Micks' Musings

Who needs backups? My parents went on a holiday to Europe last year. My father had a new Digital SLR and on the last day in Italy, just before they were about to return to Australia, it was stolen. If he had backed up his photos on to a laptop, for example, he would have them now. The camera is replaceable but the photos were not. I am sure everyone has a story about lost data. Everyone needs backups. So how can you backup a file server when the amount of data far exceeds any backup media you can afford? Get a second file server? In my case I make sure the stuff I do not want to lose is backed up. Pictures, media that would be hard to replace or take a lot of effort and time to reproduce (I spent nearly a year converting LPs - vinyl - to digital form) and scanned documents are all backed up to external disks and onto DVDs. I think my family have the message now. One of my sisters has bought a 1TB external drive and a 320GB portable disk for off site backups. My mother has a 500GB ex...

In the Big W Christmas Catalogue is a TV Zapper. Imagine a device that you can use to turn off any TV in the world! Imagine what will happen if you use it in a bar to turn off the football or basketball! TV Rage!!! Perhaps it just mutes the sound? Unlikely but if true it may save a few lives!! I must be missing something. If you do not like the TV being on in a bar why don't you just move further away or go to another bar which doesn't have a TV. Here is a hint which will help some people to live a little longer - most of the people at the bar want the TV on!!! Here is another helpful hint - some of those people have been drinking and get violent when they are drunk!!

This is not a reference to The Who song "mama's got a squeezebox", it is a hands on account of the Logitech Squeezebox Boom and Classic (or Squeezebox 3). The Logitech Squeezebox (originally by Slim Devices but Logitech knows a good thing when it buys it) is a Network Streaming Music Player. There are a few models but I will only be commenting on the Boom and Classic. The Boom has speakers and the Classic connects to your stereo so the two devices have two different purposes. Both can connect to your home network using wireless or Ethernet. You will need to set up a Squeezebox Server or use the online storage option. I have a computer that is on all the time so I installed the server software on that. Both squeezeboxes, once configured with the Network details, found the squeezebox server and can then be configured using the web interface. The Boom is located in the main bedroom and has been set up as an alarm clock, it displays the time when not playing music and i...

I have been using Windows Vista Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC for several years. In that time the Music Library has been polished, album art and track information cleaned up so all albums have the correct information associated with them and nothing shows up as unknown in the artist view. I can tolerate some things, such as podcasts , without album names. With Windows 7 this was not the case. After adding the music folders to the Music library there were 74 tracks listed as unknown. This brings us to the first recommendation - if you can you should create a readonly network share for your music so that Windows Media Player cannot change anything. If Windows Media Player does not like your tags it can end up removing them - I ended up with over a thousand tracks with the carefully crafted album information removed. Luckily I had a backup (and had not overwritten it). This was probably caused by the lookup of album information that Windows Media Player does. I have turned off every...

Well the fix lasted a week and then the problem occured again. This is a Media Centre PC so I think it is time to reformat and reinstall. A clean install will take about an hour, install codecs - about 5 minutes, configure Media Centre, tuning TV, setting the locations for Music, videos, Recorded TV - about another hour. Just researching the problems takes that long.

A friends Media Centre PC was failing to boot with a message reported a problem with \Boot\BCD and address 0xc000000f. Not something that the non-technical person wants to see. The owner of the media centre is a technical person and he found one of the solutions - use the Vista Recovery Disk to repair and restart Vista. This procedure fixed the problem for the first reboot but it returned as soon as Windows Update installed something and restarted. And it repeated over and over again. I had used a tool called EasyBCD to modify the Vista boot loader and some googling produced the homepage for this utility and in the troubleshooting section there was a description of how to fix the very problem my friend was having. Solution one was the same as what had already been tried but there were several other solutions and the second one of these worked. Removing and recreating the Boot Loader data using EasyBCD fixed the problem. Check out EasyBCD and the solutions to Vista Boot Loader problems ...

There were two of them in front of me at the lights. Just seeing two other bicycles is unusual enough during winter but there were two Echidna helmets on top of the riders as well! I didn't see any magpies so the cable ties were doing their job well!

This is a rant about spammers. I just received an email claiming that I have "received a Hallmark E-Card!" Several clues indicate something is wrong. 1. There is no name for the person sending it. 2. It invites you to click on a link to see the card 3. The link is to a site with an IP address (string of numbers) and not a name. It should point to "hallmark.com " as that is what the email address says. 4. Firefox thinks it is an email scam and warns you. 5. I have no friends so no one will be sending me a e-card (actually not true for me or anyone else)! The other links in the email point to Hallmark but I bet the link will bring up a nice picture of some pills. How many people click on the links in their email without checking where they are actually pointing to?

I have been fine tuning the setup on my Fedora 11 File server. I have a PrOffice (yes it is spelt with one oh) Upsonic UPS that does not come with software but had a peice of paper with a link to download the Windows version of the software. Now that I am using Linux I did a search and found the Linux version (they even had an AMD64 Linux version). Google is your friend! This works fine (it looks like a Java application and looks identical under Linux to how it does under Windows). I had lost the serial number but my "friend" provided the answer. Why is software that is tied to a particular type and brand of hardware protected by a serial number? Especially a serial number that was supplied on a small, loose, piece of paper that was probably lost five minutes after the first time the software was installed and is probably thrown away in the box nine times out of ten!

I have now commissioned our new file server. The two disks reporting reallocated sectors have stabilised and there has been no change to the number for ten days. My research (a quote from the Seagate support forums) indicated that there are a lot (maybe even thousands) of spare sectors on the 1.5TB drives so I decided to go ahead and commission the new file server after adding a sixth disk (a Samsung 1.5TB) to take the space to 7TB. Using my own blog post to add and grow the raid worked fine after I fixed the " mdadm --grow" example to include the "-n 6" parameter. Without that the extra disk was kept as a spare disk ! There is one other thing to do - use " tunefs " to remove the reserved space that Linux automatically keeps on each disk. For a storage medium why keep 5% or more unused? See http://www.walkernews.net/2007/02/28/tune2fs-increase-linux-free-disk-space/ for more details on how to do this and why you might want to. I will wait a few week...

WARNING COMPUTER JARGON! I have been test driving the Windows 7 beta and Release Candidate (RC) on an old Athlon XP 3200+ based PC. This is a 64bit CPU so I installed both the 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows 7 before settling on the 64bit version when it managed to find all my hardware. Athlon XP 64, Abit AN8, 2GB DDR400 RAM, 200GB HD, Avermedia AverTV Duo Hybrid PCI-E, ATI 2600Pro Video card, Receiver and Remote (MS compatible). Windows 7 beta and RC installed cleanly, installed all the drivers and things worked. I tested the new media centre and it supported both digital tuners, both analog tuners and the FM radio that were present on the TV Tuner card. Being in Canberra there is nothing on Analog TV that is not on digital so for a production media centre PC I would not bother with the Analog tuners but it was nice to get FM radio working. I still occasionally listen to the radio. The music library is nicer than Vista except it refuses to add all my music - it always seems to be...

WARNING TECHNICAL CONTENT! I am sure this is a familiar story. Our media collection is spread out over two NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices and two computers on about 8 hard disks. There is no redundancy - if a disk dies it takes the media with it - and the only backup startegy is to write to DVDs - a waste as we have several bookcases full of the original CDs and DVDs!! It is time for a new file server with redundancy - in other words a RAID based file system. I tried out a few options. Windows Home Server looked promising but it doesn't do RAID 5. It does do mirroring and you can add any disk you like - USB, SATA, PATA, Hard Disks of any size you have but to get redundancy means telling it to duplicate a directory. This means you need twice as many disks as RAID 5 which uses one extra disk. So in the end I decided to use a Software Raid solution based on the recenylt released Fedora 11 (64 bit release) Linux release which also included Virtualisation support which would al...