size) for communication and the iPAQ for emailing and the PIM applications. The combination beared the risk of not having the PIM-Data ready when I needed it, but all other smartphone offerings out there where either too heavy, too user-unfriendly, too large or just too limited in their feature-set.

However, last week, the joystick of my K700 completely stopped working (I’ve never met even one person not having a broken joystick after about a year or so), so I needed a replacement.

SonyEricsson does not have any new devices to offer (the next one being the K750i, released in Q2 – about june or july, I suppose), so I was on the lookout to something different.

Then I found the QTek S100 quite by accident. You may know the device produced by HTC where it’s called “Magician” under the name JAM by i-Mate (or as SPV if you’re a customer of Orange, or even MDA compact at T-Online – it’s always the same device).

Size-wise it’s a bit thinner than the K700, has the same height, but it’s a bit wider. It runs Windows Mobile 2003 Phone Edition, so it can naturally be natively integrated in our Exchange-Environement. All known PocketPC-Software runs on it and it’s even powerful enough for watching videos (only at 320×240 pixels – the device has no VGA-Screen). It has a SD-slot which is SDIO capable, so I could use that for WLAN which the device unfortunately does not have built-in.

It comes with Bluetooth-Support which I’ve already used both for dialing into the internet and synchronizing with the PC.

I’m told that the MS-Stack is a bit limited, but it fits my needs.

The sound quality isn’t as good as with the K700, but far better than what I feared it’d be.

Usability-wise, this is the first Smartphone that really works for me. I’m as fast with the QTek as I’m with my K700. As I’m already used to the letter-recognition of the PocketPC, I’m quite fast in writing SMS too, though the device does have a special input-panel with T9 support.

What surprises me the most (which actually led me to write this article) is the battery lifetime: It’s now 5 days since I last charged it and it’s still 45% full. This is already longer than what my K700 did when it was completely new. I did not think I’d last longer than 2 days at most….

Additionally, as it’s a real PocketPC, you will have the device connected to your PC when you are in your office. So it will automatically be charged during the day, so battery lifetime would not even be that an issue.

For me, the QTek is a great device. Nearly the optimal phone (which I still have not found). The only things I’m missing are (in no particular order):

  • A standard 3mm headphone connector. The S100 has a smaller 2.5mm connector which doesn’t allow me to plug my headphones and use the phone as an MP3 player. I know that adaptors exist, but it would have been nice if it thad the right connector in the first place.
  • A VGA screen. This is unrealistic for this small screen size, but whatever…
  • WLAN-Support. Public WLANs are getting more and more common here. It would have been nice to connect to those.
  • A real docking station. Currently they provide only a USB-cable. A real docking-station would have been a nice thing to have
  • A real keypad. While the soft-keyboard is nice, an exdendable real hardware-keypad has the advantage of being usable even when not looking at the device.

That’s all. Small things. Not nearly as annoying as the problems I found in the P800.

So if you ask me what phone you should buy: For now it’s clearly one of those HTC Magician based phones as it combines the power of the smartphone and the known user interface of the PocketPC with the small size and battery power of a regular cellphone.

AirPort basesation and external DHCP server

Recently, I bought an airport basestation.

I wanted to use it as a NAT router and a wireless access point. DNS and DHCP I wanted to do via a fully-fledged BIND/dhcpd combination running on my iMac.

DNS I need because I’m doing some work for the office from home. As much of it is web based, I need virtual hosts on my server and I certainly don’t want to go back to stone age and move around hosts files. DNS was invented for something, so please, let me use it.

DHCP I wanted because sometimes, I’m using applications on my notebook that require some ports forwarded to them (bittorrent for example). Forwarding ports without fixed IP-adresses can be difficult (especially if changing the forwarding address requires a restart of the router), so I wanted the possibility to give the MAC-adress of my notebooks NIC a fixed IP-address. This is not possible with airports built-in DHCP server (and I don’t blame them for this – it’s quite a special feature)

Now, imagine how disappointed I was seing, that this is not possible when using Apples configuration program:

They tie NAT and DHCP together: Either you turn off both NAT and DHCP, NAT only, or none of them. Turning off DHCP only is not possible.

Looking around on the web, I came across Jon Sevys Java Based Configurator again.

With this tool my configuration certainly is possible:

  1. Configure your basestation using Apples utility. Tell it to enable NAT and distribute IP-Adresses
  2. Update the configuration and exit Apples utility.
  3. Run the Java Based configurator.
  4. On the “DHCP Functions”-Tab, unckeck the Checkbox
  5. On the “Bridging Functions”-Tab uncheck “Disable bridging between Ethernet and wireless Lan”
  6. Save the configuration.

    The last step is important if you want the Basestation to continue working as an usable wireless access point. I forgot to do this the first time I tried and did not get an IP-Adress and could not connect to the wired lan after setting one manually either. Logical, but disturbing if you think you got the solution but it still does not work as expected…

Pile of new hardware

Last wednesday, I finally did what I have been talking since the very beginning of this blog: I bought myself a Mac. In the end, what lead me to the decision was that I wanted my home server back. I had some requirements to the new hardware:

  • It must run quietly. I don’t have enough space to designate a dedicated server-room so the server – if constantly running, must be quiet. This is where my older solution failed.
  • It must run a UNIX derivate. Much of the work I do requires a UNIX server. Having such a beast at home can save me from going to the office here and then.

The iMac (17inch, 1.8Ghz) I finally bought fullfills those two requirements (it’s quite quiet as long as I’m not doing anything calcualation intensive – which I’m not – at least not when sleeping) and has the additional benefit of a cool UI frontend.

So in the end, this was a logical decision: Had I deceided to go with a quiet Linux box, the parts alone would have been more expensive – not to speak of the time required to assemble the beast.

Setting up the iMac was easy (as I’ve expected). First, I wanted to go with Gentoo for MacOS X, but this is extremely under construction, so I went with Fink for my UNIX-needs

Now I’m running a DNS, DHCP, PostgreSQL and Apache Server. All I need to do my work.

So. After my UNIXish needs where fulfilled, there came the Macish ones: I wanted to video-iChat with my girfriend. This has proven to be quite a hassle to set up:

We never managed to get a working connection. I got timeouts everytime I tried to connect. A bit debugging around on my ZyWall router quickly determined it as the culprit: Despite me having configured the iMac as default NAT-Server, the device did not forward any UDP packets to the host. No wonder this does not work.

So it was time for my now nearly 4 years old ZyWall to be replaced (lately it began crashing quite often anyways). As I did not want to take any further risks, I bought an Airport Basesation. Works nicely – also with my other gear (PocketPC and Thinkpad).

Furthermore, it became clear to me that I finally have a continously running server in my home, so I finally could (at least somewhat) justify buying myself a Squeezebox. This device arrived only today and while I knew how great the thing is, it suprised me even more now that I had a look at it: So many settings to tweak and so great quality of the hardware. Very good.

In the end, the last week (ending today) was quite hardware-intensive:

  • The iMac
  • Two iSights (one for me, another for my girfriend). Speaking of iSight. I’ve just noticed that the iMac has a magnet in the middle of the screen to be used with the iSight magnet holder to position it nicely in the middle of the screen. Very nice
  • An Airport Extreme Basestation. Not that I wanted one, but the investement into the iSights would have been in vain as it’s technically impossible to video-chat over the ZyWall
  • The squeezebox

    • All in all quite a lot of junk, but so much fun to play with ;-)