Toys
"Tonight's Project" ... Just A Couple Weeks Late
Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:29:59 -0700
I'm finally getting around to posting all the pictures of this. It actually turned out pretty good, even though I was too impatient to wait to order some more fitting parts from online. Oddly enough, I could find almost all the parts locally besides these tiny little brackets that were basically holders to create a patch panel out of already plumbed out keystones.
After having my network completely reset itself a couple times, sometimes randomly, sometimes during a storm, sometimes during something normal spiking the electrical in the house like a washer or vacuum being turned on, I decided something needed to be done. The "home connectivity center" that was installed by the company I had wire my house up was a generic piece of crap that had a cover that was almost impossible to line up and put back in its place properly.
I was thinking I would get a connectivity box with a door. Nope.
Anyway, my thoughts were to find a UPS and get the central D-Link 5 port gigabit switch on it, something with voltage regulation hopefully, but at least something that should provide uninterrupted power should the power spike up or down. Simple, right? Not so much.
The box did not provide enough room, I would have had to special order some funky UPS from online, and I still wasn't guaranteed it was the best solution. It would radiate some heat and the box already made me a bit nervous heat-wise.
After talking to my old boss he got me thinking again about putting the UPS somewhere else. I realized I had the perfect place to put it - the access panel to my jetted tub right below the box (I figured that's where they ran the power from to power the box anyway...)
Anyway, here's the box before (a little messy, I did have the FiOS router strapped in too, just didn't take pics first)
With the smallest UPS I could find, which actually might have worked but definately would have been a heat worry...
I called around to look for a different box, that may be deeper or at least had an easier cover to put on. Sadly, I could only find one. It did not match up with mine either. Mine was 20" tall, the standard height seems to be 28" for a medium size one. So I decided I would rip mine out and replace it, and actually cut out 8 inches of my wall (what the hell was I thinking?)
I went and picked up the "home connection center" at Home Depot, and decided to get to work. What annoyed me is they only sold two other accessories for this unit, one of them was $50 just for a couple internal attachments. No thanks. I'll figure that out later.
Now the old one is ripped out of the wall:
What the bottom looked like after I cleaned it up a little:
Oh yeah - this is what I was given. They plumbed it out for me nicely, so I just needed to find a little patch panel type thing - should be easy enough (so I thought...)
Skip forward after sawing out my wall (I did a hell of a good job for the tools I had available to me, I think!)
Now, time to lay out the internal components. They've got some bracket accessories, but of course nobody had any at 12am at night, not to mention it didn't look good that any place would have it in stock locally to begin with.
Cleaned up a little bit more:
Finally, this will be about as good as I can get it. You'll note that I used zip ties - those were fun to fish around behind the panel (I'm joking) and the left side has a normal wall plate with 6 keystone spaces. I rigged it in to one of the only brackets any company had in town.
You'll see in the middle picture at the bottom the power cables. I bought an extension cable and split it myself to power my own power outlet that was wired directly to the UPS underneath the box, so the entire power outlet could be considered UPS'ed. The power cable on the rightmost is actually the original power cable - I was able to retain that. So it winds up being
Original power cable -> UPS -> New power outlets -> Router and Switch
When I looked in the little diagram I realized that there was an optional door that could be added. Instantly I got even more excited about the outcome of this project. I was finally going to have a box with a door. I was actually happy with the original hinged cover it came with, it was much easier to use than the old panel. That one was a piece of garbage.
Anyway, the final product, with the door...
Oh, and of course, the UPS that is underneath all of this:
I propped it up on some of the original foam packaging to keep it off the dusty/dirty/possibly wet ground (some day) - seems to have worked out quite well. I did clean up the cords a bit more too though.
Now all I need is to clean up the paint job. They had painted with the access door to the tub on, so when I went to remove it, it ripped off dried paint. That was a nice surprise. Also, there's some marks on the walls from random stuff and a sharpee mark from where the old box lined up. But when it's all sealed you can't really see any of that.
All in all, I'm kinda happy. Being such an Internet geek, I have very little patience for any manual labor, so to complete a project and for it to come together so well with a mish-mash of parts and tools was neat. I got the majority of work done the first night, but wound up bleeding in to the second day when I was trying to track down the other spare parts. Couldn't find the patch panel-ish thing (they do make one, but I would have had to wait 2-3 days at least) - so I just crafted some thing on that left side that works just as well.
It's functional, clean, has more space than it did before, has a door and now is fully UPS-ized. All in all, it was a good experience.
I Love This Frickin' Toolkit
Sat, 09 May 2009 10:33:16 -0700
I have to give original props to Kevin for first letting me borrow it a couple times. He got it a long time ago but it appears Best Buy is still selling it.
It's Dynex, which is their "cheap house brand" - but it's still great. Its saved my hyde now a couple times. If it was a person, it would actually go under my "Respect Knuckles" category. I am almost tempted to do it anyway... But I digress!
From helping me dismantle a bunch of annoying hex screws on HD enclosures to helping me fish out what was almost a screw in an almost impossible place, this kit so far has been great. Price isn't too bad either, and of course, every geek needs something like this.
Price: $29.99
SKU: 7263061
There's probably hundreds out there, but this has a nice clean case, easily portable and so far has had a tool for everything I need.
The (Current) State of (e)SATA Port Multipliers
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:47:32 -0700
For the most part, open source has been good to me. I can run my business on free software that is for the most part better than its commercial counterparts. I'm able to use often-updated and relatively bug-free software in all facets of my life. However, there are a couple things that have been bugging me - one of them has been SATA Port Multipler (PMP, not to be confused with PM - Power Management!) support. 1TB drives hit an all time low last week (at least in my ads) and it got me motivated to check in to the status of PMP support once again. Previously there weren't a lot of people using it and not a lot of feedback or information. Today, I have a bunch of good information, but still not the magic combination, which for me, includes ZFS (as it is the only filesystem out there still to offer all the good checksumming, self-healing, etc.) This post isn't going to talk about why ZFS rocks. Most people already know why. I want a filesystem that has been built for integrity. This is for home archiving, and I'll be damned if bit rot is going to ruin my memories.
My goal was to find an OS that has ZFS support, which currently is between Solaris (or OpenSolaris, Nexenta, etc.) and FreeBSD 7 (which has "experimental" but usable ZFS support) - I'd prefer Linux as it has the fastest rate of bug fixes and driver support and I am already using Linux on one of my home machines, but ZFS doesn't run natively on it (FUSE is not native enough.)
The following below are the current status I am aware of taken from direct emails exchanged with Adriaan de Groot (who said he might port PMP support to FreeBSD 7) and Tejun Heo (who maintains the PMP driver libata-pmp for Linux) and Google searches, mailing list and forum postings as of today.
Windows
I'm not even going to bother here. Most drivers for the controllers are coded for Windows first, and then if we're lucky an open source Linux/etc. version is put out. So Windows support is probably 100% - but you're stuck to using NTFS or something (blech.)
FreeBSD
According to Adriaan:
"Don't bother, as port multipliers are not supported. I had some PMP support hacked in at some point, but without NCQ there's not much (performance) point. It *might* be that Soren has added NCQ / PMP in the meantime, but I'm not aware of it."
Also:
"PMP requires NCQ to be useful; otherwise you end up queuing all the requests for the different disks and performance goes down a fair bit - but like I said, it's *possible* and if all you're after is big storage, it will work. Anyway, it's not the cards' fault: there just isn't any NCQ in the (FreeBSD) kernel."
Tejun's comment:
Although NCQ and PMP supports don't really have to go together. Non-NCQ PMP should work as good as direct non-NCQ. Nothing more to lose there because it's attached via PMP. Maybe they were talking about pushing multiple commands to a port. If the driver can't do that, PMP won't work too nice.
As of now according to Adriaan, there is no PMP support in FreeBSD (except possibly some highly experimental patches.)
Solaris (and variants)
From Adriaan:
"I run OSOL ... but OSOL also does not support PMP"
Additional links:
- http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/OpenSolaris_Storage_Developer_Wish_List
- http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg13192.html
- http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=49507&tstart=45
- http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=54481&tstart=45
- http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6409327
OS X
Possibly? I did not look into this. It would be a shame if some were supported with NCQ and not given back to FreeBSD... this guy claims to have what sounds like two 4:1 multipliers on his Mac:
http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg13749.html
Linux
(There is a site that tries to keep up to date with SATA support in the Linux kernel. This is probably the best place to look. As of writing, it still appears up to date. http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html)
According to Tejun, who was extremely helpful answering my barrage of questions gracefully, it does look like Linux has some PMP options (now if only we had ZFS or BTRFS...!) with the following notes for each chipset:
Controller chipsets: SiI3124, SiI3132 - both will work. His comments:
"3124/3132 controllers are good"
"Performance-wise, all the PMPs on the market should be okay but 3124/3132s have certain limitations on PCI bus side and can't deliver full bandwidth concurrently from all drives attached through PMP. I don't remember the exact numbers but it maxes out after three drives or so."
"I have second gen chips from SIMG and they behave really good."
Note: SiI3124-1 is only 1.5Gbps. SiI3124-2 supports 3Gbps.
Enclosure chipsets: SiI3726, SiI4726, Marvell 88SM4140 - all should work great. His comments:
"3726/4726 PMPs are the first gen PMPs and both are a bit quirky"
"Marvell port multipliers behave really well."
"That said, 3726/4726's work okay too. The only problem is that they always need their first slot occupied to operate correctly. As long as you occupy the first slot, there shouldn't be much problem."
Update: "There have been reports of 3726/4726 PMPs having trouble with 3Gbps link speed under certain configurations. I still don't know what's the exact cause. It doesn't seem common but if you can maybe trying out with one drive before ordering the whole array is a good idea."
Note: the Marvell is only a 4:1 multiplier, the SiI ones are 5:1.
So the big winner here for the time being is Linux - looks like I will be purchasing a SiI3124-2-based controller (probably this one, which claims it is a 3124A, a successor of the 3124-2) and a SiI3726 or SiI4726 based PMP enclosure. I am trying to determine which one will be the quietest right now. I don't believe that hardware RAID-5 is supported on any PMP, only RAID 0, 1, and 10. It gets confusing because most advertise RAID but it leverages some software RAID stuff. So I will probably using mdadm for RAID5 at home.
Hopefully this is a useful (and correct) summary. I invite anyone with updated information to leave a comment, and I will correct it. Especially if you have experience with eSATA PMP enclosures and have anything to add! Not many people have ventured out into these waters yet, but it looks pretty neat - off a single PCI-X or PCI-e card you could chain 20 drives all with decent bandwidth and only have one cable for each set of five drives...
Are you getting the most out of your DVI port?
Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:46:43 -0700
Did you know there are five types of DVI connectors? I didn't. DVI-D dual link, DVI-D single link, DVI-I dual link, DVI-I single link, and DVI-A. Of course, I learned this the hard way, and I bet most people still haven't. I don't have much previous experience with DVI, but now that I have a Macbook Pro and an HDTV, I wanted to connect it at 1080p once I realized I could (using an HDMI port on the TV, not the VGA connection.)
I thought it would be as simple as going and picking up an HDMI to DVI cable. Not even close. After I picked one up at a local shop and brought it home, I realized it was "missing" pins. It would function still, but not at its full potential. I wondered about this and hit up Wikipedia, and sure enough, there are multiple types of DVI connections.
After shopping at five different stores (including the Apple Store and the Mac Store) I realized that nobody actually sells DVI-D or DVI-I dual link cables (or even adapters) which is what is required for 1080p. I had to go down to Fry's in Wilsonville and finally was able to pick one up. 15 feet for $24.99, actually much cheaper than most of the single link options at all the other stores (and those were shorter cables, too.)
Sure enough, DVI-D dual link saves the day. I can now use the Macbook at full 1080p on my 47" Vizio GV47LF, although I have to say the text is pretty small. Using Front Row and watching movie trailers through it using all 47" is pretty neat though.
Say what you want about Best Buy...
Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:09:24 -0800
... but they're a big company, and big companies can be useful.
I won't mention the obvious bad points - the stupid salespeople, incompetent techs, people getting arrested for using two-dollar bills...
Instead, I'm going to share my positive story tonight. Best Buy pulled through for me, as I had hoped. Most big companies will price match (especially in the consumer and office electronics markets) and I'm always looking at the weekly ads. Not just to look for a deal, but just to get a general feel for how the prices are rising and falling.
Anyway, this week Fry's had a sale on Seagate 750GB PATA hard drives for $309.99 - not an amazing deal, but I am in need, and I had a gift card to Best Buy, so the timing was right. I took the ad to Best Buy and had them price match that (after the salesperson told me "750GB PATAs don't exist" and I had to correct him...) - on top of that, because at one point or other Best Buy decided to add me to their mailing list, I get monthly coupons for 10-12% off of various things; this one sounded promising. It said only "external hard drives" on it, and I was hoping it wouldn't be an issue. Sure enough, they either did not care or did not know that it wasn't applicable to my item.
Anyway, now I am the proud owner of another 750GB drive, which is good, considering the 400GB in my Linux box is about to die. Total price: $272.79 (original price was $399.99 - a 32% savings.) While most people can't use the coupon since it's mailed to individual people, the Fry's price match is still valid for anyone to use, so if you want a 750GB drive without the drive to the local Fry's, I encourage you to price match it.
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