Posts Tagged review
Apple iOS 3 and 4 VS Android 2.1 and 2.2
Review: QNAP TS-109 Pro II
I bit the bullet and bought a SOHO-level / entry-level NAS unit for the home office. I reviewed several units online for the past month or so and finally decided that the QNAP TS-109 Pro II did everything I’d need.
“But Ian,” you say. “You run Linux, why not do it all there?”
Frankly, the recent fires around Los Angeles, and paranoid need to keep stuff backed up and immediately packable should we ever need to evacuate, plus the need to organize our digital life a little at home, all culminated in this purchase. The last time I changed anything on my home network, Samba broke (badly) and shared files and printing capability got kinda hosed.
For $320, the NAS unit has a wealth of features that ultimately came cheaper than buying a whole machine to manage:
- gigabit interface
- two USB ports on the back, one will be used for the printer so we’ll have proper print sharing on our machines
- eSATA port on the back which I’ll use in the near future for mirroring the data on the NAS in RAID fashion
- USB port on the front with a button above it that copies all files from whatever device you plug in (like our digital camera), and copies the files into a unique folder name on the enclosed drive
- runs embedded linux and formats the internal drive as ext3, so hard symlinks have become my new best friend for getting rid of duplicate files on the drive while giving Elizabeth and I the flexibility to store our music/photos how we each see fit.
- only runs at 14W at maximum usage — far cheaper to run this than a full system with a 300W or 400W power supply.
- no fan, so the only noise it makes is from the hard drive
- Samba functionality is very seamless on my wife’s Windows PC, and the Pro version has NFS capability for mounting somewhat more natively on my Linux workstation.
For another $129 ($99 after rebate), I picked up a duplicate Hitachi DeskStar 1TB drive that I’ve currently got in my workstation — once I get files moved to the NAS unit, I’ll ask Santa for an eSATA enclosure to plug into the TS-109 to set up RAID mirroring of the data.
It’ll be nice to have this unit available on the network (though all 4 ports on my wireless router are now completely full), which will also give me the flexibility to dual-boot my workstation into Windows from time to time, though I rarely have any free time to do any gaming whatsoever. But at least the headaches of configuring Samba for file/printer sharing are all taken care of with this box.
A really great, really long review of the unit is at this URL:
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1137&pageID=
The unit has plenty of other features like an iTunes server, a photo slideshow engine, a built-in web server with PHP, MySQL and SQLite, and opkg for package updates. Oh yeah, and a bittorrent client built in to download torrent files for you in case you want to shut off your computer.
Setup of the unit was pretty simple, though there’s no option to configure it for Linux, you need a Mac or Windows machine to install the initial setup software, though in retrospect, I probably could have accessed it via its web browser to configure everything.
The longest part of the setup was letting it format the 1TB drive as ext3 — it took about 20 minutes — then I mounted a few of the folders onto my wife’s PC:
Z:\ is the Public folder where we can share files with each other
Y:\ is the copied-from-USB folder where we’ll retrieve camera photos and anything from a USB key drive
X:\ is a ‘multimedia’ folder where we’ll put our music and photos.
As I mentioned, Elizabeth and I store our photos and music entirely differently. Elizabeth has stated several times, no joking intended, that she’d rather share a toothbrush than share a hard drive.
With hard symlinks, the underlying file system will only store one copy of a file, but make it accessible as many times as we need to. Soft symlinks don’t give the same functionality, and Windows doesn’t seem to handly soft symlinks well over the network.
So now I can simply move all of our music into /artist/album/song.mp3 folders, hard symlink the same structure to a music folder I created for her, and she can move the files via Windows into /year/genre/artist-song.mp3 or whatever format she wants. Though my suspicion is that she uses the Zune software to manage all of her files now so she probably doesn’t even care where the music lives. But the other nice thing is that we’ll have copies of all of the music on the NAS for ourselves, and we can delete whichever music files we don’t want to keep — for example, I’m not as big a fan of her swing music, and she hates most of my music, but there’s a lot of overlap like 80′s rock, the Wicked soundtrack, stress-relief music, etc.
Photos can be managed the same way, though since our Sony camera has reset the filename counter a few times, we’ll have several copies of files like DSC00001.JPG which I’ll need to figure out … I’ll probably work something out with MD5 checksums to determine which photos are duplicated, and sort them by content. Does anybody know if there’s an f-spot equivalent for Windows, or should we both start using Picassa or something to tag our photos?
As I use the drive more, I’ll write another review in a couple of weeks, but so far I’m extremely happy. The only drawback I’ve found so far is typical of any external hard drive — you’re limited by the connection. Even with a gigabit network, copying music and photos from my wife’s PC at the same time as copying about 15GB of files from my PC, plus testing the USB-device-copy to pull photos and video off our camera, slowed the little unit to a crawl. Then again, it’s only got a 500MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM, so I’m sure I taxed it pretty hard last night. Under typical usage, I’m sure it’ll perform just fine.
I’ll also share any scripts I write for detecting duplicates or symlinking files.
SCALE 6x 2008 Review and OpenMoko
If I had to sum up SCALE 2008 in one word, I’d have to say “underwhelmed.” I was disappointed in the sessions offered this year, and found that instead of trying to coordinate with colleagues to cover multiple sessions in the same time slot that I only really wanted to attend a single session on Saturday and Sunday each (of 16 possible each day). The session I attended today on MySQL Clustering was okay, but honestly wasn’t anything new from what I’d already read on MySQL’s own site. The only difference was the presenter, Solomon Chang, who was a co-author of a book on MySQL 5.1 Clustering Certification. Turns out Solomon was hired at PriceGrabber shortly after I left working there full-time, and did some database work there. He admitted early in his presentation that he accessed a development database server at PriceGrabber recently to, I guess, get some ideas for his talk this afternoon, and joked about how a previous manager of his from PG had to borrow bus fare from him at the show.
The highlight of “SCALE 6x” for me though was getting to meet Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko. Looking back through my blog, I can’t believe I haven’t blogged more about owning a Neo 1973 GAT01v4 since last fall, the world’s first fully open-source phone (hardware and software). Their latest phrase is “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it” … OpenMoko creates the hardware through FIC (the motherboard people), and also develops the underlying software stack (OS, drivers and firmware). Their marketing lingo from OpenMoko.org (the dot-org site is their community based site with wiki and mailing lists etc) says that OpenMoko is creating the “world’s first integrated open source mobile communications platform.” Then name comes from OPEN (source) MObile COmmunication, with the ‘C’ changed to a ‘K’ perhaps so the ‘co’ wouldn’t be pronounced ‘so’ by those who have never heard of the company.
In a nutshell, the OpenMoko software running on the device is essentially an embedded Linux environment. You should have seen the eyes light up on my fellow Linux geeks when pulling up a shell prompt on the phone. Well, okay, the younger geeks had their eyes light up — the ‘mature’ geeks in the crowd immediately squinted at the on-screen keyboard wondering how on earth they were going to type on a software keyboard where the letters were about 1/32″ big.
When I arrived at SCALE on Saturday, Michael’s booth was one of the first I saw, and quickly introduced myself. We had a handful of Emails back and forth about the GSM modem firmware upgrade and why my T-Mobile pre-paid SIM card would not work, and I had also contacted Michael shortly before SCALE to volunteer to help him out at the booth. After some debugging with Michael during quieter times at the booth, we determined there was something wrong with the T-Mobile SIM card. Michael uses a T-Mobile phone, so we put my SIM card in and it said it had a 0 balance on the card. Michael got a little swamped with answering questions, so I stuck around and shared my own experiences with passers-by and was able to relay information in true F.A.Q. style:
- When can I buy one? (openmoko.org, whenever it’s released — in Michael’s own words “we’re horrible at predicting when we’ll be releasing something”, but you don’t need the phone to start developing)
- How much is it? ($450-ish)
- Does it have Wifi? (the GTA02 model will, yes, 802.11 b/g)
- Can I do VoIP with it? (why not, port your favorite VoIP software using the cross compiler available at openmoko.org)
- What’s the battery life? (“Uh, Michael, you want to take this one?”)
- (while searching the edges of the phone) Where’s the stylus? (you want a stylus on the phone, make your own case, that’s open source now too!)
- Does it support (insert your favorite Linux app here)? (check the OpenMoko project tree)
Having been caught up in answering questions, I had missed the only session I had wanted to attend on Saturday. One overly-excited geek who attended that “mobile Linux” session from Motorola, in his words (not mine) Motorola told the crowd that a pure Linux environment did not exist yet on a phone. This same excited fellow geek wouldn’t believe the Neo ran Linux until I opened a shell prompt and ran “uname -a” and showed him “2.6.22.5-moko11″ … he immediately asked where he could buy one. I *almost* had a guy named Marc offer to straight up trade his Nokia N810 for my Neo. During the afternoon I also got to meet a guy named Matthew (sorry, I forget his last name) who is also on the community list. We all paired up and answered questions for people at the booth sometimes 3 deep crowding around wondering what an “open source” phone was all about.
I called T-Mobile this morning, had them fix the SIM card (they had never activated the minutes on the card), but my Neo still wouldn’t register with T-Mobile over the 25-mile trek down Imperial Hwy and down the full length of the 105 Freeway getting back to SCALE. I dropped the phone off with Michael, attended the MySQL talk, and came back to the booth about 4:30pm to find Michael packing up. After trying the SIM again in Michael’s own T-Mobile phone to see if it was still a SIM card issue, and being able to receive a call on his phone with my SIM, we put the SIM back into my Neo which *immediately* registered on the T-Mobile network, and I was able to both make and receive calls on the Neo with full audio !!! I’ve posted a question to the OpenMoko community list regarding the pre-paid SIM issue we tracked down by inserting the pre-paid SIM into an actual phone sold by the carrier (AT&T or T-Mobile) before it would work in the Neo, since my Neo wouldn’t register on the network for over 6 hours, yet immediately (within 10 seconds) once we successfully used the SIM card in the carrier’s phone.
The SCALE organizers had common interest group meetings after the show officially closed at 6pm, called “Birds of a Feather” and about 10 people including Michael and myself sat around a table discussing the features of the phone, and about 8 others wandered in and out. We talked about the wants and needs of people there who were just hearing about it for the first time, and passing around three GTA01′s including my own. Again, there were people there who are part of the OpenMoko community mailing lists and Michael shared his thoughts on the 500MHz CPU running at 400MHz, battery life, the GTA02 features, and so on.
Not that I was surprised by this, but Michael is a fountain of knowledge. He’s definitely passionate about the project and product, and it definitely showed when talking to people at the booth and the after-show meeting. It was great to meet him and help out as best I could. Next stop with the Neo is the Orange County Linux Users Group (OCLUG) who had a member at the “Birds of a Feather” session, who I told I’d attend a meeting of theirs at UC Fullerton in March to show off the Neo and a development environment, provided we’re not moving that weekend. Might have to wait until April.
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