Pretty much anything computer related except for Apple Computers, which has its own category. I run a custom desktop computer with Windows XP for video gaming and anything requiring a lot of power, and an Acer Aspire One netbook that I take with me for work. I also sometimes talk about PC news.
I promised in my last tech post that this entry would continue, and hopefully conclude, my journey towards the perfect Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. The primary reason I want to use one is to stream TV Shows and Movies to my Samsung 40” LCD TV in my Living Room by means of my AppleTV. It also serves as a backup location for my important files, and is now capable of performing server related tasks that were previously handled by the AppleTV. This is my 4th attempt at a NAS solution for the Spitfire Network, the most expensive, the most capable, and finally…the most likely to survive. For a quick NAS summary:
| Eclipse (Gaming PC) | Too loud, power intensive, resource hog no redundancy |  |
| Apple Extreme Wireless Station + USB HDD | Ran drive continuously leading to failure no redundancy |  |
| Linksys NAS 200 | Ridiculously Poor Performance, Noisy |  |
| Atom / FreeNAS | Best of all worlds but expensive, large footprint |  |
I tried all the cheap alternatives to buckling down and forking over the cash for a decent NAS / Server but in the end the only lesson is one we should all be familiar with already - You get what you pay for. In trying to be cheap, all I got in return was lost data (Apple Base Station) and unusable performance (Linksys + hosting files on my gaming pc). Not that a FreeNAS solution has to be expensive however. These days many people have a spare PC in their garage or something. All it needs to be given new life as a FreeNAS server is:
x86 Processor
128 MB ram
32 MB disk space
Network card
The catch is that your hardware has to be supported by FreeBSD, but I’d be willing to bet that if it’s anything similar to a commercial computer, you are all set. I looked into the option of buying a cheap, used PC for under $100 on craigslist but in the end I decided to build a new PC specifically for a few reasons:
1. I knew exactly what hardware it would have, with warranties.
2. By using an Atom chipset it has power consumption comparable to a netbook, which is preferable to a power hungry P4
3. The Atom D510MO chipset is fanless, making the entire computer almost silent
4. Gigabit Ethernet (up from 10/100 on the linksys nas)
I bought a nice looking glossy black case from Newegg, which was running a pretty nice deal on it as long as I signed up for spam, and sold the Linksys NAS for $5 profit. I had the disk drives already from the linksys raid setup, so in the end I just had to buy the case, atom board/cpu combo, and 1 GB of RAM for it. Not too much cost to expand its use greatly, but if you were starting from scratch it might be a big investment. So give it a try with your old garage PC first. I paired the computer with a 23” Samsung 2333HD Display, which is kind of a misnomer. The actual NAS is capable of displaying a typical Unix/bsd console, but it’s really meant to run in a corner or a closet without a keyboard or monitor hooked up. In fact, there is no GUI display included. The monitor is really displaying video from my macbook pro, which makes the computer give the appearance of a hackintosh. It’s also a nice 1080p HDTV. The actual Atom computer runs without being plugged into the monitor, unless I’m debugging something.
So I spent all this money getting decent hardware, at least the software was free! You’ll need to decide between a “full install” or “embedded” install. The full install is like a typical OS installed onto your disk. The embedded install is copied to a USB Flash Drive which is then booted off of, and it runs FreeNAS in a virtual disk created out of RAM. The full install is easier to customize, but the embedded install is blistering fast and allows your hard drives to spin down when idle. I went with the embedded because it’s very important to me for the idle disks to spin down. This saves wear and tear, heat (remember it’s fanless), and power ($). You can’t repartition the boot drive, so I had to add another flash drive to run my custom server apps like rssdler and python. Running these apps off the main data HDDs would prevent them from spinning down (they’d never be idle). Flash drives are cheap SSDs and it works great for NAS purposes.
After the initial console setup, you can unplug the monitor and control the system via a web interface on any other computer on the network. This makes it very easy to choose services, set them up, add disks and shares… You really don’t have to be a pro to get it to work reliable and consistently. I followed a tutorial, added my two hard drives as a redundant software RAID 1 array, and added windows and apple file sharing in less than 20 minutes. Performance was a ten-fold increase over my Linksys NAS, averaging about 40MB/s transfers which I’m guessing is limited by the software RAID 1. But don’t take my word for it, here’s some fancy looking pictures:
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My Atom server blows away any of my previous NAS attempts, and I’m finally happy and able to not worry anymore about my hard disks crashing and taking all my stuff with them like the great hard drive crashes of 2003. It’s far quieter and faster than the Linksys NAS, and I can run apps like rssdler off the server alone. This means the AppleTV, which is already slow, doesn’t have to use its few resources on downloading for me anymore. It uses waay less power than my gaming pc did when it stayed on to serve files, and adds the redundancy of two drives, protecting against hardware failure. The loss of one hard drive wouldn’t make me lose any data. The web interface is easy to use, and since it’s a mini-atx form factor, it’s got plenty of room for additional hard drive space so I can expand it over time. The Linksys and many other NAS devices only support a maximum of two disks. And did I mention how quiet it is?
The only disadvantages I could think of was the additional cost for having an additional computer. If you have an old PC and could throw it in the closet or something, this disadvantage may not mean much for you. Also, the mini-atx form factor eats up some desk space for me, but I want to keep it close to my other computers. Again if you threw it in a closet you might not care. I’m decent enough with Linux/Unix/bsd commands that I didn’t have any trouble setting it up, but if you’re a windows lover then buying a commercial NAS might be up your alley.
So in summary, I am totally blown away by FreeNAS and all it’s capable of. I tried everything else, but sometimes when you need the job done right you just have to do it yourself. My next tech post will probably be about AT&T U-Verse, how it’s integrated into my new house, changed my network, and reacted to my experiments.
Check out the free software at: http://freenas.org/freenas
While I was in town for Aviation Day 2009, my dad wanted to go “netbook hunting”. He has seen my Aspire One D150 and since they are the greatest thing ever, we headed out to best buy in CF to look. My biggest concern was to find him something that would fit his needs more than a toy. He is still using my Dell L400 as his primary computer at home, which is getting old and slow. I tried to explain to him that computers themselves don’t really slow down, but he keeps trying to run newer versions of programs like AOL that eat up more and more of his little 128mb of ram.
Best Buy had a few notebooks and I was surprised to find a whole section devoted to netbooks, but their selection was not that great. I was able to show him some of the main differences in netbooks like screen size vs resolution, glossy vs matte, SSD vs HDD, etc but they still only had a few brands. I also tried to show him smaller full notebooks, and explained the sacrifices made by netbooks like the CD drive. I also showed him the low end macbook but he was pretty set on the netbooks, so we headed out to Micro Center in Lyndhurst.
I have to say I much prefer Micro Center to Best Buy, sorry Will. They have a better selection and the salespeople aren’t quite as obnoxiously pushy, although they are still hovering around. Micro Center did have everything BB had and more, from a $150 Eee PC to a holy-shit Alienware mainframe replacement. He wanted portability to take it to a class at CSU, so the main things we looked at were battery life, screen size, and we stuck with HDD versions.
In the end we were left with two netbooks with 1024x600 10.1” screens, an MSI Wind and the Acer Aspire One D250 (the slightly bigger version of mine). In the end, the deciding factor was the keyboard. The Acer won out because the MSI keyboard had shrunk the comma, period, and forward slash keys, among others. Once I pointed that out, he noticed and didn’t like that. The computer is basically the same as mine, with the same CPU/RAM/HDD combo I have. His screen is a little bigger at 10.1” vs my 8.9”, but uses the same resolution. I found that while using his, I preferred the 10.1 screen to my own. I still like the small physical dimensions of mine though, for it to fit in my flight bag. He also had nice features like bluetooth, a 6-cell battery for 7 hours of use, and mouse buttons that are under the trackpad! A little jealous…yeah maybe.. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a traveling laptop.
Since we were in the area, we took it up to CSU to make sure he could connect to the university wireless and get him set up with their provided antivirus. Getting on the network there was highly unusual, so I’m glad I could help him out there. And it was fun throwing the help desk off when we showed up to get the antivirus CD. They kept asking me for my ID when he was holding his, of course they assumed I was the student! Since they only provided the software by CD, we had to use a lab computer to copy it to a flashdrive. He seemed comfortable with the computer and I think it will work well for him.
Ultraportable laptops, or netbooks, are the fastest growing segment of the PC market right now. My first encounter with one was through Krhainos and his Acer Aspire One. I didn’t understand the point of it at the time. It was slow, the screen size was tiny, the keyboard was hard to use. It wasn’t until a few months later that I started to realize just how useful one could be. I travel a lot for work, staying in a hotel overnight 2 days a week. I tried to take my macbook pro around with me, but it was heavy and I even made a small dent in the side by forgetting it was there and pushing my seat back into the case. So I tried to get by with my iPhone. It’s nice to be able to use the internet at any time without having to carry my laptop around, but the experience isn’t quite the same. You have to keep zooming in and out, there’s no java support, and the screen is just too small to use for more than a few minutes. So one night a hotel, I started to think about my old Dell L400, and how it could be neat to have one again. It was a small, thin laptop, especially for those days. It had external drives, but that was ok because I wouldn’t need them on the road. By today’s standards it’s pretty slow, but again I thought I could get by because I was only using it for internet browsing. I searched but couldn’t find much right away. The one I did find referred to it as a netbook. I thought back to Jo’s Aspire One and realized that I could get a new netbook for about the same cost, with the same features and probably not quite as slow. Being a little impatient, by the end of the day I had talked a craigslist seller down to $240 for his week-old Aspire One (retail $379), and the experiment began.
I like my 15” Macbook pro for its dedicated video card. It’s great to go to LAN parties in Ohio and not have to take much more than it and a mouse. It’s getting a little old, but still handles most things pretty well. The new Acer is great too in that it’s super light, more durable, and cheeeaaap while still giving me good enough performance to run the latest operating systems and browsers. It’s great to be able to use a real web browser, AIM, iTunes, etc again at the same time. If you want to know how wide the screen is, the white part of my website just fills up the screen (1024x600). My biggest realization was that while I enjoyed having both performance and ultra-portability, I didn’t need both at the same time. The Acer is as small as my flight manuals and fits nicely into my kitbag at work. Once I have the software set up just the way I like, I plan to leave it there at work for good. I don’t need an ultra portable laptop at home, and I wouldn’t have to drag it through security each time I went to work.
The small size does have some limitations. The keyboard is 91% full size, so it’s a little smaller and takes a little bit of use to get up to speed with. Once I stopped trying to rest my palms on the base of the laptop I got a lot faster! I do like that Acer didn’t make any strange alterations in key placement like the Dells. I like the page up and page down buttons near the arrow keys, since the screen size is smaller both the arrows and page up/down get used a lot. The touchpad also takes some getting used to, since the buttons are on the left and right sides. It’s often hard to press the buttons. They are in a little groove and it’s hard to tell by touch what is the groove, what is a button, and what is the touchpad. It results in the mouse cursor getting pissed off and flying rapidly all over the screen. I am a big keyboard command person anyways and try to use a mouse as little as possible. Try to stick to tapping the mousepad for a click.
My Aspire One is the 160Gb Hard drive version, which means Windows XP was the default OS instead of Linpus Linux. I like XP, it’s compatible with pretty much everything these days, but Linux has its uses too. Like when a hotel wants you to pay for your internet and you don’t want to… So I was interested in installing a linux build on it. Jo had the idea of installing Moblin, short for mobile-linux. It’s a linux build designed for netbooks. It had some really great ideas such as a toolbar that hides to save screen space. When you’re only dealing with 1024x600 pixels, things like the start menu just waste your precious screen space. You want to give the web browser or whatever program as much room as you can. It was also able to boot in about 5 seconds. That is pretty impressive I suppose. However, the entire setup was just far too limiting. The OS is basically crippled, lacking almost every feature you take for granted in an OS, like samba networking and the ability to change the desktop wallpaper. Installing everything you actually needed took a lot of time and increased that precious boot time up to all the other operating systems. The chrome web browser it came with could be maximized, but a third party install of firefox couldn’t. You were left with wasted screen space, the very thing moblin was designed to prevent. The multiple desktop feature was impossible to use without a mouse, and more hassle than it was worth. Little things in Moblin also make it aggravating to use. After typing in a URL to the browser, it wouldn’t change focus to the actual web page. You’d try to page up/down and the cursor would be in the URL field still. You had to then take the mouse, and click on the page just to move it around. Ugh. So I ended up giving up on Moblin. I understand it’s a beta, but it’s not ready to be used as a full time OS and so I won’t.
I do love OS X, and so with some prompting by BobOmega, I started to look into turning it into a hackintosh by installing OS X. As I read about it, it got good reviews except for one part. The Atheros wifi card in the laptop wouldn’t work because apple doesn’t use their cards and there were no drivers for them. What good is a netbook without wireless internet? However, the Aspire One uses a standard mini PCI-E wifi card, so it was just a matter of buying a compatible card (Dell/Broadcom 1490) off ebay for about $15 and opening it up to replace the card. It arrived during Quakecon, but after a few days I finally sat down and spent about 2 hours performing the surgery. I had read a lot about what to do, and some horror stories, but all went surprisingly well. Removing the keyboard was the hardest part, taking about an hour itself. I popped off the F8 key while trying to release the little tab underneath it, but fortunately it snapped back on easily when the keyboard is removed. Afterwards, it was just a simple matter of unplugging the old card and plugging the new one in. I attached the wires for the antenna and closed it back up. It detected the new card right away and I was online instantly. My “macbook mini” is complete!
OS X has become my main OS now. It gives me all the networking features of linux while being a good-looking and powerful OS. With the Spaces multi-desktop program, I can have a full screen web brower up, and press Opt + left/right to get to other virtual desktops with my AIM, iTunes, whatever, using just the keyboard. It’s easy, pretty, powerful, and user friendly. Everything a real OS should be. I see now why netbooks are becoming so popular.
vid:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060309/ap_on_hi_te/origami_unfolded
““It ideally brings the best of what a Windows PC is and marries it to what the best of a very capable consumer electronic device is,” Mitchell said.”
WTF? OMG I thought marriage was defined as between a man and a woman! This is outrage! What’s next? Hardware marrying software? What is this world coming to? The government should take action to prevent this kind of thing!
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I am a professional pilot, tech enthusiast, and avid PC gamer. I post about all sorts of things, but you can click a category above to see what I like the most.
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@krhainos tell me about it 3 days ago. |
