Projects

Friday night i was driving home from Tesco – just a few miles away on the motorway, i brought the car up the speed and…. check engine light comes on, lost almost all power.

I pulled onto the hard shoulder and stopped/started the engine a few times – made no difference. So i called the RAC. After he had bitched about my address being wrong (my permanant address is not on the Wirral) he looked at the car – fiddled with ignition coil/HT leads then connected his diagnostic tool. The OBD readout didn’t have any fault codes logged so we started the engine – was running fine.

It’s been fine ever since, i asked on the MG Rover owners forum and apparently one common fault is the connector for the throttle position sensor which would cause this sort of thing – so the solution is to cable tie it on, which i’ve now done. According to the service manual a few other things can cause it – ht leads, spark plugs, battery. ignition coil – most of which will get serviced/replaced next week. The battery definitely wants doing as it does feel a bit flat.

So that was that fun, hopefully just a minor glitch that won’t be a problem.

When i got home however, i was watching TV when it went bang – very loudly. Taking it to bits one of the regs has blown on the psu board so i’ve had to order a replacement PSU board, luckily only £35 delivered but still, damned annoying!. I’ll post with details on makes/model and fault when i get it sorted out.

It’s with a heavy heart that i announce the death of my beloved Rover 220TD. My first car, a 2 Litre Turbo Diesel, power steering, electric windows, roomy, remote central locking is soon to be no more. After what i’d call a minor bump where someone went into the back of me, the insurence company have written it off to the tune of £900. They did offer a cash settlement, however, in order to re-insure it, i would have to have undergone (at my expense) another MOT and engineers inspection – i suspect this would have made it far too expensive.

Despite the car being well looked after – full service history from new at 10k mile intervals with all required work undertaken and absolutely no issues, that’s what they valued it at. So i spent some time using all the fuel and stripping it of useful components – the newish Bosch Silver battery, GPS receiver, phone charger/holder, head unit, tweeter speakers, floor mats and other bits and pieces, including the odd momento. It also took me a week to find a new car. I had a plan. I had heard the adverts on the radio for http://www.chapelhouse.co.uk/ – offering 0%/£0 deposit 5 year finance, perfect i thought. I looked at the website, found a couple of lovely Citereon C4 Coupe’s (i think they look amazing), well within budget – one at £7,000 or £116 per month.

So i toddled off to the showroom – “I’m afraid you don’t qualify for 0% finance sir, the total repayment will be almost £9,000″. Normally that would be fine(ish if you don’t mind being stiffed for interest) but similar specification C4′s were on autotrader for £4.5-5k, i had assumed they’d just inflated the cost of the car instead of charging interest, so they could offer 0%. I told them to stuff it, i wasn’t going to pay nearly double. I could have found another dealer, on high interest finance and bought it for around £7k. However, i didn’t have time. So we went trailing around all kinds of back end dodgy dealers before i found a car.

There’s no easy way to say this, it’s a….

Cityrover.

Phew, glad i got that out in the open, i am the not so proud owner of a Rover Cityrover, or rather a Tata Indica with a Rover badge. It’s saving grace is that it only cost £995 and it’s a 2004 car which has 12 months MOT and 6 months Tax. Other than that, theres not a lot else to it, it’s just a simple, basic runabout, hopefully one which works.

It’s not without it’s quirks (let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be a Rover if it all worked), the fuel gague only works properly when turning left and the indicators don’t click in but hey, it works!

Rover made a big mistake asking £7,700 for this car (Sprite model) when they were buying them from Tata in India for £2k and they sell over there for about £3.5k. If they’d just sold it at £4.5k then it would have been massively popular.

It’s going to the garage next wednesday for a service and inspection, watch this space for how much it’s going to cost. If it’s ok then i’ll be re-instating the car pc – it’ll be the most pimped up CityRover in existance!

Bye all for now

So we’re onto another beer, this time Floris Apple, the distributors had this to say:

Floris Apple is an easy drinking and fresh, apple-sweet, Single Apple White Fruit beer. Best Served in a branded straight glass at 3-5C, with the sediment. Good with port and goat cheese.

This beer is a much improvement on the Floris Mango, with the taste being strong enough for flavour, yet not so strong it’s overpowering. It has a refreshing taste and has certainly renewed my confidence in the Floris range over the mango. I suspect the extended chilling time that the Apple has had may have improved the flavour, i will make sure to give the same treatment to the next ones. Reccommended. (330ml Bottle, 3.6%).

Ok, so it’s got nothing to do with tech, but meh, i like beer?

Earlier in the year i was introduced to Lindemans Kriek – Kriek meaning cherry. This is, surprisingly, a type of beer. You can buy it in ASDA for around £1.50 a bottle -  everyone should give it a go. Lindemans is a brewery in Belgium, now, the Flemish seem to have an obsession with fruit flavoured beers so after discovering this delightful drink, i decided to order a case of mixed fruit beers from www.beermerchants.com.

£40 and a few days later, a case turned up on my doorstep, from which i gleefully unpacked the beers. Included in the box was:

• Boon Framboise (Raspberry)
• Book Kriek (Cherry)
• Lindemans Cassis (Blackberry)
• Lindemans Framboos
• Lindemans Kriek
• Lindemans Pecheresse (Peach)
• Fruli Strawberry
• Floris Framboos
• Floris Apple
• Floris Ninkleberry
• Floris Passion
• Floris Mango
• Mongozo Banana
• Mongozo Coconut
• Mort Subite Kriek

I’ve only just started working my way through them but, the Lindemans Kriek i will leave out as that’s more or less a standard available on the high street.

So, the beers, first up:

Fruli Strawberry, the tasting notes had this to say (i’ve had this beer before from Tesco so i didn’t give it a full tasting analysis)

Fruli Strawberry is an easy drinking and smooth, strawberry-sweet, Extra Strawberry White Fruit beer. Best served in a branded straight glass at 3 – 5C, with the sediment. Good with light curry and ice cream.

Now as i understand it, there are two types of fruit beer, one is White Beer based and the other is Lambiek based. (I can’t be bothered investigating what these are so just look it up on Wikipedia). The Fruli has quite a strong sweet taste of strawberry’s and is quite a refreshing beer. Recommended. (250ml Bottle, 4.1%abv, available on the high-street – Tesco).

Mongozo Coconut, this was a new beer to me, although i’m sure it’s available in Tesco. The flavour did not inspire me with confidence hence why i decided to get it out of the way first. The tasting notes said this:

Mongozo Coconut is an easy drinking and creamy, coconut-sweet, Single White Fruit beer. Best served in a branded straight glass at 3-5C, with the sediment. Good with curry and ice cream.

On opening the bottle did not go well. Unfortunately, i had previously dropped it so it decided to squirt everywhere, i did manage to get most of it into the BeerMerchants branded glass that was sent with the case. I took one whiff of it and was immediately put off. However, in the name of science i decided to sacrifice myself to the cause. I took a good sip and unbelievably – it’s absolutely delicious, you can barely taste the coconut, it’s an extremely refined, smooth, creamy and refreshing drink, one i will definitely be buying again. Recommended. (330ml Bottle, 3.5%, Maybe available in Tesco).

Mongozo Banana, i think this is also available in Tesco, this is from the same Fair-Trade brewery as the Coconut one above and was also extremely deceptive. The tasting notes had this to say:

Mongozo Banana is an easy drinking and exotic, baked banana-sweet, Extra Banana White Fruit beer. Best served in a branded straight glass at 3-5C, with the sediment. Good with bread and butter putting and ice cream.

This one smelled even worse than the coconut – i felt physically sick, nevertheless, i soldiered on and took a sip – once again those crazy Belgians have done it produced a foul smelling, deliciously tasty beer. It’s very refreshing and creamy – i really do not like bananas but i do like this beer. Recommended. (330ml Bottle, 4.5%, Maybe available in Tesco)

Floris Mango – i had saved some of the nicer sounding flavours for later, this one was included. I wish i hadn’t. But before i slate it, here’s the tasting notes from the distributor:-

Floris Mango is a smooth and easy drinking White beer, with exotic fruity flavours and a refreshing citric finish. Best served at 3-5C in a tulip shaped glass. Great with Thai food and puddings.

A disappointing beer i must say, i was expecting it to be on a par with the Coconut and Banana, but it simply isn’t fruity enough – it tastes like lager with a slice of mango shoved in it. I hope this isn’t indicative of the rest of the Floris range as there are several included in this case and i do want them to taste as good as they sound. So a thumbs down from me on this one, the taste just isn’t there. (330ml, 3.6%).

So that’s it for now on the beer front, as i work my way through the rest of the case, i’ll write about the other beers. If you’re interested in trying a fruit beer – as a note i don’t normally like Lager or Bitter so even if you don’t, you may like fruit beers, try the Lindemans Kriek from ASDA or the Kriek MAX from Tesco. It’ll change your life.

(The tasting notes are word for word typed copy from the distributor – mistakes and all)

(Enjoy alcohol responsibly)

So it appears i have been away a long time, not so true, my current webhost (000webhost) decided to delete my account for ‘inactivity’ despite having the site set as my homepage so it always gets hits. Obviously they are demanding i log into my online control panel every so often – if i don’t, they just delete the account – without asking or reminding me.

In 8 months it will be back on a self hosted line, i may even have a dual line – 2x 24Meg Be* perhaps? We’ll see how it goes. For now the site may randomly disappear from time to time but i will do my best to restore it quickly.

The lack of blog is more due to being busy – first i was commuting from manchester to the wirral every day for work, now i’m snowing myself under with final year project work – it’s a very exciting and interesting project but shhh i can’t say much more now.

That said, i’ve spent the last 4 days watching House M.D. back to back so i think it’s time i got off my ass and did some work. I have some interesting personal projects lined up so as i complete those i will try and post the details of what i did and how i did it.

My lounge now contains a rather nice 24U server rack (fully enclosed, full depth, all black with blue trim and a smoked glass door) which was a bargain at £50, although driving it back from Huddersfield in my car was not fun to say the least and an experience i will not be repeating.

That will do for now, everything is more or less ok. TTFN.

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!

Well then, i know i haven’t been blogging much recently, i’ve just been in that new-years lull where i can’t really be bothered with anything, however, i’m working my way out of it and do i have a treat in store for all of you. This entry will be quite full, so sit back, strap in and enjoy the ride. (Geek restrictions apply.)

First off, a nice easy one – i got me a new PC! Spec:

Asus P5B Intel based mobo – lots of sata, usb and all the usual bits, although annoyingly only one IDE – my MCE has two IDE hd’s and two IDE optical drives – i changed this (see later)
Pentium E2180 CPU – dual Core 2GHz, can be overclocked to the max – which i won’t be doing as i want it to run cool (and therefore quiet)
2Gb Ram
nVidia 8400GS Graphics

Not a bad replacement spec – i put MCE 2005 on it and does it fly! I can play back 720p MKV video at about 15% CPU – the old box used more CPU to play Mpeg4! As a result i’ve been watching a few HD movies, although i will be glad when we get American TV back again (it seems shows will be returning to the air in the US in April) 1080p also doesn’t seem a problem.

By far the best footage i’ve seen is the BBC Top Gear Polar Special, in 1080p, the detail really is phenomenal – you can see individual snow flakes on the screen. It also highlights production cheats – one shot in particular i noticed that Richard Hammond was blue screened (or chroma keyed if you prefer) onto the backround – something i did not notice on the SD version.

A good investment, although it currently does not have any optical drive (due to no IDE connectors), i am seriously considering buying a Blu-Ray reader/DVD-RW drive as they are around £60-70 now and then i can purchase HD content on disc. Now that HD-DVD has properly died, blu-ray will be the leading format for some time to come.

Now that i have the guts of the machine spare, i have piled them into my old light-up case along with the PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 and the 8 port SATA controller. After installing solaris the system is all ready to go with a ZFS filestore, i just need to purchase the disks, i am planning on 3x 500GB to begin with, and expanding later.

I am well away i need to re-write the computers page of the site, as all the specs are now wrong and i will do when i get around to it! Using a new mobo in the mediacentre allowed me to remove loads of expansion cards – USB2, Sound, Network – all gone as they are on board.

I did have a problem with standby relating to the mediacentre remote control – it requires 5VSB at all times – sending the machine to S3 caused it to wake again, but disabling the remote. Simply find the 5VSB jumper for the USB port you are using and switch it – instructions are in the manual. It’s a jumper not a BIOS option!

Next Up: Car2PC

I caved, i bought one of these devices and even though its cost me somewhere near to £70-80 (due to customs charges and ParcelFarce surcharges) it is actually well worth the money…if it works…which mine doesn’t.

If i leave it in the car overnight, it stops working – i emailed tech support and they said they would get me a replacement, i’ve not heard anything since, so i emailed them again and im waiting a response. I do hope they send another, one that works, because if it’s reliable, it’s a fantastic bit of kit – being able to control the laptop from the headunit remote – and the steering wheel control is just amazing. It takes the hassle out of it all – i’m still using the LCD where the clock was for artist and track name and it all looks factory fit almost. You can even control shuffle from the headunit, the problem i have seen however though, is that i no longer have shutdown control.

If i eventually get a proper car-pc (mini ITX job) then it will be on permanant 12V so standby would suffice.

Already mentioned Solaris, but worthy of a mention again, since im only lacking disks, i have been playing with ZFS using the debug ‘file’ method (virtual disks), there is an extremely nice webgui for configuring ZFS and RAID-Z which i will make extensive use of as soon as i buy disks. I’m not sure when that will be, perhaps after easter when i get more student loan, who knows?

And onward we march, to the final main thing i have to talk about tonight – http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-wireless-pc-lock/42940.html

The wireless RFID PC lock. Really, fantastic. If you write your own software…which is what i did. Since all this does is fudge up a HID device – on linux it emulates a mouse and makes the pointer jump randomly when in range. You can tie in quite a lot to it. I did give their own software a go at work – on windows it simply displays a full screen splash which you cant ALT+TAB round until you’re in range. This is comepletely useless since i have dual displays and i was still able to read my email even though the system was ‘locked’.

I contacted Lindy tech support asking for an API, they just said No, not even a why? how can we help instead, just No. So reverse engineering it is. After snooping the USB traffic on a windows box i noticed all the fob does is transmit a burst every few seconds of 4 bytes.

Since on linux it appeared as /dev/input/mouse3 i can pipe this into cat and into a file, therefore, all the data recieved by the fob is piped into a file. All i did was carry out a 5 second cat of the data and if the file was still empty, call xlock & to lock the workstation, if data was then detected it just called pkill xlock – effectively unlocking the workstation!

Code example below:

#! /bin/bash
RFIDPRESENT=0

export DISPLAY=:0

while test 1==1; do

cat /dev/input/mouse3 > /root/test & sleep 5s && pkill cat

FILESIZE=$(stat -c%s “./test”)

echo “starting round tests”

if test “$FILESIZE” -eq 0; then
echo “no data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 1; then
xlock &
RFIDPRESENT=0
echo “no data in file terminal locked”
fi
fi
if test “$FILESIZE” -gt 0; then
echo “data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 0; then
pkill xlock
RFIDPRESENT=1
echo “data in file terminal unlocked”
fi
fi

echo “ending round tests”

rm “./test”
touch “./test”

done

That code will loop forever, until user terminates, it’s not pretty but it does the job. It will eventually be integrated as a cron job, and also cause XMMS/media player to pause and change my MSN status to away.

All in all, a worthwhile project! Next task is getting it to work on windows! Oh and my thanks to MattJ for the bash help. There may be a video attached, if i can get it to work of the system in action. It’s pretty cool, especially given the cost. I’m quite proud as it’s my first reverse engineered device

Video here: http://www.lewty.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/rfidlock.mp4

So thats the main projects covered as for everything else, it’s just ticking along in the usual way, work is going well, finally finished our low bandwidth compression project and we’ve started work on another order. That’s in between me designing a fully relational database system for in-house management. I also got WebDAV working finally so we have a secure file storage facility which is quite cool.

Currently i’m working on integrating our secondary VHF Recorder product into the mainstream IRIS Radar Display – not a whole load of new code, just quite tedious and complicated to follow (a lot of what were we thinking? moments!)

That’s all for now, will try and blog a bit more often in the future, but i tend not to bother if there isn’t any big projects on.

Well,

Although i seem to be in a minority when it comes to the specifics of my setup it is somthing which does continue to annoy me about the whole *nix situation in general.

Don’t get me wrong, i use Unix and Linux on plenty of servers, but as a desktop it has always been found lacking, i have taken it once again and given it another go.

So far its been pretty good, there are a few issues, but ones i think which will eventually be solvable. Installing hardware is pretty easy – my printer and so on were instantly recognised.

The new effects system – compiz fusion, is however a bugbear as is X with its multi-monitor issues – i have a triple monitor setup, two graphics cards, three screens and this simple does not work properly with X.

At the moment i have my two Dell 17″ TFTs on the nVidia 6600GT AGP i was given and this works perfectly – using nVIdias config and restricted driver i can turn on twin view and get all the nice display effects. However, i want to use my 3rd monitor on a seperate PCI ATI Radeon 9200 card, which is tricky to say the least – having it as one extended display like in windows does not seem to be at all possible, having it as a seperate X display which i cant drag windows on or off does work but only if i disable compiz, and compiz is too pretty to be disabled.

I have asked on the compiz forums for a solution so we’ll have to wait and see, X really is backwards when it comes to multi monitor support from multi cards, theres no reason for it – it works perfectly well under windows. Although with the newer nVidia drivers there is no chance of having additional non-nVidia cards.

I was also given another 1Gb of DDR400 which i have fitted half into my desktop and half into the mediacentre which is a nice little upgrade. Last week i also installed mediacentre onto my laptop, along with the Omega Drivers it works very nicely and i now have a nice interface to use when in my bedroom, instead of having to get up to read the screen.

I’ve also got to grips with solaris/zfs/raidz using the pretty ZFS web gui and i think while its not going to do exactly what i want, its pretty close and as good as im going to get, i just need to pick up all the bits to build the box. My plan is to upgrade the mediacentre so it will play HD content – Core2Duo 2Ghz, 1gb RAM, new mobo + ATI X1600 should work nicely, then use the old bits in the new fileserver in a new case and new disks.

What else have i played with? I don’t remember off hand, i have found and signed for a house in salford which myself, martin, matt and sam will be moving into in July ready for returning to uni. That should be a lot of fun, the location is perfect too, i even have a seperate attic room which i can escape to.

There we go, thats the update, Ubuntu 7.10 is pretty cool, i even have CounterStrike running nicely – under WINE no less! It’s certainly come on a LONG way since the last time i tried it.

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.

So i am here, writing this with a now working trixbox pbx which i have setup to give me extensions on the 3xx range, as well as trunked to voiptalk.org for my 0560 1050 785 number (extension 300 is me). But, i don’t only have that, i also have a very special trixbox trunk to Matt who has extensions on the 600 and 700 ranges. I can direct dial an extension on his pbx and it goes right through!

But it wasn’t all plain sailing, oh no, the configuration itself became ludicrous in how it did not work although it should. We were referencing from a few different guides and websites, one of which is the notable trixbox without tears http://dumbme.voipeye.com.au/trixbox/trixbox_without_tears.htm which was very helpful.

We had tried it in the past by setting up an extension on the other box for the other user to trunk into (and essentially masquerade to put it into IP routing terms), but now we are using a friend-friend setup, which as far as i can tell is basically a ‘trust’ between the two boxes – with the boxes requiring matching configs to work.

We had the config right – but no, it still would not work, it would appear there is a bug in the version of FreePBX one or both of us has, which probably wasn’t writing the config file correctly, after lots of hair tearing and trying of different configs all of a sudden it magically worked – the authentication/call rejected errors we were seeing went far far away.

A problem which was isolated on my end of the link was down to the parking facility in trixbox, it was using extension 700 as the parking zone, i had to install the parking module, enable it and finally change the extension it uses to somthing low and irrelevent – even though it was never installed to start with! Matt also ran into a similar problem but that was easy to fix since i’d already solved it once.

On another note, i am now home in Cumbria for christmas and very nice it is too – the frost is so hard and cold that the ground is permantly white – almost like we have a light dusting of snow every day, it certainly makes the place look pretty, even if snowball fights are out of the question.