Category Archives: Home IT

Ubuntu 10.04 SSD Tweaks

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Reduce “swappiness” to 0

This prevents the swap file from being used unless it is actually needed, preventing unnecessary write cycles on the drive.

Code:
vm.swappiness=0

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf by using your favorite editor :
$sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

If the line doesn’t exist, you will need to create it.

After reboot vm.swappiness is 0

Enable TRIM (if applicable)

Uninstall proprietary (ie, video card) drivers first. The 10.6 cats included didn’t like the newer kernel and it really garbled up the video driver install process.

Update to a newer kernel. 2.6.33+

Edit your /etc/fstab file so your SSD line looks like this:

UUID=of your SSD here / ext4 noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1

After reboot TRIM should function.

Links I found useful:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php…1&postcount=43 (swapiness syntax)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9740235 (fstab discussion)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD (link to Kernel versions and an explanation of how to update)

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2069761 (incredibly informative forum posting about SSD drives in general)

Enjoy!

–Nat

Municipal Broadband – Broadband Internet for Everyone

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Today Ars Technica posted a couple great articles about broadband in the United States, one covering how communities are stepping up and providing their own high speed access while the other covered the new Broadband Plan set before congress.  What interests me most is the support for broadband for all of the U.S., including rural areas.  The FCC recently proposed a plan that would set the goal of all households receiving a minimum of 4mbps internet at a reasonable price by 2020 – a little above the typical DSL speed of 3mbps and about 80 times faster than 56k dial up.  To put this into perspective, that would equate to download speeds of about 500KB per second or the ability to stream Netflix in high quality while still doing some low impact web surfing.   When you consider the number of internet connected homes that have more than one concurrent internet user, it is easy to imagine that this is constraining.  On the other hand, the number of homes and users connected to the internet via dial up and satellite that technologies such as flash and streaming video have rendered quite obsolete it is obvious that this is a great step in the right direction.  The plan also has a goal of 100mbps in 100 million homes by 2020 as well in urban areas.

What is troubling, however is how far behind the rest of the developed world we are in internet access.  Given that the information age is here and the very competitiveness of our schools and workforce relies the internet and related services it is difficult to understand how we are not more ambitious.  That is where the Municipality driven broadband speeds shine as a great example.  In the article linked above, it is noted how the area around the Wisconsin Dells has urban internet hosted by the city that features two tiers; 10mbps for $50 per month and 5mbps for $40.  Using federal grant money and private investment, they are going to push this service to all of their users via fiber optics, including those far out in the rural areas that currently only have access to dial up or satellite.  The community feels that this will allow them to sustain a thriving rural atmosphere that doesn’t make moving into town for internet required to work remotely or take classes online necessary.

Some might think this is a waste of federal tax funds, but for all the projects we endeavor on with our federal funds this one not only delivers value to constituents but enables our country to continue its rural heritage and remain relevant in an ever increasingly connected world.  I am really thankful that Butler-Bremer offered DSL to the farm when I was there as I feel it was critical to my development as an IT professional, hopefully more rural towns will follow suit.

I mean, what is life without You Tube?  Empty!

–Nat

Home Data Protection Schemes, pt. 1

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Having more and more digital “stuff” that’s somewhat important to retain, I’ve started looking at some solutions.  Already, we put all of our “important” files on our Windows Home Server because it has disk redundancy and is available from anywhere internet is accessible.  Our pictures, tax information, etc. is all stored electronically and it is important that it be protected.  The question then becomes how data is protected from there.

What are we protecting against is probably the first and most important item to detail.  What could happen?

  • Windows Home Server failure (hardware or software) resulting in corrupted data.
  • House fire/natural disaster.
  • Theft.

After that, we have to decide how much data loss would be acceptable.  If we could potentially lose thirty days worth of data, is that reasonable?  One day?  One hour?  One year?

Tiered backups is also something that has to be considered.  Some data, like important documents, likely needs to be more secured and backed up more often than the photo collection. The photo collection likely needs to be backed up more often and securely than the TV show collection, etc.

Some strategies will come in follow up posts…

–Nat

Setting up the Internet CS:S Server

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This was very helpful information:

Call this entry CSS1

it should be like so

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS1
Incoming ports: 27020 – 27039
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27020 – 27039
Port type: Check TCP

Press submit

Now we need to create another, this time call it CSS2:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS2
Incoming ports: 1200 – 1200
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 1200 – 1200
Port type: Check UDP

Press submit

Now we must make a final one, we will call it CSS3:

Check the enable box
Service name: CSS3
Incoming ports: 27000 – 27015
Destination IP Address: “Your Internal IP here, for example 192.168.2.4”
*Destination ports: 27000 – 27015
Port type: Check UDP

Courtesy of FPSBanana, a site that seems to live on in Google’s cache.

Server config generator is here…

The server is up, by the way 🙂

–Nat

An adventure in storage expansion

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In this great age of rapidly expanding storage, I’ve decided to stop throwing things away in a digital sense.  We are talking storage that is under $0.07 per gigabyte.  This means that each 3.5 megabyte picture I retain costs $0.00002.  Someday the real issue will be keeping track of these things, but that is a separate discussion.

First up, the fun part of this post.

Before

Before, 1.59TB of available space

After

After, 2.96 TB of available space

One 1.5TB just doubled the storage capacity of my Windows Home Server.   When I put the 750 GB and 1TB drive in there, those were the $100 drives of the time.  The 1.5TB drive cost $102 shipped.

Now, here is the complicated part.  They (the hard drive industry as a whole) are changing how the data is laid out on hard drives that is not very compatible with Windows XP and Server 2003 (which is what WHS is based on.)  There are a number of technological issues at stake here that a number of sources like Ars Technica have covered this in depth so I will spare you that.  Basically, you get bad performance with the new drives on old operating systems – and WHS is effected.

What do you need to do?  Well, you basically have two options.  On most drives, there will be jumpers on there like there were on hard drives for a long time that limited their capacity to 2GB for 16 bit file systems that will fake out the operating system.  The caveat?  You can only have one partition per drive.  If you read the above article, you’ll know that this is intended for big drives, so you’ll be committed to something like a 2TB C: drive if you go that route, which is pretty ugly.

The second option is to use software to “realign” the partition after it has been created which allows for whatever layout you want.  The caveat here?  You could lose your data and any time you redo a partition you are going to be using this software.

Being the idiot I am, I didn’t use the jumper to fake out the operating system and I promptly put data on the drive by adding into the WHS storage pool (which you have to do to get the partition created that you can later realign.)  I tried to go back in and save myself with the bootable software, but this dropped the 1.5TB drive out of the pool and corrupted all my PC backups.  Then I shut it all down and did the jumper thing, which also made WHS freak out until I told it I really wanted to drop the drive out of the pool permanently and added it back in again.

Moral of the story – I wasted about three hours of my life and lost about 300GB of PC backups because I didn’t take time to set the jumper first.  If you are buying a hard drive for WHS or XP in the next few months, you are going to need to be aware of this issue.  Trust me, the jumper is easier and apparently neccessary with WHS as covered in the forums over at www.wegotserved.com.

–Nat

Pandora, how have I ignored you for so long?

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www.pandora.com – the awesome streaming radio site that is free.

A while back I had tried it out but wasn’t too happy with what I was hearing… it uses a system where you give “thumbs up” to music you like and likewise a “thumbs down” to music you don’t like.  I was finding that I wasn’t hearing anything that I didn’t already have in my collection or heard way too many times on the radio.  So I stopped using it until just a few weeks ago.

I decided to try to a whole new genre compared to what I already listened to.  Say what you want, but I get a kick out of the Lady Gaga “Bad Romance” and I have listened to pop music, well, ever, so I thought it would be a good way to hear some of the hits I had likely missed out on.  So, I fired up Pandora, started a station with that song and proceded to thumb up everything I liked on that station.

That’s the wrong way to do it.  The station quickly lost its focus from pop dance beats into something more resembling a pop variety station.  Fed up with that, I decided to move back to my Metallica channel to see if I could salvage it.  I undid all my previous ratings and saved the “thumbs up” for only the stuff I really liked.  Evntually it happened upon some Iced Earth, which is great… Hammerfall, which I also really enjoy.  My Metallica station has morphed into a late nineties to current thrash/power metal station (artists like Dream Evil, Testament and Dragon Fire) with some Anthrax, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest thrown in for good measure.  Giving death metal genre songs a couple thumbs down and the consistentcy of quality has been great and I keep getting introduced to new bands.

Thanks Pandora =)  I am actually thinking of buying a premium account for the ad removal and the higher bit rate music.  I don’t know if that works with all of the set top boxes, like the Roku, that act as Pandora receivers for your more typical home stereo, but I am hopeful…

Check out Pandora if you haven’t yet, it is a great way to enjoy a lot of free music.

–Nat

If I post this here, I will be motivated

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Anandtech is looking for writers – I’ve been an incredibly faithful reader of this site since I went to college back in the fall of 2002 and it would be a dream come true in a literal sense if even once I was able to get an article on there.  Even more awesome than making the front page of Slickdeals.net wight my first deal posting.

What I plan on writing in order to submit for this position are:

  • A review on the powerline network adapters I bought from woot.com right before the new year.
  • A “how to” on how to P2V a XP machine with all free software.   This is a useful approach for a number of reasons.
  • An opinion piece on something.   Probably the current state of XBMC and how it can be useful and where it seems to come up short.
  • Some new “news blog” posts and a mix in of some of the posts I have already published.

There it is, out in the open.  I have pretty much psyched myself out of even trying to do this – but I owe it to myself to give it a shot.

Wish me luck.

–Nat

Adblock Plus, you rock…

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There are some pretty annoying advertisements out there.  Facebook is annoying enough since the whole right pane of the page is ads.  Other sites like Dailytech are worse with their “Vibrant” advertising, where the popups come when you mistakenly move your cursor over highlighted text.  There is a simple remedy to get rid of this crud when using Firefox, and its name is Adblock Plus.

  1. Install the latest version of Firefox from www.mozilla.org
  2. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  3. Click “Get Add-ons”
  4. Type “adblock plus” into the search box
  5. Click “Add to Firefox”
  6. Click through the installation
  7. You’ll have to restart Firefox
  8. *Important* – now you actually have to enable Adblock Plus
  9. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  10. Under extensions, you’ll see Adblock Plus, click “options”
  11. Open Filters –> Add filter subscription
  12. I’ve been using the first one, Easylist USA, make sure you hit “apply”
  13. Under options, make sure Adblock Plus is enabled
  14. Viola, all done!
It just works...

All the usual garbage on the right is gone.

Do you have any awesome browser extensions you’d like to share?  Leave feed back below 🙂

–Nat

Zune Update 4.2

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Running Windows update with the Zune software installed gets you a little point release upgrade.  Ars Technica is all excited about how this software added some mysterious phone support.  Myself, I am thrilled that xvid, avi, and divx are all recognized by the player!  Even though they have to be re-encoded to work on the Zune, they now show up in the library and the re-encode is handled natively by the Zune software which uses at least two cores and seems to give good audio/video quality.  Previously, I had to re-encode all the crap from the internet into .mp4 or .wmv manually and separately.  This additional codec support is going to be a huge time and effort saver for me.  Evidently the Zune HD will play these files back natively in the future, which would be perfect.  With anyluck, they’ll support .mkv files in the next few months too, totally eliminating all that messy manual re-encoding 🙂

Which, incidentally, brings me to the big new iPad.  Its codec support is pretty sucktastic and speaks to how tightly integrated it will have to be with iTunes to get crap onto that device.  It really is just a big iPod touch…  it gets less and less cool the more I think about it.

I would take a 7″ Zune HD for $300 though :p  (Please, Kristin?)

–Nat

Creative Gigaworks S700, RIP

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It was a sad day yesterday when I realized that my amp had perished on my prized set of PC speakers.  The Creative Gigaworks was a primo set from 2005, boasting 560 watts RMS of power (probably not really…), 5.1 sound with very solid 8″ subwoofer and remote control to accompany its THX certification.  They were very nice, and they were also $350+.

Perhaps the sad thing is that I should be happy they lasted so long, threads like this one are easy to find with google.  There is evidently a 105 page thread about the failures of these units on Creative’s support forums.  Evidently the glue they pasted over the internal wiring of the amp/subwoofer turned out to be conductive.  Smart.

With that, I am writing off Creative’s speaker offerings.  Their sound cards and portable media players have already turned me off, I guess this is the last straw.  When you buy the most expensive set of speakers currently available, you expect them to last a decade or more.   Like the beige plastic Altec Lansings that I have been kicking around for years…

–Nat