Well, I've got the remote access running now by manually configuring the ports on my router, including opening the required port for WebGuide to stream media.
Now that this is working I'm able to upload files to the home server via drag and drop in Internet Explorer, which will be useful, but not as useful as it was in the days prior to SkyDrive and Mesh. It's nice to know the only limits I'll have are my own disc space though.
And whilst I'm able to connect to the server via remote desktop, I'm not yet able to connect to any client machines. This is probably because I need to re-start, but unfortunately I didn't have time to test the laptop this morning, and the desktop machine is still less that 70% through its first backup at the time of writing (about 10:25), despite having kicked this off at about 20:30 last night (hopefully subsequent backups will be tiny, that's what you'd expect, if that's not the case I'm in trouble for disc space anyway).
One of the things I need to see after the desktop backup completes is if the media files get put into the media directories automatically. If not I'll be copying these with SyncToy periodically, but at least then I'll be able to remove them from the backup cycle, which to be fair is where most of the backup file size comes from.
The other feature I've made use of today is remote desktop via the Mesh client, which is really useful, but also incredibly slow (I guess the backup isn't helping). I've since opened up the required ports, but again I need to restart before these changes take place.
No doubt I'll elaborate in my next post.
Showing posts with label Live Mesh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Live Mesh. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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.
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.
Monday, 30 November 2009
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.
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.
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