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Category Archives: computers
A backup
Finally considered NAS again and it’s going to be the Synology DS211j. I’m wondering if I can remove the HDD from 2 of my WD MyBook’s and slot those in. Might get 2x1TB though. Jacq seems sold on the idea and it’s a new toy to play with. The proliferation of ext HD’s has to stop, the simplification of backups has to start, media sharing will be good and scooting around with usb drives gets boring and this is definitely the way.
D’s macbook screen died 2 days ago so with the age of the overall machine and her coming need for a laptop when she starts a new education/career course in September I said she could get a new one. Being a student does indeed have it’s benefits which saved me around £300, she impressed with her knowledge of the machine so is on the shortlist at that store for a position and she has the best computer in the house. And it’ll do Facebook, Minecraft and Runescape. Keeps her happy :) On the upside she does now believe that Portal and HL2 are worth playing despite my saying so for a long long time.
The 3rd
1st: the external HD (which subsequently came back to life)
2nd: daughter’s macbook (which was repaired for free and Apple got another customer for life)
and
3rd: the CD/DVD drive on the mac mini died. Got two of them and now both won’t play discs. They just make a lot of noise. Pointless taking it to Apple as an external burner is going to be way cheaper. And can’t complain with the work they did and their age (5 and 4 yrs).
But at least the 3rd breakage has been and gone.
Typical
I buy another drive and the dead one breathes again (gave it power to test a plug as another drive appeared dead). It is seen and repaired by the mac and ‘appears to be ok’. So I have 1TB of backup hanging off 1 machine and 1.5TB off the other. Nuts, absolutely nuts. Offline I am disorganised. The phrase “Yes I know it looks a mess but I know where everything is”** applies here. But on the machines it is tidy and organised. Spotlight can’t look anywhere because it’s all set to Private (if I really need something in a file I use Easyfind but that is rare indeed. So all that space is going to stay just space. You can’t backup backups esp when the important stuff is backed up online already. Play around with photo libraries maybe.
And I write this while praying at the Altar of Apple. Much pain through the night at my coccyx and I can’t do anything without it hurting. So I am kneeling at this desk, elbows raised and tapping away. So to the casual observer I am worshipping much white plastic. I don’t think so :)
**Everywhere J goes is clean and tidy. Not fair to live in a bombsite for her. Probably explains why this room is a Health & Safety problem. 19 plugs off 1 socket? What’s wrong with that?
I killed a HD
Daughter’s macboook started making a huge clattering noise yesterday. Not some ticking, this was closer to a golf ball in a tin. It’s the first white macbook I bought in early 2006 so it’s had some use but nothing extreme. This morning went to back it up before her Genius appt on Tuesday. Attached the 500gb WD (which is 4 years old, formatted as journaled) and dragged over her home directory. That threw some sort of file error so I asked her to drag over several directories at once. In total around 50gb of files, 330gb free on the WD. That hung so a reboot and pulled the usb plug out. Costly was that.
The mac will not format from Disk Utility or Terminal. Disk Warrior says it is unformatted so will not recover.
Windows can see the disk but will not mount the disk
Ubuntu says the disk is failing and will not format the drive or the volume.
So I do believe I have killed this HD which is a lesson about unplugging. I’ve not given up hope but I’m not hopeful from what I have read. At Amazon I can now get a 1TB drive for less than I paid for this 500gb but then you need 2 really – to back each other up. Bigger drives are good until you lose bigger amounts of data. Not that in this case I lost anything – all backed up elsewhere. Oh – and during this I had to burn a CD and doing that in the mini was really noisy too, sounded like the disc was shattering. Comes in 3′s doesn’t it – which machine next ….
Hd d.d.d.d.d.d….d
Decided that I really should find out what I had and what could be salvaged from various HD’s lying around the place. 3 were IDE so pulling the right bit from an enclosure mean I could fire them up. They had a combined 320gb. One disc shows me there is a lot there but cannot read it, another grinds away forever and the smallest 40gb gave me only 6gb of actual data. Total data loss of over 300gb. But these were old discs and had been backed up when new machines appeared so actual data loss is probably zero.
The PC I had up to recently – one Steve built for me some years ago had 2 SATA drives in. (I had debated either installing Ubuntu on there or running it from USB to rescue what I could but I thought £15 was a fair trade in time/money) To get at those I ordered a NEWlink USB 2.0 Docking Station for SATA HDD and that worked perfectly. 2 250gb drives. One was a single partition and everything I had on that was backed up on newer discs. The other was in two partitions – the Windows part had failed to boot took some time to get the data off – very very noisy – but other data came off well enough.
So in total I had storage space of around 820gb and I am confident I have lost nothing that matters. Easy for me to say because it’s not like I have anything super important but it’s in some way testament to the way I backup what actually does matter (and I’ll bet that a stack of what people think matters doesn’t, not really, not in the big picture) and also that for so much data accumulated I just don’t give a crap. Lose data forever or have a big argument with the wife? I’ll lose the data. Data is all 1′s and 0′s but life has the bits that matter :)
The Docking Station was a very neat purchase for £15 but what to do now…. I could leave it for a ‘just in case I need it again’ or I could use it as a backup drive for one of the girls. Be a useful thing for snapshot backups if you had a somewhere safe for them wouldn’t it? Buy 12 drives and use them on a rotating basis through the year.
The drive I cannot extract data from is an exercise awaiting but then I have 5 drives. None are reusable given the noise they made during the process. 1 I will take apart just to see what’s there, another I will take outside, throw high into the air so it smashes to the ground and then see if the drive is broken and the other 3 … not sure yet. I don’t think they have Great Big Magnets which was always my motivation to take things apart when I was a kid.
One click proxy
Overall problem: Have netbook and want to be sure browser traffic is hidden from prying eyes. I don’t care about other programs, just the browser.
Sub-problem: I really cannot be bothered to do the ssh -D 8000 thing every time. Tedious.
So:
1. Get your ssh keys set up as listed here (Ubuntu) (Mac). They both talk about using scp to shift the file from machine to server. For some reason that did not work so I used ftp.
2. Open Terminal and check you can ssh straight in, no password prompt then exit. If you can’t go back up a step.
3. Install QuickProxy in Firefox. Go to http://whatismyip.com and note the numbers. Restart.
4. In Firefox > Edit > Preferences > Network
and apart from the 8000 which you can change you put exactly that.
5. Open Terminal and ssh -D 8000 name@domain.com You should not get a password prompt still.
6. In Firefox click the QuickProxy icon and then go to http://whatismyip.com. They should be completely different. The alternative is that you will get no connection in which case go back to 4 and check that the 8000 (or whatever) you used matches the number you used in terminal.
So, that should all work just great but that whole long winded hassle of opening Terminal, typing that long string and having to then press Return is just too tiring.
Open Gedit (textedit) and type the ssh line then save.
You need to make that file executable. In Ubuntu right-click, select Properties and check the box near the bottom. Save it somewhere easy to find like your main directory.
Now go to the main desktop, press alt-f2 and when the box appears you want to run ‘alacarte’
Go to Accessories (not that it matters, just seemed a good place) and on the right choose New Item.
Find your file (I saved mine as ‘ssh’) and when you add it make the Type “Application in Terminal”
Close the dialogue to save
Back to Desktop, go to Accessories and you should see ‘ssh’ ready for you.
Right-click and Add to favourites.
And there you go. Log in to your machine, give that a couple of clicks and you are good to safely go.
What to do with a PC.
The PC youngest uses has been declared dead earlier. It will get to the screen that offers Safe Mode but will not complete that loading. I haven’t tried to change boot order but I can’t see that not working. So I have a 2 HD 1gb RAM PC with I know not what inside. It was good enough to run Jade Empire on release and the gfx/cpu had been upgraded. The HD’s have some data so I could pop those into an enclosure to rescue that but then I still have a machine that does actually work. I could install Ubuntu after making a bootable usb but what to do with it? I have no idea. Though I could put music in it and say goodbye to iTunes… get it working first and then decide.
NAS or not to NAS
Been reading about NAS and with 2 computers to upgrade and daughters that have a stack of photos some of which are not backed up I wondered if this would be a solution. I have no idea if it is – colour me clueless on this one. The setup:
me: 2 mac minis that are almost the same in content. Each has a HD attached, likewise they too are almost similar. My laptop/netbook contents can be ignored.
jacq: laptop running Vista
girls: macbook each
Images/files should be shared as we exchange those by email or usb right now, music really should be shared so Jacq can access all of her music upstairs. I have yet to find the equivalent of a digital jukebox with a really clear display and easy to use controls (an ipod touch is not the answer here as good as they may otherwise be for reduced sight and hand mobility). So I understand that a NAS keeps everything together, you add drives to add redundancy and once you are set up everything goes swimmingly. Or do I not need one as it would be overkill and could be done – that is automatic backups and sharing – much more cheaply? Wifi or wires? Plug and Play?
New shiny
I’m sitting in front of two machines, both belong to work. My laptop belongs to work. The other computers in the house – and there are a few – do not have my name on. So if I want to just browse the net, or do non-work stuff I have to do this on a work machine. And work is work, I can’t help but see that xchat is open, adium is showing incoming, twitter searches are in the dock as are 3 browsers and any other programs I might be using that day. There is no getting away from the fact that these two are Work. They are almost identical too so that should this one fail the other is there to rely on. Anyway, no computer, no personal web stuff. I couldn’t compartmentalise any online activity. That works as an excuse for a new shiny but it’s actually real.
Don’t need a desktop or a SFF machine because I don’t need what it can do. I don’t need a laptop because what I want to use it for does not warrant the size, weight or ability. So – that leaves a notebook. Checking several sites in the end I opted for a Compaq CQ10. It’s running Windows XP (and it arrived with no activated crapware) so I’m quite happy there. All the programs I want are now installed, I have a few gb of music and when the extra gb of RAM arrives (it runs well but as it’ll take 2 it can have 2) it’ll be all the smoother. OS is tweaked a little, custom theme installed. And no work programs. Pidgin will be Live and ICQ only, no Skype, irc is there but not for work. It’s a work-free machine, one I can use and see just what I have created. I do have a couple of plans for some non-work work which I can move to it which will be better. And if I am out and it is lost / stolen then unlike my laptop I don’t need to worry about work passwords/data. So all is good.