On With The Plunge.

There’s not been a whole lot of progress with my Windows Home Server experiments recently. The trial installation would have well and truly expired by now, but it was bought to a crashing halt when I added a third HDD to the machine – suddenly it all stopped booting and this time I couldn’t find a solution.

That wasn’t the main problem though, as a back-up server this would be inconvenient, but not fatal as long as everything else is safely stored elsewhere. What is really still getting me is the 500Gb of data still locked away on the old Ubuntu HDD, and the fact I have decided to run the server with the 1Tb drive currently powering my main desktop PC (in addition to the 500Gb drive and another I already have knocking around.

I decided to go for a couple of Samsung Spinpoint F3 (ordered yesterday to hopefully be delivered tomorrow) drives in the end, putting them in a striped RAID 0 configuration. I was looking at doing a RAID 5 config on 3 drives, but this would use 1Tb for parity data, and I can’t afford a 4 drive RAID 5 array (which interestingly would still only use 1Tb of parity). Besides which, as I’ve probably mentioned before, I don’t even fill 1Tb locally (although I could) so 3Tb would be massive overkill.

I figure RAID 0 with a scheduled backup to WHS should see me OK. If a drive fails it will be a pain, but not the end of the world. Hopefully I’ll get some performance increase in with the newer faster drives and striping as I believe this is what generally holds back my PC, however I'm lead to believe that boot times and application start-up are largely unaffected in RAID 0.

So when these drives arrive, Windows 7 Ultimate will be installed on the new array, I’ll copy off any remaining data from my old drive, then it’s back to getting the WHS box running. I should also have room for a nice collection of VMWare machine images, and I'll have a go attaching some old XP only hardware in XP Mode.

Lets just hope neither of the drives arrive dead, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Drawing to a new conclusion...

As those of you who read my various other web sites (and the earlier incarnation of this blog) may be aware, I started a new job at the end of April this year which resulted in me moving from a Java (and occasionally SQL) developer, on to C# (via Microsoft Visual Studio 2008) and back to (what has become over the years) the nightmare of Delphi 5.

Delphi, specifically version 5 was way ahead of the crowd in it's time, unfortunately that time was 1999. I used to love Delphi, it was so advanced compared to similar offerings such as Visual Basic that anyone who had used it seriously didn't want to go back to other languages unless they were offered a seriously large pay-cheque to do so.

Then a series of events happened which saw Delphi get left behind, the two main (from my perspective) being:

1. Java arrived and offered the opportunity to program in a new object oriented language that allowed code to run across different platforms. Many Delphi developers moved over to Java, and by using JBuilder which also originated at Borland, we felt at home in a familiar IDE too (versions 1 to 3 of JBuilder were written in Delphi, JBuilder 3.5 was the first native Java IDE for JBuilder).
2. Anders Hejlsberg was poached from Borland by Microsoft and as a result the lead architect had gone. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of very talented people at Borland, but despite this there was always the perception (accurate or otherwise) that after Anders jumpred ship, the product was left in disarray.

Delphi was never as popular again.

This is all a long time before the .Net platform, and more importantly for the remaining Delphi developers, C# started shipping. In fact, Anders Hejlsberg was the chief architecht of C# after his J# language, understandably, upset Sun, so morphed into Cool, which was eventually released as C# (at least that's how I remember it).

Despite remaining a solid language, Delphi started to stagnate and fall behind Java and C# in terms of features and the integration of new technologies at that time. Although Delphi version 7 was a particularly good release (as far as I remember, was it version 4 that was always rubbish, even after two service packs?) it just wasn't enough. The job ads for Delphi were starting to decline, and its hey-day was now behind it. As a develper, that raises some concerns, and for me it was time to move on.

Java became my language of choice. Not only was the JDK free, but I'd been playing around with it since late 1996 in the version 1.0 builds. So it was that I moved to a job offering cross training to Java from Delphi, which after some complaining eventually happened.

And so Java started to pay the bills as well, if not better, than Delphi had in previous years. However apart from a few notable times (such as when James Talbot introduced me to the Spring Framework, thanks James) Java development was never as much fun as Delphi in those early days.

Don't get me wrong, I like Java a lot, but it rarely had the comparatively instant gratification moments that Delphi often provided. I think a lot of this can be down to two points: My Java programming involved little Swing (or indeed any visual) work, so whilst it was immensley satisfying to get JSP being constructed from a web server, or process huge amounts of financial data, it didn't grab my imagination in quite the same way. The second problem is that Java does so much I could never hope to be comfortable with it all. It is true that this is the case with Delphi (DCOM required me to grab a book and ISAPI extensions have never been produced by this particular mortal) and also C#, but with Java you always felt like you should know it all, it's not enough to just be aware it exists until you need to use it.

So now I'm spending a proprtion of my work time developing in C#, and to my great delight I find it has some of the same highlights as Delphi used to, only more applicable to the world of now. I don't wish to be unfair to the latest versions of Delphi, which I believe are very good, but the whole community around C# is massive, and it's not the dog of a language that Visual Basic was (is?)

I'm now re-learning how to implement things like threading in yet another language. I don't regret this for a moment though as not only may the approaches to some things have changed over the years, but I also believe that in doing this you always get a little deeper understanding, and hopefully wash away a few of the bad habits you may have picked up over the years.

One of the new areas I'm interested in investigating further is the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF or Avalon to some). This looks similar in many basic ways to Swing in Java, only it feels like a later revision. As a result hopefully I'll be able to take back some of what I learn to future Swing applications.

WPF is still quite new (having been released alongside Windows Vista) and the plan is eventually to make this and Silverlight one and the same thing (or so I believe, at the moment Silverlight uses a subset of WPF).

The down side on this is that a lot of the announcements about Silverlight 4 seem to be moving away from cross platform solutions towards Windows only technologies such as COM. I guess time will tell on that front.

WPF is also a core component of Windows 7, so there's significant opportunity there. Also, I believe, the Windows Mobile 7 UI will be rendered in WPF... that will be awesome if/when it happens. And if they start to add the tools into Visual Studio Express from installation then the uptake of WM7 will only improve in my opinion (you can code Windows Mobile Apps without Visual Studio, but it's a lot more complicated without Visual Studio Professional of above. See my later Windows 7 follow-up post in a few days for more of what I think about this).

There's lots of new things being offered by .Net and C# that I need to look into, if not become an expert in, but just to be aware and not completely ignorant of them. The way I'm approaching this is far more relaxed than Java, so hopefully it will be more fun and I'll achieve even more, then take some of the positives back to Java some time in the future.

At last I am once again excited about the possibilities. I just need to shed some (or all) of this Delphi work to give it more of the time it deserves. Oh well, needs must.

Just a quick one...

This quote from The Register made me laugh:

When Jobs petulantly pouted that Windows stole the Mac's look and feel, Gates countered with "Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's house before I did and stole the TV doesn't mean that I can't go in later and take the stereo."

I think I may be using that particular quote in future.

Here's a thing, reading a book by an ex-Microsoft employee a few years ago I seem to remember the said employee reminising on development of Windows 1.0. The first (or at least an early) version of scroll-bars in windows had a dynamically sizing thumb area to reflect the proportion of the window visible compared to its overall size. When Gates was shown this he ordered it to be removed, not because he didn't like it, but because it looked too much like the Apple OS, so the fixed size area that some of you may remember was born.

It seems like such a bad choice to make now, but there you go. Interpret that as you will, to me it says Gates didn't want to be seen copying, but knew that a WIMP environment was the way to go. Of course, these day's the whole concept would have probably been patented by Xerox on the drawing board and never implemented. Still, that's progress.

Either way, I know who I'd rather work for...

Is that a virus in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Whilst on Facebook last night, Emma visited one of the app pages she'd been to before (some kind of family tree app I believe it was). As the page was loading a pop-up appeared warning her that her PC as infected and offered to scan the machine. Hopefully at least about half of you can guess where this story is headed (if not the exact next course of action).

Despite constantly telling me I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near computers (as I tend to break them and are forever re-installing Windows, but as I try to tell her, that's partly due to the fact that I'm forever tinkering to try and learn more), she called me down from upstairs to advise.

As it happens I recently started running the free Microsoft Security Essentials pack (after a year with Avira Premium, which in all fairness caused me no end of trouble by being over secure), and although thus far I've never seen MSE flag a warning, I was pretty sure that this just looked like a web dialog box, and so told her to click the 'Cancel' button. That was probably the wrong thing to do but all that happened was the same dialog box appeared again. This time I told her to click the Close icon (the [X] button in the top right) and the dialog disappeared to be replaced with what looked like a windows explorer dialog with a scan taking place on the hard drives. This scan reported to find countless instances of malware and trojans.

I'll admit at this point I did a double take, again possibly due to the fact that (as yet) I've not been hit by a nasty while running the Security Essentials suite. That was only for a split-second I'm pleased to say, and a quick look at the icon in the top left of the window showed this was indeed another web page trying to scare us into buying a real trojan. We closed the web page, performed a quick scan via MSE (which took much longer than the full scan from the bogus web page) and sure enough the machine was reported as clean.

I was very impressed with this attack. The crooks had done a decent job and your average user, especially those who don't know about this variety of scam, would have been scared and possibly very tempted to download the 'cure', probably paying for the privilege.

Needless to say Emma has deleted this application from her Facebook list.

So what can we learn from this:
1. Beware of this type of scan.
2. Download security software and keep it up to date. Always go back to this to check if you suspect anything untoward is going on. No virus checker will catch everything, but at least you'll be starting from a point you trust.
3. Your main (day-to-day) user accounts should not be set up at an administrator level. Create an administrator account (or two if you are not the only user) and only use this to install software. For day to day usage use a user-level account, as you would under Unix. On this machine Emma’s user hasn't got Admin rights, so she would have needed to jump through many hoops to get the fake software to install. It's not foolproof, but it's actually one of the best defence approaches out there.

I'd also like to suggest to the suppliers of security suites that they have example dialog screen shots for users to refer to. The only time I paused to consider if this was real or fake was because I've never seen the real warning from Microsoft Security Essentials.

I'll be doing a full scan on the machine later this week, but I think it's 1 - 0 to us this time. Well done Emma for being on the ball too! Many wouldn't have been.

Bloody Linux!

I've just spent all this evening trawling through the Ubuntu community help pages on LaunchPad, and trying various tools in Windows to get my Linux HDD to mount, all with no success.

So in the next couple of days I'll be trying to run from a Ubuntu Live installation to access the drives, after which I'm afraid I'll give up and loose the best part of 400Gb of data.

I'm not happy, there's a lot of work there (not to mention probably a few paid for software apps too).

I imagine won't be coming back to Linux for a long time, not least due to the attitude of some of the community members to people asking for help.

You know what, I don't want to be part of that scene. Goodbye Linux, you served me well right up to the point where you screwed me.

PhotoSynth Updated

I see from an old posting on the Channel 9 RSS feed that Photosynth has been updated.

If you are interested in photographing locations or objects you really should take a look at this, it's awesome technology.



In other news you may have seen that Bing Maps is starting to use GeoTagged Photosynth images, so there's another chance to show off your photographic skills. I have images scattered over Google Maps via the postings I've made to Panoramio, so it will be interesting to see if any of my synths make it to Bing.

I should probably check that they're geo-tagged first!

Windows Home Server – Part IV

Well, I’m down to 10 days before my Windows Home Server trial installation expires, and as promised I’ve had a go at running the box with the graphics card removed. Actually, I also removed the TV tuner card that was still in there from when the box used to perform its Media Center duties.

The box booted, however the HDD was still spinning a few minutes later, then the box rebooted itself. Then the same thing happened again, then on the third (or possibly fourth) reboot everything settled down and now seems to be running normally.

So what’s the power draw with the two cards removed?

Prior to taking the cards out the machine was running at 102 watts (whilst the lower specified Biostar box was running around 90 watts).

The Shuttle box now also runs at about 90 watts, so a decent saving of about 10 watts (or 10%) so I’d get an extra couple of hours a day for free on the electricity bill, or about 3 days a month. Worthwhile.

As a matter of interest, unplugging the power from the DVD re-writer drive drops this to 89 watts, but to be honest the meter I’m using isn’t likely to be that accurate.

The other point to note is that there is only room for 3 HDD inside the box, and this will up the power requirements a little. I’ll investigate this more later, but I reckon that if I install the OS on the 500Gb drive from the Ubuntu machine, then use a 25oGb for the second drive and either another 25oGb or 160Gb drive for the third (depending what I can salvage) then I should be good to go. This also depends somewhat on me getting the stuff off the old Ubuntu installation first. It’s on the to-do list.

Hmmmm, I wonder if I can force another drive in somehow.

(I’ve just had a look and possibly if I mount the drives vertically. Or have one outside the case – risky considering its intended location. We’ll see – perhaps the BIOS won’t allow it….)

Stay tuned.

Disappearing Code (WHS Update 3)

In my previous post I talked about Mesh and mentioned the pitfalls of the current implementation, specifically the fact that if a file ‘goes bad’ in one location, it will quickly go bad in all synchronized locations, with no option (that I can see) to revert to an earlier version or undelete.

One of the folders I synchronize on Mesh contains code for a personal project I’ve been working on for a few years. Fortunately, most of the work I’ve been doing is getting my head around what I wanted to achieve, and devising the core of a design and an implementation approach to achieve this, meanwhile I’ve cut very little code.

About a year ago I created a few of the basic objects and tests in Java, and have recently been in the process of converting this Java code to C# with the intention that not only would I be able to use this project to aid in my C# education, but that also by the fact that the app would be better solved (at least initially) by a Windows desktop application (and possibly a Windows Mobile incarnation), rather than a generic Java Swing application. My ultimate goal is to make a Java Servlet web based implementation followed by a generic Java client; what better way to show off your skills to prospective employers than a solution implemented in two languages targeting multiple different clients?

Anyway, I’ve strayed a little, the key is that the Java and C# code is kept in folders replicated by Mesh. One evening late last week before setting off home from the office I decided to load the C# version to see what suggestions ReSharper would have to clean things up (ReSharper is an excellent tool – take a look if you work in any of the .NET languages, it’s good enough that it’s changed my style of programming in a few areas due to its suggestions). So I navigated my way to my replicated C# folder and… well you can probably guess: My source files were missing!!!

Bugger.

There’s only a couple of hours work there, but it’s a pain to write such things a second time. I don’t know who deleted (or hopefully moved the files) yet – me or the Mesh. Hopefully it’s me who has moved them (although the fact that some files still exist in the directory makes me wonder), but it does highlight the fragility of the system for longer term work.

So then I set to thinking about this less than ideal situation. I’ve been using Subversion for a couple of years now, and this is exactly what that system is for – source control of code. I did spend several hours trying to set up a subversion server on my (still currently dead) Ubuntu box, but failed, however after a quick search on Google I see several people are running subversion on Windows Home Server with it externally accessible from other locations. This down side of this is that it does open the machine up to the outside world, but I was intending to do this for such things as music streaming anyway, so it looks like the way I’m going to go.

I’m taking a risk here in as much as I haven’t done a test install on my trial version of WHS (which only has a few days of trial time remaining), but there’s enough going for Windows Home Server now that I know I’ll be buying a licence soon (especially since the 120 day activation key has been withdrawn from the Microsoft site – thanks guys!). You can do all this stuff for free in Ubuntu, but frankly it’s not worth the hassle to me, at least for the moment.

I also did some quick investigations into the power requirements of running the old Ubuntu box (Biostar iDeq 210) verses my old PC running the test WHS install (Shuttle SN45V3). Both machines have 2 HDD, but the Shuttle has a graphics card while the Biostar is using the internal graphics chipset (after all it was only running Linux in terminal mode). The Shuttle idles at about 102 Watts, while the BioStar was about 90 Watts. Aside from the fact they both have different processors, Hard Drives and probably memory, the extra power draw on the shuttle can probably be explained by the graphics card (and it has an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ as opposed to the BioStar 3000+). The Biostar would be of ample horsepower to run WHS, but it never properly managed to run XP without problems, it would periodically crash with a display driver warning on the BSOD, a problem I never managed to rectify either with re-installation of the OS and Drivers, or by installing an external graphics card, so I’m cautious of running WHS on this box.

Considering everything, and for the sake of an extra 10% power draw, it looks like the Shuttle box will get the WHS build. 100 Watts is more than the 35-50 Watts of the HP MediaSmart box I was looking at, and it won’t have the expandability of that box, but that machine costs over £400, so even factoring in the WHS operating system (at £66) it would still take several years to recoup the money, based on current energy prices.

The next steps are that I need to take the box apart next to see if it’s feasible to get 4 hard drives in there (3 should work as I’m going to remove the broken DVD drive, but 4 would be better if I can find the space).

The box is going to live in the garage, so I also need to drill a bigger hole in the wall to get a Cat6 cable out there (the box only has a 100 Base-T connection, but I don’t want to be running a cable twice). When I’ve done all that I’ll order the OS, a 10 meter Cat-6 cable and possibly a new bigger HDD and take it from there.

I wonder if WHS will run headless… a quick search suggests it will so I suppose that will probably be my next test (after a re-install of the trial I suppose), after all, if I can take the graphics card out the power draw may drop a little, and as they sat at Tesco “Every little helps!”. By headless I mean without a graphics card at all – not just without a monitor attached. That may sound odd, but I remember the early versions of Java would fail if certain operations were performed without any graphics card present (I think it was something to do with rendering AWT components even if they were to be served up remotely, but I’m probably wrong, this was a long time ago).

Oh, and now I see Power Pack 3 is out!

Stay tuned.

Mesh

I’m a big fan of Windows Live Mesh and use it extensively for keeping copies of books (mainly PDF) synchronised between home and work machines, however it’s clearly not a backup solution.

Here is a quick overview of what it does (or at least how I use it), although you’d probably be better off going to the web site to see the official description.

Mesh is owned and operated by Microsoft, uses a passport login (so if you’ve got a hotmail or live account, for example, then you can just sign in and start using it) and provides 5Gb of free online file storage space which you can pretty much do with what you want.

From within your browser there’s a web interface that provides a Windows style desktop on which you can create individual folders, then from within these folders you can drag and drop files to upload, and later download to another machine.

Nothing new there I hear you say. Indeed, but the clever bit (and I know there are solutions from other providers that will do the same) is the Mesh Operating Environment service which sits in your Windows tool tray and allows you to download and keep synchronized the folders you created above onto the local machine. Additionally you can select a local folder and choose to have this synchronised to the online space, where it will also appear on the web desktop for access via the browser on machines without MOE installed.

Client machines with MOE installed can choose which folders to synchronise and where they should be located locally (and even allow you to rename the local name), so your own folder structure locally doesn’t need to mirror the remote structure or other instances (although nested folders will have their contents synchronised as part of the parent folder, as you’d expect).

The real power of this is that multiple machines can connect to your Mesh account, so for example, if I add a file to my work PC, by the time I get home it will be copied to my home PC automatically. Want to work on that work office document from home? Don’t worry about copying it to a USB key (or other device), if you set up correctly then it will be at home before you are!

This is all very cool, but needs to be used with some care, and explains why Mesh can’t be used as a backup solution; if one file gets corrupted/deleted/changed then this propagates to all instances of that file located remotely too. I’ve lost a lot of work by making silly mistakes like this, what Mesh needs is an archive or history feature to allow files to be restored to an earlier time, more on one of these mistakes in a later post.

The mesh framework also bizarrely allows for remote PC connection in the style of VNC or Remote Desktop, although not quite as slick.

Folders/files can also be shared with other users allowing for some collaboration (although Office Live does a better job of this, more on that another time), and at some point in time they may actually get around to releasing the promised mobile client.

As it stands Mesh is a useful tool and one I make use of on a regular basis, but do ensure you keep backups away from it, otherwise you may get stung. If they ever bring in an archive then Mesh will be of far more use and could become a must have for anyone working on more than one PC in multiple locations.

Smart Phones

I recently upgraded my phone to an HTC Touch Pro2 which runs Windows Phone (supplied with 6.1 but now running the free 6.5 ROM update), and it’s a purchase I’m extremely pleased with, despite having to send it back to get the space bar on the keyboard and the speakerphone microphone fixed. The true test of how good I think it is is the answer to the question “Would I buy another?”, which would have to be an almost definite “Yes!”. The almost part being that I’d possibly got for the new HTC HD2, which has better hardware (although no physical keyboard, but still runs Windows Phone OS.

But here’s the thing: I never recommend phones running Windows to anyone other than other developers.

Why?

Well, I chose a phone running this OS as I actually like it. It’s not the fact that, despite there only being a few apps on the Windows Marketplace there are actually more Window CE applications than for any other device (yes, including the iPhone and possibly even Symbian devices).

I don’t mind that many of the applications are designed with a stylus in mind, I had an iPaq back in 2004 and have used that ever since, so it’s actually an input method I am comfortable with. Actually, I think having a device entirely finger driven is not something I’m looking for, having the phone functionality covered by fingers is fine for me, and HTCs Sense interface they overlay on their phones (including their impressive range of Android phones) goes further than I need in achieving this.

I also have a few paid for apps from my iPaq which still run without problems.

The camera isn’t all that good, but I knew that before I bought the device, and is hardly a consequence of the OS.

One of the main reasons for getting a Windows Phone is that I can write software for it using C#, a language I’m using in the workplace. I’ve already knocked up a couple of small applications and found it remarkably easy.

But the point is most people don’t want to use the phone in the same way I do, hence why I will usually recommend either an Android base smart phone, or an iPhone.

I’d never touch an iPhone myself, but that’s because it doesn’t offer me the things I want from a phone, and I think the way apple treats their customers and developers stinks. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter at the moment. What I will say is that the virus known as iTunes does a good job of managing the purchase of Apples chosen applications, and is simple enough for my less technical friends to use. And I suppose I should mention there’s a lot of good games for it.

Shame the phone functionality itself is a little…. sub-optimal.

My favourite alternative at the moment is many of the Android based phones. I really think this is the OS to watch, and if they can break the Apple love fest (which is a very difficult nut to crack) then this is the phone with the best prospects.

Then, of course, there’s Symbian, who ship more licences than any of the others (possibly combined). I had a Nokia N95 and was generally happy with it, but it was a bit buggy. Through talking to a friend who worked at Symbian he convinced me that this was probably down to what Nokia had ‘added’ to the OS, but the net result is the same.

So please don’t tell my your iPhone is better than my Windows Phone as I won’t listen. Yes, it’s probably a better phone for you, but not for me. Enjoy playing with your iBeer, and leave me alone, I’ll be busy writing OneNote documents and Excel spreadsheets on a device that’s donig what I want it to, and a lot more besides.

(BTW: I deleted the Windows Phone version of iBeer, it was OK, but what’s the point.)

ECommerce Done Bad.

I was recently sent an email from Nokia telling me they’d created an account for me at their Nokia Music site and credited it with £4, which works out at about 5 free tracks at the 79 pence each they charge. So I promptly flagged it for looking at later and forgot all about it.

It’s now a couple of weeks later and I decided to log into this account I never asked for to see what gems I could find, my ultimate goal being to find an old classic album and download the lot for my free £4.

After installing their odd software (which I wouldn’t normally do, but since I will be re-installing the operating system on this machine shortly I’m not too bothered), I managed to browse around their store, but to my disappointment no albums could be found for less than £7.99, and no individual tracks for less than 79 pence.

So basically, CDs which I could got into HMV and buy for £3 will cost me over twice as much, without the physical expense of a tangible product which I could (arguably) format shift onto MP3 anyway.

So I’ve decided to spend my £4, then never return unless they ever decide to give me more free credit, at which point I may repeat the process if I can be bothered. The design of the site itself is not intuitive and it took me just under 5 minutes to work out how to download the tracks I’d selected. If I’m confused, what’s Mr. Average Joe going to do.

Sorry Nokia, but your store deserves to fail on both price and design.

And that brings me onto the second part of my rant – the greed of the music companies.

I used to have some sympathy for the record labels, after all they often spend large amounts of money promoting new groups, and don’t always get it back. But their business model for electronic delivery is just crazy.

When CDs came out we were told how they would be cheaper than Vinyl or cassette as the breakage rate would fall and they would become super cheap to manufacture. This did eventually happen, but only after the percentage ‘reserved’ by the publishers for these breakages was doubled from the previous formats, and only in recent times since imports via the web, and the demand for music has dropped has price followed suit.

Why has demand dropped? I’d guess that there’s just too much choice for other ways to spend our cash now, be that DVDs, video games, or any number of fancy gadgets that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.

I’m wrong of course, it’s actually down to all the pirates out there illegally downloading music for free from drug dealing gangs to make more money. Silly me.

I’d imagine any gang dealing in drugs that makes more money through distributing torrents for free is probably not that big a risk for the DEA. Of course, I understand there needs to be methods for money laundering used by these imaginary gangs, but I always assumed the point of these was using a legitimate business as a front, not another ‘criminal’ activity, after all, what would be gained? How silly I am…

So instead I’ll pay £7.99 for an electronic copy of an album I could get cheaper on CD anywhere else, or pay 79 pence for a single of one track, when I could have four or more tracks on a CD single for £2.

Except I won’t, I’m not that silly after all.

WHS Update

Further to my (la/fir)st posting yesterday, I now have Windows Home server installed on the old PC, but it looks like it may fail on one of my main aims - a centralised Windows Media Center base unit. I should probably list what are (currently) my main goals:

1. Backup of the various Windows machines I have running at home, especially things like Photos, etc. I currently use SyncToy, which is very good, but I’ve never managed to automate it satisfactorily.
2. A centralised back-up store of media files, with...
3. The ability to stream music from home over the internets, as was being provided by Jinzora on my old Ubuntu machine.
4. Stream media to the XBox 360... going forward possibly multiple Media Center Extender devices...
5. …which means it needs to run media center for extenders to connect to, along with other PCs, possibly with support for TV tuners (see comment on Windows Media Connect, below).
6. Still be able to host my own website... well if the hardware is on it's a waste not to.
7. Run a torrent client, although since this is mainly really being used to download Linux type stuff now, that's not so important.
8. Cut down on my enormous electricity bill.

So far, what I've looked at with Windows Home Server seems to be pretty impressive, although a few hours over one weekend is not quite enough time to part with serious cash yet.

I should add the caveat that I also haven’t actually run any backups yet, what with the box only running with 320Gb of total storage, spaced over two drives. I set up the laptop to backup, which to be honest was a pain in the arse – but to be fair this was only because, with such limited storage on the server, I had to go in excluding most of the hard disc (for example the “Program Files” directory).

I also like the fact you can do “Wake On Lan” to start the PCs when it’s time to backup, although I’m not sure if this is only available via wired connections, or I just need to set it in the BIOS, I suspect the former. There are also a range of functional add-ins, one of which allows you to shut down PCs, which I actually think could be remarkably useful.

WHS offers remote access, which will be nice, and remote desktop, so if I can manage to get a Cat6 cable through my wall, will allow me to stow it away in the garage, just like I used to do via HomePlug (anybody want to buy 4 200Mbs Homeplug devices off me?). Of course the network card in the machine is only 100Mbs, but it will save trouble on future upgrades.

So the only sticking point, so far, is the fact that WHS doesn’t run Media Center.

Then, this morning, I had a thought: How about running Vista or Windows 7 as a Virtual machine on within WHS as the host? Looking on the VMWare site a couple of people had tried and failed to do this, but I also see one guy had pretty much achieved it albeit with a few issues.

The thing is, to really get going I’ll need to get at least one new 1Tb hard drive (although frankly I think WHS should run on at least 2 drives to take advantage of duplication), then there’s the cost of the OS itself (66), and the fact the hardware is an old shuttle mini box, so limited expansion potential and I’ve not yet measured power consumption. Plus to get VMWare player running I’d need more than 1Gb of memory, and I’ll need to use one of my Windows 7 licenses to run in the VM. Plus the USB TV Tuners.

So I’m now wondering if it’s all going to be worth it. For most of the time the functionality provided by Windows Media Connect, which WHS does support will probably be fine, and those occasions I do want MCE functionality I can turn on the desktop machine upstairs. It’s not like I’ve got a stack of cash to throw around anymore.

The strange thing is, I’m now warming to the idea of getting an HP Homeserver machine and throwing another 1Tb HDD in there… but that would need to wait.

I may be uninstalling my 30 day Windows Home server trial and replacing it with a 120 day trial while I save up the cash for the HP box and do further testing, as I don’t think a month is going to be long enough.

As for Ubuntu… the chances are I’ll mount the drives on my desktop machine to copy off the contents, then put them back into the test WHS box (as it has a 500Gb and 250Gb drive) and see if I can squeeze an extra SATA drive in there too by removing the dead DVD drive and using my USB DVD drive instead. Then, if I can squeeze in some super cheap extra memory from eBay, I may just install Ubuntu as a Virtual Machine. We’ll see.

Now, I wonder what those power draw figures will be.

Welcome

“Ah” I hear you say, another new blog for me not to update, and you’re probably right, so let me attempt to explain:

Until recently I’ve been running (but not maintaining) my website on a Linux box sat at home under my TV which was working very nicely. Recently however, I upgraded it from Ubuntu 9.4 to 9.10, at which point it decided to not recognise my second HDD, effectively rendering the box useless without, possibly, rolling back. I then read that they estimate only 10% of users upgraded in-place without issue.

At the same time Windows 7 arrived on the scene, of which I had pre-ordered 3 copies. One of copy of Windows 7 was to update my old machine based around an Nvidia GeForce 2 chipset, which I now know isn’t supported by the new OS (or it seems, Vista before this). The result of this is that I now have the choice of either rolling back to Windows XP Media Center Edition, or buying new hardware.

I’ve been running XP MCE for years, at it streams nicely to the Xbox 360, hence why I had this in addition to the Linux box (yes, I had installed various media streaming solutions to the Ubuntu box, but none of these had the tight integration MCE offers.

Then, yesterday, I had a thought. Doing a little research it seems that Windows Home Server will also play nicely with the hardware, plus this will allow me to backup from my various boxes very easily. I had been looking at an HP solution for about £400, but I just don’t have that kind of money anymore, but if it works on the old hardware…

So I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial (and I now see there’s a 120 day trial available), installed it on the old XP MCE machine without too much trouble, and I’m now testing this.

The upshot of all of this is that, if it goes well, they’ll be a reduced need for the Ubuntu server, especially since running 2 machines 24-7 is going to use more electricity (which isn’t cheap nowadays) so I’ve decided to move my tech blog that was based on that machine to here, at least for the time being, we’ll see how it goes.

I’ll update all the URLs when there’s a few more entries on here, then just fix the old Ubuntu box when I get time, and use this as a test machine.

I hope that makes sense.

Stu.