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By Johnny, September 5, 2011 1:07 am

Those that work with me or know about my weird obsession with backing up my data and building file storage solution servers will be glad to know that I’ve finally broke the the 1TB mark last month. I’ve finally decided to step up and build a big boy network attached storage (NAS) box. I actually considered buying a Drobo and popping a couple of drives and call it a day. But after helping a friend configure her Drobo, I found the software available for additional features being very lacking for my needs. It was also a pain in the a#$ to configure and relied on the fact that you need special Drobo client software to complete some of the that configuration.

Around the same time, I had helped my brother-in-law build his own NAS box with the extra machine that was lying around at my home. I decided to install FreeNAS 0.7.2 which I’ve played around briefly a few months back. The main reason I went with this version was that it had the ability for him to host movies, pictures, and music files using uPNP (Universal Plug N’ Play) so that he can stream his personal content from the NAS box to his PS3.

For my own purpose, I was thinking about replacing my current file server solution which consists of a Slackware 12.2 server which runs my Samba share for Windows, Fuppes for uPNP for my XBox 360, and LAMP server for my personal Wiki pages. The server contains a 20GB root drive, 250GB mirrored RAID 1 drives, and an externally attached 500GB mirrored RAID 1 drives. It is my primary backup server which serves up movies, photos, & music to the rest of my network. I’ve used up about 80% of my storage on this existing server so far so I think it was a perfect time to think about expanding out. With the possibility of using hardware that was more powerful, energy efficient, and quiet was very appealing.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to do a complete replace of the existing system. The software that I chose to run my NAS box is FreeNAS 8.0. This is the next generation of the software which is primarily built on the ZFS file system. ZFS is a fairly knew concept in which the software uses your hardware and create virtual devices and then device pools to manage your storage needs. It allows you to expand your storage needs similarly to how Drobo does it. This is a huge requirement for my next file server in which it needs to be expandable. I don’t want to go through the trouble of backing things up and replacing hardware and restoring from that backup. The downside of this software is that I lose functionality to share my media to my XBox 360 since uPNP was not available. I’ll also lose LAMP for my Wiki. The only way around this is to add my new build to my server farm of 2.

I carefully picked out my list of parts for the build. I started with four 2TB green drives from Western Digital (WD). I’m usually very hesitant in using WD as my drives but the years that I haven’t been keeping up, Seagate’s quality seem to have withered while WD has made great strides in the large capacity drives. From there I ordered the rest of my system which featured the following items:

• Asus E35M1-I micro ITX motherboard with a passively cooled AMD Dual Core E-350 processor
• 8GB G.Skill RipJaw 4GB x 2 Memory Kit
• Lian-Li PC-Q08 mini tower case which has 6 internal hard drive slots
• Antec 380W ATX power supply
• Verbatim 4GB Store ‘n’ Stay USB Drive

Stay tuned for Part 2 which will explain the build in detail.

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By Johnny, June 18, 2011 2:12 am

I must be a psychic or extremely lucky! After giving away my desktop that I’ve been using for about 1.5 years to my brother-in-law so that he can roll his own FreeNAS server, my RAID 1 hard drive enclosure decided to throw errors in which I was no longer able to access the video files from the mount on the file server. I ran some diagnostic tools and found that one of the drive was not responding well. Perhaps a bad sector or what not.

As if the hard drive Gods gave me a gift, I have the yanked out hard drive sitting on my coffee table for the entire week. Through-out the week, I was figuring what I should do with the extra 500GB but it become more apparent when my 500GB disk array became at risk. I quickly swapped the hard drive out of the tray. The amazing part was that as soon as I popped the drives back in, the enclosure immediately knew what to do to recreate the copy without me doing anything. Apparently, this works because the enclosure checks the timestamp on both disks and the newest one will have their data mirrored. Amazingly enough, the disks were the same exact model and size.

So after I let the enclosure do it’s thing in generating a mirrored drive, I was back in business the next day. I quickly mounted the enclosure back and voila! My data was back and it was redundant again.

I can’t say how glad I am to have a fully redundant data storage system. Big kudos to DAT Optic’s ezRAID enclosure. They really work!

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By Johnny, May 21, 2008 12:36 pm

I’ve been fascinated with the idea of building my own fixed-gear bicycle for a couple of months now. I first caught sight of one when I was looking around for ways to improve my current commuter. I came across a beautiful bike with no brake levers and no derailleurs. It was just a bike with one chain around the wheel and nothing else. A fixed-gear bike does not have a free wheel. This means that when you pedal backwards on a complete stop, you actually can go backwards. It makes it challenging if you ride around hills both going up and going down. You can simply pedal backwards if you wanted to stop. There’s plenty of people who uses fixed-gear bikes for tricks and stunts. You can find clips on YouTube. Track bikes that are used in competitive racing are all fixed-gear. It’s suppose to improve your riding and is good for training. I’m going to be doing a triathlon in September and thought that this would be neat to ride.

A friend of my gave me his old Nishiki International road bike. It’s a pretty old bike but still in very good shape. I took it to the Bike Oven in Highland Park to begin my project last night. The folks at Bike Oven were awesome. They were very friendly, receptive, and most importantly patient. I spent about 3 hours taking parts off of my bike, rebuilt the headset and bottom bracket. Things I thought would be hard wasn’t too bad. Of course I was spoiled by the plethora of tools that was available around me. What remains is buying a cog for my rear wheel and a new chain. Hopefully I’ll have it completed by this Saturday so I can take it out to ride during the upcoming holiday weekend. The before and after pictures will come shortly.

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By Johnny, January 20, 2008 2:13 am

Another post inspired by the lack of information on the Internet. Here’s some background information. I run a Linux file server at home for about 5 years now. I recently hit the 80% capacity of a 200GB hard disk and was looking for more storage on my file server. The file server is a dual processor Celeron 500Mhz with the 200GB in a RAID 1 configuration and about 768MB of memory. That means my data is being mirrored between both drives. In theory if one should fail, I still have the other one. I also have an extensive back-up procedure using 2 external hard drives. I’ll go over that at a later time.

At first I wanted to rebuild my entire system and stick in a couple of higher capacity drives. That didn’t seem feasible since that may cost me a chunk of change and in reality, I don’t need a faster system. Just more storage. I had opened up my system and realized I couldn’t even add another disk controller since I am out of PCI slots. Since I have a Firewire card in the machine and my external drives are attached that way, I decided to see if there are any possibilities of getting a hard drive enclosure with Firewire (IEEE1394a specifically), RAID capabilities, and SATA drive interface. There were many that fulfilled 2 of the 3 features but there was only 1 that had all these requirements met. I even posted a question on LinuxQuestions.org to see if anybody had used this before. Unfortunately no one responded. Instead I was asked to see if I can provide some feedback. So here it is!

I snatched one up at FireWire Depot’s website. I also bought 2 500GB hard drive from Fry’s Electronics which was mentioned in the previous post. For $.18 per GB, it was the cheapest deal around. I was so tempted to get the 1TB drive but decided to save some money. That’s still plenty of storage for awhile.

The enclosure finally was delivered today. So I spent sometime installing and documenting the setup. But first let’s see what is included:

Here are a couple of pictures of the box that arrived

A bit fuzzy but here are the front and rear of the enclosure. The box seems very well built.

Here is what’s included. You get a power cord, Firewire cables (both 400 & 800), USB cable, some screws with the disk lock key, and a sheet of instructions. Pure and simple.

The ports in the back reveals 2 Firewire connections and a USB connection.

Here are both of the disk rack removed from the enclosure.

The enclosure without the racks.

Under each disk rack, there is a fan for cooling.

Empty disk rack. A view from the rear.

Front of the rack with a display and some buttons.

Ok, enough eye candy for now. Let’s see what is needed to get things setup on my Linux Slackware 10 system.

1. I changed the setting on the enclosure to make sure that it treats the disks as a RAID 1 setup and nothing else. The number was suppose to be “0″. You do that by simply pressing on little “-” and “+” buttons with a pen or pencil tip.
2. I changed the jumper settings on my disk to SATA I opting for reliability than performance. Even though the company I bought it from stated that SATA II was supported, the literature did not mention SATA II anywhere. Seeing that so many people are having DOA disk, it seems that they are using the disk in default setting of SATA II enabled.
3. I installed both disk into the drive racks. It took 6 screws to hold a snug fit. The rack had a heat sensor that I had to slip in there. Fairly straight-forward.
   
4. Plugged the drives back into the enclosure and connected the enclosure to my laptop. I powered the enclosure and the laptop on with System Rescue CD booting up (If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend downloading this and burning it onto a CD to add to your arsenal of tools for techie problems.).
   
   Shiny blue lights!
5. Start X-windows and launched gparted. I used this tool to an upgrade of my laptop hard drive a couple of months ago. Excellent tool. It had no problems recognizing the single device. Remember, the OS has no idea that this enclosure is RAID 1.
   
6. Gparted asked me to create a disk-label. I selected MS-DOS, which was default. I did some research and found that this is correct for Linux systems.
7. It then let me create a partition. I selected ext3 since my other drives on the box was ext3. It had no problems creating this partition.
8. I then quit out of System Rescue CD and powered down everything.
9. The enclosure was attached to the file server finally. Before I powered it on, I had to unmount and turn off the other enclosures. I also had create an entry of the /etc/fstab file and create the new mount point.

   /dev/sda1 /u2 ext3 defaults 1 2

   You may notice that this was created on the sda device. Depending on which devices is plugged in and powered first, it will get the first device name. This means the RAID enclosure must always be the first Firewire device plugged in and powered before any of the other enclosures.

10. I finally powered the RAID device on. Unfortunately the system didn’t see the device. I had run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script. Slackware 10 apparently has a bug that it won’t detect hotplugged Firewire drives without rescanning for it. I had to add the script call in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file as well as the mount to the enclosure so that it boots up mounted. Why not upgrade to the recent Slackware? Nah! Upgrading to another version is a waste of my time when Slack 10 has been great. It may not be an elegant solution but it’s been working for 5 years now!
11. Rebooted the system to double-check that the enclosure comes up. It did!
    
    Here’s my server with the ezRAID enclosure sitting on top.

All-in-all a very simple implementation. I’m still testing the enclosure by transferring items into and out of it. Symbolic linked a couple of folders that I access through Samba and testing on both a PC and OS X system. I am streaming videos and music off of it. So far so good. Hopefully no dead hard drives. If so I’ll note it in another post.

**Edit 01/20/2008: This post is linked from the following website: http://technology.anything08.com/setting-up-an-ezraid-enclosure/. This looks like a generic blog that someone put together that takes posts from various blogs online. It thinks that this site is called Patrickâ??s Notebook? I did a quick whois search and found that it is owned by NameCheap.com. Looks like a parked site from a domain company.

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By Johnny, January 18, 2008 12:09 pm

For those who are technically deficient I recommend turning away from this post. I’m writing this because I couldn’t find any resources regarding this specific problem. Hopefully the spiders creep up on this and puts it out there to help others who are looking for this solution.

This week, Fry’s Electronics brick and mortar store had the Western Digital Cavier SE16 500GB SATA WD5000AAKS drive on sale for $90 a piece. I picked up two for a RAID 1 configuration only to realize from people all over the Internet that this drive has TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) disabled. This means that the drive self-corrects errors at a much longer time than normal. These drives are considered consumer drives which are designed for the desktop use. Western Digital would rather have the consumer spend more money on purchasing the RE drives which are more for server environments. The difference in TLER means that one that has it disabled, will correct the errors at a longer interval of time (~2 minutes) compared to others that have it enabled and set for a shorter interval of time (usually 7 seconds). This means that if you have a RAID configuration and your drive has TLER disabled, it will take a much longer time to respond if it is in error correction mode and thus tell the RAID controller that your redundant disc array has failed. This is well documented in some customer feedback on the NewEgg product page.

After further digging, I found that other models such as the RE line of drives have this utility for you to change that TLER values. Western Digital offers this utility on a as needed basis. You would have to get in contact with their support to get it. Luckily, I found this posting that had information on getting this. It also has links to creating a bootable jump drive should you need it.

I tested and confirmed that you can enable the TLER using the utility on the WD5000AAKS drive.

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By Johnny, September 23, 2007 5:46 pm

I got my Seagate 160GB laptop hard drive on Friday in the mail. Needless to say I was looking forward to bump my storage needs from a maxed out 25GB factory drive. I bought the drive refurbished from Computer Geeks online. It cost me about $100 which was alot cheaper than many of newer drives out there even in eBay. What began as a task that I was looking forward to in the week, finally ended now at Sunday evening. Copying a hard drive may seem to be a trivial task, since many people would just reformat and reinstall the operating system and all your software. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to retain the same exact settings from my previous hard drive and did not want to go through reinstalling. I hate starting over when I don’t have to.

Back when I first worked as a System Administrator, I use to configure and build out similar laptops by first installing and setup 1 laptop with the exact software and settings required. I would then use, at the time, Norton Ghost to image the entire hard drive and saved the image on a server somewhere on our network and then use that image to duplicate on laptops with the same hardware. It was the coolest thing back then and would save alot of time versus setting up and installing manually. I did a quick Google search for “free hard drive cloning” which yielded several references to 2 free Linux-based solutions: Gparted and Partimage. They were both part of a live CD called SystemRescueCD. You use Gparted to setup your new hard drive’s partition and use Partimage to clone and restore a partition.

I could go through the excruciating tasks I had to endure but I’ll save that pain and give you a brief summary of what worked for me.

1. Cloned all three of my partitions from my smaller hard drive to my Linux file server. I did this by booting up the live CD and issuing the following commands:

   mkdir /mnt/samba

   mount -t smbfs -o username:johnny //192.168.0.xxx/johnny /mnt/samba

   partimage -z1 /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz

   I had to turn on DHCP on the rescuecd start-up prompt by executing the command rescuecd dodhcp

2. Physically installed my new hard drive.
3. Executed the following command at the start-up prompt:
   rescuecd dodhcp dostartx This started the X-Windows with a valid network connection.
4. I then used Gparted to partition all my partitions exactly the same as my previous hard drive. This step is important since I actually jumped the gun and partitioned the main boot drive to fill-up the disc’s maximum capacity. This rendered the partition unreadable from Windows XP. It only saw the original 25GB and not the 140GB. I also turned on the “boot” flag for the main partition that had Windows XP and turned the “hidden” flag on the other 2 partitions that wasn’t there in my original drive.
5. I then started the x-term window and executed the command: partimage restore /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz.000. I did this for each 3 partitions.
6. After all my data was restored, I rebooted the system into Windows XP.
7. Windows XP sees the new drive and ask to reboot the system once again after it automatically installed the drive.
8. I reboot again into SystemRescueCD and ran the previous command to start X-windows and DHCP.
9. I opened up Gparted and chose to resize my partition from 25GB to the remaining unallocated disk space.
10. I rebooted to XP again.
11. XP automatically jumped into CHKDSK mode and revalidated the hard drive space.
12. XP then boots into the operating system and finds the new hard drive. I then asked for me to reboot my system once again. I obliged.
13. Voila! My new C: drive is now 140GB.

I probably left out alot of details but the general idea is captured here. I tried so many ways of setting this up which included an attempt to use 1 large partition, setting up a larger partition for the boot partition, etc. All this did was give me blank screens with a flashing prompt. I was never able to boot-up using the other methods. But when I finally followed the steps above, I was successful.

Just a bit of a warning. I’ve been using Linux for over 8 years now so I know my way around the operating system. Doing this requires alot of patience. Hopefully I did most of the grunt work for those who stumble upon this post to use.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600. The other 2 partitions are backup crap that Dell installs with every new laptop. I tried so hard to not include them in my new hard drive. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that. C’est la vie.

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By Johnny, January 17, 2006 11:38 pm

Believe it or not, its easy to change your oil on a motorcycle. At least on my 1999 Yamaha R6, its easy! Hopefully this post will help out those who may think this maybe a daunting task. Daunting only because a single mistake can cost you significant injuries or even worse, your life. And with that, I would like to add that I am not liable for any injuries that may have been the result of this post. I merely describe my experiences. Please use caution and continue at your own risk. Hopefully you still want to read on and learn something new.

This guide should be applicable not only to 1999 R6 but any R6 from 1999-2002. Also, the steps taken here should also help guide oil changes for other sport bikes.

To begin, make sure you have the right tools for the job.

Shown in the picture are 3 quarts of motor oil, 1 oil filter, 1 oil filter tool, 1 torque wrench, and 1 ratchet wrench set. Not shown but is required is a flat-head screwdriver, dirty rag, and a rear motorcycle stand.

An oil container to collect your oil and recycle will help as well. You’re probably wondering, “I don’t have a rear motorcycle stand or a torque wrench.” Well, the motorcycle stand is very helpful if you’re working on your motorcycle. Its also perfect if you park your motorcycle for a long period of time. This way the oil is distributed evenly in the center of the engine so that its not constantly leaning to the left side. A torque wrench is probably not as essential. If you do want one, I suggest go out and splurge on a really nice one that gives you 0-150 ft. lbs. of torque reading. Don’t go for what I have in the picture. Its very difficult to read and I’ve already returned it.

You should also consider the brand of oil. Although, my owner’s manual for my R6 recommends a 10W30 SAE oil for cold weather and 15W40 for warmer weather, I went with the Castrol R4. At $10 a qt, it isn’t the cheapest stuff out there. But its supposedly the best thing you can put in your bike which burns really clean and its synthetic. The only difference I’ve noticed is that when my bike is idling now, the wound is alot deeper and sounds better when I accelerate. I believe there may be some improvements on horsepower, but really no way in validating this without bring it in for a test. Its probably more psychological than anything else.

The oil filter I chose was from Fram. Filter number PH6017A should fit the standard R6 from 1999-2002.

After you’ve straightened out the items you need to buy, warm up your motorcycle. Take it out for a quick ride and come back so you can help the oil drain out easier when the vehicle is warm.


Remove the screws indicated by the arrows in the photos and remove the left and right lower fairing.

The left side of your motorcycle should look like this without the fairing.

The fairing should come off in one piece like the image above.

Remove the oil cap and check the oil level with the oil dip stick.

Locate the oil filter and drain plug and remove the drain plug first.

Oil should drain out like the image above as soon as you remove the drain plug. Wait till there’s a trickle left until you proceed to remove the oil filter. The oil filter will have residual oil so make sure you catch the dripping oil with your pan/container.

Set your oil cap and drain plug aside while you’re draining your oil. Once all oil is drained, clean the drain plug with your rag.

Apply a light coat of oil around the rim of the oil filter and drain plug. Make sure you do not lose the washer of the drain plug! Clean the hole or surface where you’re going to screw the oil filter and drain plug so that there’s no dirt that may get trapped. The filter should be screwed on with 12 ft. lbs. of torque and the drain plug should be 36 ft. lbs. of torque.

After you’ve tighten both oil filter and drain plug, proceed to pour your 3.5 quarts of oil in the engine. Check the dipstick constantly to make sure you have enough oil. Warm your bike up again and make sure oil is not leaking from the drain plug or the oil filter. Once satisfied, proceed to attach the fairing back to the same position and screw the piece back on. This may take some time and is primarily the reason why shops charge an hourly rate because it takes them time to remove and put back these fairing pieces back together. And there you have it! Your first oil change.

On a side note, I bought 2 cleaner solutions called Moto Pro to clean my bike. That stuff is incredible!

The first cleaner does a really good job removing the dirt from your bike. The contact cleaner is incredible on tough dirt. Check out the before and and after photos of my rear wheel.

Needless to say I’m happy with the $7 I spent on the cleaner spray and $4 on the contact cleaner.

I also recommend that you lube your chain while you’re at it. I use Bel-Ray’s Super Clean Chain Lube. This stuff sprays on white and keeps your chain from getting dirty. After it sets for 15 minutes, it doesn’t splatter any oil while the chain is spinning through the sprocket during operation. That’s the main reason my rear rims was so dirty was because my previous oil change guy used motor oil to lube my chain.

This should get you started in your new weekend job as a motorcycle mechanic! If not, its another thing you can put under your skills section of your resume. Actually not really. Its just good to know for your own curiosity. Let me know if you find this useful.

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By Johnny, January 14, 2006 12:58 am

There comes a time when you don’t ride your motorcycle for awhile and the battery goes out. What is one to do? Fortunately for you, yours truly have been stranded in that same situation enough time to know exactly what to do. Yes, you should try to push start your bike.

First thing you should do is find some open area so you have enough space to begin the actual pushing. This process is much easier if you have another person doing the pushing or if you find an incline so that you can push yourself while on your bike.

Turn your key to the “On” position and have your bike’s engine stop switch (the one that kills your engine) in the “On” position as well. Unfortunately I don’t have a fuel switch on my bike so I don’t know what you’re suppose to have that on. I would imagine having it at the open setting or the reserve fuel setting should be adequate.

Shift your bike to 2nd gear. That’s one click up from the neutral position. This way when the bike comes to life, you don’t get jolted out on first gear.

Grab and hold down the clutch lever and proceed to have your bike either pushed by someone else or by yourself down an incline. By the time you hit about 5-10 mph, slowly ease off of the clutch. As soon as you hear or feel the engine come to life, twist the throttle so you let in more gas to get the engine going. Make sure when the engine starts up and you twist the throttle that you hold down the clutch immediately. Otherwise serious injuries may occur if you forget to hold the clutch down and you turn your wrist too much on the throttle. That’s it!

I recommend doing this when you really don’t need to. It’s a good thing to practice and learn before you really need it.

Note: By following the suggestions on this post may cause serious injuries if not done correctly. I am not liable for any injuries that may result in this. Please understand that it is your choice to proceed. Consider yourself warned!