lazyotter

Got 4 x 500GB disks for my broken Terastation this week and managed to fit all its pieces back together to get it working again. The disks I got were Seagate Barracuda 7200 11ms which should be fast and reliable. With RAID 5 configured (following 12 hour disk check) there’s now roughly 1.4TB of space and of course the safeguard of RAID 5 being that any one of the 4 x 500GB disks could fail and all my data would still be perfectly safe. I did consider using 750GB disks but read somewhere that the operating system wouldn’t take anything larger than 500GB. However, as there are 4 x IDE ports potentially it would be possible to just get some new cables and add another 4 x IDE disks as slaves, meaning a potential 2.8TB :). To do this though would require rigging up some kind of external caddies to house the new disks and also cutting a seriously large hole in the TS to get the cables out. And it would also need an additional power source.

As soon as the TS was back online I got round to hacking it. The following links were extremely useful in doing this…

1. gain root access by flashing modified firmware
2. install essential and useful packages - in order… busybox, libraries update, samba 3.0.25 (gains nice performance boost), openSSH (to gain SSH access, then disable telnet) and Joe editor
3. ctorrent/ctcs binaries - thanks to Herbert Marcus for excellent info and binaries (ctcs is a web interface that lets you monitor active torrents and manage the ctorrent client)
4. complete guide on configuring ctorrent and ctcs - how to auto run the services and a script that starts any torrents dropped into a specific folder automatically
5. TwonkyVision media server - UPNP server for music, movies, pictures etc.

So now my TS is serving as a (very quiet) torrent box and media server :).

It was very foggy outside when I got up this morning - couldn’t even see past the trees in the field. Thought I’d get back into the swing of things after my holiday and went for a run up Moel Famau. Was expecting it to be completely in the fog, but was pleased to find that upon approaching the car park the fog dissipated and I was in lovely bright sunshine!

Took a new route which ended up being 4.75 miles, and the most direct to the summit and some 800ft of climbing with no breaks… The weather was absolutely gorgeous at the top, and the view from the top was that of a sea of fog with odd hill tops poking through like islands.

Did some of those domestic chores today like washing the car and cleaning up. Spent the afternoon doing extensive research into a place I’m interested in. Also tried to get Gallery2 integrated with iPhoto and Wordpress, and at the same time set up an Ubuntu linux box on RAID1.

Due to unsuccessful hacking it was necessary to disassemble my Buffalo Terastation NAS and try and fix the damage by mounting the drives on a Linux box. Somehow in doing this I managed to destroy two of the 400GB disks. This means that about 1TB of movies, music and data has been lost :(. Hopefully I can get some of it back from various backups but it will take a while.

So now I have a technological dilemma. Buy another two 400GB replacement disks (which have incidentally been discontinued) for a premium price, or start again with something else… I keep having an idea about building a new home-server Linux/RAID 5 box. Hmmm, is it possible to get 4×750GB SATA II disks into a small form factor case?

Time for an early night.

It has been an eventful weekend of sorts. On Saturday morning I repeated last weeks fell run up Moel Famau, but this time in reverse, meaning it was a hell of a lot harder! The really steep climbing (1100ft) is done in the first 2 miles then the easy 4 mile descent at the end ;). The route I took can be viewed here (although it should be reversed). There was rather an unpleasant headwind which made going up even harder, but despite this I did the whole thing without stopping, oh yes. I was pleased to see some people on the way to the summit. It’s always nice to give them that knowing wink and a cheery “good morning!”, as though I do this sort of thing every day (then get around the next corner and practically have a cardiac arrest as my lungs are bursting through my chest!). I somehow managed a little sprint up the last vertical section, which was followed by a huge wave of euphoria as I reached the trig-point. There then followed a few moments of standing on the tower before the starting my descent. The descent was actually quite good fun for a while as the ridge drops sharply and then continues up and down for a good mile, before hitting the boring vehicle track and roads all the way back to Cilcain.

Also tried adding ginger (about an inch) to a smoothie yesterday which gave it a nice kick. May do that again, as raw ginger is very good for all sorts of things.

Saturday afternoon wasn’t as good as the morning as I managed to effectively render my 1.6TB Buffalo Terastation useless. At the time I was trying to free up space on its system partition by moving /usr to the larger shared array. I obviously moved something I shouldn’t have, as now it won’t boot. That was essentially the rest of the day wasted and resulting in my lounge floor getting covered in bits of terastation and PC components. I believe the problem can be solved by first mounting the RAID1 partition on a linux box, fixing the problem (or wiping the system partition), then flashing the terastation firmware. This issue is still on going, and the safety of over a terabyte of movies and music is hanging in the balance…

Today I looked around some houses in Chester with a friend who is thinking about buying there. Chester is a nice place with plenty of good shops, pubs and restaurants, and the prices seem to have gone up nearly 15% since I looked there two years ago - not so good news for non home owners or first time buyers. Looking for a home is also something on my vague and crumpled to-do list, but for now I’ll stick with rental and the maximum flexibility in case I want to bail out and leave for distant shores or far off lands sometime soon.

Shortly afterward I found myself walking on Moel Famau again and this time found a new alternative route to return to the Llanferres car park. Its actually signposted “Loggerheads” from the summit but is possible to turn off and follow a forest track (for a few miles) round the side of the hill and back to the starting point. It was well past dark when I got back at 6.30, but a nice warm evening and many stars in the sky to look at.

Felt like watching a movie tonight but then realised the terastation is still in bits all over the lounge floor.

No, its not some long lost Bob Dylan song. A Buffalo Terastation is essentially a NAS box, of which I own and also recently found out runs Linux

Last week I hacked into it (using excellent info from here) and got root access by replacing the firmware with a hacked version. This means potentially I now have an extremely useful Linux box which I never knew I had!

So far I’ve upgraded samba to version 3 which has made a huge difference in disk sharing performance - can’t believe it! I’ve also installed TwonkyVision UPnP media server which allows media files on the terastation e.g. music, movies, pictures to be streamed to any UPnP capable device on the network, such as some unnameable games consoles that support HD TV…

My aim today was to try and get rtorrent working on the TS but this turned out to be a much bigger job than I’d anticipated. The software has to be compiled from source for use on the TS PowerPC processor and kernel. So far I’ve managed to get most of the dev toolkit onto the TS, and have all the source code ready. In order, I think need to compile:

• libsigc++-2.0.0
• libTorrent
• rTorrent

Everything was going according to plan until I tried to compile libsigc++-2.0.0 and realised there was no space on the TS hda1 partition. This is a relatively small partition just used for system files, but with the PPC dev tools installed there isn’t any space left! Going to have to work out how to free some up, or even possibly the scary option of (oooohh!) wiping the system partition and reinstalling another Linux… Could be dangerous.