pluzzi.com

April 22, 2012

Paul — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:35:33 +0000

Not long ago, the Sony Vaio that I was using for my Linux laptop - had some fatal hard disk errors. I liked the screen size and quality of the Vaio, but it was big and bulky - and in my case, due to other hardware issues - it only worked when on the dock, due to charging issues. So with the hardware failure, it was time to revisit Linux desktop operating systems. This seems to be a pattern I’m in - happens every 1.5 to 2.0 years, so this is actually a good thing.

Previously I’ve tried FreeSpire, gOS, Xandros4, and others. This time, at least initially, I was going to go with Knoppix again, because there is really just no beating it. But I’ve been forcing myself to get used to Ubuntu lately. As more and more folks use it, I wanted to be more familiar with it. My daily driver Sun Ultra 20 is loaded with Ubuntu 9.04 but that’s getting a little long in the tooth at this point. I also don’t like Unity at this time, so I tried an alternative - the Xubuntu variant. It came on the Linux Magazine that I get - and also on the Ubuntu User magazine that I get. So I had two copies, and that made me think it was time to try 11.04.

I loaded up Xubuntu on my 2.0Ghz Celeron based IBM R40 laptop. I have to admit, I really like the look and feel of the Xubuntu desktop. And because its Debian based - copying over my $USER/bin with all my custom scripts was an effortless task. And also being Debian based - a few “apt-get” tasks had me working in no time. At this point, I really think its there to stay … at least until the R40 fails. And maybe that’s the reason I do this so often - I’m always using old hardware.

March 31, 2012

Paul — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:48:22 +0000

I’ve long missed the “send to : mail recipient” function in Windows Explorer when using webmail. Once we could no longer use http mail services in Windows Mail or Outlook, I just gave up on it, and always brought up my webmail manually and then copied my attachments, etc. But recently, I decided to look around and see if there were new options these days. To my surprise, I found a few that I think I like :

Affixa : which is free for personal use, and integrates fully into Windows Explorer
MailTo for Gmail : allows the “mail to” links in a web page to launch into gmail and not try to launch any thick clients (but this one is just for Chrome and GMail)
SendMail In Browser : Firefox extension to allow “mail to” links to be able to launch a webmail compose window of choice

Also of note while I’m at it - in Chrome this is the Click and Clean extension which helps clear cache on exit. Chrome does seem to be missing some of these key features regarding privacy and cache maintenance.

Shutdown the vpn-router today and its two access points. That system is no longer useable. Its good timing really because the power supply in the tower had lost its fan, so the box was starting to get very warm.

March 24, 2012

Paul — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:45:38 +0000

On Monday, March 19th, I had a power failure due to one of my UPS’s failing. Normally, that’s not a big deal, but my issue was with 2 of my 2 TB external drives from OpenFiler being connected to that UPS, and one other connected to another UPS. When the failure happened, 2 of my 3 drives in the RAID5 config failed, but one survived. RAID5 can’t run with just 1 drive, so it marked the array as faulted. Not an easy recovery. Details available here .

February 4, 2012

Paul — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:01:03 +0000

I’ve long been annoyed that Windows 7 didn’t include the QuickLaunch bar. But I finally decided to search for a solution and found two great links :

January 8, 2012

Paul — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:13:20 +0000

So I’ve been struggling with my Sharp Blu-Ray player - its the BD-HP24u(a) model, and its occasionally hanging on the startup menu, or sits for 5-10 minutes with a pure black screen. I’ve tried to update firmware, but there is nothing - not via the menu, and not via the Sharp website. After getting fed up tonight trying to watch CARS 2, I decided to do some research. what I found is that trying a reset was a good idea - so I did that via the “settings | system | reset” menu options - but no luck. So after resetting my IP again, tried - but no luck. The ticket was to turn off the BD-Live option in the settings menu. It seems that the hanging and lockups were due to the player trying to get network data that it couldn’t reach. I guess some folks don’t know how to code for trapping of error conditions and all that. Anyway - turning off BD-Live, and this thing came RIGHT up, and played just fine.

January 1, 2012

Paul — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:26:53 +0000

I wanted to put some pictures up on the big screen, but I didn’t have DLNA configured at home. I’m using OpenFiler NAS, not one of the over the counter NAS devices. So I had to build it in. I’m trying MediaTomb for mine, and have documented what I’m doing so far here.

I was doing good with MediaTomb, but still couldn’t get the pictures working. On a hunch, I tried miniDLNA and loved it - right out of the box, no hassles, just worked. That’s now documented here.

November 6, 2011

Paul — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:00:33 +0000

After much (and I mean much) testing of OpenFiler 2.99.1 and FreeNAS8, I’ve decided to go with OpenFiler as my next gen NAS. I’ve been a user of FreeNAS7 for quite a while now and it works great. But I wanted iSCSI shares, and had to up my share sizes - so a new environment was needed. I ran into issues with OpenFiler not auto starting my software RAID volumes, and saw lots of folks with similar issues - but nobody had solutions. Now I do - a script that runs at startup and fixes everything. It should work in any environment, if anyone needs it … no guarantees, no warranty and no claims of any kind though … you know the drill. Its all going to be documented in my Wiki, once I get around to finishing that doc up.

Update : its worth noting though - I ended up choosing FreeNAS8 (v8.0.2) for my iSCSI based SAN duties, to shares storage out to my virtual servers - and I’m using OpenFiler 2.99.1 for my NAS duties, sharing volumes to my pc’s, laptops, audiotrons, and video devices. I had both functions on OpenFiler for a little while, but noticed the slightest performance benefit by using FreeNAS8 for my iSCSI shares. So my DL380G3 is the FreeNAS8 host, and my DL385G1 is now the OpenFiler host. This offers me the most flexibility and least impact when doing maintenance, new volumes, etc, etc.

October 31, 2011

Paul — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 04:32:43 +0000

Lost my firewall to disk corruption in the power losses of late. The power up/down cycling seems to have caused enough data corruption issues that I could not recover the data - so I had to build a new one. I could salvage my home grown scripts, rules, etc - but some of the key libraries were lost, and some of /var was toast. So everything is back online now on the “new” firewall, and all is good again.

October 17, 2011

Paul — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:56:18 +0000

Today just another update to my July 31 2008 post about Firefox plugins. This is now also part of a new “Firefox Extensions” category in this blog to make them easier for me to find. Today’s additions are :

Google Redesigned — http://www.globexdesigns.com/products/gr/#!products/gr/install.php
Session Manager — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/?src=cb-dl-featured
Better Privacy — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/?src=collection&collection_id=4f45af7f-8117-2a9a-3dcb-32e1a2a59166
TinEye Image Search — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tineye-reverse-image-search/
Memory Fox — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/
Tab Preview — https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-preview/?src=collection&collection_id=4f45af7f-8117-2a9a-3dcb-32e1a2a59166

October 4, 2011

Paul — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:01:54 +0000

My basement audiotron (Gateway version) had been giving me issues lately. So I found one on eBay for about 15 bucks and ordered it. Just got done setting up, and now its all good. Swapped out “gatetron” for the new “basetron” instead.