Archive for the 'technology' Category

Netgear ReadyNAS Pro

I bought one of these because I keep running out of disk space. With the ability to store 12Tb, I thought it might keep me going for some time to come.

It allows you to build raid 0,1 and 5 arrays and Netgear’s own X raid something or other. Unfortunately, it doent allow striping and mirroring. It  is compatible with OS X and supports AFP shares and Timemachine as well as iscsi as I mentioned earlier. However, the GUI is a bit flaky and didn’t seem to like Initiator iqn’s at all. If you download the root ssh plugin you can access the box as root over ssh and look at what it is actually doing.

iscsi config is held in /etc/ietd.conf

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:calendarserver
 Lun 0 Path=/e/calendarserver,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-003,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:calendarserver

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:collaboration
 Lun 0 Path=/e/collaboration,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-001,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:collaboration

Firstly their Target IQNs don’t look like the spec described on wikipedia – I don’t know if it is Netgear or Wikipedia that is wrong here and don’t care as this doen’t seem to break anything.

The real problem in the Initiator IQN – I had to add this by hand and it gets stripped out of every entry in the file every time a new iscsi target is created and at other random times. According to the Netgear web GUI theses are needed for persistent reservation support.

However, once it is working it seems nice and stable. If your disks don’t mount just go and check those Initiator IQNs.

OS X Server

I have recently bought one of the new Mac Mini Servers, partly because I like everything mac and partly because I wanted to try OS X Server for my business.

First impressions are great. Apple have taken the best (or very good) OSS and created a nice, if somewhat basic GUI to sit on top. You can of course still go and edit the configuration by hand if need be.

Unfortunately, the graphics card failed in the first unit, however Apple were very good and I had a new unit in a couple of days. This got me thinking. Normally if I wanted to send a computer back for repair or replacement I would remove the disks but with a mac mini you have to prise it open with a paint scraper. Not something I really want to be doing to a box which is still under warranty.

So, when the new one arrived, I decided to take advantage of my Netgear ReadyNAS Pro NAS box’s (of which more later) ability to do iscsi and along with the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator added disks for each service that could contain sensitive data.  This took some time to get working, mostly due to issues with the Netgear but I now have all data on hot swap mirrored disks and the mac mini could go back to apple with no sign of sensitive data.

Mutliple displays on MacBook Pro

Display Link have released beta drivers that allow you to use up to 4 USB connected displays on your MacBook Pro.

Airport Extreme

I have never had much luck getting good wireless reception in my house. Until now I have used the wireless access point built in to my ADSL router. I have tried products from Vigor, Linksys and Dlink and reception has always been terrible unless you are working in the same room as the access point. Even in the lounge, one room away from the access point, through a thin partition wall (it used to be all one room) I could only get intermittent reception at best.

So today I gave in and got an Apple Airport Extreme. I should have known that Apple would make yet another great product. First impressions are that I now have a strong, reliable signal throughout the house and what is more it was a pleasure to configure. Compared to the web pages in the Linksys and Vigor products I have tried the Apples Airport Utility is really simple, well designed and as with all Apple stuff it “just works!”

Openfire

I upgraded my ejabberd server to openfire today. It is really nice. ejabberd was very stable and worked extremely well but really lacked a management interface. Openfire has a fantastic interface that really makes it easy to configure. Even migrating my users across was painless.

Openfire have also announced a beta of their next release. It has an invisibility option. Once there is client support this should allow you to control who can see you presence. This is a feature that I and others have been waiting for.