Tiernans Comms Closet

Blog is back online... Could be moving to Wordpress

Tiernan OToole — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:16:20 GMT

So, this morning, my Proliant server decided that its secondary hard drive was dead, and all my VMs that where running on that box (my ISA/TMG server included) went away... not good.... and to make matters worse, i have been sick all day too.... AND (it gets worse) my CDN (SimpleCDN) has been dead for the last few days also... its not going well... So, i finally started work on the upgrade to the blog. My TMG server is back online. My CSS and JS files and some images are now being hosted by Mosso using the Limelight CDN (SWEET!) and i am starting to look at WordPress for my hosting needs (now that it will work on win2k8 and IIS without much of a problem). Sorry for the long time getting back into blogging... been lazy. you can follow me though on Twitter (@tiernano)

Drobo Pro looks pretty cool.

Tiernan OToole — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:49:25 GMT

Today, Data Robotics released their new device, the Drobo Pro. Basically, its a large Drobo with 8 SATA Drive bays, 2 FireWire 800 Ports, a USB 2 port and GigE Network connection for iSCSI support.

The iSCSI piece is not for sharing between multiple machines, from what i can gather, but designed as a faster than the 800mb/s that firewire gives way of connecting to your Drobo.

The Drobo has always been an interesting idea, but i am still not 100% convinced… I have my Windows Home Server, which currently has a fair amount of storage on it, and can do a lot more than the Drobo can (can be connected to multiple machines, has support for backing them up, etc). I have even gotten it acting as a SVN server (part 1 and part 2). `

I can see an advantage to Drobo (all managed in one box, easy access to drives, etc). but 8 drives is still limiting… No USB upgrade, no PATA support… All stuff i have with my current (Home Built) Home Server…

Online, NearLine and OffLine storage offering cheaply

Tiernan OToole — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:32:20 GMT

Found this post over at TechCrunch about a company called Diomede who are offering green file storage. there offer you three ways of storing your data and differing prices:

Online: Immediate access, like any cloud storage provider at the moment, at a cost of about $0.05 per gig, which is very cheap also.
NearLine: available within 5 min of requesting the data. costs about 4.5c per Gig.
OffLine: available within 4 hours of requesting. costs only 2c per gig.

this started to make me think about my cloud data usage. I currently have about 110gb stored in the cloud (Amazon S3), mostly photos i have taken and backed up, backups of my SVN server and also images hosted on my Images site. they are stored between the US and EU (planning on moving just to hosting in the EU, but never got around to it fully). The images for the image hosting site are required immediatly, but the backups are not as important... i dont think waiting 4 hours would be an issue if i needed to download my 50gb or so of photos. Sure, its going to take at least that amount of time to download it, and it would probably be done over night anyway...

It has started making me think about storage needs though. and my thinking behind it is that even as a home user, 3 levels of stoage is nearly now a necessity. by 3 levels i mean Online, NearLine and OffLine. but not in the same way as above:

Online: stuff on your C Drive, or in your local machine. important content should be in RAID 1, not so important should be just on standard disks and temporary stuff, or least important could be on RAID 0.
Nearline: Windows Home Server would be great for this. this is what i use. My videos, ISO Images (from MSDN, etc) and Photos are all stored here.
OffLine: really, this is online, but i concider this offline in that its not in the house. This is stuff stored "in the cloud", like Amazon. not there immediatly, but can be there soon enough.

the biggest problem with "offline storage" is upstream bandwidth. I have 2 lines into the house, one running at 1.5mb up and the other at just 1. to upload 50gb, it would take about 75 horus, non stop on the 1.5Mb line and 113 on the 1mb line... yea, i could split the lines and use all bandwidth, but most people dont have that kind of option. ideally, some sort of faster uplink to the storage providers would be handy, or having the ISP giving you a dedicated line direct to the stoage provider.NTL/UPC, my cable modem provider, have a modem which has both data and phone. based on what i think is going on, there are 2 seperate connections to their network going on here: one just for VOIP and one just for data... If you could add a third just for stoage (SAN or NAS type solution) it would be very cool... and something i would pay for if i 1) dident use my internet bandwidth for it and 2) had a very fast connection to it... just a thought...

valentine's Day random post

Tiernan OToole — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:37:08 GMT

So, being today being Valentines day (and yesterday being Friday 13th) this aint a good weekend... The daddy "borrowed" my car to bring the mammy out for a meal (awwww), so i was left with his, which is also a 2.5l BMW 5 series, but his is 4 years older than mine and has a manual gear box.... and something wrong with the powerstearing pump... Anyway, drove down to get pizza so i can sit back and watch TV with pizza (yep, single...) and while on the way home, his iPod (which has the Rolling Stones top 500 songs of all time on it) started to play AC/DC, Highway to hell... Neadless to say, its the kind fo song that makes you want to put your foot down a bit... which i did... had to pull up to a traffic lights, just as the chorus kicks in (i had my window open, by the way, and the volume up fairly loud) and well, car pulls up beside me, with quite a cute looking lady driving (well, it was dark, maybe she was cute...) and all i could do was laugh, hit the window close button (he window was open too!!!), lower the music and floor it when the light went green... it was definatly a "you had to be there" moment... Sorry for my random saturday night/Valentines day rant... nomral programming will return eventually...

Finally, ISA box is back!

Tiernan OToole — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:46:27 GMT

Right, it has taken a while (since my old ISA server died.... Minuites silence for the old scsibox.... please....)

Anyway, the box died about 2 Sundays ago (waking me up in the middle of the night, mind you) and i have not been able to get it back online since... Well, i have just installed Microsoft Forefront Threat Managment Gateway BETA, the next generation of ISA server, and this is what is serving this page to you now! It is all good! Its virtualized too, which means i am not running on some acient hardware that could die at any moment... i hope... So, we are back in business! :)

I dont like hard drives!

Tiernan OToole — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:32:16 GMT

Well, this month, i have had 4 hard drives fail on me, and tonight it is the turn of my Proxy server. i was awoken by the BIOS beep of my old IBM server, and it seems that the main hard drive has failed. this actually now means that some of my pages are not showing correctly, one of which is the images site... i will try and recreate the box virtually tomorrow, but at the moment i need sleep...

Sync Windows Live Writer Posts and bookmarks between machines with Live Mesh

Tiernan OToole — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:20:29 GMT

found this post over at rakimk’s blog showing you how to sync your Windows Live Writer drafts between machines with Live Mesh. I have stepped it up one further and shared my whole Windows Live Writer directory (drafts AND previous posts) with Live Mesh. Not sure why, but I did…

Also, using a similar technique, I have synced my IE favorites folder. not sure why I haven't thought of that before… mind you, ideally, some sort of cloud service to sync both IE and Firefox bookmarks together would be a lot nicer…

HTC S740 phone arrives (in my hands)

Tiernan OToole — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:30:39 GMT

A couple of days ago, i decided to get rid of my trusty Nokia N95 8Gb and get myself a new Windows Mobile Smartphone, namley the HTC S740. I pre-sold the N95 on Thursday, ordered the S740 20min later, and it arrived last night. Couple of things i have noticed since.

It is georgous! it is one hell of a nice device.
the OS is great. i had a Windows Mobile Smartphone before, but it was a 2003 edition. this one still has the nice things of 2003 (the start typing someones name on the home screen and find their contact quickly bit) but has some very nice new pieces (push email, which is invaluable!)
keyboard is different to the one on the Kaiser (my other phone) but still very usable.

So, photos. click below to see the whole set. add comments if you have questions.

WHS + SSH + SVN + Certs + TortoiseSVN = Finally working!

Tiernan OToole — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:19:48 GMT

yesterday I posted about how to get Windows Home Server to act as a SVN server over SSH. Well, after a lot of following steps, sometimes multiple times last night, I gave up and went to bed…

Then today, I decided to mess around a bit more, and found the following post on the TortoiseSVN site showing you how to get TortoiseSVN working over SSH. This is all well and good, but, at the end it didn't work, and it got me a bit angry…

further searching helped me find this post by Rene Gourley (hope I pronounced that correctly…) explaining HOW TortoiseSVN uses Putty to get certs and connection info… This was the eye opener! I was putting the server name into my url (in my case svn+ssh://svn@tiernanohs/repository) where I should have been using the name I saved in putty (SVN) instead of the server name… TortoiseSVN looks for the session name, not the server name! Annoying, I will admit, but now its working!

now all I have to do is get it talking to the MacBook Pro and my MSI Wind, and poke some holes in the firewall and I can work remotely!

Running SVN + SSH on Windows Home Server

Tiernan OToole — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:26:00 GMT

I have been running a Windows Home Server for a couple of months now, and other than some small issues with hardware (one of the hard drives failed, but i lost nothing!) i have been very happy with the experiance. i have used it to stream music and video to my XBox 360, and AFAIK the PS3 can see it too. I have also used it to store my iTunes collection, and this works flawlessly. but now, there is a way to get it to act as an SVN server.

Coderhaus has a post showing you how to setup SSH and SVN on your Home Server. with SSH, you can securley access your SVN server from a remote connection, and only have port 22 open. there are quite a few steps on how to set it up, about 35 in total, but i think it would definatly be worth it. you also have the advantage of having your share replicated, so your nice and safe... but, if you want to be safer (say, your house burns down) you may want to look at how i was backing up my SVN server using Mozy that i wrote back in 2007. [update] added missing link... sorry.