Media Server – FreeNAS

 Geek, Media Server  No Responses »
May 302010
 

I’ve never been completely happy with my server running Ubuntu 10.04. I do really like the OS but integration with OS X was always a little shaky. Before the upgrade to 10.04 I wasn’t able to use Time Machine with the network share. After the upgrade I could use Time Machine for wireless back ups but lost the ability to have multiple shares.

Whilst Ubuntu is fairly lightweight it was still running the horribly slow Intel Celeron processor at 100% most of the time which created a lot of heat – not really good for a server. This was with all the eye candy turned off.

I decided to replace the OS with FreeNAS as I realised the server was practically just a network attached storage drive. FreeNAS is a free (obviously) operating system that changes any old PC into a NAS with inbuilt support for AFP, Time Machine, UPnP, BitTorrent and rSync. This basically sums up what I was using the server for so FreeNAS is perfect for me.

Installation was quick and easy and after transferring all of the data over I was set up within a few minutes. I’ve now got multiple shares and Time Machine is backing up to a dedicated back up share. Jordan’s new Macbook is doing the same.

So everything is running much cooler. The  processor is currently running at 0%! All the things that I wanted to work are working so I can’t really ask for more!

In Communist Slovenia Holiday Books You

 Personal, Travel  No Responses »
May 162010
 

Jordan and I had pretty much ruled out going on holiday this year. I’m not quite sure why as we are doing better for money at the moment then ever before but we also have a huge amount of outgoings this year including student fees and buying Jordan a new laptop for when she starts her Masters.

After deciding we could probably get away with a short weekend in Europe we started looking at Amsterdam, Berlin or maybe somewhere in Italy. Whilst these are all places we would really like to go, they tend to get fairly expensive once you choose a decent hotel or a time that is not freezing cold.

This evening we sat half watching a ‘moving abroad’ type programme on Sky and came across a couple wanting to buy a place in Slovenia.We’ve never really considered Slovenia but only the other day I was saying that I’d like to see more of Eastern(ish) Europe as it tends to contain some really striking architecture. So we had a quick look at WikiTravel (one of the best websites around if you’re interested in travel) and really liked what we saw.

After some pretty quick decisions (which is how we usually we do this kind of thing) we ended up booking 4 nights over the August bank holiday in a 4* hotel for a really reasonable price.

Now to start planning what to do. We both like the look of Bled – a town an hour outside of the capital Ljubljana. There also seem to be quite a few very picturesque castles around.

So it’s hardly your average holiday but we both agree that it’s best to get these places out of the way before they are discovered by more people and become commercialised. Needless to say I’m looking forward to it.

More on the Milton Keynes Fibre Optic Internet Trial

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  No Responses »
May 102010
 

It’s not much but I’ve got a little more  information on the fibre optic internet trial that is supposed to be happening in Milton Keynes (Walnut Tree specifically) over this year. I thought I’d post the leaflet that can be obtained from the Openreach vans that are dotted around the area.

I went to the web address on the leaflet which doesn’t really give any hard facts. However if you look at the table detailing deployment dates it lists Milton Keynes as being fibre enabled in December 2010. This is a fair bit later than the June date that was being tossed around a few months ago. I’m hoping this is referring to the rest of Milton Keynes and not Walnut Tree as we are supposed to be getting it first. If we have to wait until December then I feel sorry for the rest of the city.

There is still no word on which ISPs are going to be in the trial which is annoying.

I suppose at least the fact that there are vans around and this leaflet is being handed out mean that something is being done. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.

Media Server – Upgrading to Lucid Lynx and Troubles With Netatalk

 Geek, Media Server  1 Response »
May 042010
 

I wasn’t planning on upgrading my server to the newly released Ubuntu 10.04 (codenamed Lucid Lynx) just yet but after reading many positive reviews I decided to give it a shot. It is after all a Long Term Support release which means that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) will be supporting this version for three years as opposed to the usual 18 months.

I decided on using Ubuntu’s inbuilt Update Manager as I’ve never experienced any issues with it so far. I also have everything backed up so I could always roll back to 9.10 if anything happened. The upgrade took an age. Bear in mind though that my server is a rather ageing 2GHz single core Celeron with 512MB DDR RAM. It’s not fast by anyone’s standards. I left it running over night and when I woke up everything had installed correctly and restarted.

This isn’t going to be a review or anything as I use my server for serving files and media so I rarely actually look at the desktop.

Now it seems that Netatalk (the open source implimentation of Apple’s AFP file sharing protocol) is included in this version of Ubuntu which upgraded my 2.0.4 installation. I had tried upgrading Netatalk a couple of weeks ago and gave up due to a username and password prompt when connecting to shares that didn’t recognise either my server’s login details or my Macbook Pro’s. I decided to give 2.0.5 another go seeing as it was already installed.

My shares had stopped working so I ventured into the AppleVolumes.default config file and reentered my shares. They are…

/media/storage/Media "Media"
/media/storage/backup "Back Up"

For some reason this didn’t seem to work. When using ‘Connect to server’ from my Macbook Pro I was able to choose which share to mount but once chosen it would fail.

I spent most of the morning fiddling with options and restarting Netatalk. Finally I realised that mounting the root directory would work correctly.

/ "Root"

I tried /media which again worked. Even

/media/storage

worked. But as soon as I added the final folder it would refuse to mount. I have had to leave it for the time being. Hopefully someone more clued up on the complexities of Netatalk will be able to shed some light on things.

On the plus side it means that I can finally use Time Machine with the share. This was the feature touted for 2.0.5 which tempted me to upgrade in the first place. Time Machine is far more picky in Snow Leopard than it was on Leopard so just using the terminal command…

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

doesn’t do the trick anymore. Snow Leopard required a lot more work before Netatalk 2.0.5 came along. Now Netatalk basically pretends it’s a authorised share such as a computer running Leopard or a Time Capsule.

So my upgrade was a half success. On the plus side I can now back up over the network. On the down side I now have to make do with the one network share instead of the nicely organised ‘Media and ‘Back Up’ ones I had previously. Admittedly the ‘Back Up’ wasn’t really doing much without Time Machine so I supposed I haven’t lost out too badly.