Lots and lots of stuff…
Saturday, April 26th, 2008Well 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!
