Projects

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.