Chatter Of The Squirrel

Tech: Buffalo Terastation III 2.0TB

It’s a black box. Comes with 4x 500MB SATA harddisks. Different flavours of RAID 0, 1, 5, or 10. 2x Gigabit LAN ports. 2x USB ports, which you can use to plug in an external harddrive / thumbdrive to share it via the NAS, or plug in a printer and the Terastation will run as a print server too.

Power it up. Hook it up to your network. Do the networking voodoo. Sacrifice a white dove or two. And you’ll have 2 Terabytes of NAS (Network Attached Storage) on your network.

That’s enough to siphon all the multimedia content from your desktop, notebook, home theatre entertainment PC, and iPod over, without even making a dent to the capacity. Unless like me, you’re running multiple units of high capacity harddrives on the desktop… I might be able to fill up half of this thing.

It’ll even run Bit-Torrent and help you fill up the vacuum.

Very cool gear.

But kinda pricey. And the higher capacity models are exponentially more expensive.

Which is why my boss had the brilliant idea to buy the 2.0TB version. Then buy 4x 1TB SATA harddrives separately. Swap out the 500MB from the box, and getting the 4.0TB version for less.

What he ended up with was a large brick with cool lights and fan noise.

Then it became my problem….

Apparently, removing all the drives at once generates some bad error. The OS (there is one) expects to find an array of disks in the box, and failing to find them, it even fails to boot up properly. Downloaded and did a lot of shit to make the thing boot, by way of some serious voodoo, I got the BIOS to boot via the LAN etc. Couldn’t see a way to reflash the firmware or rebuild whatever’s necessary back onto the new harddisks.

Found a guide on rebuilding a TeraStation. But this is a crap load of work. Basically, this is for the case if you’ve got a RAID-5 array, and you don’t have 2TB of external storage to back up your existing shit. What the guide does, is basically breaking the RAID-5 by taking a drive out and replacing it with a new one. Let the RAID rebuild the array, taking 10+ hours easily. Repeat this 3 more times until all the old drives are swapped out. And THEN, telnet into the box, INTO the Linux OS inside, and run the commands to manipulate the disk partitions to discover the extra 2TB you just upgraded.

I got as far as downloading the Java, running the ACP Commander, and gaining Shell access on the Linux box. It’s quite exciting. At least I didn’t have to look for a hacked firmware of the correct version, take a leap of faith, and attempt to root the firmware.

But there MUST be an easier way. I’m stepping into this device blind. Reading stuff here and there was slowly putting the puzzle pieces together, but I still can’t be sure what and how exactly this thing  works.

Fortunately, I came across this easy way to upgrade a fresh Terastation with no existing data on it.

Distilling it down…

I put back 3 of the original 4x 500MB harddisks back into the box. 1 of the drive has the new 1TB harddisk.

Switch On. Delete the RAID-5 array, so that it doesn’t waste hours rebuilding an array that’s got no data on it at all. So the system just sees 4 HDs, and one of them is new.

Select the new disk, and format it with the XFS file system. Maybe in the formatting, it built some information onto the partition somehow. It’s voodoo, so I’m only speculating.

Finish formatting. Switch off. Remove another disk, swap in with another 1TB disk. Switch On. Format.

Repeat until all 4 disks have been swapped.

Whooooop~!! A Terastation 4.0TB is born. Now create a new array to flavour.

Tech: Google Nexus One

Just concluded a week of Android programming that our department somehow conned out of HR. There’s no conceivable reason why a bunch of techs need to know how to program a phone, but the training came our way via a suspicious ally… So, eat first. Think later.

The trainer was a young man from India, and the venue is at this shitty old place in town: McOrange Institute. The venue had serious plumbing issues, failed airconditioning, a 30yr old elevator that didn’t work half the time, and indescribable odours haunt various corners of the building. We had to move the training over to our own campus. But overall, the training was fun and informative. Although the pace of the teaching had to match the pace of the slowest student, so I felt that many higher level stuff was never covered.

But at the end of the day, our ally managed to procure a unit of the Nexus One for our department for use as our development phone. I was quickest to grab hold of the unit, and had been hogging it all to myself for almost a whole week.

This is the first time I am using a phone costing this much. It’s not technically available in Malaysia, but I’m on the newsletter list of a trader who imported a couple of units from HK. It’s available in the US for US$529. The guy over here sold the Nexus One at RM2400 each.

A simple looking phone. Doesn’t look too flashy, but the big shiny touchscreen already gave me an R+J moment…

HTC manufactured. 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Android 2.1. OLED display. Capacitance multi-touch screen. Thin and solid.

The moment everyone else got done looking at its shininess and tested out the camera… I commandeered the unit and lost no time tossing my SIM card and SD Card in. So, in the order of things I tested…

#1 Multimedia:
I want to know how my music and audio book will sound. The multimedia uses the crappy ringer speaker. Volume leaves much to be desired. Quality will obviously be crap too. Even at full ringer volume, I don’t hear the phone ring in my pocket.

#2 Phone:
Comes with 2 mics. One on the back, one on the bottom. Noise cancellation. But can’t speak for how well it works. Signal reception does seem to be a little bit worse than my Nokia. Loses signal occasionally underground.

#3 Wifi:
Grabs a signal and starts working very fast. Very easy. Just works. And once there’s wifi…

#4 GMail:
Log in GMail, and everything else starts working. Mail starts coming in. GTalk starts working. Even the picture gallery starts to grab everything I’ve uploaded onto PicasaWeb. My Contacts list starts filling up.

#5 FaceBook:
Log in this one, and my Contacts list fills up to the brim with everyone’s email addresses.

#6 Market:
Once you’ve logged in a Google account, the Marketplace opens up for you. Head right there and browse thousands of free apps that downloads and installs easily onto the phone. Lots of useful and show-offy stuff like Google Sky Maps. And a Sudoku game is practically a must. No good, free Kakuro game yet though…

#7 Web Browsing:
Flash support. SUCK ON THAT, iPhone! Everything is smooth. But there’s no multi-touch in Android 2.1. Some patent issue. Apple wants to hold exclusivity to the interface. Just like what they did with the iPod shuffle wheel and UI a while ago.

But with an OTA (Over The Air) update that happened on Friday afternoon, the multi-touch function is suddenly enabled! The hardware is there all along. Pinch zooming and other gestures now available.

#8 Battery:
Takes an insanely long time to charge. About 5hrs for a full charge. It depletes about 50% in 7hrs. Hardly enough, especially with the myriad of things you will want to do with it when you’ve got a web connection. But on the plus side, the battery is replaceable. There’s another inconvenience: you need to remove the battery every time you swab out the SD Card. The slot is on the inside of the device. Pain.

#9 Keyboard:
Not very pleasant to use. The predictive text and such helps a fair bit. But it requires much more concentration to type messages on this as compared to a T9 input. And tapping out long URLs are a particular pain, if you accidentally touch the Search or Back button and lose all your hard work and have to start over again and again…

#10 Voice Input:
There’s a handy little mic button on the keyboard. Tap, and speak into the mic. Voila, voice to text! But it uses the internet for this. Very clever, using off-device processing and database resources to do this. And it’s so responsive that you don’t actually realise that your voice was just digitally encoded, pushed into the internet, parsed by a giant datacenter somewhere, crunched through a very good algorithm, the results matched to a database, and the results pushed back through the internet and back onto your keyboard. It’s like being able to eat French fries that was fried in France and freighted over, that still tastes as good as MacDonald’s French fries. On the down side, this doesn’t work when you have no internet access. And it also censors vulgarities. “Asshole” comes out as “####”.

#11 The Mouse Clit:
I’m inventing a rude name for the tiny trackball interface, to see if the name will catch on. Male rodents have had their genitals maligned for much too long, so I figured there should be equal opportunity for the other gender. Besides, it’s quite apt, descriptively. It’s a little nub at the bottom of the phone that serves little purpose. There isn’t a way to adjust the sensitivity of the clit, and when trying to move the cursor around a line of text, the clit moves it way too slowly. But I can appreciate why such an interface is still very much needed for accurate cursor movements. Cos you can’t use a stylus on this screen, and fat fingers can’t poke exactly where you need things to go. But the sensitivity needs to be very much better for it to be useable. Also, it serves to protect the shiny screen cos it keeps the screen off the surface if you put the phone facedown on a table.

In summary, this is a fine fine tool. Especially if you’re willing to pay for 3G broadband access, so that you can use all the cool shit everywhere you go. All the truly neat stuff needs the net. Very cool to sip coffee with friends, and be able to MSN when everyone starts talking about work.

I want one. But not at this price.

The name of the phone is an obvious reference to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep which got made into the Harrison Ford movie, Blade Runner. In the story, the Nexus 6 is a series of bio-engineered androids made for off-world work. Does Google think it can get that far with five more iterations of its phone?

Tech: Microsoft Hyper-V, unable to connect

Built up my Hyper-V system and the remote management console previously.

Then it broke.

When attempting to connect to the HyperV via the remote management console, I kept getting, “You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer.”

After a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the password to the HyperV machine has expired.

Change the password on the HyperV server. Change the password on the remote management machine. (Remember that the username and password of both machines have to match, if you’re not using Active Directory.) Reboot both computers. And they work again.

Now… something else has broken my KnowledgeTree install. How do I want to fix this?

Tech: Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, language change

Cool phone. Bought a few months ago. Review pending.

Only today, I managed to get hold of the data cable for this phone, and was able to do interesting things to it.

I had purchased an Iranian copy of the phone. The only languages available are English, and probably Arabic, Kurdish or something.

Chinese would have been more relevant to me. And to enable such, I had to do the following.

1. Download NSS from B-Phreaks.
2. Disable Nokia phone suite if enabled. Plug in phone. Run NSS.
3. Click the Magnifying Glass to scan for phone. If all’s well, then Phone Info, then Scan.
4. Tick the Enable box for Product Code, change the code to 0576251. (Complete list of Product Codes for 5730).
5. Write.
6. Close NSS. Download and run the Nokia Software Updater, downloadable from Nokia’s website.
7. Run the update, and my phone now supports English, Simplified Chinese, Melayu, & Indonesian.

Can’t do anything about the Arabic letters on my Qwerty keyboard though.

Tech: Microsoft Server 2008 R2 cracked

I ‘test-drove’ MS Server 2008 R2 almost immediately after it became available. Cos there was a serious issue with my previous installation. The system will just freeze up for a minute when I try to copy large files (more than 100Mb) into my harddisk. Nobody seems to have an idea what that was about, so I hoped that R2 might fix that issue.

But it didn’t.

So, I ended up with a new OS on my home system, with only a 1mth trial CD-key, and it’s sporting the toughest copy protection scheme ever.

I had faith in the Chinese. They’ll crack it.

Managed to extend the trial by re-arming the trial key a couple of times (run: slmgr.vbs -rearm). Up till the 3rd and last re-arm.

By the end, I had to be careful not to do anything too aggressive to the system cos if it reboots, then it might not start up again.

Until, THIS.

Yes, it works. Not quite sure how. But it works. It’s quite a huge file, and who knows what Trojan might be lurking inside.

But it works.