Category Archives: Hardware

Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M2

Leave a reply

It would appear that one of the two Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M2′s that I purchased has suffered a fault.

I reset it to factory defaults and upon it restarting I noticed that I could only get a ping of about 4-5 packets every 60 or so seconds. It never stayed up long enough for me to get back onto the web interface to configure it again.

Attempted a recovery using tftp etc and got it to accept the firmware via tftp, at which point it reboots post the loading. Once again goes into the same condition. I’ve now submitted it for RMA and will set about sending it back.

Not really my luck with hardware sometimes.

Back to Macintosh

Leave a reply

I’ve been wanting to buy another Macintosh for a while, ever since I sold the Mac Mini I had earlier in the year.

Plan was to go back to the iMac, however considering how old the current model is, it’s clearly due for update. But who knows when?

Decided to let my wife get a new machine this year, so I ended up buying a 2nd hand iMac instead, this will do what I need it to do. Already got Lion on it and all the other items, still a bit of applications to be installed and data to be sorted out. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I will get it all done over time.

Going to be good to have a single place where the two iPad’s can sync too.

Storage Changes

Leave a reply

As you will remember, a few posts back I mentioned getting a HP N40L Microserver.

These are certainly good servers, but I must admit it was a little on the loud side. Although could of been lived with, however I still loved just how easy the old Synology NAS unit was that I had prior to it.

So decided to sell off the Microserver, good thing too, as the demand for them is still high so I sold it quite easy without much loss.

Had intended to get 2 x Synology DS212j’s, however it appears the supplier was wanting to get rid of some legacy stock, so I picked up Synology DS109 and a DS109+. Plan on running both with a single 2Tb drive and test out the replication between them. At the moment I only have one 2Tb drive, will get another soon.

Will get a DS212j in a few months time and populate with 2 x 3Tb drives (as they drop in price).

EVGA GTX570 dies

Leave a reply

Looks like my EVGA GTX570 video card just died. Cannot play anything game wise without it producing lots of artifacts.

Updated my RMA request with EVGA, as I submitted one 10 days ago. Have performed what they requested and it’s gotten worse, now just can’t use it on gaming at all.

Guess no Battlefield3 for now until they respond and confirm where/how to RMA it.

EDIT: Seems whatever happened, it came good a few days later. No idea what happened, but it was giving bad video. Now I can’t even reproduce that fault. It’s now been stable for a week.

Open Media Vault USB boot corruption

Leave a reply

Looks like the Open Media Vault appliance I had running via the HP N40L Microserver had some issues.

I left it overnight to copy 400+Gb of files and woke to find it had failed half way. Host was up, but networking wasn’t working quite so well. Rebooted and immediately saw the root file system failed to mount and caused the usual panic.

I suspect the USB key I had the OS installed on has corrupted. Which means my data should be okay, although hasn’t impressed me much.

Think I will go back to my Debian install and just do everything via it. So it’s not an appliance, but at least I know it will work day in and day out when ran from the hard drive.

 

SSD acquired

Leave a reply

I’ve been tempted to purchase an SSD for my home desktop system for sometime. This is the same system I use to run a number of virtual machines and for playing battlefield3.

Got the SSD on Monday. Purchased a Corsair 120Gb Series 3 and reinstalled Windows. The time it takes for Windows to boot to logon screen is only about 12 or so seconds.

Below is how my Windows Index scores changed, and I knew this change for my boot drive would bring the score up quite a lot. So knew it was worth a purchase.

Game play via BF3 seems better too, although only early days. I need more time to play some more. I installed BF3 onto the SSD too, and have installed VMware Workstation to a 7200rpm traditional internal drive.

HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L

Leave a reply

As per my post a few days back, ordered a N40L.

All I can say is it’s a great bit of kit. I’ve installed Debian 6.0.4 amd64 and have configured it to do a number of services and other tasks.

So good to be running a dedicated physical linux host on my network again.

I installed Debian  on the 250gb drive it shipped with, and carved it up so I have about 200gb left over for data storage via samba (and nfs soon as I configure it up). I dropped in 2 x 500 7200rpm Samsungs I had from my desktop, and setup those in a mdadm raid1. I also put in a 2Tb WD Green to also share out via samba (and nfs).

Running quite nicely. Thumbs up. Think I need another one :)

New hardware purchases

Leave a reply

I ordered a HP N40L Microserver on Saturday night. It should arrive in the next day or so. Have been wanting to get one of these for a while and with the recent decrease in pricing, I just happened to have some spare dollars from a recent Kogan refund (against a 22″ LED TV that had several major issues).

In addition, anyone in Sydney that might be interested in a Synology NAS, let me know, as I’d like to sell my Synology DS109+ Single bay NAS (without disk).

Plans for the N40L include installation of Debian to setup some internal dns services, and mail relay etc. I also going to deploy the Ubiquiti UniFi controller software on it, so I can manage the UniFi hardware I have been testing (and still completely impressed with). Would love to buy some more Ubiquiti gear to test a point to point link in my street.

Kogan 7″ Andriod Tablet

Leave a reply

My wife and I picked up a Kogan 7inch Andriod Tablet via the ebay store they have for a really good price, so we purchased it for Darwyn to use.

I’ve installed a 16Gb microsd card in it and put on the entire Octonauts series for him in mp4 format. Plus a few other programs he likes.

I rooted the device using the details at the XDA link here. This allowed me to backup the factory firmware using SuperOneClick. I next installed MoboPlayer via alternative method, as any attempts to install via the Market app on the device resulted in it not being seen. The process to root it was super easy. I even put Cyanogenmod7 on it, but later removed it, as it’s not really designed for a tablet, but indeed worked (although some things didn’t i.e. camera etc).

EDIT: Sorry clockworkmod backup is installed first, so you can do a backup of the firmware from factory + rom. The SuperOneClick is the app ran on Windows for example to root the device.