"Old Tech" Step By Step

Before my OTP (Old ThinkPad) can become a rolling form of this, it needed a few things.

An operating system that can serve as a decent server, and run stably on old hardware. As it turned out, the most obvious solution, Windows Home Server v1 didn't like my A31. The load threw all manner of errors during the install and generally "acted a fool". From there, I moved on to Ubuntu, which ran very well, but I just didn't like it very much. After a suggestion by one of my internet friends from the ThinkPad Forum, I decided to give CentOS a try. Once I got the ISO burned properly, the load went very smoothly. Everything was recognized and the old P4, with the 2Gb RAM (max) was responding like something a couple of generations newer!

A little bit of this, and Samba was downloaded..... not configured mind you, but downloaded! The configuring part could wait. What I needed to was make sure that the machine would talk to my drives.

The first order of business was to get this sorted out. What is it? Well; it's a hard drive adapter for the UltraBay 2000K (UB2K) generation of ThinkPads. I'm not completely certain, but it's a pretty safe bet that IBM invented the concept of the replaceable device "bay" going all the way to the original ThinkPad. Back in those days, there were many devices that weren't built-in on notebook computers, so there needed to be all manner of standardized (PCMCIA) and quasi-standardized connections to allow devices to attach. The A31 is unique in that it didn't have just one like the run-of-the-mill corporate notebooks, but TWO!!! However, they didn't behave the same. One of my issues was to figure out whether CentOS would recognize devices in these bays other than the normal optical drives and floppies. As it turned out, after some experimenting, it was learned that a second hard drive could be placed in the right-side bay, but not the left. It didn't matter how I set the "boot sequence", the machine would hang trying to boot from the UB2K drive if it was in the left side! When this was confirmed and I could access the secondary drive through the Drive Utility, I was set. Optical drive in the left and hard disk drive in the right. This gives me replaceable storage of relatively large sizes, although it was limited to PATA/IDE drives which is a problem. More on this later.

Next came the dock. In this case, I went with the ThinkPad Dock II, Model 2877 because: a) it's newer than the original 2631 and b) I have it. This "dock" was actually designed for the later T4x machines, but IBM, being IBM made it backwards compatible. So, what's so special about it? OK, first of all; it's an actual DOCKING STATION (hence dock) meaning that it has capabilities of its own beyond what is built into the machine attached to it. Most people call what is in reality a port replicator, a dock. They are wrong. You'll notice that it's quite a bit deeper than the typical port replicator. That's because it has it's own power supply (so no need for the adapter), two more PCMCIA card slots, a half-length PCI card slot, and another UltraBay. On top of that, there are the normal pass-throughs for things like video, serial and parallel interface and floppy disk drive. For all intents and purposes, these things make a notebook computer a full desktop in miniature. It turns out that the A31 running CentOS has so far completely recognized this thing so I can attach all manner of devices to it..... SCORE!

 

The last 2 devices that I needed to get going were the Adaptec AUA-1422 PCMCIA adapter that would give the A31 USB 2.0, and most importantly IEEE 1394 (AKA Firewire).... that's because, I have an old Lacie "Firewire" external drive with a 500Gb hard drive in it. I've had both of these devices forever, and finding a way to use them productively would the the icing on the cake! In fact, I have a second Lacie enclosure that would daisy-chain nicely if it worked. To make a long story short, it worked, all of it. I was able to connect, have the disk recognize, partition and format for Linux in short order. 

So, the concept is almost complete. I can take this old notebook that most people would consider obsolete, set it up almost anywhere as a full blown file server, or pretty much any other service that Linux has in it's bag of tricks. With the various add-ons that it recognizes, I can access an almost limitless amount of storage! 

Now, on to the next (more difficult) stage of the project. Learning how to configure and administer a Linux file server.
 

iPads Are of the Devil!

There it is, the baaaad beasty! Just look at it! What harm could it be, I asked myself? Just one little iPad for my wife so she could test classroom kid apps on iOS against the Android. We were an Android house with 4 Android tablets running variously "Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich". 

Then this happened. I got a great deal from a co-worker upgrading and asked my wife if she wanted it. "Sure", she said "What could it hurt"? Then she decided that iOS was more kid-centric on educational apps. And of course (as you know), iPad 1s can't be upgraded beyond iOS 5. 

You can predict what happened next right? This right here, of course! We bought a "2" (got a great deal by the way), and the original became Katie's, but mom wasn't terribly pleased because it wouldn't run the same apps. What to do?

This happened of course! Apparently, any idiot knows you don't let 2 iPads into your house....except me of obviously! So, we sell the offending iPad 1, and put the money into a partial payment for the.......

iPad Air for my wife, who then passes the iPad 2 down to Katie. Now you figure, we were finished right? Ohhhh, Nooooo! Now we had an issue of the one child using the iPad and the other who didn't have the same apps to work on. You try having an 8 year old girl share "her iPad" with her 11-year old brother!

That's when this happened! Within a short amount of time, we got Josh a Mini for his birthday, then later in the summer, decided that we were better off with both kids on Minis instead of Katie trying to tote around the much bigger "2", which became the wife's "school" iPad to use in the classroom as she moved to a Mac-centric district. 

In my mind's eye; it was this..... or this!!!

The effect was this! It was now the end of the summer and the school year was looming. I was tasked with the job of selling off the 9 old laptops that the wife had used in her classroom. I started selling old ThinkPads one after another and putting away the money. I won't regale you with the detaileds, but when the dust settled and it was "said and done" a week ago. We had as follows:

• 1 iPad Air 32Gb- Momma's personal property "NO TRESPASSING" by commoners
• 2 iPad 2s 16Gb/1 iPad Mini- Classroom iPads for working in "stations"
• 1 iPad 2 16Gb- Provided by her district for the teacher and used in her "stations"
• 1 iPad Mini Retina 16Gb- Katie's (she of the bad eyes) tablet
• 1 iPad Mini 16Gb- Josh's (he of the better eyes) tablet

That's 7 of these things if you count the school's and 6 if you don't! What am I using?

Well, duh! Did you expect Batman to start wearing green with gold bling? So, score one for the good guys! I did tell, my "Mac is great" brother-in-law" about the onslaught and he laughed, say "ahhh, iPads; the gateway drug of iOS". 

So you all should see this as a cautionary tale!

The Frugal Propellerhead Family's Great 2014 Computer Upgrade

The great 2014 technology (mostly computers) upgrade is now over. WOW, it was a crazy and fast ride..... kinda like the Texas Giant roller coaster! 

Many of you will remember the late spring when I moved my desktop workstation to an Ivy Bridge "Core" system built in the ginormous Cooler Master Cosmos II case. At the time, we were a Core 2 Duo family. The workstation was a "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quad, myself and daughter on ThinkPad X301/X61 running low/ultra-low voltage C2D, wife and son on ThinkPad T61s running regular mobile C2D. 

Around that time, I came across a ThinkPad T500 locally that was too cheap to pass up (sub-$100), so it began. While these machines are "Montevina" platform running Intel's Penryn processors and thus NOT the later Westfield, "Core" processors, there's not a huge difference in routine performance. Especially when you load them with plenty of RAM and run the OS on an SSD. The whole thing really gained momentum a few weeks ago when I picked up a cheap T400 on Goodwill's auction site (yes there is such a thing). It had some issues such as a couple of broken USB ports, but at $42, I wasn't going to complain! 

For those who aren't aware, the T400 is the 14.1" version of the T500 (15.4" LCD) with universally integrated Intel graphics vs. the switchable ATI Radeon HD 3650 GPU and higher end panels that can be optioned. Around the same time, while MacBook Air shopping on Craigslist (not for myself), I spotted a T500 for $75 complete with the Advanced MiniDock. Yes, I did say $75! That's just stupid cheap! So, I picked it up last weekend on my great Metroplex swing through Arlington, Kennedale, Bedford and Dallas (more on this later). 

And of course, right in the middle of this mash-up came the X1 that replaced my X301. So, are you wondering how I can afford to do this on a teacher's salary? After all, we're talking $1000+ retail on every one of these machines with the X1 over $2000! 

Ahhh.... that's the money question if you'll pardon the pun. First of all; know your market. Secondly; know your products. And thirdly, be ever watchful and ready to strike when the opportunity arises. So, let's start at the beginning:

• I know that working computers can always be sold, it's just a matter of what it is, which governs how much it can be sold for. Pretty much any laptop running a recent OS can sell for about $100.... give or take. In this case-in-point, the T61 machines sold for between $125 and $150, which is exactly what I sold my son's machine for. While the Z61t (daughter's laptop) being older and slower, with a bad battery sold for the $100 that I asked. So, that gives me $250 to upgrade. The other half of the market is that the newer T400/500 can and do often appear for under $100 if one is patient.
• The Montevina platformed T400/500 are in a number of ways significantly faster and better machines than the T61 that they replaced, while at the same time take the same drives, batteries, A/C adapters, docks etc. However, they use a faster bus, run the next gen "Penryn" Core 2 Duo processors, and uses the DDR3 memory that I want standardize our home machines onto. This RAM come in a higher density per module and are thus cheaper to buy. Whatever the cost is for a size (1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb) memory I can buy in DDR2 is close to the next size up in DDR3. I also know that in my 8 year old daughter and 11 year old son's computing world, the spec of these machines is more than enough for their needs. After all, we're talking YouTube and Minecraft. So, even the Intel integrated GPU version of these machines is plenty. 
• Now that I had a known target and money in hand from selling their old computers, I was ready to catch the $42 (about $70 after shipping) T400 on Goodwill and the $75 T500 on Craigslist. All-in-all, I spent less than $150 for an complete upgrade, netting me a +$100, in the exchange. Where did that $100 go? Into upgrades of course! The T500 that Josh got received an Intel 160Gb SSD over the 64Gb SSD that was in the T61. The T61 went away with a 160Gb mechanical hard drive that was originally in that machine, so the SSD is sitting in my drive box awaiting future use. The 64Gb SSD in Katie's machine went into her T400. She doesn't need a lot of storage, but I'm afraid that Minecraft and other 11 year old games will be too much for his old SSD. That 160Gb upgrade cost $55, so I'm actually still on the plus side of the ledger! Even the Advanced MiniDock that was included with the T500 came into play as we can now move his speaker plug from the unfortunate front position to the rear.

But what about this? OK, I'll admit it. It was a "one-off", one of those ridiculous deals that sometimes still happen on eBay. I got it at $305, so about $330 after the rather high shipping, but still a very low price. I'm selling my X301, complete with it's 160Gb Intel SSD, and 8Gb of RAM for $300 while including my spare no longer needed batteries. If I wasn't selling to my friend who's been lusting after it for a long time, I'd price the machine (downgraded to 4Gb of RAM and 128Gb SSD) for about $375-400 which is completely doable. I'm doing this because, he and I have been friends for a LONG time. And, it's where my personal ThinkPads go to live out their retirement (T23, T42p, X41, X300 and now X301). 

Before I close out of this long post, I'll go back and explain what I was doing last Saturday.... instead of writing blog posts. Besides the T500, I also went out to pick up a iPad Mini 2 (aka Mini Retina) for my wife to go into her fleet. Yes, for those who are counting, that's 6 iPads that we own and 7 that are used on a regular basis including the iPad 2 that her school provides! I promise, I'm going to write a post just on our little brood of these things soon! Oh, I also stopped by and visited with one of my favorite YouTube video makers who goes by iBookGuy. It was a great visit and will make its way into a future post as well. In any case; now you know how the great upgrade of 2014 came about to be and how it was done, at a pretty low cost.

 

 

Old Tech!

By any measure, an April 2003 manufacture date for a computer, any computer, pretty much defines it as ancient!!! It's a good thing I teach World History in my day job! 

Yet, sitting on my workbench/desk at this very moment is an IBM ThinkPad A31 with that manufacture date. It's not just sitting there; it's booted up and workings it's little P4 heart out doing a few things that I've asked the obsolete Windows XPP to do. Am I going to continue using this machine running Windows XP? Yes and No actually. Yes; I'm going to continue to use this machine (explanations in a minute). No; I'm not going to use Windows XP unless I'm just trying to test out something. And to that end, I'll be keeping the hard drive from it with the OS load intact.... in the hard drive box kinda like those people who have themselves cryogenically frozen. Then, what am I going to do with this computing Centenarian?

This of course! Except in my world, it's a quarter the size, an eighth the weight, and I don't have to buy anything! I'm going to turn it into a portable file server.

"Now, await-a-minute", you say: "so you are trying to do what a little box the size of an external drive can do"!?! I can hear the laughter now..... through the Internet. Actually, the answer is.... kind of..... Yes, I get that these drives like the Corsair Voyager Air can serve files wirelessly in an amazingly small package and do so without even being plugged in. That's cool.... but it's still not a server with a server OS loaded allowing me to have the kind of control that can only happen with an actual operating system. And now that we've established that, that operating system isn't going to be Windows XPP, what am I proposing to do here?

You might have already come to this conclusion already given the hardware. Here are some pluses and minuses associated with using them. FreeNAS can be loaded up on a USB flashdrive, thus freeing up a drive bay for storage. I don't know much about it, so there's that, and I'm going to bet the driver support is going to by a little sketchy when dealing with random devices (more on this later). That should be less of an issue with many of the various distros of Linux, some of which (such as Ubuntu/Zorin) are pretty "mainstream" these days. However, most of these are full-on OS loads requiring an actual disk drive, but more importantly taking one of my precious drive bays. On top of which I don't know a bunch about Linux, although I've loaded up and used both Ubuntu and Mint in the past. 

 

And that takes us to the orphaned Windows Home Server: no I don't even mean the newer "Vail" version which I have running on my Spectre file server right now. I mean the original v.1! Why the heck would I want to do that!?! Well.... I have it, and I have experience with it since I used it with my original Hercules file server. It's driver support will be better since it's based off of the old MS 2003 Server OS. But one of my favorite features of that version was that it had the drive extender function that allowed it to take any random drive you connect to it and aggregate it into it's management scheme. Kinda like Drobo, but in a full OS.

So.... what am I going to do? All of it of course! I'm go to load up FreeNAS on a stick, put WHS on a drive, and probably some version of Linux on another drive. Then I'm going to play with it ALL and see which one I like!

Back to the hardware. What exactly is my point with this exercise other than that I have some A31s sitting around with nothing to do? There is that, of course. The attraction of $0 acquisition cost is pretty nice. But that's not all. Not all old laptops can apply for this "Portable File Server" (PFS) job. It's a bit like that one job at Walmart. There are many senior citizens with time on their hands, but only a few make good Greeters! 

 

The A31 is a special computer.... even by ThinkPad standards. This model is often considered to be the last of the ThinkPad "mobile workstations" until the arrival of the short-lived W70x series. Let's start with what makes it a mobile workstation:

• Availability of very high end (at the time) GPUs along with the then new in mobile computing high res (1600 x 1200) IPS screens, which are still considered to be some of the best ever produced.
• Multiple (2) configurable drive bays dubbed "UltraBay" which could take; optical drives, floppy drives, removable storage such as Zip and LS-120 Superdisk, hard disk drives, battery (in 1), as well as PDA (Palm Pilot) dock and/or "10-Key" number pad.
• Pentium 4m (Mobile) processors in excess of 2ghz.
• Full expansion capabilities including 2 PCMCIA slots and a docking port. This translates to either a port replicator, or the 2631 Dock that had another UltraBay slot, 2 more Cardbus PCMCIA slots, internal power supply AND full length PCI card slot.

  

"Wow", you say.... what in the heck does all that mean? OK, I'll put you outta your misery. All this expansion give the A31 (and A30, but they are PIII) machines the ability to have up to 3 spinning drives of virtually any combination on board. When you add in the dock, it's a 4th drive. The PCMCIA cardbus slot gives it the ability to overcome one of it's deficiencies, which is that it's chipset is so old, it doesn't even have USB 2.0. Yup, that's right.... USB 1.1! So, one Adaptec USB2.0/Firewire card later, it now has the ability to interact with more external drives at a higher speed. And I just so happen to have a 500Gb drive in a Lacie Firewire external enclosure. The full PCI slot in the dock also give me the ability to put in pretty much anything else I might need as well. 

It's no wonder that NASA chose these machine to go on the Space Shuttle and later the International Space Station.

When you combine this machine, it's various modular capabilities, the ThinkPad 2631 dock, and my wife's old Samsonite rolling case; it quickly become a fully portable, file server ready for use in virtually any location at any time. Not bad for a $0 cost build.