Category: IT

Years ago I had the pleasure of getting called out to a client site where they had some problems with their IBM Server. I needed access to the data from their Raid 1 pack running on an IBM ServeRAID controller. For some reason that eludes me there was a problem on that machine. “No Worries” I thought, I’ll just drop it in the box beside it and read off the data. It’ll show up as a normal disk on a normal SCSI controller.

Err – NO

You see whilst Adaptec and others do genuinely mirror their disks, IBM implements some type of Mirrored Striping. I don’t know and haven’t researched all the details, but the short story is that if you want to read the Mirrored disk – you need an IBM RAID Controller. I did speak to an IBM tech and was told it was for performance reasons.

Now using an IBM ServeRAID controller to read the data isn’t the end of the world – just throw it in another box (assuming you have one). At least IBM RAID is compatible across their controller model ranges.

This is where your world will now get “interesting”. You see IBM has this interesting concept where they store a copy of the RAID controller configuration on the disks. If you install RAID Pack 1 from Server1 into Server2 that already has a RAID pack (Raid Pack 2) operating, the RAID Controller (assuming there is only one for that backplane) will see two different configurations. Pack 1 knows only about itself and Pack 2 is the same.

Fair enough you say – we’ll just teach them about each other. Well – you can’t. IBM does not allow “merging” of RAID pack configurations onto the controller. This means that if you try, it’ll delete one of the packs. Fun Fun Fun. Great design effort boys.

 I haven’t seen this much brains used since Intel decided to make a RAID controller with no recovery console except for the one installed in the OS – THAT YOU CAN’T BOOT to because that’s why you need the recovery console. (I use these for doorstops)

OK, so you can’t merge, so you can’t easily swap packs between machines for quick recovery. Good marketing move, it does give a reason to keep a spare IBM box in the corner.

It also makes one of my safety tricks useless. I have on more than one occasion seen an administrator delete the wrong pack or disk on a machine with several arrays. I haven’t had it happen, but it’s entertaining to watch. It’s not that hard to do. Often the logical labeling is not the same as the physical labeling, or is inconsistent in some other way. My solution to this (assuming things are offline) is to drop the healthy pack out whilst working on the failed one. It’s very hard to make a mistake and delete something that isn’t plugged in.

BUT – if you try this with an IBM ServeRAID controller, the pack you are working on will likely lose knowledge of the offline pack. When you go to plug it back in – presto – pick one, but not both. You then start all over with the healthy pack online, and waste another two hours. Wonderful during a DR situation.

So – if you are used to other RAID manufacturers kit and get dumped with an IBM system, things are a little different.

I actually like the IBM ServeRAID kit, I just get frustrated by companies that insist on being different and make my life harder in the process.

I like having a bit of space to store stuff at home. Dumping the Media Centre, Music, Photos and Backups back to a central server makes sense to me. It lets me use my XBox (chipped original) as a brilliant DivX player with AC3 Surround. I also worry about losing this data, and find it impractical to back it up to CD (3000 CD’s is difficult). This is why I run RAID on my server, to help protect my data. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.

You’ll need an old PC. This is a great way to reuse your desktop when you upgrade. Any old piece of junk will do, but ideally it will have the following:

1. Tower Case
2. 300W Power Supply (250W may do at a pinch)
3. 4 x SATA Ports
4. 2 x IDE (PATA) Ports
5. Any CPU – doesn’t matter
6. 512MB RAM
7. On Board Video preferred

The intent is to run 5 x Hard Drives and a CDROM. You can do this with all IDE (PATA) but it gets difficult to find IDE adapter cards, and their performance can be poor. You can run two drives per PATA cable vs 1 per SATA.

You want 4 drives the same size. 500GB is about the most cost effective per GB at the moment (mid 2007), but do the numbers on whatever gives you the best deal at the time. You could use 5 – 10 old smaller drives, however finding a controller to plug them all into is next to impossible. 4 x medium size drives tend to be the most cost effective way of getting bulk space. The fifth HDD can be any old piece of junk. It’s only to run the OS, and can be replaced if it dies. It doesn’t hold any data.

The case doesn’t need to have mounts for all these drives, and it doesn’t have to be anything special. If the drives are all 7200RPM, they tend to get a little warm. They should have some space between them and ventilation. If they are 5400RPM’s you can stack them together on the base of the PC, they won’t care.

As it is a server you can shove it anywhere in the house, making super silent a lower priority. If you want to build it silent see my “building a quiet PC article“. I prefer to shove it under the stairs where noise isn’t a problem. I manage it through Remote Desktop, so it doesn’t even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse.

Install Windows Server if you have it (licensed and legitimate of course) or XP onto the single small HDD. Nothing special here. If you are running XP you’ll have to do some hacks that are covered in this article on Tomshardware. I haven’t found a hack to get Vista to support RAID 5 yet. Windows Home Server should be an interesting one to evaluate when I comes out, as it has some new takes on RAID. In the meantime however, I’ll stick with Server 2K3.

The objective is to protect the data through the use of RAID. I see plenty of people with data on a single machine at home they use as a server, but most don’t run RAID. I always run Software RAID, that way if a HDD dies, I lose nothing. I prefer software RAID in windows to any of the Hardware RAID adapters for home use. The reason is simple. If you Hardware RAID adapter fails, you have to get one the same or compatible to get to your data. Being cheap equipment, this has a fair likelihood of occurring, and then not being available. Using Software RAID on the other hand means any Windows Server can read the disks, and recover the data. We are doing this for data safety, not performance. I have always found software RAID performance to be acceptable, even when I was running an old Pentium MMX 166 box.  In a business environment it’s a very different story and cost.

Once Windows is installed I recommend you configure RAID 5 across the other 4 data disks. There are instructions here.  The disks need to be the same size to participate in the RAID pack. They can actually be different sizes, but you’ll waste space on the larger disks. Now most RAID solutions support two different types of RAID to protect your data – RAID 1 and RAID 5, which I’ll outline.

Raid 1 is a Mirror. It makes a copy of one disk onto another, and shows them as a single disk. If one dies, you have the data on the other disk, and the failure is transparent. The problem is you lose 50% of your space. Your 2 x 500GB disks (1TB total) give you 500GB useable space. Not particularly efficient. To make it practical for a home server you have to buy larger more expensive disks. This is supposed to be a cheapish exercise.

RAID 5 is referred to as a Stripe with Parity. The redundant data is spread equally across all of the disks. You need a minimum of 3 Hard Drives to run RAID 5. The way the algorithm works you lose the effective space of ONE disk to the data protection. If you think about it, the more disks you add, the more efficient it is. The data being spread over multiple disks tends to make the system faster as well, disks being the most common bottleneck. Our 4 x 500GB (2TB) gives us about 1.5TB useable. It’s actually a little less due to HDD manufacturers counting differently to the rest of the IT industry, but hey, that’s marketing for you.

With your RAID 5 setup on your old PC and some cheap Hard Drives, you’ll have one of the cheapest large data stores around. You also get the benefit of knowing if one of those drives dies, your data is safe. The gotcha is you actually have to check the RAID occasionally to be sure it is healthy. You can do this by checking the system event log. There is a risk that as it all just keeps working in the event of a failure, it will continue unnoticed, until a second disk fails, resulting in the loss of everything. I am still looking for a freeware utility to alert in the event of a software raid pack error.

It should be noted that RAID only protects against one type of disaster – loss of a single Hard Disk Drive. If you lose multiple drives, accidentally delete files, get a virus etc etc, your data will be lost. As I tend to store non critical data, and use this space to backup my other PC’s, loss of this type is not a significant problem for me. This risk should be kept in mind and managed where possible. There is no cheap large scale backup for home use that I have found on the market. The ideal would be some type of 100 disk DVD Loader, however all the library’s out there don’t have integrated burners. If anyone finds a large cheap loader with a burner, I would love to know about it (another market opportunity for some Taiwanese company).

Now this machine is going to be on 24/7 and you should think a little green. Most CPU’s aren’t too bad for power when idling, even if they aren’t the latest models. The biggest energy chewer will be the HDD’s. If you go into Power under Control Panel and set the machine to shut down the Hard Drives after 15minutes of inactivity, you’ll save a heap of power, and extend the life of your drives significantly. Consumer drivers aren’t really designed to spin 24/7. Stopping them spinning also reduces noise. Overall it will probably chew about 30-50W at idle and up to 250W under load, depending on the CPU you are running. It’s not practical to enable Standby, as there is no remote wake up command.

The screen rotation feature of the Jasjam is cool, but it takes a while, and some apps really hate it. It will even crash some video playback. It’s a great function for the slide out keyboard, but it is slow.

Have you ever noticed your Jasjam is incorrectly aligned when you answer the phone or an SMS message, and it takes a few seconds to sort it self out?

Well – it turns out the way the rotation is sensed is via a magnetic pickup. iMate in their wisdom supplies a case that has its lid closed by some very strong magnets. Presto – they just broke their own orientation sensing mechanism, causing the poor thing to heave  heart attack when it’s removed from it pouch, and it’s owner to wonder “why is this thing always trying to sort out it’s screen”.

Time to find a leather non magnetic case I think.

Sites like www.silentpcreview.com offer some great component reviews for bits to build a quiet machine. What is missing is a guide about the fundamentals to think about to do it simply, without having to buy super expensive gear. This is that guide.

It’s probably a geek thing, but the “why bother” for me is that I run a home server to keep my stuff on and a noisy PC is just plain irritating. Ditto for the media centre PC, or even the desktop. Because my machines are on all the time, keeping them quiet, and power saving matters.

Interestingly enough the Corporate (not the home user crap) Dell’s and IBM’s I see through work are relatively quiet, not super silent, but not bad for an off the shelf machine.

The key is ventilation design. Move the most air you can, where it is needed, as quietly as possible.

The method to do this is quite simple. Unfortunately most PC cases and motherboards out there do nothing to help this, they just make it worse.

Lets try some basic rules

1. Big fans move more air for less noise than small ones (listen to a 1RU rack mount server to see the ultimate of this – like a jet engine, noise is astounding)
2. Moving air round and round inside the case is inefficient and makes noise (most servers don’t run CPU fan’s, they put decent heatsinks in the system airflow).
3. Pumping the air in AND out is unnecessary – more noise (in 99% of cases two fans blowing out will move more air than one blowing in and the other out)

So what we want is a case that uses one big fan to pump air out (or in) and flows it past all internal components such that small fans on heatsinks are not required. It’s called ATX and was designed to solve the deficiencies of the AT design, especially those relating to cooling. Unfortunately the cases we get today aren’t really the original design.

If we look at components.

Case:
Tower cases are easier to do this with due to their natural tendency to flow air up. Hot air rises (heat does not rise, that’s a myth) You want a case that lets as much air in as possible at key points – down low toward the front. Some flowing in past the hard drives is also ideal. It should NOT have vents up high, or at the rear or  near the CPU. If it does, seal them up, as they’ll let air bypass the other components. Cases with 60mm rear fans are particularly noisy. Look for something that will take a 120mm rear fan, or if you are running a Core Duo CPU – no rear fan is needed – seal it up. Holes over the CPU are a waste – seal them up too. If your case is well designed, you don’t want fans in the front of the case.
Desktop cases are more difficult. You’ll have to plan it a little more.
Make sure either case has provision for mounting the HDD’s in rubber.

Power Supply:
This is the most important component, the thing in the original ATX specification designed to cool the system. Look for a power supply with a SINGLE 120mm or 140mm fan. Big = more air for less noise. It will be mounted in the base of the PS over the CPU – ideal. It will also leave the entire rear of the power supply as a large mesh grid – ideal for moving more air. Finally, the fan is inside the box behind the power supply electronics, this will further muffle any noise. You don’t want a second 80mm fan in the rear. This is a restriction, makes noise, and fans in series are un-needed.

CPU:
The coolest running you can buy. A Core Duo is ideal here. Also the smaller the die size, the cooler they tend to run, so if given the choice pick the CPU with the smallest nanometer size. The late P4’s are awful and need huge heatsiks to compensate.

CPU Heatsink / Fan:
This is where it gets tricky. My base assumption is that I want the airflow from the power supply to do most of the cooling. Therefore it has to have fins that face into the power supply and cool from air running ACROSS it, not down into it as most stock and many aftermarket coolers do. This one is good. This one is not. It has to be oriented the right way. The factory heatsinks that force air down onto the CPU rather than across are simply recycling hot air round and round. They rely on the other system fans to keep the system cool. Seems like a waste to me, more noise for no reason. Reviews on the internet are not always useful for this, as they test the heatsink in open air, not in a sealed forced airflow like a well designed case should be. My CPU fans often never even run.

Fans:
Buy quiet one’s, but don’t spend too much money. Centrifugal fans tend to flow more air for less noise, but are rarely available in useful sizes or configurations. Fan grills should be the thin wire style. Grilles in cases that are punched gaps in the press steel, or worse, lots of small perforated holes, should be cut out and replaced with a wire grill. Remember – larger = more air for less noise. The quiet fans simply tend to spin at lower speeds. I tend to run mine at 7V to achieve a reasonable result. 7V comes from between the 5V and the 12V rail.

HDD’s:
Just follow the recommended drive on www.silentpcreview.com. I tried a “similar” drive, and the seek noise was irritating during movies. I learnt to follow their recommendation exactly. Mount them on rubber.

DVD Drive:
I can’t find a quiet one – any one that knows please help me.

Next time you go to buy a “quiet” component, ask yourself, is this simply covering an existing problem, it this just another “quiet” noisemaker. The quietest fan is the one that isn’t there, and with careful design you’ll need far fewer.

There it is – simple. Pick the case with the holes in the right spot, put in a power supply with the big fan in the base, and pick a CPU and Cooler combination that will let you run your heatsink passive most of the time, and damn quiet the rest. Don’t install more fans than you need and make sure each is actually doing something useful. Finally add some quiet drives and presto – a quiet PC without too much hassle.

 
80mm fans – OK
120mm PS Fan – Good
60mm CPU Fan – Bad (luckily the Core Duo makes very little heat, so it spins very slowly)

60mm fans – Bad
80mm PS Fan – Bad
90mm CPU Fan recirculating – OK as nearly turned off.
High Efficiency Heatsink – OK – needs very little airflow.

High efficiency Heatsink – OK, but airflow is wrong – recirculates.

Clear exit from P/S – Good   Entire rear of PS is available for airflow.

120mm Exhaust Fan – Good, but ideal would be not at all.
140mm PS Fan – Excellent – this does most of the work.
Huge CPU heatsink – Excellent – Aligned with P/S airflow and convective currents. The CPU fan is off 99% of the time, it’s not needed.

Grilles removed behind fans improves airflow.

I logged onto Custdata today and did a quick query – the error below gave me a laugh.

I must admit, I prefer this level of honesty to PR lies attempting to save face.

I was somewhat concerned about the refresh behavior if IE on my Jasjam. I threw this as the MS Newsgroups and got some answers. Looks like I have to be careful with IE.

Can anyone confirm 3 questions regarding the refresh behavior of Mobile 
Internet Explorer. The device is an iMate JASJAM. Windows Mobile 5. 

1) Does a page with content (ads or similar) that expire continue to refresh 
and consume downloads when in the foreground? 
2) Does this still occur when IE is in the background? 
3) Does this still occur when the device is in standby? 

I am concerned about both battery life and MB consumption and can't find any 
documentation on refresh behavior. 

Thanx 
Paul

 

 >> 
1) Does a page with content (ads or similar) that expire continue to 
refresh and consume downloads when in the foreground? 
2) Does this still occur when IE is in the background? 
3) Does this still occur when the device is in standby? 
<< 

1 - yes 

2 - yes 

3 - no 

Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]

 

So the implication is that unless you go into Control Panel – memory – running applications and shut down IE, it will keep chewing download capacity and battery life? Thanx Paul

>> it will keep chewing download capacity and battery life? << More importantly, if you pay for your cellular data by the data amount, things could get very expensive. The cache situation is primarily a user one… it’s good to get into the habit of hitting tools/options/memory and clearing the cache on a regular basis depending on how you use explorer. Since PIE only has a single window, it doesn’t impact any other speed issues and your wireless is not going to be much, if any, different than   with PIE shut down. I have a local html file which I set as my home page when I’m on a cellular $/byte connection which is a single tap away… and, one of the first third party app’s every serious user should install is a task manager to control app’s… I use and recommend vBar. Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]

It’s quite common to run the file server and the print server on the same box. They don’t tend to compete for resources and are moderately complimentary. The downside is the instability of the spooler service combined with varied drivers leads to more frequent reboots than is ideal. Everyone loves to reboot a large file server.

The problem is that no one wants to dedicate hardware to just printing. or heaven forbid, coexisting with a domain controller Continue reading Why you should VM your Print Servers

The problem is that if you use the IBM drivers, the default Microsoft Serial Port Interface is not configured as described.

Instead you do the following:

 

• Create a Serial port (or edit the default one) in the “Bluetooth Configuration” in Control Panel
• Set to AUTO START – this is why it doesn’t “just work”
• Point ActiveSync on the PC to the new COM port
• Setup your Bluetooth partnership
• Fire up Activesync on the KJAM and click “Sync with Bluetooth”
• It may prompt to tick the “Activesync” service of the Bluetooth partnership with the PC

We have been having problems with the satellite link at the moment. Looks like it may be related to the rather large volcano that has just decided to blow it’s top. Mt Tavurvur – Rabaul has been a well know performer, but nothing this big since 1994 whish was huge.

Hey, this is PNG, nothing surprises me anymore.

I challenge you to beat that for an uncontrolled outage.

was dissapointed when Ministumbler didn’t work on my KJam, must not support the wireless chipset. I found Wififofum does work succesfully. No comments on functionality yet.

http://www.aspecto-software.com/

DON’T install Ministumbler, it’s a bugger to remove, the uninstaller doesn’t work.

Replicating a large file store – 850 odd Gig. Due to conflict issues, running the secondary site replicated but with no referrals. I’ll enable it if the primary has a failure. Anyway –

Replicated Folder	Total Size of Data If Received Without DFS Replication	Actual Data Received Across the Network Using DFS Replication	DFS Replication Efficiency Savings
Department$	869.94 GB	251.07 GB	71.14%

Thats a reduction of 618Gig for FIRST TIME ONE WAY replication. It can only get better from here with partial change replication.

(Although I do have questions about .pst files – testing required here)

These numbers are from the DFSR utilities, I’ll have to assume it’s telling the truth. You do have to run Enterprise Edition on your file servers to get the full benefit (more details another day).

http://www.confuzer.com/geekblog/

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Intelligent-Message-Filter-version-2-IMF-v2.html

If you have a corporate wallpaper pushed to your desktop / laptop, chances are it’s being done with Windows Group Policy. It’s likely this is a PR rather than IT initiative, IT being there to service rather than brand the customer.

You can override this wallpaper with some local settings, although this *may* have impacts down the track where other settings are also blocked. This may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective. It will definitely mean that IT won’t be happy as your PC is no longer standard and may not behave as they expect. This isn’t really a big stress, as with the advent of the Internet and web applications, no machine is the same as another anymore, despite opinions to the contrary. Your mileage may vary.

You need to have local administrative rights to make these changes. You may be this already, many laptop users are due to deficiencies in XP. Vista users are less likely to be local admin, as the newer design doesn’t require admin rights as frequently. To test if you are a local admin, try the below steps, if it denies you access, you need to escalate your privileges. Your friendly IT staff member may do this by adding your user account the the local pc administrators group, or alternately you can look at escalation of privilege attacks on the system. It is preferable not to be an administrator all the time, as the computer is MUCH more vulnerable to being attacked if you log on with Administrative access.

There is another way to gain administrative access. Every computer has a default Administrator account. Normally it’s named “Administrator”, but many companies to rename it. If you can get he password for this account, you can logon with it, and do what you want.
If you can’t get the password a nice utility from Peter Nordahl called NT Password Reset Disk will reset the password for the Administrator account, renamed or not. There is some risk with using this tool, but it still worked on NT/2K/XP/Vista including SP1 when I use it. You break your PC, you get to explain to IT  what happened.

Once you have admin access you need to open a Registry Editor

Check the account you are logged on with is a member of the group “Administrators”This is found under My Computer (Right Click) ManageAlso check if the account “Administrator” has been renamed.
Start | Run | Regedt32
Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software \Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Right click “system” in the LHS pane and select “Permissions”
Click the “Advanced” Button
Untick “Include Inheritable Permissions from the Objects Parent”And select “Copy” existing permissions when prompted
Add “Full Control” to your user accountRemove “Full Control” from “System” and “Administrators” – leave “Read”.
You can now set the wallpaper path in the registry to whatever wallpaper you prefer. The key “Wallpaper” contains the path. If you delete the 2 “wallpaper” keys, then you will have access to set your wallpaper in windows as normal.
WallpaperStyle settings are as follows	0 Centered 1 Tiled 2 Stretchedas per MS

Presto – you now own your wallpaper again. You still can’t set it from the usual “Right Click” – select, but changing the path above isn’t too difficult.

The other options you have as workarounds against wallpaper policies depend on where the wallpaper file comes from.

If the file is stored locally on your PC, you can simply replace the file with something else with the same name, and change the permissions to stop it being over-written.

If it’s on the network, if you boot up disconnected, you won’t get the wallpaper.

Happy playing.
And remember, don’t trust anything you read on the Internet, we are all evil hackers out to get you. Now can I have your c/c details please?