menu.

I need a NAS or a Home Server, I just can’t decide which.

I currently have a desktop PC in a bedroom, a laptop which spends most of its time in the living room, and a Buffalo LinkTheater which sits under the TV (also in the living room). I have a lot of files on the desktop PC that I watch, through the LinkTheater, on my TV. One of the problems with this is that it requires the PC to be switched on when I want to watch something, but a bigger problem is that the hard drives are filling up. For extra storage, the natural option seemed to be a LinkStation Live NAS which would store the files and allow the LinkTheater to stream them, but then I read about the efforts made by other nerds to turn the LinkStation into a web server. How great would it be if I could turn it into a testing server for the web sites I design?

After a little more reading it seems that this is not an easy thing to do with the LinkStation Live. The OpenLink hacked LinkStation firmware allows installation of extra software, but from what I can tell doesn’t seem to be compatible with ARM-based boxes like the LinkStation Live, only with older LinkStations (at least the lack of installation instructions suggest this). I’m now investigating the possibility of getting a cheap Home Server instead, though I have some constraints: it must be small, so I can stick it in a corner out of the way, and it must be silent. Basically I want to be able to completely forget about it when I’m not using it.

Obviously since a 500GB NAS (the LinkStation) can be obtained for under £150, I don’t want to spend too much more than that on the server – which all but rules out a Windows Home Server based system. That’s not a problem, I want to work on my Linux knowledge anyway. I’ve spent part of today searching on Google and ebay for terms like “xpc x100“, “shuttle pc“, “sff pc” (small form factor) and “mini pc“. Finally I came to “ITX PC“; Mini-ITX (along with Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX) being a standard form factor for motherboards that use low amounts of power and are therefore suitable for use as the basis of fanless (and therefore quiet) systems. I should have remembered this from a project I did last year in university involving in-car PCs.

So far I’ve come across a couple of UK shops so far, none of which have managed to give exactly what I wanted. Mini-ITX.com, as well as news and reviews, have bundles that basically amount to DIY kits for the type of system I’m looking for. The Intel Bundle comes close but I’d need to add a new hard drive as 80GB would not last any time at all. Another UK company, LinITX, offer build-your-own systems based on their skeleton systems, but the ones in my price range (like their Home Server bundle) are too big, at normal PC size, and don’t include hard drives. ITX-Warehouse just looked too dear; their only self-build barebones system was over £300.

Sorry if anyone was looking for a conclusion to this post, but I’m still looking for now. I may look further into hacking the LinkStation into a web server or I may just take the (relatively) easy option of getting a home server.

On Wednesday 12th December I placed an order with OddsNPods.co.uk, whom I’d come across during a price comparison using Google. That was my first mistake. The item was a Christmas present for my girlfriend and I believed that by ordering almost 2 weeks before Christmas I was giving them plenty of time to dispatch before the last posting date (they say they post at the latest the end of the next working day).

By Friday I was starting to get worried that my order was still “Awaiting Dispatch” so sent a message via their contact form (ticking the “Urgent” box). On Monday morning still nothing so I called the number on their web site to be greeted by a foreign-sounding lady.

“Hello?” she said. Puzzled by the lack of a company-branded welcome, I went on to say I was calling about an order that hadn’t been dispatched to find out what was going on.

“What company are you calling?” she asked.

Getting suspicious now I asked her “What company is this?”

“I can’t tell you that information.”

WHAT?! Alarm bells were ringing now. I asked if this was OddsNPods and she said “No, it’s a different company,” although it didn’t sound like a company at all.

A quick google search revealed that OddsNPods were related to DataKits.co.uk, a company with whom some people had previously had problems (despite a supposedly good rating on Kelkoo). The WHOIS for OddsNPods revealed they were indeed part of DataKits but had hidden their phone number from the whois results because “The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.”

I fired off an email to their email address (bypassing the online form this time), telling them if I’d heard nothing by the end of today I’d be taking matters up with my credit-card company, and then fired another email off to Nominet telling them to update their WHOIS entry (they’ve since done this and now show the address of OddsNPods.co.uk as: 9 Frensham Road, Southsea, Hampshire, PO4 8AD, which seems to be a residential address to me).

As of11:53 their web site seems to be down.

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/tmp/mysql.sock’ (11) in /home/oddsnpod/public_html/includes/functions/database.php on line 19
Unable to connect to database server!

Not reassuring!

Anyway, come Tuesday afternoon (pretty much a week after I placed the order) I finally heard back and they asked if I still wanted it. I said if they could send it out first class the following day to go ahead with the order and they did. It arrived on Friday, safely in time for Christmas. It seems it’s not a scam after all but this “company” has serious customer service issues. Despite their good prices I’d think twice.

I was treated to a Buffalo Linktheater Wireless A & G (that’s the version with no DVD player, I think that was a US-only thing) media streamer by my wonderful girlfriend for Christmas. I’ll post a review (hopefully) in the near future, but first I need to get it set up properly. I successfully streamed some video files to it while at my parents’ house for Christmas week. I finally got round to setting it up in my own house tonight to discover a few kinks.

I have been using Windows Media Player 11 (as it’s already built in to Vista, it’s also a free download for XP) as the server to stream from. The problem is that when I tried to browse a particular folder the Linktheater seems to freeze for a while before opening it, and then showing it as empty. When I checked my PC an error message had appeared informing me that “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service has stopped working”. On clicking “search online” for more information Windows informed me that:

This problem was caused by DivX Codec. DivX Codec was created by DivX, Inc..
DivX, Inc. is aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available.

The Application Event Log contains an entry for each crash with Event ID 1000 and Task Category 100 and a description something along the lines of:

Faulting application wmpnetwk.exe, version 11.0.6000.6324, time stamp 0x4549b540, faulting module divxdec.ax, version 6.8.0.0, time stamp 0x47547cff, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0005c021, process id 0xe1c, application start time 0x01c84be4834cb5f8.

which doesn’t really help much.

Workaround

I split the folder in two, and one of the new ones worked fine. I continued like this until I had narrowed the culprit down to be one of two files. However at this stage the folders all displayed their contents fine, including the one containing only the suspects. Now they just wouldn’t play.

After a lot of moving files and much more crashing and restarting of the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service, I narrowed the culprit down to a particular video file. I’m not sure what the problem was as it had worked fine when streamed from an XP computer also using Windows Media Player 11; in fact it was watched start to finish without any problems. It may be an issue specific to Vista or the DivX 6.8 codec, either way I’m happy it’s sorted.

If anyone finds out any more about the cause of this kind of problem or a quicker solution, please do let me know. Meanwhile I hope the above helps someone. Oh and the Buffalo Linktheater Wireless A & G is available from Dabs for about £95.

Vodafone‘s head of internet and content services made this bold, and rather hasty, claim in promotion of MusicStation, Vodafone’s new subscription music service, which offers unlimited music downloads – downloads which all become useless the instant you stop making regular monthly payments to Vodafone.

“This generation does not want an archive of music. We offer unlimited music on a rental model – no-one has done this in the marketplace, and certainly not the iPhone.”
Al Russell, Vodafone’s head of internet and content services

Maybe this blogger, in his early-to-mid-twenties, is too old not part of whatever Mr Russel means by “this generation” any longer, but the last thing I want is to pay over £100 a year (£2 a week) and have nothing to show for it at the end should I decide to change networks. I’ve always avoided subscription-based download services like Napster for exactly this kind of reason (even they now offer Napster Light: a pay-per-download service). I will use it if it’s included free when I happen to take out a Vodafone contract (which I might have to if they’re the only network to get the N95 8GB which I desperately want, just not at £50 a month!), but MusicStation will not be a factor in my decision.

Perhaps Vodafone should take a look at the experience of Bango who manage, among other services, The Sun newspaper’s download service.

Trusted brands are keen not to be tarred with the subscription brush. For example, The Sun newspaper that uses Bango to power the pay per downloads on Sun Mobile, print “No subscriptions – No hidden charges” on its ads to reassure consumers it is not a subscription service. Mobile operators have also expressed a desire to move away from this type of payment as subscriptions are a major cause of consumer dissatisfaction.
Network for Online Commerce – Pay-per-download gaining popularity…

The ‘archive of music’ as Mr Russell describes it, is the modern equivalent of the CD collection. It doesn’t make a difference if you only listen to the CD once in 5 years, you keep it because you can.  It comforts the inner-hoarder in all of us. The long and short of it is, I think, that we do want it.

The push for subscription based downloads has nothing to do with what Vodafone’s (or anyone else’s) consumers want, it’s all about the interests of the big service providers and record labels, and any push towards this should be resisted. It will by this consumer anyway.

The good news is that Nokia’s new “N95i”, or Nokia N95 8GB as it looks like being officially dubbed, is going to see a UK release this side of Christmas. The bad news is that it seems to be a Vodafone exclusive. This is not good news for anyone that was hoping to get a good deal on it as, in my experience anyway, Vodafone seem to be much more expensive than O2 and Orange in terms of tariff deals (although to be fair they’re all getting more expensive for handset prices).

What’s the big deal with the new N95 8GB anyway? Well, there are a few tweaks to the N95 formula: for a start I’ve wanted a phone equipped with WiFi for a good while now, but while the N95 met this criterion it apparently ate batteries, so the new 8GB version Nokia are releasing has a bigger battery as well as an even bigger 2.8″ screen (very useful when using the wireless to browse the internet) and has 8GB of internal flash memory instead of an expansion slot. I really badly wanted an N95 but I’ve been hanging off until this comes out, though I may be hoping for too much for Vodafone to have it available on a £30/month tariff before Christmas (the busiest time of the year for mobile phone sales).

Ah well, maybe I can get one in the January sales?

For more info on the N95 8GB see the Nokia or “tweaks” links in the post or see this Dialaphone blog post.

Being a small player struggling in a market dominated by a single juggernaut is something you’d expect Apple to have sympathy for, but apparently this is not so. The slap on the wrist Microsoft received from the EU Competition Commission for abusing it’s monopoly to stifle competition has just been upheld in court and you’d expect Apple, as one of their competitors in the market concerned, to be pleased. Then again, Apple seem to be getting pretty good at this abuse of monopoly thing themselves, and there are already calls that the EU Competition Commissioner should move on to Apple.

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Following my earlier rant about the trial that is installing Vista with a Netgear wireless card, I thought I’d offer an update on that story.

Firstly, my new Linksys (WMP54G v4.1) wireless card is working fine. Thanks Amazon.

Secondly, I updated the Windows Experience Index score just now. Still the same graphics card in the machine, so I don’t know how but suddenly my desktop graphics rating jumped from showing 2.1 to 4.1, pretty sweet! On viewing the details I also noticed that the graphics card apparently has 334MB of system memory available on top of the 256MB of dedicated RAM. I don’t know if this was the case before or not so can’t say if that influenced the change in score.

Anyway, this brings my overall Windows Experience Index up from 2.1 to 3.0, now based on the Gaming Graphics score (WEI bases your overall experience rating on the lowest score it finds). My system now looks like:

Processor (AMD Athlon 2800+): 3.4
RAM (1.5GB @ 266MHz): 3.7
Graphics (256MB eForce 6200): 4.1
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary Hard Disk (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm): 4.4

Now if anyone can tell me of a Protowall/PeerGuardian substitute that works with Vista I’ll be sorted.

Even though, as a web designer, I hate Internet Explorer I’ve been using it regularly on my laptop more or less since I got it. The reason for this sad state of affairs was that Firefox wouldn’t recognise the scroll buttons on the Synaptics TouchPad and so I’d have to scroll using the cursor keys or the scroll bar on the right. This situation finally became untenable this morning though – I had two instances of Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer open and the machine seemed frustratingly slow to respond. A quick duke at Task Manager confirmed that this was because lots of memory was being used.

The Visual Web Developer program uses a lot of memory but I was surprised to find that Internet Explorer was actually using more at about 60MB. Firefox, also running at the time, was only using about 20MB so I decided it was time to fix the scrolling problem. I googled a bit and came across reports of people testifying that they solved the problem by downloading the newest drivers from Synaptics’ web site. This didn’t work for me though. Then I came across this forum post at Mozillazine which talked about changing a setting for the scroll buttons from “scroll selected item” to “scroll item beneath pointer”. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me either.

Here’s what did (after installing those new drivers):

1. Double-click the touchpad icon in the system tray
2. Ensure the correct device is selected in the Device Settings tab and click the Settings button
3. Open the Buttons list and click ‘Scroll Up Button Action’
4. Choose “Scroll the current window up” from the list.
5. Click the ‘Scroll Down Button Action’ and choose ‘Scroll the current window down’ from the list.
6. Apply/OK out.

Voila! Firefox now scrolls. I later discovered that someone else had replied to the above Mozillazine forum post advising just that, but I assure you I discovered it myself quite by accident.

Anyway, during the course of this fiddling I also discovered that you can use the right hand edge of your touch pad for scrolling. Just move your finger up or down the far right edge of your touch pad and the window scrolls. Unlike the scroll buttons, this did work in Firefox regardless of the above setting (though according to this KnowledgeBase entry, it may require the newest drivers), so if you’re having problems with Firefox scrolling with a Synaptics touchpad device, you should now have two solutions. Enjoy!

Back in October/November time I got myself a new laptop for university and general showyness. I didn’t want to spend too much money and, following a recommendation from a friend, decided to check out LaptopsDirect.co.uk. Soon enough I’d plumped for the Acer Aspire 5003 wlmi – a 64-bit AMD-based laptop with 512MB of RAM. Having taken note of the 64-bit Turion mobile processor, I initially found it highly strange that the laptop shipped with a 32-bit version of Windows XP Home, rendering the 64-bit processor about as much use as a chocolate teapot (OK, as much use as a 32-bit processor anyway). Then again, this is the same machine which for some reason has a hard drive partitioned into two 40GB volumes, both formatted using the FAT32 file system. Honest to God.

I realise there are issues with drivers with x64 machines and put the perplexing decision to ship 32-bit Windows down to that, however after a lot of hunting a thread Planet AMD64 provided links to x64 drivers for both Acer’s Ferarri 4000 range and their Aspire 5020, which seem to work for the 5000 series too. Maybe it was just laziness.

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I’ve had the WG311 wireless PCI card from Netgear since I initially set up my home wireless network a few months ago. In that time it has been no end of f**king trouble!!

The first problem I had was that on installation was that the connection would cut out inexplicably (the router was about 2 feet away through a plasterboard wall), but wouldn’t actually realise that it had been disconnected (either running the Netgear utility or the Windows Wireless Zero configuration, both seemed to think they were still connected despite the lack of traffic.

Fortunately I also had a nearly clean partition with Windows XP Pro installed, so I tried using it with that. Here it seemed ok, for a few hours anyway. It turned out it was suffering from the same problem, but it the connection lasted for 8-12 hours rather than 30-90 minutes.

I tried everything. I used the Netgear utility; upgraded the drivers to the latest version from the Netgear website (1.1 – despite well-known problems with Windows XP SP 2, they’ve only ever produced one revision); I disabled the Netgear utility and just used the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration (uninstalling and reinstalling the card between times to be doubly sure there was nothing left lurking on the system). Nothing seemed to work.

A Solution?

Eventually I downloaded the drivers provided by Marvell, the original manufacturers of the chipset for the v3 version of the WG311 (Netgear seem to bring out different, incompatible versions of the same card with chipsets from different manufacturers to allow them to shop around for parts- and you can’t usually choose which one you get when you buy, not that the previous versions of the WG311 were problem-free). Shock of shock, the Marvell drivers actually worked!! Netgear should just bundle them with the card instead of their own messed up piece of crap they call a ‘utility’.

Now all I had to worry about was the fact that since moving the PC with the WG311 in it to a different room, the signal was extremely weak and intermittent. Having little experience with wireless networks, I just assumed this was because, despite only being about 10 feet away, there were 3 plasterboard walls between the router and the PC. Still blaming the router, I was on the verge of ordering a stronger antenna when my brand spanking new laptop arrived and in the same room, it was getting a “Very Good” signal at 54 Mbps; imagine my pure rage!

So that’s that. After a few months of pain after pain in the ass with Netgear’s WG311 v3, I’ve given up and am planning to replace the card in the near future. What’s the point in a wireless network card that only works when its right beside the router?

If you’re having similar problems, you might find the Marvell drivers (MV-S800374-00.zip) useful. That said I make no warranty as to their usefulness, and Marvell probably won’t either since I can’t find a link to the file from their site. Use at your own risk.

Also, see this follow-up for the next chapter of my battle with the Netgear WG311v3.