Craig's Musings

On Tuesday, Sprint announced a Text To Landline feature. I gave it a try, and I think is very clever and well delivered. You send a text message as normal. A few seconds later, the landline rings and you get told that phone # blah-blah has sent you a message, press 1 to hear it. The text to speech is pretty good. Once you hear your message, you can either reply by 5 pre-canned text messages (Yes, No, Please call back, Thank you, Where are you? ) or a voice message. The voice message is cool, you get a number back in the reply SMS and when you call it, you hear the message the person left for you. Another neat feature is that you get a response SMS when the person listens to their Text to Landline message. Handy. This is a trade off - by making me press "1" to receive the message, they can know I have listened, but if they didn't require that, my message would have gone to the persons voicemail. There are pros and cons to both. Here is a recording a made (using my cell phone) of the callback I received: TextToLandlineRecording.wav (101 KB)

You could argue that this feature is silly because I could just call the person. But I don't think so. The advantage of SMS and IM is the non-real time nature of it. I can fire a message, move on to the next thing, then deal with the reply when it comes back. Plus it is private - placing a call is not. Extending SMS/IM paradigm to the landline allows someone to send a message to anyone during a meeting, class, etc. Could be a killer feature for desktop and mobile AIM.

Posted by Craig at 5:53 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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Yesterday afternoon I had a throbbing broken tooth, so I needed both liquor and a distraction, and since it was afternoon, I only had one of the two. So I set about the task of reorganizing my rag-tag fugitive fleet of home brewed crap (Home Datacenter 1.0) to the new, streamlined, mostly-built-by-professionals Data Center 2.0.

After plugging everything in, I flashed back to the thing that I did to kill some harddisks last year - I accidentally turned off power instead of flipping the house to the backup system to exercise it. Ooops. And I looked at my cool Vtrak 15200 and my cool Dell 1850, both with cool redundant power supplies and I thought - perfect, both power supplies lose power simultaneously when something goes amuck. So when I took my boys out on "boys day out" today, we stopped by "Best Buy" (after all, Full Retail is the Best Buy! ) and picked up two APC Back-UPS XS 1500's, which can support up to 865 watts. I had one already, but it was old, and I figured I would use it in a less critical spot. Of course, one of the two I bought had a defective battery, so I am using the old one while I figure out when I am going to get time to go back to Best Buy.

I split the load - each UPS has one of the power supplies of the Vtrak and Dell, and then I divvied up the miscellaneous crud (two switches, 2 Buffalo TeraStations, and the monitor) evenly. Now I can get struck by lightning (which is my luck, by the way) and survive. Turn the house power off by accident? No problem. Trip the circuit (happened at least 4 or 5 times since we moved here, there is one outlet by the bathroom in the basement that is tied to the same circuit as my Home Datacenter)? No problem. Have a UPS fail (had that happen last year too)? Only a minor problem, as one of the switches will go offline.

Home Datacenter 2.0 is finally done being tinkered with (well, I still haven't found an automated replication/backup system I like, but that is it. Oh, and I should use a rack instead of a wicker basket and a Virginia ham box. But then really, that is it. Except for I am down to 1.3 terabytes out of 4.8, so I am likely to need more storage. Hopefully the 1.3 TB will hold out until tax refund time next year). I get to spend the next few hours doing other things for a change - like enjoying my broken tooth (but luckily it is after 5 so I can add liquor to the mix ). Now that my tax refund is spent, its back to being an I.T. lightweight - maybe I'll get to buy a new phone or something soon.

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Seagate has leaked (either by accident or an on-purpose accident) the up & coming Seagate 7200.10, which will have a 750GB version (the ST3750640A and ST3750640AS). Sporting a 16mb cache and supporting 3.0Gb/s SATA, these drives would kick some serious ass. 15 of those bad boys in my Vtrak 15200 would give a whopping 9 terabytes of storage in a RAID 50 + hot spare configuration (vs 4.8 terabytes that I have now). Damn!

According to Excaliberpc.com, the ETA for the drive is 5/1/2006, and they are asking $517 per drive. So the 15 drive thing is just a drug-induced hallucination for now. Well, by the time I get my tax return next year, they'll probably be in the $300-$350 range and I could at least fantasize about having them.

Posted by Craig at 6:39 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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Its been almost 2 weeks of screwing around in little bits and snippits of time, but I finally got everything working on my spiffy new server.

There was un-ending joy in trying to get it the final details to work. Microsoft's latest iSCSI initiator doesn't work with my Vtrak 15200, but their old version 1.06 did work. Oh, and of course it didn't occur to the folks that built the iSCSI initiator that you might want to share directories on an iSCSI disk, so every time you reboot your server, all the shares go away. I just cracked that problem after about 2 hours of googling over the past 2 weeks - turns out you just have to run the command sc config LanManServer depend= MSiSCSI from a cmd prompt on your server. Lord knows that was too complicated to just add to iSCSI setup.

Then there was Virtual Server 2005 - whenever a virtual PC was running, it would disconnect the network briefly a couple times a minute, thus ensuring that no files could ever be copied to or from the server. But Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition (how is that for a mouthful!) seems to have fixed that problem. I'm running 3 virtual machines, each running Windows 2000 server and DVArchive, a way cool java app that emulates a ReplayTV. Now my ReplayTVs can see the 3 different show archives again, and all of the archives are consolidated on my Vtrack15200.

Final project is to move pull the old servers out of the server room, and either sell them for parts on ebay or find new homes for them. Wahoo!

Posted by Craig at 5:46 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I've been running a home-brewed set of servers in my house ever since 1997, when working on the Chrome Project. Chrome ("fast and flashy") was Eric's and my big follow-on to DirectX, stuffing high performance multimedia into Internet Explorer 4.0. Sadly, it never really saw the light of day (although Eric slipped it out on MSN Access CDs when he took the MSN Access job). Anyway, back then the hot processor was the 300MHz Pentium II, and if you could buy one (which you couldn't as there was no supply), it cost $1,999.00. My Intel contact scored me FOUR, count 'em, FOUR of these bad boys, and being the generous soul I am, I kept three for myself and gave one to Eric. From those three, I built a desktop machine and a 2 processor server that I ran for years. I used it for managing internet access (128kbps ISDN until 2003, if you can believe it), file storage and printing (i.e., a server ). When my first born server finally started coughing and wheezing, I replaced it with another home-brewed contraption (which for the life of me I can't remember the specs of), and most recently (in July of 2002 - going on 4 years ago), I built a monster of a server - dual 2ghz Xeon with 2 GB of RAM and a 750GB Raid 5 (w/hot spare) array with 8 125 gb drives on a 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. The damned thing has 15 drive bays and was the size of a small planet. I upgraded this server to1.5 terabytes (8 250gb drives) in December of 2003.

Over the past two years, I took a couple of desktop machines, added a 3 bay 4 drive hot swap array and a 4 drive 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller and declared them servers as well. One is running Exchange 2000, and the other does nothing other than run a java program that simulates a replay TV device and serves up recorded kids shows. Along with my Vtrak 15200 iSCSI appliance with 4.8 terabytes of storage, my furnace room (where this all lives) sounds something like the inside of a jet engine and is burning something like 1500 watts of power.

As our life became more and more digital (110gb of pictures and mpeg videos taken from my digital Elph, along with terabytes of shows, mp3s, etc) I realized that I was pushing my luck relying on these power hungry home built dinosaurs that could fall over on any given Sunday. So I dedicated the rest of my tax return (the first part went to my gaming PC and 30" monitor, of course ) to a new server, built by professionals and actually supported. I had been waffling about buying it since Christmas, and finally pulled the trigger in the United lounge while waiting for my flight to Toronto a couple weeks back (34% off was enough to get my butt in gear).

And boy oh boy, what a server. For not a lot more than the home brewed server I built 4 years ago, our fancy new Dell PowerEdge 1850 has the following (all in a sweet 1U package, which is only 1.75 inches tall and 19 inches wide):

• 2 Dual Core 2.8GHz Xeon processors (with 2 2MB caches each)
• 8GB of DDR2 400Mhz RAM (8 is so much better than 2!)
• a PCI Express Dual 1GB Intel network card (for 1 port for network, one to connect to my Vtrak 15200)
• DVD/CD-RW drive
• Dual 146GB U320 10k RPM SCSI drives, in a RAID 1 configuration (finally I don't have to worry about boot drive failure)
• Perc4-SC RAID controller, with 128MB cache and battery backup for said cache
• Dual redundant power supplies

Whaa-Hoo! Thanks to my handy MSDN Universal subscription, I could install Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition (necessary to access the full 8GB of RAM) and Exchange 2003 Server without mortgaging my house. Pretty painless, all the drivers were supported, so no screwing around to get Windows booting. 8GB of RAM is pretty cool, and - get this - because there are dual Xeons each with dual cores and each core is hyperthreaded, Windows shows EIGHT processors. Truth be told, it will probably perform like around 3 or 3 1/2 processors, but it still 8 looks cool!

I had all kinds of trouble getting the Microsoft 2.01 iSCSI initiator to see my Vtrak 15200 (by all sorts, I mean it never did work). The older 1.06 version worked great, albeit on reboot, I lose all the directories I shared out - I think I can solve that problem by change some service start dependencies, I need to do some digging.

Exchange 2003 installed without a hiccup either, athough I got bitched at by both by the main install and the SP 1 upgrade that there were some "compatibility issues" with the version of Windows I was running - gotta love that, Exchange 2003 complaining about Windows Server 2003. But bitching aside (which in fairness, by SP2 MSFT managed to make Exchange 2003 not bitch about having compatibility issues with Windows 2003 Server), I could connect via Outlook just fine, so I am in the midst of backing up all my outlook data (8gb!!).

My next great adventure is to add Virtual Server 2005 so I can run Replay TV servers, get all the data transferred from my old server to the Vtrak array, and setup MirrorFolder to auto-backup my Vtrak to my new Buffalo TeraStations. Then I can take about 1000 watts of home-brewed servers offline at last - 9 years after my first home brewed server first saw the light of day.

Posted by Craig at 5:28 PM | Permalink

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Okay, I admit I bought my Buffalo TeraStation without doing enough research. A friend of mine (who I've known for years, lives in Seattle, and shall remain nameless) bought one and loved it, so I did some digging and thought "perfect". The sweet spot for price was the 4x250GB drive configuration, which with RAID 5 would give 750GB of storage - which is perfect for a backup solution. Once you eliminate DVD backups & tv shows from my storage requirements, this was more than enough to back up my DV video, pictures, MP3s, personal files, and software. And at 750 bucks from buy.com, way, way, WAY cheaper than tape solutions.

It is a great little appliance - plug it in, run the software to give it a name, and you are off to the races and able to copy files to it. Oh, don't try to use the backup software they provide - it crashes on startup. Their backup software has a dependancy on .NET Framework, and my guess is that the latest service pack from Microsoft broke it. Why test software before you ship it, that is what customers are for! Anyway, as an appliance, it works great - simple web interface, plug and play (no praying at all), and fast access. I got my stuff backed up in no time (about a week ago or so).

Friday, I was surfing for info on the TeraStartion to show my friend Greg and I noticed that Buffalo had a "professional" version with "easy hot swap". And I said "oh-oh - what about mine?". It didn't even occur to me that someone would build a RAID 5 solution that you couldn't swap a dead drive in, but this got me worried. I didn't care if it was hot swap, I was fine with taking it offline to do a drive replacement. So I took out my handy screwdriver and went to work. After removing over 40 screws, I still had no way to replace the drives. You have to take the thing completely apart to change out a drive, a task that after 45 minutes I still wasn't near accomplishing. So I put it back together, put it back online, and quietly resolved never to buy something that this particular friend owned again unless I did my research. Given that this friend needed me to make his home internet work and to configure Outlook for him, that was probably something I should have figured out without this incident.

Again, the device works great, but it is basically a one-shot device. Once a drive fails, you are living on borrowed time. So when a drive fails (hopefully an event a couple of years out), I'll replace the TeraStation with whatever the 2-year-from-now appliance is. Probably 2-4 terabytes with hot swap for the same price point, if hard drive evolution continues at its current pace.

Posted by Craig at 4:10 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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