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The morning when Apple announced that they were going to release the MacBook Air, I came across a couple of comments on Gizmodo’s site where people were saying that you can buy 5 EEEPC. What the hell was a EEEPC? After a brief search, I found 2 sites that was interesting. First, the official Asus EEEPC site which was the sales site for this little machine. The second site was the EEEUser site. This was the unofficial fan site. After reading about it, I found myself compelled to purchase one. I checked Amazon and saw that they sold this wonderful machine. I quickly ordered one with a 8GB SDHC memory card for extra storage.

I received it this past weekend and have been carrying this little machine around. It runs a Xandros Linux operating system. The systems is very straight-forward and easy to use. It’s perfect for on the go computing. I just need something to jump onto the Internet or small tasks like taking notes wherever I go. It’s tiny and unobtrusive. Boots up really fast from a cold shutdown. One complaint I have is that it gets hot which then kicks off the somewhat noisy fan. Battery life could be better since this thing doesn’t use your standard hard drive. It uses a 4GB Solid State Drive (no moving parts). The folks over at the EEEUser site have been doing alot of hacking to their system. I think I’m fine with the default OS installation. I thought I was wanting a full-blown Linux OS but this interface from Xandros is very useful and I don’t need anything more than what is offered there.

This thing isn’t going to win any computing race. But when you think about the purpose of this machine, it does the basics at a quarter of the price of something similar in size. Don’t expect to buy this to be your primary machine. The screen is too small and it doesn’t have enough juice to be doing heavy lifting like image manipulation, video editing, or even documentation. But for the times when you just need a machine to quickly get onto the web or jot down a quick note, this is perfect. So for those who can’t afford a MacBook Air but would like a portable system, I ask you to consider this.

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.

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.

So its been over a month of using my Mac Mini. It’s been a good experience. I find myself missing the Expose feature whenever I’m on my PC now. I bought Leopard but have resisted upgrading until all the kinks are worked out. So for now I’m using Tiger. I ended up ordering a 2GB RAM upgrade. I finally got the memory today and did the upgrade. The process wasn’t too bad. Except the part where I had to pry open the cover of the system using a putty knife. I was convinced that I must have broken something but luckily I didn’t. Maybe a little scratches here and there. But nothing too bad. Everything was documented on the 123macmini.com site where they had people making videos on how to dissect the little machine.

The upgrade was definitely worth it. Now I can run Parallels and other applications without any hiccups. The Parallels Windows instance loads up much faster now that I’ve allocated 1GB of RAM for the Virtual Machine. I must admit, this has been a pleasant experience using my Mac. Adding this much memory has made this machine shine. Things not only “just work”, they work responsively too. Let’s just say my next laptop will definitely be a MacBook Pro of some sort.

So I was surfing around the 123MacMini site and found a reference relating to a software called Synergy. I was in the photo gallery for Mac Mini Setup and came across a person’s setup. Apparently there is a way to control multiple computers with multiple monitors using one set of keyboard and mouse. Further investigation yield an article from from LifeHacker describing on how to do this. You basically use the network connectivity between all your machines and setup a client-server with Synergy. You can also copy and paste clipboard items in between each system.

This is going to be perfect for work! I have a Dell Dimension and a Mac Mini at work with 2 huge monitors. One CRT 21” and one Apple cinema display. I’m using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. The PC is strictly for work while the mini is for personal and when I need to do Internet research. According to the people who replied on LifeHacker, it has improved the productivity to those who used this software. Exciting stuff to say the least. This will be the first thing I’ll do when I get in tomorrow. What a good start to a Monday morning.

*10/23/2007: Synergy worked like a charm. I am now using 1 keyboard and mouse across 2 machines. This is so cool!

So I find on the Internet that Apple recently released a video tour of the next Mac OSX operating system, Leopard. I have to tell ya. Seeing someone using some of those features makes me want that new operating system much sooner than the October 26th release date. Don’t know what it is. It’s like being brain-washed by the company. I can’t wait to use features like “Time-Machine” for back-ups and “Spaces” for desktop management (similar to many Linux GUI interface).

I found myself perusing their website for more of these videos and saw one for iLife. OMG, this was a good one. I was almost going to dismiss the entire iLife application to be something cool and may one day use it. But after watching this video, I wanted to jump on and begin managing my pictures better with iPhoto. The video showed the basics of using the application and got me up and running. So tonight I spent my time importing all my pictures into iPhoto. I have to say the software is very well thought out. I mean I imported an entire folder of albums and it knew that each folder was an album for a particular event and automatically created “Events” for each sets of folders. Amazing to say the least. I think I’m finally getting why Apple products are such fan favorites. For example, things like knowing when to turn on and off when you insert and remove your headphones on your iPod is awesome! They really thought about their products before they even begin building it. That attention to details and making everything so damn easy to use, really wins over demanding users like myself. It’s so hard to not want to use an Apple system now. I find myself missing things like Expose when I’m on the PC. Damn you Apple for brain-washing me!

My free time has been completely consumed with 3 things this week.

1. Radiohead’s In Rainbows album
2. My new Mac Mini
3. My new Uninterruptible Power Supply

I did get some Halo 3 in the mix but I must digress. In Rainbows has been playing non-stop on my work computers and my iPod. The more I listen to this album, the more I love it. Yes that’s right, love it! I find myself looking forward to Jigsaw Falling Into Places everytime the album loops around. I still haven’t decided if this is top 3 of my RH albums. It’s so hard because the more you listen to it, the more you enjoy an album. This happened to Amnesiac and Kid A. I didn’t like those album at first but when I started to listen to them more and more, it grew on me. In my opinion In Rainbows is another masterpiece.

I used the hell out of my Mac Mini this week. It’s been on 5 days straight. I’ve been making it my own by installing various freeware and testing out Parallels. I got my laptop’s WinXP loaded on my my Mac Mini. Only thing left is to get an activation key from Microsoft. My iTunes is setup similar to my PC but I don’t think I’m going to reformat my iPod with the Mac. The PC has all the interesting historical data like the star ratings and the times I’ve played a song. It’s so stupid how little things like that makes such a good experience in using an iPod. Moving it over to the Mac is a cumbersome task. My entire library is on my Linux fileserver.

I also had to replace my UPS this weekend. I got it setup but was interested in getting it to shutdown my server in the event of a power failure. The model I got was an APC BACK UPS XS 900. It came with software for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately none for Linux. I found out that there is an open-source solution called apcupsd. It basically are scripts that allows you to do shutdowns for APC branded UPS. I also found that people have used my UPS with this software solution successfully. I installed the source code and compiled it. Everything is working fine, I think. I’m in the middle of running various tests. So far it passed the few early tests. I need to simulate a complete power failure and see if it shuts down my server. May not sound fun to you but gobs of fun for a geek like me.

It’s official! Just picked up my first Apple system. I got myself a Mac Mini with a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 1Gb of memory, and 120Gb hard drive.

Finally did it after a couple months of contemplating. I’ve been actively using a mini at work but it’s an old G4. Now I need to get Windows XP running on it.

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.