September 25, 2011
by Luis Ventura
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Time For A New NAS

I thought I wouldn’t have to say this for years to come, but I’ve reached the conclusion that after 3 years of service the time to replace my current NAS has come, for sake of reference here is what I currently have:

  • Via C3
  • Windows Server 2003
  • 512MB of RAM
  • 2TB Storage / 1TB Usable

It’s not the hardware that I find to be the problem, but the lack of expansion that’s holding me back. If you look at the picture below you can see the board currently in my NAS. For starters I am limited to a single 10/100 onboard NIC, there is no option to upgrade to SATA only IDE, while there is one PCI slot available its currently occupied by a PCI SATA controller meaning its not possible to upgrade to gigabit speeds.

CPU:

While the onboard VIA C3 CPU is no monster its certainly capable of handling most tasks: File server, web server. But there is one service I don’t even want to try and run with the current limitations, SCSI Target. Since I would not be making of a TOE NIC for the iSCSI traffic, all calculations would have to be performed in CPU which would take a toll on performance and nothing good would come out of it. Although I thought about running software RAID I opted not to because of the possible added load on the CPU.

STORAGE:

Another serious limitation is storage capacity, because of its age the board lacks SATA ports leaving me with IDE as the default option, good luck trying to find a 1TB IDE hard drive. The only possible expansion came from the PCI slot in which I installed a PCI SATA controller and connected two 1TB SATA drives, only 1TB is usable because the second drive contains a copy of the first.

RAM:

Currently running with 512MB, but can be upgraded to 1GB. I don’t see the point of upgrading.

Networking:

The board comes with a 10/100 NIC, the only expansion port is being used by the PCI SATA controller. Its either a 10/100/1000 NIC or a PCI SATA controller.

I thought of using an external USB drives or an eSATA enclosure but that would have been a temporary measure. Instead I’ve started to look for a replacement solution something that is capable, with the possibility for future expansion and with enough resources to run iSCSI, SMB, RAID, SSH for tunneling, and expansion slots.

  • Either an Intel or AMD CPU
  • At least 1GB of RAM
  • At least 4 drives
  • Gigabit NIC
  • PCI-E would be nice

At the moment there are two front runners one is a semi-complete solution: QNAP TS-410 ($450.00) and the HP Micro Server ($350.00) which would require me to once again provide the OS among other things.

I like the convenience of QNAP and the favorable reviews on what appears to be a solid product that comes with many useful features like iSCSI, HTTP server, SMB. But the nerd in me calls out for the HP Micro Server.

September 19, 2011
by Luis Ventura
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How To Backup And Restore The MBR

You are a geek therefore you can’t trust your self to not render a system unbootable. Specially if you are about to boot from more than one operating system which is done incorrectly could result in getting a blank screen. BTW: The MBR holds partition data and Operating System boot essential data. Therefore, it’s essential to know how to backup the MBR, fortunately we can backup with a few simple steps and only using free tools.

MBR = Master Boot Record

This tutorial uses a Live CD which includes the utility know as dd with can be used to copy entire drives or just sections of it.

First of all you should boot in to your Linux environment and mount a second drive where we can store the MBR backup.

Do not save the backup file in the same drive from which you are making the backup.

Create a directory.

mkdir mountusb

Use the ls command to identify the second drive. In my case I have a SATA drive and a USB drive, the SATA drive is always assigned the first letter of the alphabet in this case it’s named sda and the USB drive was assigned the name sdb.

root@PartedMagic:~# ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sda  /dev/sda1  /dev/sdb  /dev/sdb1

You can’t mount the drive itself, instead you have to mount partitions. In this case I will be mounting a USB drive which is where I will be storing the MBR backup, remember to mount the partition not the drive.

mount /dev/sdb1 mountusb

And now we back up the MBR aka the first 512 bytes. 

dd if=/dev/sda count=1 bs=512 > mountusb/sda.mbr
  • mountusb - Is the previously created directory
  • sda.mbr - Represents the actual backup

Restoring the MBR follows similar steps, you first need to mount the drive where the MBR was backup to and use the dd command to restore the backup to the desired drive.

dd if=mountusb/sda.mbr of=/dev/sda

Now that you know how to backup the MBR go ahead and start playing with multiple operating system, if at a latter time you decided to remove them you can always revert to the original MBR with a single command. Thanks for reading.

September 14, 2011
by Luis Ventura
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Download The Windows 8 Developer Preview

If you are looking for something to download then why not download the Windows 8 Developer Preview and have a taste of the next desktop OS from Microsoft. Keep in mind this is a pre-beta which means you should expect bug and instability.

Recommended hardware is similar to what you should already using with either Vista or Windows 7:

  1. 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  2. 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  3. 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  4. DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  5. Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch

Use the following links to download the version you find adequate:

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) 4.8GB
SHA-1 Hash: 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF
Download

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) 3.6GB
Sha 1 hash – 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF
Download

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86) 2.8GB
SHA-1 Hash: 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC
Download

Don’t forget to watch the Microsoft preview of Windows Server 8 @ 9am Pacific time, Sept. 14.

September 5, 2011
by Luis Ventura
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Change The Default Text Editor In WinSCP

I consider WinSCP to be the best free SFTP, SCP and FTP client for Windows but like other similar clients the bundled text editor is not what I would consider to be the best or adequate for the type of work I do.

In this post I will describe the necessary steps to replace the default text editor WinSCP uses whenever a file is opened, instead of executing the default text editor the replacement editor will be executed. Although this tutorial uses Intype as the third party text editor of choice you can substitute for the text editor of your choice.

Start WinSCP and make sure the Advanced options check box is checked.

Click on Preferences.

Once again click on the Preferences… box.

Click on Editors.

Click on the Add … box.

Select External editor: and Browse… to the path where the replecement text editor resides in the case of Intype the path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Intype\intype.exe.

WinSCP will format the path for you!. Click on OK to save the changes.

In my case the text editor was recognized as Intype, click on it to highlight it. Click on the Up button till the new text editor is at the top making it the default choice.

Click on the OK button to save.

From now on whenever you edit a file WinSCP will execute the replacement text editor instead of the bundled one.

Feel free to leave comments below.