Tuesday 21 September 2010

Church Mouse


The latest addition to the family is a new JSCO noiseless gaming mouse. It may not look like much but its got it where it counts... Well, it doesn't have any balls but thats expected in this day and age. The JSCO mouse has REALLY REALLY quiet buttons. Quiet like you can hardly hear them, and it doesn't take long to really fall in love with its clickless slickness.

With four settings from 750-1600 dpi and a button to switch between them its darn quick to switch from a sensible desktop speed to an uber twitch fps turn-on-a-dime speed. Sounds like a gimmick, and probably is, but its a gimmick thats very likeable very quickly.

Two quiet thumb buttons, two quiet mousy buttons and ... Its Achilles wheel. The mouse wheel clicks like a Morse code dolphin. Actually clicking it is alright, but scrolling it just lets the whole package down. Feels like the wheel has left, right and center clicks giving you seven buttons plus uppy/downy scrolling which again is really nice.

Its a small mouse, lets call it compact. Smaller than the 'average' Microsoft mouse - you know the one - it kind of gets lost in the hand. But its not the size that counts, its what you do with it and you can do a lot with the JSCO without being heard.

Its a good mouse gaining high marks for excellent motion and a bunch of buttons. A couple of bonus points for being quiet and having dpi selection too gives this an 8/10. A quiet wheel and larger form factor would have earned it more points.






Thursday 16 September 2010

Kernel Mustard


About 80GB into a backup, mah file server rebooted.
Do Not Want. This is bad, really bad if you value data security - which I do. So this is bad.

Applying some perspective this is something like 2000% better now its got a Promise SATA controller, which is a start. And I believe in starts. But I really want to be able to do whole machine backup-restore, as well as large scale copies of media.
Largly, because I've got a media centre PC and want to copy all of my music onto it. Worse than this, I've got a CD collection ripped to 320kbps MP3 that I've now got the storage space to rip to PCM. The magnitude of the task means I only want to do it once, and really want to rinse and repeat with my DVDs for that 21st Century On-Demand feeling. Physical scratchable disks, what is this - the nineties?

So an unstable fileserver is just NOT on the cards. FreeNAS 6.0 has been reliable for years but running on a low spec machine with 500GB bursting at the seams and this new(er) hardware and storage space should be enough to last for years to come.

So I'm about to go back to the log file(s) and find something new to diagnose and fix. All in all, its a bit of a bother. The project came about because I made some assumptions about reliability and stability which I'm still not sure about.

Recycling a 3.2Ghz Intel P4 with a few gigs of RAM as a fileserver seemed like a good idea, and seems like it should be stable enough. Its a known-good PC that served well as a desktop/gaming computer when it was up to the spec, and since being replaced putting some serious disks in it sounded like it would give it a new lease of life. RaidZ seemed like a good idea, FreeNAS seemed like a good idea.

So how come all of these good ideas haven't combined to form an uber-idea? The sum of the parts isn't all that grand and no matter how I look at it I can't help wondering if I'm using the wrongs tools for the job. What should be a really good domestic file server has tecked up until its become a second rate enterprise solution, and may have suffered in the process.

Setting my goalposts closer and storming past them might just serve better than aiming high and having to put effort in to reach them.








Saturday 11 September 2010

The Promise Land

The continuing adventures of Alt-F4

With the rising popularity of Microsoft, personal computers have entered the mainstream and all but replaced the abacus and etch-a-sketch that they resemble. However the technologist community have had a mixed opinion of MS offerings and viable alternatives have been quietly queuing up for attention. There are a lot of reasons to take what you are given and like it without questioning what you are getting, everything is simpler. I'd be happy that a computer works in the same way that a car does. I have a vague idea what makes it go, and I understand that there are people who do - but I don't need to be one of them to be happy.
But then you can raise your head above the trenches and take a good look around. What is new, what works, what can I achieve? What can I do to push myself, what can I do to push the technology around me?

Apple are seeing a return to glory, clinging on to the mainframe age with their thin-client Pods and Pads and whatnot which provide a user interface to a real computer somewhere that handles All Your Stuff. Almost under the security radar because of an historically small user base, Apples consumer devices are more at risk from physical theft than virus attacks and probably will remain so for some time. Heads are nodded to their white plasticy appliance computing and its user-first paradigm.

Unix famously is still in the Data Centre game, with Sun Solaris breaking new ground with ZFS which provides a number of advantages over traditional RAID-5 solutions. This alone shows the company is alive on the cutting edge of its field, and data hosting is a billion dollar market worldwide.

Linux in all its forms is pushing to be desktop contender, but marginal games and application support put Linux third in a two-horse race for the mainstream market despite a low price point. Good flexibility and security make it more viable in the media-centre and netbook market. Despite being a tremendous community driven OS with all of the virtues of Open Source development, a lack of direction has kept Linux in the shadows and publicity like Xandros, and ChromeOS could significantly raise public awareness.

Back from theory to reality - This leaves me with a Windows desktop PC because I play games. An Ubuntu-Linux media centre, a BSD-ZFS file server and a Google-Linux netbook. I'll keep my apples in the fruit bowl for now. While it all seems like an unlikely mix, each decision has been made on its own merits and I've had the freedom to make that decision myself.

Technology integration being what it is, the compatibility problems of lifestyle are still too common and too painful for my liking. An entire Microsoft or Entire Apple setup would probably be a little smoother to troubleshoot but the lack of choice and control in both worlds is a little off-putting. At the moment I can solve my Windows problems with a reformat/reinstall, while the *nix problems generally take a kernel patch and a bit of googling.
The latest such problem has been reboots/dropouts and timeouts on my file server. The machine is an old Intel P4 running FreeNAS 7 with ZFS providing me a four drive RAID-Z pool of around 4.0TB. Its the sort of problem that makes you want to buy a prepackaged solution, however the domestic fileserver market hasn't really picked up to my needs and enterprise offerings start and budgets I can't justify.

Google hinted that the problem could actually be the Silicon Image 3512 ATA controller (and drivers) rather than a disk problem or an issue with BSD, so I've replaced the controller with a Primise FastTrak TX4310 controller and all of my problems have gone away. With the SiI controller it took a lot of luck to copy more than a couple of GB without fail, but the first impressions of the Promise card are that its delivering.
The Final Score?
Silicon Image NILL - Promise Technology ONE.

And that concludes it. Another problem vaguely hopefully black-boxed. Find problem, find solution and apply one to the other until it all works.

It was a £100 investment for the controller, but an otherwise recycled PC has life for a few more years and now I have a lot more faith in the Promise Land of unlimited* local storage with world class redundancy to keep my data safe.

* 4TB isn't unlimited local storage, but its quite a bit.




Monday 6 September 2010

On the Blog


I'm back on the blog. It sounds like a medical condition, and probably is, but I'm here to review the Silicon Image 3512 SATA controller in a mix of compliments and complaints.

The context is I recycled an old PC to use as a fileserver. Its an old Asus motherboard with an Intel 3.2Ghz HT-P4 and a few gigs of ram - nothing special by todays standards but probably capable of running a fileserver for domestic use - just has to store some music, photos, and backups of homebrew projects and code snippits. That sort of thing. Ideally, it'd have a full backup of all of my CDs and DVDs because shelf-space is at a premium and storage space is cheap.

BSD. FreeNAS. ZFS. 4x1.5TB RaidZ. CIFS. FTP.

Problem was the aged mobo only had two SATA ports. Leaping before I looked I rushed to the store and bought a two port SATA controller. Enter the SiI-3512.

After a number of problems, a kernel update, mailing list archives, forums and FAQs... I stumbled across a poster that said he's having trouble with his SiI-3512 SATA controller - and a lot of replies saying the same. Many of these with surprisingly similar error logs to my own, followed by a number of "Problem solved. Bought a Promise-SATA controller"

So, the compliments of the SiI-3512. It was cheap and store bought. You can't beat the convenience of going to a shop and coming out with your product in hand. It feels very real, involves human interaction, and is usually quicker than ordering online.

Complaints about the SiI-3512... Well, none yet. We'll just have to wait for the delivery time of the internet-ordered Promise controller - and enough time to install and configure the machine to use it.