Out of Chaos......

Ah yes..... the grinning Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. That's what I feel like right now, or more accurately, I feel like the Sam Neill character watching the park's systems come apart around him! Let me start from the beginning..... sort of......

It's finished! Last night, the final upgrade piece for the "new" Blackbird went into place. The AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card. It replaced the last major component in my desktop workstation left over from the old Core 2 Quad Blackbird, the Radeon HD 7750.

The end of last week saw the 240Gb Sandisk boot drive replaced by a new Crucial 512Gb MX100. At the same time, the secondary drive changed over from the old 1Tb Hitachi DeskStar to 2, 1.5Tb Hitachi DeskStars, plus the old drive stayed in the machine as well. So the mechanical storage is at 4Tb on top of the 512Gb of SSD boot drive. Do we live in a wonderful time or what!?!

Last night, the final piece was installed. I replaced the Radeon HD 7750 with the 7850. The Windows experience index jumped from 6.9 to 7.5 with the "S" Spec i5 3450 processor being the item that kept it from maxing out at 7.9 across the board! The power/heat friendly 7750 moved over to my son's new gaming console sized machine.

So, what's all this about chaos? So far; this post sounds completely normal, right? Yeah..... that was the last thing to do before I start dismantling the office. The flooring people are coming tomorrow and I'm about to take every last bit of electronics OUT of the office....including everything in the "closet of doom"!

Networking Nirvana for $13.16

It has to start somewhere. For me, it started with this. My "Spring Cleaning" doesn't involve any cleaning per se, at least not yet anyway! It starts with cleaning up my network. As I've documented over time; I have a lot of devices. In today's world, it's not just the computers that need a network connection, it's the Blu-Ray player and the TV as well. A week or so ago while burning up 5 hours of time giving an English benchmarking test, I engaged myself in the mental exercise of how I could make my home network better and more streamlined. I found that I didn't like my "back-end" home setup.

Back when I got it, the D-Link DIR-615 was the most "N" wireless router I could afford. Although it's since been replaced, it's not really the slower N-150 that I didn't like. It was the built-in 10/100 Ethernet switch. After I picked up a dual-band N-300 router that feeds WiFi to my newer laptops, this box moved to the office to serve WiFi to the other corner of the house and to give me extra Ethernet connections to attach client computers that come in for work. Over time, I've grown dissatisfied with the slower speed of this switch as compared to the Gigabit Ethernet of my home network "backbone". I also found that I had to install another WiFi access point in the front of the house (right next to the N-300 AP) because none of our Apple devices (tablet or phones) could connect to the Dual-band running at the faster 5ghz wave length! This was an old D-Link DI-624 that I had sitting in a box; so now, there were 3 network devices in the living room! I had previously added a switch there to give me enough ports. 

This left me with a bit of a conundrum. I wanted a faster switch in the back of the house, a faster AP in the front of the house that the i-devices could connect to, and do it while cutting down the number of network devices. This is where an idea that I learned some time ago came into play. I don't remember when, but at some point in the past; I was looking for a switch, but found that they were more expensive than the ubiquitous all-in-one router/access point/switch that everybody buys. I resolved that by purchasing one of the latter and just turning off the DHCP function so it was simply a switch with a built-in access point..... which brings us back to the first image. That...... is a D-Link DIR-655 the high-end N-300 router that I couldn't afford back when I bought the DIR-615. It had/has all the bells and whistles including a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch! Now, several years down the road, I was able to pick it up on eBay for $13.16 after shipping. 

So, yeah...... Party Like A Vulcan/Do The Happy Dance!!! I have Gigabit and faster WiFi in the rear of the house, plus, now having moved the DIR-615 to the front where it's has replaced 2 boxes, and gives me faster (N-150) that the i-devices are happy to connect to. The ousted Gigabit switch from the front? It's moving to the network cabinet where it will give the backbone 4 more wired ports, thus allowing me to finally terminate my son and daughters rooms with Ethernet!

What In The World Is A Pinnacle StreamGenie?

You see it all the time around the MetroPlex. Some silver-haired older guy (Hey! I resemble that remark!), driving around in an expensive sports car (I don't resemble that). It could range anywhere from a Ferrari to the stereotypical Porsche. A younger obsession that he can now fulfill and do double duty in staving off that feeling that your youth is slipping away. We get into our 40s and 50s and are in a place professionally where we can afford the toys that we've always wanted. 

Me: I'm a little different than most others...... ok, pretty much all others. First of all, I got married later in life, so there are still sub-teens in my house to provide for..... aaaand I have different obsessions that most guys! I always wanted one of these! What is it? Well duh...... it's a Pinnacle Systems StreamGenie of course! 

Well....it didn't have to be a "StreamGenie", but barring the military handing over one of their portable computers, it'll have to do. Again; back to the "what is it" question: It's a "Portable Computer" of course, although they've been called variously as "Lunchbox PCs" or "Luggables" as well. For all intents and purposes, it's really a full-on desktop computer inside of a portable case.... sort of..... They are very much a specialty tool used by folks for whom, even powerful "workstation" laptops are found wanting. You rarely see them these days (OK, you rarely ever saw them), but they are even more rare as today's notebook computers get more and more powerful. Where they are really useful is, being full desktop PCs, they can take expansion card of any type and not just things that plug into a USB port. 

They can get pretty wild, as you can see by the 3-screened model above. There's even a military field command unit that's so big, that the cover turns into a bench for the operator to sit on! I'd be perfectly happy with one of those, except that I haven't been able to get any branches of the armed forces to let me play with theirs toys. Mighty narrow-minded of them if you ask me! So, what's a frugal propellerhead with strange desires to do? 

You turn to the specialty industries who use these weird critters. The most well known of them are the various models of the Dolch "PAC" series of network analyzers. In the networking business, the techs would quite often have to connect a number of devices through a series of connections to determine where and what an issue was. This of course requires several expansion cards. Unfortunately, the only Dolch machines that you see for sale on a regular basis are ancient; 386/486 ancient! On top of that, any in functioning condition are still relatively expensive. But the killer is that they are quite often built on non-standard component. Yeah, that's right: I want weird, with standard components..... oh..... and inexpensive if you please!

Enter, the StreamGenie, but why? You'll see, as we go through the pictures of it, that it's case is metal in the military "field computer" idiom, thus fulfilling one of my main criteria. 

 

If you'll look closely at these two images, you can tell that the drive bays are standard (5.25" & 3.5"), and therefore able to take off-the-shelf components, most of which I have already. The second image (apart from the plate that covers the I/O shield and PSU) shows that it takes a regular ATX format motherboard and power supply. This unit is complete enough to have the adapter cables (far left and middle) which allows the machine's built in keyboard/touchpad and LCD monitor to attach to standard PS/2 and VGA/HD15 connections. What's the big deal in all of that? Well; without much work, I can simply pull out the PIII (yes, I said PIII) motherboard and old power supply, then put in something relatively current. And of course, it goes without saying that I'll be able to repeatedly do this for some time since this IS NOT a laptop with proprietary parts, but a portable desktop that can be configure any way that I want.

While you are admiring this picture of what all originally came with the StreamGenie, I'll tell you a little story. I've been wanting one of these portable computers for many years, going all the way back to the late 90's when I originally became aware of them. It didn't have to have a rugged metal case, but I wanted something that didn't use proprietary hardware. On and off over the last 10 years or so, I've actively sought one that wasn't ridiculously expense. Unfortunately, even when I was able to find one at a decent price, it was the sometimes $40-50 in shipping that killed the deal. Recently, I came across not one, but two at my favorite computer junk store in Arlington (Texas), but they wanted in excess of $350 for them. So, I'd look at them longingly and waited. Last month, they announced that they were going to close the store. Although it made me sad, I saw it as an opportunity that maybe they might blow one out at less than $200. I told myself that if it got close to $150, I'd jump all over it! So far, still, "no go". Then last week, I saw one on eBay for $135 OBO (or best offer), with an estimated $26 shipping from Florida. The seller had two that he'd picked up at a government auction and professed not to know anything about them. I offered $90, he countered at $115, I countered back at $95, but only if he would hold to the $26 shipping estimate. On Thursday night, he accepted and shipped it on Friday. 

The best of all shipping scenarios happened and it left the Orlando Fedex facility that day, meaning that it would travel through the weekend. It made Hattiesburg MS, by Saturday, and Rayville (Eastern) LA by Sunday, creating the very real possibility that it will reach the Dallas sort facility by Monday some time and delivery on Tuesday if all goes just right. What are my intentions with it? That's what Part 2 is for! Oh, did I forget to tell you that the original selling price for these units designed to for video streaming was either $20,000 or $25,000 depending on whether it had dual processors! That motherboard, I'll be pulling out of mine was the dual PIII version.

Frugal Gaming.... Is There Such A Thing?

About a week ago, my brother sent me some parts. Basically, it was centered around an Asrock Mini-ITX motherboard of the Sandy-Bridge generation. Along with it came an "S" spec i5 processor, attendant cooling and other misc parts. As the much as I LOVE computer parts, I don't really need another machine. Granted, this board is technically more advanced than the one in my bedroom HTPC and could replace that, but why? That machine does exactly everything I need it to do, and does so quietly, because it's low-powered and therefore runs "cool"! So, what to do with this relatively capable board?

Most of you are aware that I have a young son. He's not quite a teenager, but he's close enough. Right now, he plays Minecraft and loves all things 3DS, but soon enough, he'll get into "real" gaming. This year, for Christmas, we got him a Steam account and bought the Kerbal rocket building program. I'm sure he's pretty quickly want to play other PC oriented games as well. As of right now, his ThinkPad T500 is fine for what he wants to do. However, being the Nerd-Dad that I am, I'm already ahead of him on where he headed..... and that won't be anything where his ThinkPad would be very good. 

As I was helping my student rebuild her old Alienware, I started thinking that one of those might be a good candidate for my son as well. However, he just doesn't have that much space in his room. A few years ago, we reworked his room and built a large loft, so there's a space underneath that's his little "boy-cave". It's nice, but it's only the size of a "queen" bed under there. Right now, he has a cabinet, that holds a TV, his a GameCube (!), XBox, and a bunch of Legos. There's some seating and it's where he "hangs out".

You can probably see where this is going. Mini-ITX board, small hang-out area..... Mini-Gaming Computer! Although that Asrock board only has an H61 chipset, we certainly won't be over-clocking or anything close to that. We are talking an 11-year-old, after all! So; here's what I'm thinking on this. I'm going to use an actual stand-alone GPU so it will have some decent graphics ability. Maybe something long the lines of an Radeon HD 7770 or an nVidia 460; whatever I can get the best deal on. A re-tasked SSD, 320Gb mechanical drive and call it good. 

We're done then; right? Not so much! What does an 11-year-old want his "gaming rig" to look like? If you're my son, then, anything green will be good. As soon as I saw the Azza CSAZ-103 case, I knew that it would be the case for the boy! As it turned out, it's inexpensive, and pretty much designed as a case that replicates a gaming console to some degree. Perfect! As soon as I land a suitable graphics card, we'll start building.

It's In With the New At the Frugal Propellerhead House

It was all "elbows and knees" at Case Del Propellerhead today. With the weather a mess, everything closed down and everyone elses computers out of the way, I started the new year off right! 

With the exception of our various laptops, every computer in the house got worked on. It ranged from the major overhaul of the server to add-in cards for the Blackbird workstation.

The work on the Blackbird was pretty simple, in that all I did was put in a PCI combo USB/Firewire card. You might ask.... what on earth would I need that for given now new that machine is.... at least to me. You won't believe this, but I'm all out of USB ports in the back! I've got so many devices, that I've used them up. Plus, I've still got some Firewire drive enclosures that I do a few things with now and then, so it's nice to be able to access them. I also switch out one of my Hauppauge tuner cards for another one, putting the more sophisticated HVR-2550 vs. 1800 that was in it since I'm much more likely to do video editing in it vs. the HTPC in the living room.

Then it was on to the Viking HTPC (bedroom) rebuild. I haven't discussed this, but in the middle of getting everyone elses' machines done, I picked up a a Silverstone SG08-Lite case. The original (non-lite) version was about a $150+ case, but it included a power supply that I neither needed nor wanted, so I was lucky. Plus it was less than $40 in "like new" condition. Earlier last week, I moved the entire contents of that machine from the Cooler Master Elite 130 case over this this much nicer case. Although almost everything fit nicely, there were a few items that required changes. The location of the drives forced me to switch out the SATA cables to 90 degree versions, and I have a slot loading optical drive coming; although I'm not sure why I'm bothering with that. Old school I guess. Otherwise, this machine is pretty much done and back online again.

 As much as I'd love for this post to be about me rebuilding my HTPC into one of the cool cases with the built-in screen, this is as good as it gets right now. I had previously pulled the old Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard out and removed all it's parts with the exception of the drives. Now came time for the other half of the upgrade. I had pulled the Asus E35M1-Pro board out of the Spectre server and now finally having it do the work it was designed to do. These board with their AMD "Brazos" APUs were really intended for media work in set-top boxes and the like, hence the no-fan heatsink set up. Unfortunately for the poor thing, I've had it running a file server up until this point! As we speak, it's running it's 4th round of updates and will soon be able to go back into the living room A/V rack.

All that was great, but the big ticket item of the day was the Spectre file server. Up until this point, it was a Windows Home Server 2011 (Vail) OS machine running 2, 2Tb Hitachi drives off of a HighPoint caching RAID controller. I've grown increasingly annoyed with the controller and now that the WHS has been orphaned....... Anyway, I've been considering moving over to one of the FreeBSD based OS's for some time now. Apparently, now is the time! So the machine got a Core2Duo generation Intel motherboard, along with an additional Intel NIC, 3, 2Tb Hitachi drives (soon to be 4), so I can get 75% efficiency while using ZFS RAID with parity. So "stay tuned". This is liable to be interesting!

Home Server Rebuild: Part 1 The Grunt Work

I've been avoiding this for a while now..... the grunt-work associated with a major change. But it had to happen sooner or later. As I've discussed before, there are a number of things about my WHS (Windows Home Server 2011) running file server that I've become unhappy with; although, much of it doesn't have anything to do with WHS itself, but rather the HighPoint Caching controller. 

After a lot of hours of watching YouTube I came to the following conclusions:

• I have to decide how I want to manage my storage.
• I have to decide what operating system I want to use.
• How safe do I want to be in terms of the files residing on the file server?
• How much money do I want to put into the server in terms of drives?
• How much time do I want to allocate to learning the OS?

Don't get me wrong: I love this stuff! But I have another full-time profession, a family that expects me to spend time with them. AND I do not have an unlimited amount of cash to expend on this solution.

So, here are my options. They start with reloading Windows Home Server 2011 which has the distinct advantage that I own it and have used it for close to a year now so there's a level of familiarity. My hardware is also set up for it, with a 160Gb SSD for the OS to live on, and a Highpoint caching controller that I know works with it. The downside is that I'm not very happy with how it's working and will have to expend an unknown amount of time figuring out how to make it work better..... if that's possible. Furthermore, it's a product that's been "orphaned" by Microsoft, so this is the "end of the trail" for it.

An obvious alternative is FreeNAS. It's well-known and quite popular today. It has that always favorable attribute of being a free product. As such is supported by the "open-source" community. It and it's off-shoot, NAS4Free (more on this later), have the advantage of having a robust software RAID file system that doesn't require the use of an expensive (and often annoyingly difficult to use) hardware controller. Plus underlying technology that allows it to play nicely with various other systems ranging from Windows (CIFS), Linux (SMB) to AFP (Mac Networking). They can also handle standalone authentication or work with Active Directory, although that's not particularly relevant in my case.

 

And of course, you can't talk about FreeNAS without getting into NAS4Free which is ixSystems' attempt to do FreeNAS with a better web interface and plugin system. As it turns out, based on lots of research, it seems to be somewhat less "bleeding edge" than FreeNAS and thus easier for laymen like me to grasp. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly pushed me in this direction. Suffice to say that the cleaner and easier interface was a better fit for me. 

....But what about the various Linux distros? Although, I'm certain that these are great for full production environments with a professional well versed in running command-line, these aren't for me. I will say that I was suitably impressed with CentOS during my time with it, but I just don't see myself investing the time necessary to become fully comfortable with it's use. Plus; I don't need a full server. I just need something to serve files, so really a "roll-your-own" NAS with greater flexibility.

What got done today? I loaded the OTP (Old ThinkPad) mobile file server up with NAS4Free 32-bit v. 9.3.0.2.1190 with it. Got it up and running. Copied a ripped movie file to it and played it back off. It's a good start! So stay tuned as this project proceeds and I decide whether this is in fact the server OS for me.

The Alienware Part 3: A Merry Alien Christmas!

All the parts were gathered..... kind of. The students sitting around the table in a circle. The patient laying on it's side with it's internal spaces open for access. Tools laid out. It was almost like one of those surgery theaters you see in a TV show or movie.

I stood there watching my student walking through all the internal parts that would go into the cosmetically altered Alienware Aurora 7500 with all the other computer club kids. I felt a bit like a proud doctor dad watching his surgeon daughter about to perform her first surgery!

In fact, we had done most of the hard work 2 days ago, when she and I reassembled the repainted case. All-in-all, it took the better part of two hours. While we were at it, we adjusted the "stand-offs" to the holes of the new motherboard, attached the drives to their slide-in frames, made certain all the connections we had, had somewhere to attach, AND that we knew where that "somewhere" was! The actual build took less than an hour, with much of that time being taken up by the adjustment and attachment of the Heatsink/Fan assembly.

Was there drama? Well..... yes, in that due to holiday shipping issues, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo didn't arrive until the afternoon of the build. So I had to run home and get it off of my porch and bring it back to school! "Smart-Post" might be the single most idiotic shipping "solution" ever! Let's just say that it took a package that was supposed to arrive on Friday until the following Tuesday to get to my house from Newegg's Memphis facility! It's actually not an issue with either FedEx or USPS..... just the interchange between the two which adds one or two days to the process that I take exception to!

 

Anything else? Well, at least partially thanks to Smart-Post, the "bay" card reader/USB 3.0/fan controller didn't arrive till yesterday. That leaves it for me to install when I do the Windows load some time in the next couple of days.

Is there a silver lining? I'll have to say "absolutely"! I'll have this machine completed and back to her before Christmas! As I sit here typing this, the re-animated alien is happily purring away right here next to me loading it's updates. So, when she gets home from skiing in New Mexico, it'll be ready to go home. Plus, last week, we were able to finish my other computer club student's computer rebuild as well. So all this stuff is done before the holidays, which not only allows me to work on my projects (more to come), but more importantly, allows them to have their shiny toys to play with during the 2 weeks off! Merry Christmas indeed!