Projects

Well here goes…

Fileserver/NAS

I finally got round to buying the HDs for this – 3x 750Gb Samsung SATA-II hd’s. The box is a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 1Gb Ram and 80GB Boot HD. Installing Solaris was relatively painless but getting it all working was a bit of a pain.

The ZFS/RAID-Z side of things was a doddle – just plugged in the HDs, logged into the web interface and set up the disk configuration…within 5 minutes i had a 1.3Tb RAID suppported storage array

Setting up samba wasn’t too hard just svcadm enable samba and swat. The only problems i had was file permissions on the samba, got round that by forcing all files to be 777 permissions on disk, but using samba user permissions for read write (exactly how i like it).

I also noticed my throughput just dropped off randomly, this is due to some conflict issue on the network card and IRQs or the motherboard chipset – it’s a rubbish SIS thing. I swapped the slots the card was in and it works much better, i get around 20megabytes per second on a gigabit LAN. (card is a Pro/1000 MT Server)

All in all it works pretty well and i’m happy, although i do only have 500gig of space left – that is everything on there though – movies, downloads, music, games, documents and editing work. All i need to do now is get more disks and the case – i have my eye on a 20 bay 4U thing – 20 SATA hotswap bays, should be enough to keep my system for years to come. I’ll just have to keep buying controller cards…

My monitoring controller is coming on nicely, i played with the PICs for the first time not too long ago – a doddle to program and use. I’ve just about finished the audio circuits – nice powerful headphone amp is done, i replaced the main pots with a couple i found in a box as the ones i was using were absolutely dire – they crackled! But i plan to get a nice motorised one as it’ll be linked up to an IR remote control kit i got which is quite nice.

I’m slowly plodding on with it, i shoudl put some effort into getting it finished before i move back to manc though.

In the midst of sorting my NAS i got really pissed off with swapping monitors and keyboards about so i bought a Compaq Sever Console Switch (rackmount KVM to me and you, 8 ports) i was quite impressed…but it was broken! Quick email to the ebay seller and he organised a replacement. That sorted i took the broken one apart and discovered there was no output voltage on the PSU board, so i looked up the specs and found the voltages.

One ATX psu and some bodgery later i was feeding it the +12, +5, -5 and 0 it deserved, it now works perfectly, so i’ll have two once the replacement arrives.

They support cascading in a really nice way – link using a spare computer port (mouse, kb and vga) and set up the master so it ‘knows’ where the cascaded machines are – the OSD even supports point and click mouse control!

Even if it was £40 + £20 for cables it’s well worth it.

I also got around to replacing my VMWare server (5U dell poweredge dual PIII 1.4GHz, 2x 18gb, 2x36gb, 1.5gb ram if anyone is interested in buying it from me) with a 1U Compaq Dual PIII 1.4Ghz, 1.5Gb Ram and 2x 73Gb HDs, it’s running VMWare ESX very nicely and i put in a broadcom gigabit card too.

This easily runs my 3 windows server VMs and saves space (even if it is noisier) to complete my network to a nice stage i need to replace the voice server with a 1U box and then i’ll be happy.

Speaking of gigabit, i finally replaced the gigabit switch as i was having all sorts of problems – linux refused to link at gigabit – on any card on any linux! Now i have a Linksys SD1008 8 port which works like a dream, throughput is about the same though.

Had the car MOT’d over easter, they had to replace a section of the exhaust and it cost me about £130 in total which isn’t too bad for a 10 year old car, it’s mostly going strong so hopefully it’ll last a couple more years yet.

Work is hectic at the moment – i’m currently working on DirectX/Show interfacing for an IP CCTV camera and having to trawl through the MS Documentation is a bit of a drag but i’m getting there i’d say another week before it will all work, then a week more to tidy it up and get it integrated.

I also got a Grandstream HT488 FXO/FXS adaptor for work too which arrived this week, i’ve set that up – not as easy as it shoudl have been since the latest firmware just broke incoming PSTN calls completely, i had to dig out firmware 1.0.3.86 from the depths of the internet before it would work properly! I’ll be able to unleash it on the office properly on monday and really give it a good go.

Also along the lines of VOIP, i picked up a couple of Cisco 7940′s (My First Cisco…ahh how sweet) which are really really nice! They were quite awkward to flash with the SIP firmware (couple of stages, TFTP booting config files etc) but once that was done they’re such a dream to use and the build quality is far and above that of the grandstream GXP2000 i own. So good in fact that work, on seeing them, want to get some for the office!

Ubuntu 8.04 is finally on proper release – and my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse still don’t work properly, however, they do work if i force the dongle into HID mode so that’s an improvement over what it has been. Other than that issue (and the complete lack of support for proper multi monitors/extended desktop and multi line i/o on soundcards) it seems to work pretty well. I am however going to have to go back to windows because i will need a proper windows dev environment for my final year project (somthing c++ based to do with MIDI programming and user interfaces)

So there we have it, theres a lot there so i hope you enjoyed it. I should try and blog more often then i can get into the detail of the things i’ve been doing (so it may be of use to others).

See you soon folks!

Yup, i decided to hit the ‘upgrade distro button’. After taking all the necessary safety precautions:-

Fresh beverage…..Check.
Snacks………………..Check.
Seat Belt……………..Check.
Unplugged sensitive data HD…..nah be right, today i’m walkin’ on the wild side
Anything else? Nah don’t think so.

So i sat back, strapped in and clicked ‘Go’

Mostly successful, my bluetooth keyboard is broken – STILL! This is a *known* bug and was reported weeks ago but noone has fixed it yet, its partially caused by the missing HIDD binary from the Bluez-Tools package (think they’re going for a replacement method but it doesnt work. My lovely Logitech Dinovo Bluetooth keyboard simply won’t work – it doesnt even work fudging as a usb keyboard since Ubuntu detects the dongle as a bluetooth device – if you don’t install drivers under windows it just ‘works’ This had better get fixed soon as it is doing my head in using a PS2-USB adaptor which crashes every so often and i get stuck letters.

I just got Compiz working again finally, normally it would just max the cpu, it turns out this is a settings related issue which didnt get upgraded/disabled during the update. So that’s working again.

In an attempt to fix my keyboard and compiz i installed all of the test packages – thus breaking the entire system as it decided it wanted to change the kernel type to 386 (i only found this out later) so didn’t have the modules or the restricted modules installed. So everything broke – no hardware detection, no graphics to speak of etc etc etc.

Eventually i was able to fix it by installing the modules packages, why it changed the kernel type to begin with is beyond me.

Virtual box is now integrated into the distro which is nice, but i still have to manually do chmod 777 /dev/vboxdrv before i can run it, this is due to me being too lazy to look up how to add myself to the vbox group. Which should be done in the installer but isn’t.

Off Ubuntu…ish I attempted to use Mythbuntu (and hence the TV part of LinuxMCE) to find that neither of my tuners are supported, so that idea is just out completely. I’d like to try it properly – i like the idea of a backend-front end system (noisy server with big disks and lots of tuners in a cuboard, thin netbooting client on the front for playback) and being able to run clients all of which can watch tv all over the house. But alas no, it’ll have to wait until i buy new tuners.

Instead, i gave Vista a go on my mediacentre, it being a decent enough spec to run. It’s not bad either, the MCE seems less buggy, bit annoying to try to set familier settings as they all seem to have moved around but now bad. All my drivers were detected automatically – even the Tuner card. The RAID card didn’t work until i put the CD in (cheap designed before vista even came out hence no vista drivers) but it looked at the CD and said yes ok, i’ll use those – it actually worked. I’ll see how it goes, but so far it’s been more reliable than the last XP MCE install.

MS related, i was told about MS DreamSpark for Students https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ Any current student is eligible for this – either your institution must be a partner, you have an Eduserv Athens Password or an ISIC number (also on your NUS Extra-rip-off card) You authenticate your status by logging in with your Athens password (or thats how it did it, more about Salford Uni and MSDNAA later…) and you’re let in for unlimited free donwloads of things like Visual Studio 05/08 and Server 2003 Standard.

Not bad for a freebie, but not as much as i’m entitled to. Salford University, like many others are MSDNAA partners, this means they have the ability to give students access to the vast majority of MS software for free (or at least for the School of CSE) – do they allow this – NO! I suspect purely becuase of the admin overhead. Salford Uni isn’t even listed as a DreamSpark partner. Other universities give their students access to this system through their online systems (Salford has Blackboard), friends of mine elsewhere can get their hands on any MS software completely legally.

I on the other hand, am going to end up subscribing to TechNet Online – £200 a year for all the OSs and some office/server stuff isn’t bad. I’d rather have the CD Media version, but it’s twice the price.

Car wise, all isn’t bad, MOT on thursday, fingers crossed it passes. I’ve more or less sorted the Laptop in there now, i have another problem where the USB hub won’t run properly, but i’m forced to use it as the laptop only has one USB port! I found some software which monitors the power type (AC/Battery) and on switching to battery it waits 10s, closes the LCD Control App, waits 20s then hibernates. This way shutdown is automatic when i get out of the car. Start up it restores from hibernate and waits a bit, then launches the LCD control app.

I contacted the developer of LCDC, the LCD app, and asked him to put resiliency in on losing the USB/Com port, just like my Car2PC adaptor does. He said he would look into it. I’m still awaiting a response.

It’s highly likely i’ll end up developing my own, it’ll be more reliable.

I was looking at PicoITX boards – tiny little things, but i still like the idea of using a laptop – with batteries, so that i can completely cut power when the engine is off. I’ll have to replace the current machine though, with one which has a decent docking station at least – power, audio, multi usb, display, so nothing goes into the laptop itself and i can keep the ports well protected. I’ve strapped in the box of tools/fluids at least so damage is less likely.

Work wise things are going well – just sent off an order to the Isle of Man today, may be going out there to comission it in a while. Other big orders are coming up too, which is good, it keeps us busy but does get in the way of doing fun stuff!

I’ve also dug out my monitoring controller again, i finished another pair of line drivers yesterday, once i do the headphone amp and low pass filter that will be all of the audio circuitry done! Yay! I will the have to integrate switching and control, that’s a big job, i need relays, pics and usb GPIO. I have a 4-bit IR TRx module which will go in there too. I already have the light up buttons so i can get those mounted soon.

Well that’s all for now, i’ll keep you updated as and when stuff happens. TTFN

So then, Christmas has been and (almost) gone, with just the tediousness of new year to go before 2007 finally kicks the bucket. There are a few things to report on as i sit here reflecting on 2007 and all its events. First of all let me deal with Christmas, i have a few new toys to play with which is nice, so i’ll cover them each in turn and why i wanted them in the first place.

Linksys WT54GL Wireless (Cable) Router
This is the chameleon of domestic networking kit – or at least it will be once i install the open source firmware from http://www.dd-wrt.com This is very comprehensive and as well as all the traditional features you expect to find in a wifi router it will add things such as VLAN support, OpenVPN (client and server), wifi power adjust and quite a lot more, transforming this, frankly, cheap (£40) device into somthing which usually costs much more.

Since it has 4 ports of normal switching, i am also going to replace my DMZ switch with it, as this will save a full 700mA draw on the mains power (my last electricity bill was £160).

Linksys AM200 Ethernet Modem (ADSL)
Since i have a seperate server for routing, vpn, dhcp and so on, i wanted to remove the second layer of NAT that current exists between the ISP supplied BeBox router (actually a SpeedTouch 780) this modem *should* (i will explain in a bit) allow me to have the public static IP on the WAN interface of my server – with the modem itself being fully transparent.

I say *should* since on peeking through the config interface, it does actually support NAT, DHCP and whatnot – router features and thats not what i want! On upgrading to the latest firmware, i did notice that you can turn off NAT, DHCP and put it into half-bridge mode, which i think is what i want (i read this as the modem handles connection/auth etc but hands off the public ip to the client pc) But until i get back to the Wirral i can’t try it, hopefully it will ‘just work’ but given how badly ADSL is designed i’m not too hopeful. There are many other options and encapsulations which i don’t fully understand and will need to read about, but more on that when i get back to try it.

Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA-II PCI-X Card
Obvious really, im going to use it for my new NAS, which i have realised is only 3  disks short – everything else on it i can buy later – case, server HW, backplanes, all i need is a machine (i can dig one up from somewhere) and some disks. However, i have been reading the Sun Solaris Admin Guide for ZFS and RAIDZ (start here http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/) and it appears that it won’t do what i want (i need to speak to Matt as he’s the expert)

Basically i want this: a single RAIDZ array (like RAID5 but better) which i can dynamically add disks to, with the pool storage capacity increasing when it can tolerate the failure of a single drive (like a sort of dynamic RAID5). Then when i want to, be able to replace a smaller capacity drive with a larger one and again have the pool capacity increase when the array can tolerate failure of the largest capacity single drive. Simple eh? Perhaps not, maybe i’m asking too much, it appears you cannot add disks to a RAIDZ array in the future, however you can add arrays or disks to a ZFS pool dynamically, so i could add a 3 disk RAIDZ first, then later on add another 3 disk RAIDZ, then maybe even a 2 disk mirror to end on. It also seems that replacing disks with bigger ones is a possibility in RAIDZ. So it seems to do everything apart from dynamic sized RAIDZ arrays (which, to be fair, can’t be easy – i wan an 8 disk RAIDZ to tolerate a single drive failure, not asking much am i?)

Pioneer DEH-P40MP MP3-CD Car Headunit
New cd player for the car – it means i have been able to remove the other TWO head units that were in there – i had my ‘good’ Sony one which came with the car with its CD player and RDS tuner, then if i turned this unit off, the ‘amp remote’ pin would go low, allowing a relay to close turning on the other headunit, with its rubbish tuner, broken cd player BUT had a 3.5mm jack aux input – which i had the laptop connected to that’s in the boot.

The new head unit, has an aux in on the back (two in fact, one via the IP-BUS but more on that later) which is crystal clear (the annoying buzz when the laptop was off has gone also) As an added bonus the new player comes with an IR remote (must hide that from everyone) and the old wired Sony remote works with the new headunit – i’ll say that again to help the poor people who tried to google for an answer (i didn’t get anything i just had to try it) PIONEER CAR CD HEADUNITS WILL WORK WITH SONY CAR CD HEADUNIT WIRED REMOTES. There we go, all i had to do was plug in the minijack off the remote and all was well.

I’m not done yet though, i came across a project recently which was essentially a multi cd emulator unit – it emulates a cd changer and outputs over RS232 so a PC can talk to it – accepting control commands (play, pause, skip etc) and returning CD-Text and time information. This looked like a good idea – plug into the IP-Bus connector and the laptop – get full control over the music via the headunit – no more pc gamepad in the cubby under the headunit.

However, it was quite a fiddly build, with programming EEPROMs and all sorts, but help is at hand, i found a company called Car2PC (http://indashpc.org/new/adapters/car2pc-pio.html) who makes these adaptors and at £40 ($80) it doesn’t seem all that expensive (add shipping and tax and it gets to be quite a lot but still, i will probably go for it since i don’t really have time to be building one)

This would round off the front end quite nicely with full control available, it would be better with the proper Rover steering controls but getting those is both time consuming and expensive, plus you have to take the airbag out to fit it which i dont fancy to be perfectly honest.

Apart from a few other bits and bobs thats Christmas covered, i’ve also picked up a hardware USB MPEG4/MPEG2 converter (not sure why but it was £9) and an original XBOX (£25) in the hope of turning it into a Media Centre (Center, for our american friends) exetender but this is looking to be a lot harder than it originally seemed – first off the Xbox doesn’t even support VGA output! I have to hack the grapics controller firmware, and make up a custom cable to get it to work (i think i may poke around with the oscilloscope see if i can find VGA somewhere in there, although im sure someone would have documented this already if it was that simple) plus getting the software isn’t easy either, on top of all that the usb ports don’t use proper usb connectors so i cant just plug in my MCE remote to see if it works!

Looking like a bit of a waste of money now really.

New years resolutions, well, let’s see, i have decided to go on a cost cutting drive – im going to be good and not spend money on stuff i don’t need, i want to learn to cook properly – i’d like to host a dinner party in my flat before i have to move out, but we’ll see and im determined to see some of my projects through to completion – my monitoring controller for example, that only requires a few audio circuits to be made before it’s done (then the control but thats almost a seperate project). We’ll see how long it lasts, but so far i think i’m on for a good year – leap years have always been kind to me, lets see if that holds true.

I thought it would be best to blog again, now that im sitting here on a sunday afternoon with nothing better to do.

I have rearranged my living room here in the Wirral, the TV is now under the window, with my monitors either side – but spaced 10′ apart. The seperatation here allows me to sit a decent distance away but still retain that magical equilateral triangle so perfect for audio. These monitors, although cheap offerings from Behringer sound fantastic. I can only imagine how good a better system would sound in here, i have offered both to Martin and Foz to bring their systems around and listen in a decent room which is setup more appropriatly than theirs.

I have also decided to get back into 5.1 (or 5.0 as it may become because there is no real need for a sub on these speakers) by buying a sony 6.1 (might be 7.1) surround amp, which, although was sold as faulty (it goes into protect after a few seconds) only cost ??40 and from looking at some schematics doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to fix. It should arrive next week along with some new speaker stands.

If i can get the amp working then all i’ll need to add is some rear speakers and i’ll be good to go. That should make a world of difference to the watching of films. This also adds to the fact i am almost certainly going to be buying a 32″ HD TV when my student loan comes in, a couple of weeks away.

On the monitoring controller front, i have finished the:

PSU
Active Vol Control
4 Ch Differential Amp.
4 Ch Unity Gain Follower (x2)
2 Ch Balanced Line Driver

I still have to do the active low pass filter, another balanced line driver and the headphone amp. that should be all of the audio circuits done (bar some distribution amps) then i can get on with the control – some PICs and a ton of relays and it should be ok (i’m going to need somthing like 16x 2-pole relays and 2x 8 o/p pics but should be good!)

Anyways, i’ll leave it there, i’m away for the next few days with work, which should be fun.

Sorry for the lack of blogging recently – i havn’t really been up to all that much. I have made some headway on my monitoring controller though, just ordered a load more components from RS tonight.

Some stuff is going to have to be re-done (or re-worked, not entirely re-done) but it shouldn’t be too tricky now i know what im doing and have all the right components! Will update soon with some pics i think.

I should write some more about the 2k3/exchange migration, so here goes:

I’m now runnign two exchange servers, my one in the wirral is MX 10 so is reached first, any mail for the rest of the family is autoforwarded to @lewthwaite.no-ip.org so it will go directly to the server at home and be accepted. The server at home is MX 20 for @lewty.org.uk so should my server be down it will go to home, outlook at my end collects my mail via pop3 for any of my mail which ends up on the home server.

It would appear exchange does NOT collect POP mail from other accounts on your behalf?� unless you use a 3rd party connector – which is expensive. This in contrast to somthing like Scalix which will do all this clever stuff for you.

Thats right, my battle against British Telecommunications Plc has drawn to a close, and i have won.

They finally called me today, after i submitted a second complaint to complain that they hadn’t responded to my first complaint. They immediatly without arguement offered to wipe the ??125 extortion ‘install’ fee and reduce my minimum contract to 3 months instead of 12.

I didn’t bother to argue about getting money back for my ??50 mobile bill, compensation for the 7 hours wasted time on hold and the days leave from work i had to waste. I’m satisfied now really, i could have persued it further, the woman on the phone was ready for an arguement but i decided not to.

In other news, i’ve not really done much since my last post, other than plan what i needed to buy for my projects (now comes to around ??160 and this is before any of the control components – relays, PICs, USB GPIO etc) which i may spend the bank holiday weekend doing.

So, Martin has co-located his poweredge beast into my flat – its noisy with a capital N! But i have got my own 2k3 VM on it so i can practice migrating all the users and data off my old domain controller, although right now, the whole thing has crashed so i’m getting nowhere.

Instead i cleaned the flat and finally took some photos of the setup – check out here If theres any questions about the setup then just ask me. I’ve also stuck up some more pics of the monitoring controller now that it has all its sockets mounted and the toroid bolted in.

I also finally got rid of the annoying buzz in the car when using the car pc (caused by USB hub PSU) by fitting a +5V 3A regulator onto the 12V DC meaning i don’t have to step up to mains and back down again just to get 5V – buzz is now all gone.

I might go out to it for a bit later on today as i want to fit the bluetooth as well as copy across the refined music library – im so sick of AC/DC coming on!

Been a busy few days on the tech front!

I decided to get my head round how subversion (SVN)� and Trac work. They’re both clever beasts – subversion allows multiple contributors to one project (mainly software programming) while maintaining a full revision history – which means you can go back and re-download any version of the software regardless of what modifications occured after that.

The Win GUI is quite good – highlights changed files and so on, also allows you to merge them. Trac is basically an extension to SVN giving a web interface for the entire project allowing plans, documentation and schedules to be inserted. It also allows the allocation of work tickets to individual contributors which means everyone on the project has more of an idea of what they’re supposed to be doing. This is all in preparation for starting at Ledwood on monday (!) as i’ll be using that sort of system there.

Routing wise, i got martins subnet up and running with correct firewall rules, i’ve also discovered i can have subdomains on my public dns meaning that i can now have www.drz.lewty.org.uk. This is in addition to the fact ive finally found out how to do root proxy vhosts – ie my mce.lewty.org.uk now fully points to my mediacentre pc, with the web based login to the guide – allowing me to set it to record no matter where i am.

The iptables rules are getting lengthy to say the least, and ive just remembered what i had planned to do today – go to B&Q to get a bolt to fasten the toroid in my monitoring controller into the case! I’ll pop off and do that now then, TTFN.

It’s been full speed ahead on the monitoring controller this week, been fitting all of the nice Neutrik sockets in. I did have to buy a new hole saw as mine old one could take no more punishment unfortunatly. To fit the pots on the front of the unit i need a 10mm HSS drill bit – B&Q wanted over ?8 for one! I got straight onto ebay and paid ?1.50 including postage.

In the future i’ll order from screwfix when i can – they’re far cheaper than B&Q and Wickes don’t seem to sell anything that i want. Once the sockets and controls are installed i’ll get on with the circuity, some of which may have to wait until funds are available for more supplies.

I took a trip round to Ledwood Tech today to say hello and go through what they do and what i’ll be involved with. It looks like it’ll be a fun year, or at least i hope it will be. I start on monday so will check in then with an update, though i may well be starting a private ledwood blog, only available to me and my tutor as part of my placement work.

Anyways, i’ll get going, cheerio for now.

Ok, so i know there are better ways to spend a saturday night but i did get the balanced input stage of my monitoring controller working! I must be tired as i’ve been having so many muppet moments today! Firstly, the reason i was blowing up the chips the other day was because i had the power wired in backwards as i was convinced i’d got the colour coding wrong – seems i had that right. So then, plugged it in, no blown chips, no dodgy voltages on input or output stages. Plugged in a source, fired up a software sig gen and away we went…

Or so i thought… it works but for some reason clipped at about 1v p-p inpu..why? well i hadn’t actually plugged it in again…..

So got it all together and woohoo it works, sat here listening to music through it right now, good healthy level, can’t see any clipping on the scope, i can’t really test bandwidth properly, and CMR is tricky also – but it does work i just dont know how well.

Shoving an input to only hot gives a -6dB reduction on the output which is correct.

Attached is a pic in it’s current state, at the moment it ain’t pretty but the 3 connectors on the back look nice! Even if they’re not Neutrik….

Will have to order some more connectors – need quite a few in various guises. So watch this space, now i’ve got some confidence in actually building something which works it may move forward quite rapidly!

http://www.lewty.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/p3170001.JPG for imagery