Geek Stuff
These are the fields names the various numbers get mapped across BY DEFAULT
| MS AD | OWA 2010 | Outlook OAB 2013 |
Outlook Contact 2013 | iPhone 6 | Android | Cisco UCS | Cisco IP Phone 7841 |
| Telephone No. | Phone | Phone (Bus) | Business | Work | Work | Work | Work |
| Telephone Other | – | Bus 2 (List) | Bus 2 | Work | – | – | – |
| Telephone Other 2 | – | Bus 2 (List) | – | – | – | – | – |
| Mobile | Mobile | Mobile | Mobile | Mobile | Mobile | Mobile |
– |
| Mobile Other | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| IP Phone | – | – | – | – | – | Opt, replaces Telphone No. | Opt, replaces Telphone No. |
Philips leads many areas of lighting, and I appreciate a business that knows to specialise and do well in their chosen area.
I have been using a Philips 3520 Wake Up Light for over a year now. I find it very gently wakes me up, especially in winter, and suits my rhythms well. I hate sudden loud alarm clocks and this solves that problem well.
I recently bought a clever Philips Hue kit to play with and compare.
Both are high efficiency LED based units with some clever tricks. This should give you some comparison information.
 |
vs |  |
| Feature | Wake Up | Hue |
| Power Outage Behaviour | Forgets Time – No Battery Backup | Turns on Full Brightness.
It is VERY annoying to have lights turn on in the middle of the night after a power outage leaving you fumbling for your phone to turn them off. Does not forget time or schedule with power interruptions. |
| Gentle Wake Up | 40 Minutes, very gentle and pleasant. | 9 Minutes with harsh sudden start at about 30% brightness |
| Colours | Fixed | Huge variety |
| Programming | None | All sorts of clever options, especially with IFTTT |
| Style | Light comes from 80% from front of unit. | Use any fitting you like |
| Alarm (Sound) Function | I never use it | None |
| Reading Light | Very good.
Small fiddly buttons. Unfortunately easy to disable alarm by accident. |
Very Good. You need your phone handy. |
| Power | 24V DC | 220V AC |
| Comments | Light from the rear of the unit bounced off the wall would be much more gentle on the eyes.
It really needs a battery backup. I have actually hacked a 24V battery into mine to be sure it works no matter what. |
Powering on to full brightness after a short power outage at 2AM is very unpleasant.
The harsh startup is also a bit rough. I’m sure both of these could be fixed in software. |
If Philips merges these two products, they could be onto a really good thing. Some usability bugs could be readily improved.
Oh – and a good battery backup.
Sorry Dell – still not even close.
For intents and purposes, they perform the same. The Macbook is much thinner and lighter.
Unfortunately – we still need Windows based systems for business use.
No, you can’t. 
Yes, there is a spare Mini-PCIx slot for a WWAN card. Yes the mSATA SSD card will fit in that slot.
Unfortunately neither the BIOS or the OS will see the storage.
Here is why – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#mSATA
My first SSD, a 60Gb OCZ Vertex II ceased to be last week. I didn’t take “no moving parts” to mean “no pulse”. This wasn’t the vague threat of “SSD wearing” – but simple undetectable dead drive.
Luckily, I sync most of my data to the cloud, so the interruption was inconvenient, but not catastrophic.
SSD’s – great new tools, but they still fail. I mustn’t get complacent.
Unfortunately everything on my desktop was gone. The most commonly used “workspace” – but it doesn’t sync readily to the cloud. There goes quite a few hours work. I’ve since made a simple script to copy the desktop to the cloud folder each night – at least that will reduce the future impact to just a day’s work.
It did certainly get me to thinking though. A free consumer cloud service just saved my bacon (as I always hoped it would). How many of my customers are using this? It complies with no corporate standard, but offers so much value. And I have nothing that can compare or compete. Sure, I could buy some products, and run my own PC backup service. I doubt it would compare for features or functionality.
So, again we have the balance between great user experience, and poor corporate compliance.
I firmly believe the user experience wins in the long run. This has been proven time and again. PC’s proved it over IBM. Windows over Novell. Apple is busy proving it again.
So how is an IT team to meet yesterdays compliance requirements in tomorrows user driven world?
I rebuilt the media centre recently, as the AMD was only a temporary stand in. It was using far too much power compared to the old mobile CPU.
The new i3 is perfect for this. Enough CPU grunt to ditch the 3rd party video card power hog, everything on board. I’m an energy saving nut, so this is the lowest power system I could put together.
A low power media centre PC.
Power = 70W avg
Has some minor Audio / Video glitches, seems to be driver related
CPU Fan noisy – too high an RPM. Coolermaster helped, but speed still too high. Now running CPU fan from Case Fan socket on MB.
Dropping from 120w to 70w will save me about $100 / year in electricity costs.
When I changed over to Naked ADSL2+ with Internode, I had to sort out a replacement for the home phone. It was a tough journey and about 12mths of problems before I found a reliable combination of devices.
The problems ranged from
After 12 mths of drama’s I found only Panasonic DECT handsets where reliable with the VOIP solutions.
I also found that running a “single box” solution is less hassles than “multiple box” solutions.
DECT has a much greater cordless range than most other handsets.
Here are the combinations I tried and the issues associated.
Netgear WNDR5500 + Netgear DM111p + Open Networks 812L VOIP
Netgear DG834G v3 + Open Networks 812L VOIP
I prefer to use 1.8GHz DECT handsets where possible, they have MUCH (2x-10x)greater range than 802.11, and don’t use the same 2.4GHz wireless spectrum. 5.8GHz has worse range than 2.4Ghz or 1.8Ghz. Higher frequency = less range.
There seems to be some issues with call stability and cordless handsets. I can only guess from all my testing that it relates to off-hook detection. I played with every setting under the sun, and nothing helped. 12mths of stuffing round to find that Panasonic handsets work well.
QoS is somewhat of a confusing area. The most common method of marking packets at Layer 3 (IP) is with a DSCP tag. This method replaces the earlier Type Of Service (TOS) tag, and uses the same space in the IP header.
Whilst DSCP has a far greater range of values than TOS, there are some that are commonly used in most implementations. DSCP values also overlap with TOS values. There is a table showing the relationship between DSCP and TOS here. This is all likely to lead to confusion in implementation.
Whenever talking about this stuff, there is one very common area of confusion. Numbers. That is, whenever a number is given, is it in Decimal, Hex, or a “type” number. It can also be given as a full byte (non-offset) value – -effecting it further. The DSCP table linked above helps show the different ways a single value can be represented.
eg. 34 = 0x22 = AF41
Be VERY sure you know what they are using in any document you read. The vendors switch between the values in their own documents with remarable dexterity and no explanation.
So – back to Microsoft’s weirdness.
VOIP traffic is generally tagged as “EF” (Express Forward), one of the highest priority values. Microsoft chooses however to use DSCP marking of “CS5”. That would make sense if they where tagging using TOS, as that matches the common practice for TOS values. BUT, their own documents state they are using DiffServ which is based on DSCP markings. DSCP recommends EF for voice, not CS5.
In short, it looks like they have mixed up the older TOS standard with the newer Diffserv standard, and gotten confused along the way. This causes problems with the mappings not classifying correctly if you are using vendor managed L2 prioritisation such as Telstra’s IPWAN DCOS services on their MPLS networks.
This behaviour is consistent across:
LCS 2005
OCS 2008 R2
Server 2003
XP
Vista
W7
The only take away I can get is that Microsoft does not recommend the use of QoS in general, and offers that OCS using RTAudio codecs does not require or recommend the use of QoS due to the protocols in use. I have found however that on services that suffer from congestion, it helps improve the quality of the service.
LCS / XP – Defaults
Video – DSCP 0x18 – 011000 (24) – CS3
Voice – DSCP 0x28 – 101000 (40) – CS5
XP – “Conforming Packets”
| Service Type | Default Priority Marking | New Priority Marking |
| Best-effort | 0 | |
| Controlled load | 24 | 34 – AF41 |
| Guaranteed | 40 | 46 – EF |
| Network control | 48 | |
| Qualitative | 0 | |
Reference
DSCP and Live Mtg
http://nwsmith.blogspot.com/2009/08/dscp-qos-microsoft-office-live-meeting.html
Like most people I have been watching the “Cloud Services” develop and participated in some of the discussions surround the space. These are a collection of the best articles I have found that have shaped my thinking heavily.
A series of articles on designing Open Networks – Jericho Forum
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-04/bh-us-04-simmonds.pdf
http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/
This is the future of IT over the next 10 years as predicted by Microsoft’s chief navel gazer. I gotta say, I think he’s right.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/dd819085.aspx
You want the session by Miha Kralj
How IT will change over the next 10 years and why you should care
http://www.crn.com.au/News/84240,opinion-navel-gazing.aspx
Why Commodity Data Centres are cheaper than your server room, directly from the people building them.
http://loosebolts.wordpress.com
Article
http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!638.entry?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=860819746
Response to Rebuttal
http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/out-of-the-box-paradox-manifested-aka-chicago-area-data-center-begins-its-journey/
http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/18/clouds-over-berkeley-the-radlab-reviews-cloud-computing-pt-1/ (read the overview and original article)
http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/21/clouds-over-berkeley-the-radlab-reviews-cloud-computing-pt-2/ (read the overview and original article)
http://storagemojo.com/2009/03/04/the-amazon-keynote-at-fast-09/
http://storagemojo.com/2009/03/04/belts-suspenders-and-scale/
I noticed something very strange with a new fire suppression system. There were no valve controls on the system, of the four bottles, only one was controlled. I had to look further into this.
One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.
When I looked at the system I was mighty confused. Four high pressure cylinders indicate a high pressure non-liquefied gas. Makes sense when you look at the mix – Nitrogen, Argon, CO2 – not likely to liquefy under pressure at room temperature. A large diameter medium pressure line led to the room with no valves on it. This line was open at the room end with a simple nozzle, no valves along the way.
There was a valve on each cylinder, but no controls to any but the first one.
The first cylinder below has a both an electrical and manual release attached – but what about the other three bottles?
The control valve on each slave cylinder is the interesting bit. When pressure is sensed in the line, it opens the bottle, and remains open until the bottle is empty. Basically it’s a pneumatically operated slave. The pressure in the line is created by the first bottle’s discharge, triggered electrically, and the restriction of the line and nozzles.
And yes, they installed vents in the room to let out the extra air. When you add another 50% of gas to a room, the displaced gas has to go somewhere, or develop an unlikely amount of pressure. They would not be the first to forget the vent.
The time came to decommission the Home Server once I realised how much power it was pulling. My power meter debacle had concealed the 24/7 150w consumption, chewing into my solar feed in tariff at 44c in the daytime and my green power rate at 21c at night. This was costing me about $400/yr in power bills – it had to go.
I have toyed with various options, but the most obvious was using the other machine that was on 24/7 – the Vista Media Centre.
I found some info on running Windows Home Server as a virtual guest, but nothing on the impacts to the Vista Media Centre host. My host was not particularly new, a 3yo PC with the following specs:
I figured it would be a stretch for this machine to run a VM as well, but it was worth the try. It is a fairly power efficient machine, the Core 2 Duo being a laptop CPU and noted for it’s efficiency. The current video card pumps out heat 24/7 and could do with improvement, I’m waiting for the new Intel Nehalem CPU range to arrive and come down in price, by which stage on board video should be suitable – more power savings.
I grabbed a couple of 1TB WD Green drive, as my experience with them inside WD MyBooks showed them to be very quiet and efficient.
I used VMWare Workstation 6.5 as I had it, but you could use VMWare Server – it’s free. You could also use Windows Virtual Server, but I felt (possibly incorrectly) VMWare may have slightly lower overhead and better direct hardware and USB support. Virtual PC / Server have no USB support last I checked.
The Asus MB has 3 x SATA ports, and a PATA port. Two of the SATA ports were already in use with the DVDROM and host HDD, so I ran the first HDD on the spare SATA socket expecting great results. It was awful, woefully slow, rendering the machine unable to even record TV shows. Turns out he extra SATA slot is for RAID, and due to firmware / drivers, IRQ’s went through the roof consuming 60% CPU time. A two channel PCI SATA card fixed this problem.
With that nailed down, I installed Windows Home Server w/ PP1 onto an 80GB Virtual Disk on the 1TB HDD. The host OS and TV recording was all onto the original 500GB HDD.
Virtual machine config was easy. , Setup a Virtual Machine as Server 2003 w/ 512MB RAM, an 80 GB IDE Virtual HDD and mount the Home Server CD ISO. Sound and other unnecessary things were removed. I elected not to fully allocate the 80GB HDD, although this may impact my performance later.
Home server will install on the above with no major configuration steps. All drivers are fine. Once the install is finished, install the VMWare tools, run Windows Update, and activate your Home Server. There are instructions here – but they use a virtual SCSI HDD, greatly complicating the install for no benefit I can discern. I would use a virtual IDE.
Once mine was installed I added the extra disks. Initially I tried the disks as Direct Physical access. They were setup with a partition, but no drive letter, as per the vmware help. The VM would not even boot and there was a disk access conflict. Nothing I did could resolve this problem, so I had to settle for a couple of 900GB virtual disks (not pre-allocated) on the 2 x 1TB HDD’s (930GB formatted capacity NTFS). I tried VMWare Server 2.0, but it doesn’t support direct physical disks anymore, and also broke my Remote Desktop to the host. VMWare Server 1.08 wasn’t compatible with my VM, so I gave up.
The benefit to using Physical Disks is threefold:
Unfortunately it was not to be – so virtual disks it is.
The initial problem I had was WOEFUL disk performance and 100% CPU usage. Task Manager showed the “System Idle Process” to be hogging the CPU. Process Monitor showed it to be 60% used by IRQ’s. Google tracked that to the HDD not being in DMA mode, but rather PIO Mode 4 due to firmware / drivers / phase of the moon. As I couldn’t fix it easily, I bought and installed a 2 port PCI – SATA card. The CPU load is normal using this card as opposed to the on board port.I have since tried storing the VM 80GB “OS” drive on both the 1TB WD 5400RPM VM dedicated disk, and the faster 7200RPM disk shared with the media centre, and couldn’t detect a difference in performance either way. I have left it on the VM disk to optimise space for TV recordings.
Next issue was awful network performance between the Host and Guest. Guest to other network computers was fine – about 4-8MB/s, but Guest – Host was shocking – about 20Kb/s. Like all good technicians today I didn’t use my brain, but hit Google again. TCP Offload seemed to be a recurring theme here. The registry keys for XP didn’t fix it, but the advanced settings for the network adapter did. TCP Offload disabled on the host and now I get the same network performance anywhere. This is not a fault with VMWare, but does seem to be a common compatibility issue with many network adapters, my onboard nic being one of them.
The final hurdle was again performance related. The guest Home Server would be running, but very sluggish to respond to inputs if you had left it alone for a while. It’s like VMWare let it go to sleep, and took between 1-4 minutes to assign it resources again. I made two changes here. I disabled Memory Page Trimming in the VM admin interface and disabled Page File Sharing with the line sched.mem.pshare.enable=”FALSE” in the .vmx config file.
Both of these seemed to keep the Home Server in a much more responsive state when I wanted it. It still often needs two clicks to “connect” to the console – the first fails, but network shares and backup work perfectly. As the console is not something I regularly access, I’ll ignore this issue.
There are some other tricks that can help. I did the following on the host to reduce any possible performance hits:
With the Home Server running and all updates installed (particularly PP1) it was time to install the connector to all the PC’s in the house, and configure backups. This is mostly straightforward. There is one trick – you MUST exclude the Virtual Machine folders from the backup when you install the connector on the Vista Media Centre Host. Otherwise it will try backing up itself to itself, decide it won’t fit, and have a heart attack.
Once everything was installed I copied over all the data using Robocopy. I found that the Windows Copy with that much data to the VM wasn’t particularly reliable, although that may have been due to not having all the above tuning done first. My sequence was a learning exercise.
Vista Media Centre has an option to add remote data to it’s library. I have added music, pictures, MPG4/DivX and DVD’s stored on the Home Server. You’ll need to use the DVD library reg hack to get the latter to work.
I haven’t tried using the Home Server to store recordings of live TV, but watching movies stored on it with either DivX or a ripped DVD works just fine. Network performance is as above.
I have also setup a 1TB Mybook using USB to be the backup drive. The USB seems to work fine and is setup to automatically connect. Backups to the external drive are the usual manual deal.
Now I have access to all my data, a large file store, regular backups, a quiet media centre and a single box that only chew’s 85w. Performance is acceptable, but not amazingly snappy. I think it’s an acceptable compromise. It doesn’t really take any longer than when the old server had to spin up it’s six HDD’s. I’m not sure if the HDD’s are spinning down under VMWare, there is a few more watts to save.
I’m looking into power saving inside VMWare next, but think I’m off to a pretty good start.
There are a few things I would like to do to improve the solution:
Update Oct ’09
Now running VMWare Server.
No real difference. Still can’t use native disks.
I’ll go back to pyhsical once the new Pinetrail atom is out. Although it works, I’m sick of the ultra-long boot times.
I’l make the new WHS an Atom and the VM Host media centre an i3 w/ integrated Video.
I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.
One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.
The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.
They support several power modes, and my current meter is not accurate enough to report which one they are in.
The WD 3/5″ Black is the 7200RPM desktop drive.
The WD 3.5″ Green is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyBook
The WD 2.5″ Blue is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyPassport
| Model | C’pcty | Operate | Idle | Stdby | Sleep |
| WD 3.5” Black | 1TB | 8.4 | 7.8 | 1 | 1 |
| WD 3.5” Green | 1TB | 5.4 | 2.8 | 0.4 | 0.4 |
| WD 2.5” Blue | 500GB | 2.5 | 0.85 | 0.25 | 0.1 |
The other thing I noted was that my new power meter (which is not rated as accurate below 10w) indicated that whilst sleeping, the 3.5″ and it’s power adapter were drawing less than 1w. The power adapter was only just warm, much better than the usual little heat wasters. Well done WD for killing the parasitic standby power.
Overall, they get my vote as low power green storage.
The Green 3.5″ and Blue 2.5″ drives are also very quiet – both operating and seek. The 2.5″ is quieter, but with half the capacity, may not stack up overall.
And you can always decode the Morse Code on the outside!
OK – it came time to rebuild the media centre.
Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.
The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.
After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is
I use the VGA cable to drive the plasma – other outputs have proven problematic in the past and I can’t be bothered trying again.
The Amp is driven off the Digital Out on the M/B – a coax copper digital connection.
This current hardware setup is MUCH more stable than the previous top of the line junk I tried.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings
ShowGallery -Play
Change the Registry value data from Play to Gallery.
Presto – you should now have a system that can play most things, be reasonably stable and do all the things it should out of the box.
It’s only 98 real steps to set it up, not including all the “next, next, finish” buttons.
Wouldn’t it be great if this was how it came from Microsoft in Australia.
Depending on your hardware – your mileage may vary. This was FAR more stable than installing all the drivers from the vendor sites.
You may optionally want to
a) Have Terminal Services Access without interrupting your TV (haven’t done this yet)
b) Improve your HDD performance, but also have increased risk of data corruption.
Update Sept 09 – due to hardware failure I’m not running W7 and new hardware.
W7 is much better. Full review coming.
Still needs help though.
I’ve been trying to have the whole digital home experience for a while now. I’ve reviewed Vista Media Centre, Home Server, Wireless N before, the experiences there are documented.
The impossible dream I am thinking of consists of seamless integration between:
I reviewed home server here. It’s a great product that acts as a network store for your folders, and backs up all the PC’s in your house. It has a brilliant Disaster Recovery solution and one of the most innovative backup and storage solutions I have seen in a long time.
Unfortunately that’s all it is, and that means 40watts at idle 24/7 – 88KwHrs / qtr, and more if I make it work hard.
This thing‘s purpose in life is to record TV, and play content. In Australia it does an average job of both. It’s another 50watts 24/7.
Trying to get a PC to work well in a lounge room is an exercise in frustration. Noise, power, keyboards, mice and windows hiccups are just not fun. Add in the TV compatibility problems many experience trying to get TV interfaces and resolutions correctly out of a PC.
It’s great when it works, but it’s definitely high maintenance.
As many people have said before me, what about storing the videos on Home Server, and getting it to do the recording too. That way they noisy PC can stay in the back room, and one PC can have an excuse for staying up chewing power 2/47, not two.
I don’t really stream my video, I watch it off a remote file share. A performance comparison of Streaming vs File Serving is here.
I can’t claim to have one of these yet. The reviews are average, and every XBox 360 I hear about dies an early death.
These seem to be the obvious choice for the lounge room. They are quieter, more aesthetically pleasing, have native TV interfaces (PAL, Component etc), and an interface that never needs a mouse to drive it. They also play games, so many people end up wit one anyway.
The well known issues with power consumption on some of these come up, but at least it’s only when being watched, and it’s probably not more than the plasma TV anyway.
A chipped XBox with XBox Media Centre was my weapon of choice for years. It’s an aging solution now, and doesn’t have HiDef, but as a media player for over the network content, it beat Vista Media Centre hands down.
I can see this being the future of the lounge room.
The current problem being the limited support for what can / cannot be streamed to the current extenders, and how to connect the things.
The Wii seems to excel here, as a pure games console. The best comparison i reckon is here.
If you want all the video streaming, it’s XBox 360 or possibly, Playstation 3.
Nice toy, chews power all the time, unlike an old fashioned photos. Be good if they only displayed when they sensed movement.
The wireless versions I have seen seen only work off Flikr and other web services. None seem to be connecting to a local PC to show photo’s from. Great for using bandwidth.
Everyone has an iPod, even me. I dont’ use iTunes at all, so it’s solid MP3’s. Unfortunately Apple in their wisdom designed the thing on ID3 tags, not on files / folders. If your tags aren’t perfect, you’ll have all sorts of fun navigating the thing.
I’m still looking for the cheap simple, web managed, wireless MP3 player I can plugin to my amp.
An old laptop or Asus eePC is topping the list at the moment.
I ran wireless G for ages – just plain G, none of the tricky variants as my laptops built in is only basic G. It’s fine for web browsing and acceptable for file copying, but coverage and streaming movies never really worked.
I recently threw a bucket of cash a a Wireless N solution, sticking to a single vendor to keep the process smoother. Netgear is more common that Linksys in Australia.
Well the coverage is mildly better, and it is a bit faster, and that’s all. The problem is that the speed is still very variable, so even though the average is OK, for playing movies over the LAN – it all falls down.
Luckily my house lets me run a cable underneath to the lounge easily, so I have a solution, but it’s a disappointment.
I will have no such luck with running a cable for the spare room with the kids TV and their (might get for XMAS) 360. The consoles also don’t support Wireless N, so that’s more kit to buy.
So much for the wireless dream.
Looks like some others agree with me here and here
I’m got lucky here, with my house being able to get Naked (Unbundled Local Loop) ADSL2+. I get about 7 Mbit download speeds. Being ULL means I don’t have to pay Telstra any money, and that makes me happy.
I don’t quite understand why a GB is cheaper on ADSL2+ than the same GB on ADSL, but I won’t complain seeing as I get the service.
This is one part of the equation that works well for me.
I do however have to run THREE devices pulling another 40Watts 24/7. A Wireless/Firewall/Router, an ADSL Modem and a VOIP adapter, all pulling their own power, each with their own old fashioned power brick radiating heat.
Where oh were is the all in one Modem/Router/Wireless N/VOIP adapter that only pulls 5 watts.
“Skype” vs “VOIP from my ISP” vs “Messenger”
And never shall any of the above meet. Good luck all ye who enter here.
Then we move onto Bluetooth headsets, Wireless Handsets, GSM Picocells, and Cordless phones just for laughs.
These integrate acceptably into the home network. My biggest hurdles here are
I’m used to domain authentication, and sharing stuff around a home network isn’t quite as simple as I would have thought. More work to be done in this space.
It is still common to email a file via their internet email address, that is in the same house as you! That tells me point to point file transfer is still way too hard.
Hmm – maybe device authentication is a better idea in this space than traditional user authentication.
I have a HP wireless (802.11g) All In One unit. It works well enough except for one critical problem. It gets it’s IP Address via DHCP from the Router. If I don’t set a reservation, this changes sometimes due to the alignment of Venus and Mars. The software fails badly at finding it when it’s IP address changes.
Tip for Wireless device designers, home IP addresses are very dynamic, plan on your drivers having to work with that.
A reservation fixes the problem – until the next firmware upgrade.
And finally we have the latest set of toys, the one’s the world’s been saying will happen for years. Well it’s not there yet, even with ADSL2+, but I agree, it’s coming.
I do like some of the services and I’m using more and more over time.
I tried online backup of 20Gb of data, and it does work, but it’s nowhere near as practical as Home Server for me. For small quantities of data it would be very good.
The whole area is changing, and local sync options are making it more interesting. Google gears enables some of this functionality and is worth looking for.
Security and privacy are significant concerns. Google can inform you about google here.
A single authentication solution like OpenID starts to make all of this much easier.
Well the seamless integration of all this stuff is still a long way off. The problems are solvable, but the maintenance is high.
All I want is devices that chew no power, work together seamlessly, is available anywhere in the world and takes no effort from me. It’s not too much to ask for is it?
Watch this space.
C’mon guys – no logins for Technet subscriptions – if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.
Jesper had a similar problem last week.
This is why I learnt a long time ago – if you have an AD problem – it’s probably DNS.
Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration – especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.
I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.
When I first heard about Windows Home S
erver (WHS) – I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.
With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.
OK – at it’s simplest WHS does three things
WHS is managed by a really easy to use interface – it’s not a web interface, it’s actually a Terminal Services Published App. Anyone with a modicum of IT knowledge can drive this thing.
The hardware can be any old PC with more than 512MB of RAM. I run 4GB so I can use VMWare are well for testing. It will need a few HDD’s, either internal or external, USB, PATA, SATA, eSata, it doesn’t matter. They can be any size and speed, it will sort out the storage. Ideally there are four HDD’s, one for Boot / Temp, two for storage with duplication between them, and an external USB/eSATA for backup. I’m using a WD 1TB Mybook Essential for backup as unlike many enclosures, it will spin down saving power, and has no fans making noise. I’m running 1 x 80Gb, 4 x 500Gb, 1 x 1TB USB.
Installing and setting up the WHS is pretty simple. I had one weird error that caused it to fail due to it not liking the PATA setup on my M/B. Changing the DVD to it’s own controller solved that.
There is one strange requirement, that is the server must be plugged into an Ethernet interface, not wireless. It’s something to do with the compression algorithm and streaming of the backups. It’s documented, but I haven’t found the solid reason yet. The clients can be wireless, but not the server.
Next step is to configure any storage. Plenty of guides on that around. The very interesting technical brief / whitepaper on WHS Storage is here. It must be noted that WHS does NOT support RAID. You can run hardware RAID, but it’s not recommended. Please read the whitepaper to gain a better understanding. Basically any of the file shares can have “duplication” enabled. Initially to me this sounded like a mirror (RAID1), and as I was running RAID5, I wasn’t particularly interested. After reading the whitepaper, it is fundamentally different. Not better or worse, just different. I would kinda still prefer RAID5 – it’s more efficient, and protects the whole system, not just the file stores, but this is much easier to expand and configure. I’m neutral on this feature vs RAID5, but would be very happy to give it to a non IT person to run. I think that’s the main point, anyone could drive this and have their data protected. It does NOT protect the WHS OS in any way. It does not duplicate the PC Backups unless you hack it.
Once the server is setup and configured with storage you install the WHS connector on each PC in your house. There is a tray icon that will run on each PC in your house – it alerts you to any problems, provides shortcuts to the file shares, manages backups and allows you to manage the WHS. It makes it much easier to trust the status of the server than having to remember and check Event Logs every so often.
The backup function is split into two components. PC backup and File Server backup. The technical brief for the PC Backup is here
The PC backup runs once a day, waking the computers from sleep, and putting them back to sleep when complete. The backups are particularly clever, tracking each NTFS sector backed up. If any sectors are the same, either across backups of the same machine, or between machines, the sector is only stored once. This is all transparent to the user. The space saving is dramatic. My three computers at home are using 168GB backup space, and that is with plenty of data on each, and nightly backups for a month. The backups are cleaned up to manage space on a schedule you can define.
Restoring of PC Backup’s can be done in one of two ways. You can browse the backups to restore individual files, or you restore the whole machine like an image. The restore is particularly clever. You boot the PC from a generic “Restore CD” that comes with WHS. All the drivers for that PC are sitting in a folder on the WHS ready to go – it has automatically found them on the PC when it was backed up and prepared them for this purpose. They go onto a USB thumb drive. With the drivers available, the PC can get onto the local network, connect to the server and retrieve the backup. It will put all the files back, OS and all – presto – rebuilt client PC from backup. That is much easier than the usual “restore the OS first”. Unlike most Bare Metal or Image restores, there is no need to keep regular updated images, meaning less maintenance and less space consumed. It’s very elegant really.
The server backup can backup any of the file shares (not the Server OS or the PC backups) to any HDD in the “Backup Storage” list. The server backup must be triggered manually, it cannot be scheduled or automated (A glaring oversight). It uses NTFS Hard Links to make sure that any file is only stored once, even though it may appear to be copied up each time. This saves huge amounts of space, and can be read on any machine. Again – this is transparent to the user. The external backups must be cleaned up manually when you run out of space. It would be ideal in future versions if these external backups could be duplicated somehow, to allow for an offsite copy. The current solution would be to perform the backup twice. This is not a significant overhead, as the backup only copies any changed data using a very efficient algorithm.
The other function for a WHS box by default is as a local file server. It is very easy for anyone to configure this, and can be controlled with easy to manage user accounts and permissions.
The interesting feature in this area is “Duplication”. Each share can optionally have “Duplication” enabled. This will then have the server transparently copy each file to a separate drive. The process is described in the storage whitepaper. This is all hidden from the user by using NTFS links and other NTFS trickery. The advantage is that in the event of a disaster of some kind, the drives are fully readable on any machine. It also is dynamic enough that the drives can be any type and size, it will share the data round and balance the storage as required.
I haven’t played much in this area yet – I’ll update when I do. It uses UPNP to publish a site to the internet through your router. The domain homeserver.com lets you register a free subdomain to get to your data. You can access your files from anywhere. There is a Terminal Services Gateway function to allow remote access to your home PC’s – I haven’t investigated this yet. It probably depends on your desktop OS version, user account configuration and if the computer is asleep.
There are a reasonable and expanding number of AddIns that can be installed. These offer increased functionality through the WHS interface.
It is worth checking the Power Settings on the WHS, as mine was set not to spin the drives down. This wastes a lot of power and will reduce their life. I tend to set mine to 5 minute spin down, as this is longer than any streaming period. The machine isn’t user interactive – so spin up time is not a concern.
WHS is actually Windows Server 2003 (possibly with some SBS stuff – I have noted). It will run nearly anything W2K3 Svr will. BUT, you need to be particularly careful with your drive management. Use of Disk Manager can kill the special WHS stores. Whatever apps you install needs some careful thought as to where the data will be stored.
I’m very impressed with the data storage and backup solution used in WHS. It can be driven by anyone with a modicum of computer experience and meets it’s goals very well. It is more limited than a full W2K3 server, but offers some brilliant functions that are difficult to find elsewhere. It’s simplicity is wonderful, and with some care, offers a wonderful solution.
What should have been included that wasn’t? Hmm, well. I have a list, as do many others on the Connect forum. If I had to narrow it down it would be.
http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/
http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm
And this is why we have to wean business off Excel.
Just like programming – it’s all mistakes mistakes mistakes.
Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.
Now for 802.11g, MIMO will improve your coverage, but seeing as N is just around the corner, and uses MIMO as part of the draft standard, it made sense to just jump to 802.11n. My house is two storey, and getting good reliable coverage over both floors has proved difficult. I always get a signal, but not a good one, and for streaming my Vista Media Centre from my Home Server, I needed a good signal. I could have run Cat5, it’s what I had done in the past, but I figure, in 2008, I should be able to make all this new fangled stuff kinda come together smoothly.
Just released by Netgear and Linksys amongst others are new Dual Band draft N equipment, this runs in both the 5.8Ghz and 2.4GHz ranges. The argument being that the 5.8GHz range is far larger in frequency space, and far less utilised by other things that can interfere. Made sense to me, and at a small price premium, was worth jumping onto. Teamed with a new naked ADSL2+ service, I figured I would “embrace the future”.
The new Netgear model is WNDR3300 and the Linksys a WRT600N. I was more familiar with Netgear, it’s cheaper, and more easily available in Australia. I teamed it up with a set of Netgear USB WNDA3100 adapters. The unit supports QoS for my new Naked ADSL w/ VOIP service and has the widest range of features of the current netgear lineup.
8 Weeks after ordering, the kit finally turned up, with delays from Netgear getting it into the country. Looks like this stuff really is new – oh bugger, that’ll mean bugs.
It looks the piece, big, black, no antennas thanks to the secret metamaterial. The power pack is switch mode and small, and it comes with a few cables. Inital setup is manageable. The flashy lights on top are very very irritating, allow an extra $2 for a roll of black tape.
The first problem was the Router doesn’t have an integrated ADSL modem. Guess I should have read the specs a little better there. It’s almost impossible to purchase an ADSL modem only unit in Australia today, everything wants to route. Two routers in series = problems. You can convert the DG834G into a modem, but I had another home for mine, so I bought a DM111P to run as an Ethernet to ADSL2+ bridge. Getting the DM111P to be a modem means putting it into “RFC2684” mode, something not covered in any of the docs. This way the DM111P handles the ADSL settings, but the WNDR3300 does the ADSL PPOE login with credentials etc. The downside is that you can’t see your ADSL line connection performance figures, and whilst the DM111P is in bridge mode, it doesn’t have an IP address, so you can’t get information off of it either. You have to configure your WNDR3300 to login with “Other” and not “PPTP” or “Telstra Bigpond”. Either way, I’m getting about 7Mbit.
Once running and configured I fired up the WNDA3100 units in my partners desktop and the Media Centre. Install went OK, although I hate the “app” type driver installs. I much prefer just having the driver and managing it through windows. I figured being new, that doing it the “right” way with the vendor, and having additional signal information would be useful. Longer term, once smoothed out, I’ll be uninstalling the netgear apps and just running the driver. That said, I have to figure out how to extract it, as it’s all packaged up, and not easy to get into. Finally, there is some sort of script it runs on every login, looks dodgy to me.
The coverage is good, and speed ok. Plenty of other reviews there, no need to re-cover that. Interestingly most of the clients could only see the 2.4Ghz signal. The 5.8 signal gets wiped out by my walls too quickly. As this review covers, you can only have DraftN on either 5.8 OR 2.4 at once, so I dropped the 5.8 signal and got the speed where I could. That pretty well negates the point of having Dual Band.
The comments I have had so far are below
Next time I think I would consider the DG834N with the integrated modem, unless I had spectrum issues, possibly in densely populated areas.
Update (31/07/08)
I have updated to the latest release firmware – this has helped the stability significantly. Coverage is still ok, but not excellent. Primarily, I still can’t reliably watch DivX/XVid movies on my Vista Media Centre PC from my Windows Home Server. They play, but often judders and stall. The signal strength an quality are about 70% – but it still doesn’t cope. I think I’ll have to run Cat5 to the Media Centre after all. The Home Server is already running Cat 5 to the WNDR3300 – that is a requirement of WHS. My house is two storey timber and no too huge. Due to placement, some transmission paths are less than ideal – high angle to the walls / floors increasing apparent depth.
Router
Router w/ VOIP adapter from Internode
Router, VOIP & ADSL Modem
WNDA3100
UPDATE:
I have decided to ditch the WNDR3300 and replace is with *something* else. I ahve gone through 5 versions of the firmware since I bought it. The 5.8Ghz is a waste of time, it has very poor penetration. www.smallnetbuilder.com shows average-poor wireless performacne in comparison from other devices. THe unit was replaced under warranty a couple of weeks ago when the QoS rules would not remain set to custom.
The final deal breaker was my VOIP phone dropouts. I have an OPEN networks VOIP ATA behind the router, and frequently get “one way voice” on a call. I put this down to VOIP issues. Whilst the router was away under warranty I used my old DG834G – and had NO call dropouts. It doesn’t even have QoS and the call quality was better. As soon as the WNDR3300 went back in – dropouts came back. It’s going to be replaced, this time with somethign with an integrated ADSL modem.
I would not recommend this device.
I had the same problem as before – Activesync changing my Proxy settings in my Jasjam to use the work proxy, breaking web browsing on the thing via my Telco.
Activesync is different to the Mobile Device Thingy on Vista and although the fix was the same, it took me a bit to find.
Think of this as a Vista Version of KB915151
Continue reading Windows Mobile 6 and Poxy Proxy Settings w/ Vista