Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

25 Sep

My Hard Drive Is Bigger Than Yours

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , .

Over the last (almost) decade of working at the same company I have been amazed by the ever growing need for storage solutions. We have moved over time from a mixed Windows 95/98/ME environment to a homogeneous Windows 7 installation base. Where we were long ago running Office 97 we are now running Office 2010. During this time the file sizes produced by these software packages has increased dramatically. We are storing images of entire hard drive installations now where we used to rebuild from disc (cd-rom and floppies). Throw in redundant copies of critical information, along with the fact that no one ever deletes anything, and our storage requirements were growing at an alarming rate. Eventually I needed to make a change.

When I decided that it was time to take action I didn’t have any single device that could hold all of our short and long term storage needs. I also didn’t have any portable devices that could move this data around without breaking it up into small pieces first. This was becoming quite a problem. I needed to find a solid network storage device that was robust, redundant, easy to implement and relatively affordable.

One of the barriers to working in a smaller shop is always budget. There was a long list of storage devices that we simply couldn’t afford. Since I had already been using two of the original Drobo (Data Robotics) devices I decided to see what higher end options were available. I was initially impressed by the DroboElite. This device offered many of the features that we were looking for in a storage device. It was compatible with our virtual servers as well as offering a great deal of network storage. With the dual NIC (network interface card) configuration I could easily dual purpose the unit. I decided to pull the trigger. Once the new device arrived I quickly took it out of the box and started working with it. I made a few bad assumptions during the initial setup due to my previous experience with the original Drobo devices. The DroboElite is almost nothing like its predecessors. Here are a few key lessons learned:

  • You have to connect the DroboElite directly to your computer using the USB cable for the initial setup.
  • Once you have the desired volumes set up you can then access it via the Drobo Dashboard over the local area network.
  • You cannot format the volumes while locally connected. You have to format the volumes over the network after the initial setup is complete.
  • This device doesn’t work in Linux. Period full stop. I lost a day and half trying to get it to work. You have been warned.
  • The only really good way to set up these larger volumes is to format them in NTFS. EXT3/4 won’t work. You have been warned (again).
  • Only ONE computer on your network can access each volume at one time. This one took me some time to work out.
  • You really should enable a CHAP password on any volume exposed to your local area network. One computer can lock out the volume so that no one else can access it. You might not know which computer that is. You might spend days trying to figure out how to regain access to your data before you finally think to enable a CHAP password. You have been warned (one last time).
Now that we have the ground work laid out let’s take a look at the setup:

All drives are recognized and working!

At this point I have initialized the Drobo, installed all eight hard drives (2 TB, 7200 RPM) and moved it to the local area network (LAN). The primary network interface card (NIC) has been configured with a static IP address and is accessible from all the devices on my network.

Now we need to set up the individual volumes:

Volume Setup Screen

We are sharing this storage device between our regular LAN and a virtual storage network. Before this device arrived I was running virtual machines locally on their physical hosts. This was risky since a hardware failure could potentially take down multiple virtual servers. With the arrival of the new Drobo I will finally be able to run the virtual machines on the storage device. If a physical host goes down I can quickly recover by moving the virtual machine to another physical host and starting it up again. The public facing recovery time shrinks from hours to minutes.

In the example above I have set up an 8 GB NTFS volume. This will be shared on the LAN for storage. The 2 GB volumes will be used on a separate storage network as shared storage for the physical virtual servers. All of the virtual machines will be migrated to the storage network ranked by importance.

Now that the volumes are set up it’s time to start copying data over to the Drobo!

Time to start copying files over!

One of the major differences between the original Drobo and the DroboElite is that only one computer can access a volume at a time. To work around this limitation I mounted the volume on our file server and used the domain permissions to control access.

Setting Up The Storage Network For Virtual Machines

To segment the virtual machine traffic from our normal LAN traffic I set up a second switch to manage the storage network. All of the physical host servers have at least dual NICs. One NIC from each server goes to the storage switch. The storage network runs over iSCSI instead of the standard TCP/IP protocol. This service is disabled by default in the physical host. To enable iSCSI click on Configuration – Storage Adapters.

Enable iSCSI Detection In VMWare

Once iSCSI has been enabled you can scan the network for your iSCSI device.

VMWare Can Now See Your iSCSI Volumes

Click on the Storage link to format the volumes with vmfs3.

All volumes are formatted and ready to go!

Click on the Networking link to set up the network. In the following example we are running one physical network attached to our LAN and a second attached to our storage network.

I am surprised at how many virtual machines can be run over the single gigabit ethernet connection without any apparent loss of speed. I haven’t hit a limit yet where performance is materially impacted. All in all this device is very impressive. You can really push the capabilities of this storage device on a rather tight budget. Kudos to Data Robotics for producing such a robust (and affordable) network storage device! Very impressive!

3 Jul

E-Readers Are Your Friend

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Amazon.com recently released statistics that shows the explosive growth of e-book sales in the first half of this year. Considering the amount of sales that a company like Amazon makes this is simply staggering. A few interesting statistics:

Recent milestones for Kindle include:

  • Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
  • So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
  • In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
  • Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.
  • Less than one year after introducing the UK Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1
Keep in mind that this does not include the use of free books. If you think that is impressive, how about this statistic? According to a recent Pew Internet poll, overall e-reader ownership has doubled in the last six months.
The percent of U.S. adults with an e-book reader doubled from 6% to 12% between November 2010 and May 2011. Hispanic adults, adults younger than age 65, college graduates and those living in households with incomes of at least $75,000 are most likely to own e-book readers. Parents are also more likely than non-parents to own these devices.
Ownership of these devices still lag far behind laptops and cell phones but the e-book reader is gaining ground quickly. As someone who owns all three of these devices I have to say that the signs are encouraging. As a Kindle owner I have greatly enjoyed the ability to carry around several books at once (along with the daily newspaper and a few magazine subscriptions). Traveling around with this much paper would be impractical to say the least. With the Kindle I can switch around my reading order depending on what I am interested in. It gives me a freedom that the paper world just can’t match.
My favorite feature of the Kindle is the ability to read in short time increments. With my busy schedule and healthy reading addiction it can be difficult to find a few hours to work my way through whatever book(s) I am reading at the moment. With an e-book reader I can read a few pages over a break, while I am standing in the server room waiting for a computer to reboot or in the car waiting for my wife to come out of the store. Being able to bounce between my desktop computer, netbook, laptop, Android phone and the Kindle itself leads to a very flexible reading schedule.
The only place where the Kindle falls short is in looking at photographs. You can’t read a magazine and expect to see all of the same pictures that you would see in the paper version. That is not generally a concern for me however, so I don’t pay it much attention. If you haven’t tried reading an e-book then I recommend you give it a try. You can download the desktop software for free for all of the major readers. Grab a free book and give it a shot. I think you will like it!

19 May

The Move Is Finally Finished

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , .

Approximately eleven months ago we shut down operations in the old building at work and moved to a new facility. The biggest part of the move (for the IT Office) was relocating all of our servers. We had to schedule a significant maintenance window, shut down all of the servers, unbolt them from the old racks, move them across the county and install them in the new server room.

The first part of the move was the smoothest. On the other side we had to battle power issues, cabling issues, uncooperative backbone switches, a dead phone system and lots of co-workers who needed help getting set up. The new server racks weren’t deep enough for our rail systems and used incompatible screws from the old racks. Throw all of that into a pot, add boiling water and you’ll get a very long weekend implementation.

So in this situation what would any self respecting IT guy do? They would stack the servers in the floor, run cables everywhere and get the websites and e-mail back online!

Servers stacked beside the racks.

It looks like our server room exploded!

Fast forward eleven months and three abortive attempts to clean up the server room. I finally scheduled another maintenance window that we could deliver on. We have reduced our hardware footprint somewhat with server virtualization and e-mail system consolidation in the intervening months. My friend David Wehrle stopped by on a Saturday to help me break everything down and bolt it into the racks. Fortunately the rail adapters and new screws all worked well from the start. Remembering to bring my electric screwdriver with freshly charged batteries wound up being a big advantage over the initial moving weekend. I didn’t care for the four post racks that startedwarping once w added servers, making successive servers harder to mount. If I could go back and do it all over I would have probably purchased racks that had more substantial support around the four posts. Ah well, live and learn. After several hours of work we finally had everything squared away!

Now we can actually walk around behind the servers!

Who knew there was this much storage space?

David Reid, our systems administrator, helped me clean up the mess after we finished mounting the servers. We were sweeping up construction debris that had been there from when we moved in! Without the help of the two Davids this project would not have been completed. I really appreciate their help. It’s nice to finally have everything unpacked from the move, even if it was almost a year later!

22 Jul

What’s The Frequency?

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Telecommunications. Tagged: , , , , .

Cell phone coverage in our new building has proven to be quite a challenge.  It would appear that big steel buildings such as ours do not permit easy wireless transmission.  I have noticed issues with sending 802.11 G and N signals as well the signals that make our phones work.  The overhead wireless network was set up with a few more draft N access points to compensate for the signal troubles.  Unfortunately we can’t install a few more cell phone towers around the property to improve the signal.

Since I have been working at the new building for several months ahead of the rest of the staff I am acutely aware of the cell phone trouble.  I remember fondly having to run outside several times to make quick phone calls over the course of troubleshooting an issue.  The problem isn’t that I don’t want to fix it.  The problem is that there simply aren’t very many available options.  I called AT&T, Sprint/Nextel and Verizon to discuss the problem.  I discovered that both Verizon and Sprint/Nextel offer corporate level IT solutions for repeating their wireless network signal through a facility such as ours (approx. 35,000 sq. ft.).  AT&T, unfortunately, has no similar solution.

After discussing this internally we determined that since the majority of our staff are Verizon subscribers we would go with the Verizon solution first.  The only system that is rated to work with Verizon’s towers is the Juni JR-20 Plus.  This system has two antennas that will each cover approx. 20,000 sq. ft.  Once that system has been installed we can review its effectiveness and determine where to go from there.

Juni JR-20 Plus

On a related note, both Verizon and Sprint/Nextel use CDMA networks.  My hope is that Sprint/Nextel subscribers can roam off of these repeaters while they are inside the building.  If that works out then we won’t have to look at investing in any more major equipment purchases.  This stuff ain’t cheap!

To further complicate things, AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM.  These two different protocols do not mix.  There are smaller wireless range extenders available from AT&T but they are primarily designed for home usage.  As such, they are not well suited for use in a facility our size.  I’ll keep posting updates as my research progresses and will let you know how the installation goes.

13 Nov

Chrome OS Coming Soon

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Linux. Tagged: , , , , .

It looks like Chrome OS will be launching within the week!

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

Hardware support is a problem with all operating systems upon launch.  I hope the Mini 9 is supported soon…

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.

27 Aug

Complete Care Coverage

Posted by Douglas in Hardware. Tagged: , , , , .

Great video from the NC State Office of Information Technology on the need to purchase complete care coverage on your computer equipment.  We purchase it on all of our new computers at work!

25 Jul

Is Sugar The Laptop Or The Operating System?

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Linux, Open Source Software, Politics, Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Nicholas Negroponte is at it again, giving an interview in Singapore and discussing the major failings of the OLPC project.  I was struck by one thing that he said:

Putting a crank-shaft on the XO laptop was a mistake, but the biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application “on a vanilla Linux laptop”, said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte.

“Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system,” he told ZDNet Asia in an interview. “But what we did…was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management–it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess.”

After spending several years working in IT as a career I have learned that there is at times a disconnect between the words of management and the actual inner workings of a product.  This looked funny to me so I wondered what the actual people working behind the scenes thought of this.  Turns out Sugar wasn’t as bad as advertised:

Here’s the problem: through a somewhat regrettable set of naming decisions, the name “Sugar” came to represent two entirely different things. It was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux.

Nicholas, evidently, still remains blissfully unaware of any of this. As is plain to see from his own words, what he considers to be the biggest mistake of the project has nothing to do with Sugar the GUI, and everything to do with the gross, hairy, complicated systems development work that OLPC was doing to support the XO’s special hardware features. And to be clear, I mean “short bus special”, not “shiny unicorn special”.

Let me explain something to you. For most of OLPC’s existence, we had about two guys working on Sugar the UI. They were GUI developers, with GNOME backgrounds. They were not at all the same people doing systems development work to support our hardware. No resources were taken away from systems development to do Sugar. If Sugar hadn’t happened at all, we would have still had to do all the systems work to get Linux working on the XO, and it would have still taken just as long. So if you’re looking for things to blame, Sugar is not the droid you are looking for.

In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix.

So we wound up with a keyboard whose keys get stuck. A dual-mode touchpad, capacitive and resistive, where one mode doesn’t work at all, and the other makes the cursor spontaneously jump around and sometimes shuts off the touchpad altogether, prompting OLPC kernel developers to beg for saner hardware in the next round. We had board engineering issues that made power management practically impossible. We had a custom display controller chip that was incomplete in some regards, and completely broken in others. We had an embedded controller that blocks keyboard events and stops machine suspend, and to which we — after a long battle — received the source, under strict NDA, only to find a jungle of nested if statements, twelve levels deep, and no code history. (The company that wrote the code doesn’t use version control, see. They put dates into code comments when they make changes, and the developers mail each other zip files with new versions.) And we had a wireless chip that is so far beyond fucked, it’s just about funny.

(Each of those words is a different link. Click them all, I dare you.)

Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

In the end, Nicholas’ bit of interview nonsense just doesn’t pass the smell test. Customers aren’t stupid. There’s close to a million XOs out there; if Sugar was OLPC’s biggest mistake, Windows on the XO would be selling like hotcakes. Let me remind you, then, that the number of Windows-based XOs that OLPC has sold is exactly zero.

So next time you hear Nicholas break out the egg metaphors and wave his hands about the Sugar that doomed it all, shrug and smile. Hell, If I were a meaner person, I’d ask Nicholas why it is that Windows — you know, the Windows from Microsoft, mercifully unstained with the mistake of Sugar — can’t even shut down an XO without throwing up a blue screen of death.

I honestly don’t know what to say to this.  It’s a shame that the top down management style of the OLPC project nearly killed it.  I remember sitting around with my IT buddies excited about the future of Sugar and the XO laptop.  To be honest, most of us have moved on to something else.  What a shame…

8 Jul

Google Chrome OS

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Open Source Software, Software. Tagged: , , , , .

It’s official.  I will be installing it on my Dell Mini 9 net book as soon as it is available!

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

7 Jul

WordPress For Blackberry

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Internet, Software. Tagged: , , , .

Very interesting new Blackberry application.  Now I can blog from anywhere!  You can find out info on how to download this app here.

26 Jun

Sugar On A Stick

Posted by Douglas in Hardware, Linux, Open Source Software. Tagged: , , , , , .

Sugar on a stick!

Sugar on a stick!

The MIT Technology Review has published an article detailing the latest efforts on behalf of the Sugar Labs project.  The newest version of the Sugar operating system is designed to install on a USB thumb drive or CDROM.  If it is installed on a thumb drive then user files can be written to it and saved in between sessions.

The underlying operating system is built on Fedora 11, which was just recently released.  It represents a significant improvement from earlier versions of Sugar.  The educational software has greatly improved along with overall stability.

This is an effort that I have been following with great interest since it was part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.  After OLPC decided to stop trying to use Linux in their revolutionary laptop, the main developers of the operating system left to pursue the project further.  They have been busily improving the operating system and porting it to different architectures.

The best part is that a $200 computer can now be stored on a $5 USB key:

The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.

“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”

It will be interesting to see if this incrementalist approach will be more successful long term than the original vision.  Deploying massive amounts of cheap laptops to third world countries has not produced any outstanding successes yet.  Time will tell how this works out.  For now though, I’m going to try it out with my kids.  I’m interested to see how they do with it.

You can find full details on the project in the Sugar Labs wiki.

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