Know how to tell which of your new friends, old friends, and former friends actually understand you?

Easy, the ones who still love you.

And often you can tell which of your new friends, old friends, and former friends still love you, Rob, because they're the ones who ask for nothing.

I still love you,
The Universe

Notes from the Universe, Check It out

Notes from the Universe: New Perspectives from an Old Friend (Hardcover)
More Notes From the Universe: Life, Dreams and Happiness (Hardcover)

Even More Notes From the Universe: Dancing Life's Dance (Hardcover)

Chenbro ES34069

There are many cool features about this mini ITX case I like, and a few I have issues with.


On the Positive side.
Small, but not too small to work with
Accepts 4 SATA Drives + 1 2.5" Laptop drive + 1 SLIM optical Media Drive + built in Card reader
Two 70MM fans on back which are pretty quiet and cool the drives and cpu well.
Accepts a special PCI riser card so you can use a small PCI raid card.
The case is very well ventilated. and if need be, you can put in a 60MM fan on the front.
4 removable hotswap SATA trays

On the negative side.
I disike the external bricks, but sometimes it's the price you pay for small size.
The card reader and PCI card are very hard to come by. I had to order them separately frmo the UK (that was expensive).
I would have really liked to have had an externally accessible PCI edge so I could use an eSATA connector, but no pci edge is accesible externally.. therefore I had to do some modding of my own.
The PCI riser does come with a special bracket to lock it in, but it did not fit well with the promise TX4. If you are not careful it can rise out of the motherboard.

Parts List
Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis From Logic Supply
At First I went with the Jetway J7F2WE1 From Newegg
It was cheap had the CPU and I had the spare 1GB ram module.
Later on I switched to a higher end MSI board that could support more ram.
MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mobile Mini-ITX Mainboard From Logic Supply
OCZ Gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory From Newegg
Internal Card reader & PCI Riser Card www.mini-itx.com
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II 4-Port Adapter NewEgg.Com
Kingston 2GB Secure Digital (SD) Flash Card w/MobileLite Reader Model FCR-ML+SD/2GB From Newegg
and a bunch of 500GB SATA II drives laying around.
Slim Optical Slot load Panasonic Optical drive from eBay.
Duo Core 2.33 GHZ CPU from eBay

In general, I really like the chassis, motherboard, machine OS and form factor. I've already touted unRAID as a home server NAS environment. This chassis is a perfect fit for it.
One might have chosen to forgo the internal card reader, however unraid loads it;'s OS from a USB flash and there is a license tied to the flash GUID. This was a necessary evil, so I went for the embedded card reader.

Why did you buy a 2GB card and card reader you ask? This card reader, in particular, accepts all three SD media SD/MiniSD/MicroSD. It;s just a handy device to have around. I really needed the 2GB card and I did Not want this big bulky card reader hanging off the chassis. So it's more for a cleaner look. Besides the price was right!

Overall the build was pretty easy, Screws come off the back the motherboard tray pulls out.
One thing is that you have to build these boxes in order. So I had to install things in steps.
First the 2.5" laptop drive,
Then the card reader.
Then the motherboard, ram, route cables, PCI card to riser, Slide riser down, re-route cables so it did not push the riser card out.
Last but not least the slim optical media. This is where things became a problem.
If your board and memory are too high or close to the optical media, you will be unable to install it.

When I started out, I had the Jetway board with the AMD Geode. I got this from newegg at a very cost effective price of $129 with a $20 rebate. Not too shabby as it came with the CPU and I had a spare gig ram chip laying around. This setup performed very well. The only downside was the board's Ethernet is not natively supported by unraid. This caused me to get a 3 port 1GB Ethernet daughter board. (ugh). Once installed that worked like a charm. I knew one day I was going to rebuild gatekeeper as a mini itx machine so I knew this board would be put to use elsewhere.

I had the need for more ram because unRAID's root filesystem is in ram. this is good and bad. Good because you can spin down all the disks and the system still functions and bad because you need a decent amount of ram if you want to load other packages.
unRAID is based on Slackware 12, so installing packages is really easy.
It seems as you find more uses for an almost idle machine, you find yourself adding packages.
Very soon I had a caching nameserver, time server, dhcp server. etc, etc.. Then I decided I wanted to move my bittorrent to this device and I saw the need for more ram. Perl/php/Apache/mysql and sure enough.. now you need the ram for root.

The MSI mainboard was quite sufficient. it accepted the 4GB of ram yielding 3.2GB to the OS after loading. This is due to the bios/pci reserve area and the nature of the chipset. Still, it's enough!
With a cheap 2.33Ghz Dual core mobile processor the machine became a quite able workhorse.
I'm hoping to one day get vmware server running on it and possible rip dvd's and compress them directly on the NAS box.

As I mentioned on the downside, I could not lock/screw down the Promise TX4 PCI card and riser. Perhaps a different card would work better, but this bracket just did not fit well with the promise.
I had to have 4 SATA ports so I had to go with what was available.

I took 1 of the internal SATA motherboard ports and attached it to the 2.5: laptop drive.
as I mentioned, once I get vmware server running on it, I plan to run a ripping xp environment and a slackware development environment right on the box.
Also unraid makes use of a feature called a cache drive whereby all writes happen to a temporary work drive.
Later on in the eve, the files are moved from the cache drive to the raid array, thereby providing very fast writes because you do not do the parity calculation until files are moved to the protected JBOD array.
Ithink the main reason for this was to handle HD video streaming without having RAID parity calculation causing delays. Don't get me wrong the system is fast enough, but the ram cache fills up fast and the nature of parity calculation may cause pauses.

After all sata connections were made, I realized I had one more unused motherboard connector and I thought... Gee.. allI need is an eSATA adpater and I can attach a 5th drive...
A quick look at the case shows a vent at the back. A few nibbles here and there and I was able to unscrew the eSATA from the PCI bracket and attach it to the back of the case. I'm not using it right now, but should the need com e where I have to expand or backup data, I want to do it at top speed!

So although simpler then my ReadyNAS interface, and not as mature as openfiler, unRAID is going to be a serious contender due to the way it uses disks.

As I outgrow and retire my Kurobox-HG's I think how far we've come and how much I enjoy building these lil machines.

Stay tuned as I still have a few more project builds as I plan to dabble with clustering, iSCSI and new backup technology.

Links of Interest
http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=100
http://x-case.co.uk/p/404991/chenbro-es34069-mini-itx-home-servernas-chassis---just-arrived.html
http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2008/03/27/the-chenbro-es34069-case-review-part-1/
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=42¤cy=0

What to watch out for:
You will see a number of different pricing structures on the net. One must ask.. how can one company have this product $40 cheaper? Read the fine print. Some of them do not have a power supply, or possibly the heat sink or other cables.
I bought mine from Logic supply and it came with everything needed.
Ram Height and Placement if you plan to use slim optical media. You may have to get a motherboard with ram placement further back or go with low profile ram.
With the MSI and OCZ ram I just barely made it!

This has been something I've been exploring for quite some time now. As all the hard drives in my network started filling up from DVD rips I knew there had to be a better way. It's easy enough to buy a new hard drive, but then you have to consider how do you backup the precious data you've just placed on it.. Buy another, then raid them.

The downside of this is, you are always growing and you have to keep buying 2 drives for raid-1 or growing filesystems across multiple drives. Geeze, then god forbid you loose two drives in a raid-5 set up! This happened to me once and I'll never forget it.

I also was considering just how many spindles are spinning on the network for each raid set up. As it grows, so do the costs of keeping them live.

Don't get me wrong here, I love my readyNAS NV+. It's a great lil box, but I noticed I was outgrowing the 4 slots and realized how much time it takes to grow the file systems across multiple spindles.

Granted, RAID5 across multiple spindles has it's advantages,
Redundancy, Fast read speed, Large filesystem support.
But it also has it's cons such as...
Difficulty in expansion, How do you backup a multi terabyte raid 5 filesystem and what happens when you loose more then one spindle in a raid 5 environment.

I've had this issue in the past where I lost 2 spindles (due to simpel IDE lockups) and the raid 5 array was shot... Many mp3's from napster lost.. Oh well.

What I really like about unRAID is that each hard drive spindle becomes it's own filesystem. To me this has the pro of easy migration to larger hard drives, and the con of managing multiple hard drives and navigation across them.

unRAID solves all my neesd for a Media Storage (or backup storage) server.
It's actually a protected JBOD. Similar to RAID4 but without the striping across multiple spindles.
Each Hard drive (of any size) uses a shared parity drive (must be the largest in the system), granted there is a slight performance penalty, but for a media storage box it far outweighs the management of a mult-spindle raid5 arrangement.

Because each drive is it's own filesystem, you can litterally stop the raid array, put in a larger hard drive, restart, and the volume will be rebuilt/expanded onto the larger drive.

In addition since each drive shares the parity, the chances of loosing all your data to a multiple drive failure drop dramatically.
I.E. The array will survive a single drive failure and rebuilt the failed drive when replaced.
If by some chance, you loose a second drive, then you only loose the data on those two drives. The other remaining drives will still be intact because they have thier own separate file systems.

My only beef is that the author users reiserfs instead of ext3.. but it's a small price to pay

On the plus side, The unraid environment is designed to run the root filesystem in ram.
All the data drives are mounted, but programmed to spind down on inactivity.

This became a major plus for me with all the hard drives spinning on my network, and summer coming along with no a/c in my computer area..

Another cool feature of unRAID is it's userspace filesystem.
Because you have multiple drives and data may not all fit on one spindle, there is the user space filesystem that sort of joins the multiple drives into a single view.
Let's say for example you have 10 disks and a DVD folder.
If you program the share to overflow onto 5 of the disks, when one of the drives starts to fill up the user space filesystem will automatically write the next file to the other disk.
It's configurable at what directory level the disk toggle works too.
On Reads, you do not have to know which disk the file is on because the userspace filesystem keeps indexes of all the files in memory and knows what disk it's on.

So over the last few months I've been playing with this and I like it allot.
I plan to use it as my backup system with HDUP (possbly backula) and media server.

I have two systems I'll be pimping in the near future, in the meantime here's unRAID!

PROS
Root filesystem in ram, very easy OS install. Drop in on a USB key, set bootable. reboot.
UI is browser based and very simple to set up.
Each disk is part of a protected array, Think of it as a protected JBOD. Like RAID4 without stripping.
User Space Filesystem allows SMB shares across multiple drives to be seen as one. I.E. it hides the fact that you have the same directories on multple drives and shows them as one.
Simple slackware 12.0 install. you can install packages from the net easily.
Boot filesystem filts on a 128MB USB key.
Handles single drive failure without loosing data.
Multiple drive failure does not result in loss of every single drive, only the failed drives vs raid5 and loosing the whole array.
Can use spindles of any size as long as the parity drive is the largest drive in the array. (good way to make use of those old drives)
Can be set to spin drives down when not used for a period of time.
If need be, you can remove a drive and re-use it, accessing the data on the drive from another linux machine (as long as reiserfs is compiled into the kernel).

CONS
All of the easy of single spindle drive management.
You can migrate a drive from a smaller to a larger with a few clicks or simply swapping out the drive.
All of the performance penalty of RAID5 writes without any of the read performance. (The price you pay for easy management).
Reads do not require the parity drive so you get read performance of a single drive.
Userspace Filesystem has write performance penalty.
No NFS yet. (coming soon)
No iSCSI yet (coming soon)
Still a bit immature.
Cannot use other linux raid options because thw whole md/raid subsystem has been replaced.
Limit of 16 drives + 1 cache drive.
Cannot concat or raid0 multiple drives for parity therefore it must ALWAYS be the largest drive in the array.

Be back shortly...

(got some new toys and new fascinations!)

Can you face another summer where a day trip to the lake or the beach costs you an arm and a leg? It's shaping up to be just that if we don't ask Congress to stand up to Big Oil now.

But there is a bill in the House this week that could make gas price gouging a federal crime, so we don't pay more while the oil companies rake in record profits. I signed a petition to urge my representative to pass this bill this week -- can you join me at the link below?

http://pol.moveon.org/stoppricegouging/

Take a minute. Step up and do your part. Its easy

http://www.cotrone.com/rob/gallery/FunnyAnimals?page=6

Gateway FPD2485W 24-inch Widescreen

So far it looks pretty slick, You can see more pics in the gallery.

Future plans include another 24" widescreen for use on my development station in the computer room (hercules) along with 1 or more 20" 4:3 monitors rotated in portrait mode. (The gallery shows my brief experiment).

Circuit had almost the lowest price on this. (J&R is about 5$ lower now). However, with circuit city I was able to drive over, pick it up and also save $10 on the speaker bar. Not too shabby...

It was a bit funny though while working out the sale with the sales person.
He had to double check the pricing, to get permission.
Afterwards he kept insisting I purchase an extended warrenty.
He even went as far as suggesting to break the monitor near the end of the warrenty period to get some money back to put towards a new monitor.
My response... "but that would be dishonest".

He was really unahppy that I would not go for the extra $200.
I figure if the unit dies in a year, I'll just put that $200 towards a new monitor.
My other monitors have lasted a long time.

I think these days, I'll just refrain from the extended warrenty, I'v enever been able to really use them and it only inflates my price. About the only place I think I'll use it is on a large screen HDTV which may be happening this year.

I had high hopes for the new Kuro box coming out. It was to sport 2 SATA ports which meant I could do mirroring. As cool as the kuro's are, I've always been ansi about not having a hot copy of the hard drive. I always new I would outgrow them. The new Kuro proved that I would not be as happy because it still sported only 1 internal drive. Although there are 2 Sata ports, one is not accessible unless you pull of the front panel. Wtf? it has PCIe and a SATA port, but behind the panel!.

Over the past few weeks I've been considering upgrades in many aspects. It's that time of the year. Still I did not want all my eggs in one basket. I like having my music and video off my herculean workstation. This way I can upgrade him as needed yet still function without him.

There have been 3 choices over the past few weeks.
1. Infrannt ReadyNas NV+
2. Thecus 5200
3. A small ITX server running unRaid from lime-technology

Frankly, I was leaning towards the Thecus or the unRaid server, however I wanted something polished, reliable and low in power usage.

The unRaid server is perfect for what I need, however, It's running a customized slackware. (slopware) kernel. requires specialized hardware and questions to the developer went unanswered. It's now at version 4, but I'm still not sure it's ready for prime time. On the positive side, it has one of the best methods of making your JBOD volumes raid and reliable. Instead of striping across multiple disks, each disks is it's own volume and entitiy. The only requirement is that your largest disk is your parity disk. If that is so, the others can be of ANY size. This raid mechanism also sports the ability to survive multiple disk failures. One disk failure and your raid survives, limps along and can be rebuilt. 2 Disk failures and the failed disks are lost, but the remaining disks are still intact because they each have thier own filesystem. I've learned early on how bad a double disk failure can affect you with software raid 5. None the less, software raid 5 is much more polished these days. As much as I want to do this mechanism, I think the power will be come an issue. Still, I may try my hand at it using vmware on hercules or my itx machine.

I also considered the Thecus. The reports say this performs the best, but it's "rough around the edges". on newegg there was reports of corruption too. This was enough to scare me away... Still, The thecus might be nice as a JBOD server or perhaps rolling my own unRaid md driver.

In the end I settled on the Infrant readynas NV. For 600 bucks I purchased a diskless version. I also purchased 3 750 gb disks. let me tell you this lil guy is small and really good on power. With 2 disks in raid 1 the unit pulls about 50 watts while spinning. When the drives spin down it was pulling 22 watts. This jumps up as you add drives. For 3 drives the power is 30 watts and 60 respectively. The X-raid is a really interesting feature too. it always you to eXpand the Raid array by adding disks on an as needed basis. I started off with two. This morning I added the third, which took 4 hours to initialize. This eve, I rebooted and it automatically eXpanded The volume across the other disk to a whapping 1.3Terrabytes. When I add the 4th it will be just a bit under 2tb.
Another neat feature is you can expand the array over time by swapping each of the 4 disks (one each day). Day one, swap 750 for a terrabyte drive, day 2 and so on and so forth until wala, 3 terrabytes are available. Not too shabby.

The web management interface is quite polished too.

According to tomshardware, the thecus is the top performer, However the readyNas is no slouch either. It's great at serving files, yet slow as molassis at serving the admin pages. We'll see how this performs over time. I'm sure eventually I'll grow into the Thecus also probably using it as a scratch and jbod backup server

Then again I may just use unRaid for that. We shall see.

Now to install my new 1GB switch that supports jumbo frames and I'll be all set.

Pics are in the gallery (available by clicking the picture).

Hey, I am actually renting them. I just want to timeshift them. ;-)

So many features to talk about.
First and foremost this thing feels like a lil brick with it's aluminum housing.
It feels solid and very well built.

The WiFi is a bit sluggish, but it works well enough.
I can populate files by samba access and copying them to the archos, or by setting the wifi into file server mode and pushing them from my other boxes.

How cool is that.

The embedded web browser is slick too.

But most important, video looks great.
Audio is good enough. In comparson, the audio in the cowon a2 is better. I think the jetaudio and effects possible truly make that my favorite audio player.
Yet this is good enough for audio, and excellent for video. (although the cowon is no slouch there).

More to come later, I just wanted to get some pics up for y'all to drool over. ;-)

http://www.cotrone.com/rob/gallery/archos704wifi

My co-worker Jose demoed the unit (as we always show of our technology toys).
It's a very cool (and large) unit. What intrigued me even more was that it's a special version provided by Dish networks that interfaces with the PVR.
It allows you to download the movies onto the PMP via USB.
Jose said it takes about 5 minutes to download an hour's worth of video.

It was quite cool seeing the dresden files playing on this PMP.

I looked further into it and discovered archos came out with a later rev called the 704 WIFI.

This baby sports a higher res "touch" screen, 80GB and WIFI. How cool is that.

I want one!

http://www.archos.com/products/video/archos_704wifi/index.html?country=global&lang=en

I believe they will be released here in America around April.

http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.phpmanufacturers_id=&products_id=498

I'm a bit disappointed. Although they've upgraded the hard drive interface to SATA, The box still only fits one.
This is where I thought the Thecus did better allowing two drives so you could mirror them.

Also, the second SATA port is not available externally. Dam. I was hoping to mirror two drives. Sigh.

Well hopefully the USB performs better with the later kernel.

Pics Here
http://www.ch1.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
http://forum.linkstationwiki.net/index.php?action=vthread&forum=18&topic=2477&page=1

Then I remembered the MR26A (serial RF receiver) and the X10 MP3 anywhere remote.
A lil research showed that it's supported in the later revs of lIRC.

This is a big plus as I have X10 modules around the apartment and having them accessible on the remote while also using it to control the jukebox would be a real boon!

So low and behold, I compile and install (Partially) the lircd and it pretty much works out of the box.
The only downside is the remote sensing from lircd is only for the multimedia buttons.
Although the receiver is capable of capturing the X10 appliance/sensors signals, the lirc daemon does not decode them.

After some research I've found the place where it is all decoded.
Although I still have work to do, I'm making good progress to have the driver decode all of the X10 signals.
There are many (house codes A-P and device numbers 1-16).

Why bother?
Well this brings me down to a new use I require for the office.

Over the past two weeks they moved me to a location where there is a lot of traffic behind me.
The new cubicle is much more open and people walk up behind me scoping my monitor (Shoulder surfing).
Normally not an issue until I overheard someone comment to someone else.
"Everythime I walk by he is on the internet." hahahahaha.
Wouldn't normally matter to me except I overheard the response.
Just keep walking by his desk and see what he's doing?
Hmmm.. were they talking about me?

Funny thing about that. My Boss knows and condones it.
In fact My review this week stated how I search out the latest technology and open source to bring within the group, which improves how we do things.
(I do this as I'm always trying to improve my C system programming skills).

This gave rise to a new need.
A warning system. Who the hell is walking up behind me?
Granted I have all sorts of rear view panoramic mirrors at my desk, but I need an earlier alert system.

Hence. X10 to the rescue.
With X10's photo electric sensor along with the remote lamp modules I can put a proximity alert system in place to light my lava lamps when someone approaches. OK, primitive but fun.

Frankly, I don't need the MR26A sensor and lirc, but I figured with IREXECD functionality from LIRCD, I could run a program that spits out a vocal alert with PROXIMITY ALERT, APPROACH FROM REAR LEFT...

hhahahaha.
Sure will freak out my co-workers.

The Age of Weebo-Trek is upon us.

http://www.lirc.org
http://www.x10.com/products/x10_ak11a.htm

From what was a free network of information, has turned into a shove it in your face mechanism of advertising.
Advertising is one thing, but when they search you out and stuff shit (i mean shit!) in your inbox, message boards, blogs and profiles it's just crazy.

Do people really think you want to purchase drugs from overseas vendors to make your male member larger?
Do these webcam girls on myspace really think I want to purchase views while they remove clothing?

I guess I'm particularly frustrated today when I received a friend request on myspace from a young gal.
Really, a 23 year old looking for a guy from 25 to 50ish.. gimme a break. I smelled webcam gal from a mile away.
I scroll down to look at the profile and WHAM, there it is, a view my webcam advertisement. OK, DENY.
That was fast.

5 minutes later, another friends request. Hmmmm...
Dam Same profile style, just a different picture, scroll down again, Oh Lookie, same advert.
DENY in lightning speed.

5 minutes later, another friends request. Hmmmm...
Again, same profile, different pic. Each one was of a different enthnic background, but the profile was the same.
I denied once again. Dam, just leave alone already LOL!

So later on the day, I got 3 other friends requests from young 23yr olds. OK, Seems like I have to do something different now, My blatent title is not good enough for these idiots.

I'm just so sad the way things are today with unsolicited crap.

http://www.freehugscampaign.org/

Sometimes, a hug is all what we need. Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal.

As this symbol of human hope spread accross the city, police and officials ordered the Free Hugs campaign BANNED. What we then witness is the true spirit of humanity come together in what can only be described as awe inspiring.

In the Spirit of the free hugs campaign, PASS THIS TO A FRIEND and HUG A STRANGER! After all, If you can reach just one person...

Music by Sick Puppies. (Visit http://sickpuppies.net or http://myspace.com/sickpuppies for the music)
---------------------------------------- ---------

PS. The response to this video has been nothing short of overwhelming and touching. Hugs to every single one of you who messaged. There has been thousands of emails from all over the world by people seeking to participate in the Free Hugs campaign and asking for permission. You do not need permission. This is the peoples movement, this is *your* movement. With nothing but your bare hands you can make THE difference.

Imagine all the people.

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http://www.freehugscampaign.org
http://www.myspace.com/freehugscampaign

Press/media contact:
paul.stepanek@oninternational.com (more) (le