Mike Cohen

NFS & iTunes on my TeraStation

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Today I installed new firmware on my Terastation which allowed me to add NFS support, iTunes library sharing, and Bonjour, which makes it a lot more useful. I found that Samba networking was extremely slow, had problems with files larger than 2GB, and the shares got disconnected when my Mac goes to sleep. NFS is dramatically faster and less likely to get disconnected.

The first step is to install hacked firmware which supports Telnet & root access. An extensive firmware collection is available here. Note that you must use the proper firmware for your model. Firmware for a Terastation Pro will NOT work on an original Terastation (which is what I have). Although the latest US firmware version from Buffalo’s site is 1.12 (which mine came with), version 2 and later is available from the Japanese site. I installed 2.10 with no problems. MAKE SURE YOU READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING FIRMWARE – IT CAN BRICK YOUR TERASTATION.

Next, with telnet available I logged into it as root and installed the user space NFS server according to the instructions on this page. At this point I could now mount the shares via NFS instead of using Samba and enjoy the improved speed. However, the Terastation shares still have to be mounted by IP address. Bonjour would make it more convenient, so you can connect to it by a more friendly name.

This page has links to binaries for mDNSResponder (Bonjour) and mt-daapd (iTunes sharing) as well as instructions for installing them. Note that it refers to the Linkstation rather than the Terastation, but the PPC binaries will work on a Terastation.

A few things will need to be changed to use them on a Terastation. In particular, ldconfig isn’t available, so the shared libraries will either need to be placed in /usr/lib rather than /usr/local/lib or symbolic links to the libraries should be put in /usr/lib. Also, the startup items should be placed in /etc/rc.d/rc*.d/ rather than /etc/rc0.d, /etc/rc2.d, etc.

I find that the NFS is many times faster than Samba, the shares don’t get disconnected and have to be manually reconnected when the Mac sleeps, and there are no problems with large files. With these enhancements, the Terastation is nearly perfect.

New TeraStation

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TeraStation

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

My TeraStation arrived this morning. It has 4x250GB drives arranged in a RAID 5 array (which can be changed to RAID 0 or 1) for a total capacity of about 700GB. It was very easy to set up and I can connect to it easily using Samba.

I’m now moving my backups and other stuff from the Linux box to the TeraStation. I’ll now be able to use the Linux box as a desktop development machine with some non-critical stuff like iTunes sharing since I no longer need to use it for my critical file & print server.

Music-listeners Revolt

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Guy Kawasaki brings the concept of “framing”, much used in politics, to the music industry debate over DRM & “piracy”:

My goal is to draw lessons from linguistics and apply them to business because it is a very useful marketing technique. For example, “a music-listeners revolt” would imply that record companies are unfairly ruling people who listen to music. This beats the heck out of “piracy,” and the company who provides “relief” for this oppression is logically a hero.

I’d love to see the term “music-listeners revolt” used for illegal downloading rather than piracy, because that’s exactly what it is.

If it was easier to buy music legally that they can listen to anywhere and the cost was closer to the perceived value, people would obtain music legally. In fact recent studies showed that illegal downloading has little or no effect on music sales. People aren’t buying music because most mainstream music sucks. How many different sound-alike singers do we need whose songs sound exactly the same?

Gmail spam filter losing effectiveness

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I find that Gmail’s spam filters are becoming much less effective. Lately more and more spams get past the filter. This morning I found 11 turds in my inbox. I get over 200 spams a day, so I usually empty my junk folder more than once a day. Occasionally I’ll check the first page for false positives, but I haven’t seen any in more than a month.

With the volume of spam, I really wish they’d block the most obvious spam at the server, so it won’t even appear in the junk folder. In fact I’m now doing that on my dreamhost mailbox using their SpamAssassin with some of the settings tweaked and some extra procmail filtering. Right now my spam filtering on dreamhost is a lot more effective, since most of the spams are redirected to a dedicated spam-catcher account before I even see them. I really like Gmail’s web interface and their mobile app, otherwise I’d just forward my gmail to the dreamhost account so I can filter it there.

links for 2007-02-13

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Server Trouble

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Today was one of those days when everything breaks. When I sat down at my computer this morning I discovered that my server was down due to a disk error on the boot drive. After a few FSCKs and several reboots it’s working without any problems, but I’m still concerned since there were I/O errors.

This isn’t a server class machine. I built it with inexpensive components from CPU Solutions: a Biostar motherboard, AMD Duron 1.8 GHz CPU, Mini ATX case, and a few IDE drives (currently one 160G as the boot drive, which is the one having problems, and two 320G configured for RAID1 as /home). I depend on that machine as a file & print server, but I also use it for Linux development and web development, which isn’t an optimal setup.

Since I like my Buffalo LinkStation (more about that below), I ordered a 1TB Buffalo TeraStation, a heavy-duty server with built-in RAID 5. It will make a nice dedicated file & print server.

I plan to use my current server as a desktop Linux development system. I’ll probably put in a dual core AMD64 and replace the crappy ATI Radeon 7000 with a NVidia card that works with Beryl.

I’ve been running Open Link firmware on my LinkStation, which adds many new capabilities. With the new firmware, I added NFS support, iTunes sharing with mt-daapd, and Bonjour support. Today I tried to add even more services. Since I also run an IMAP server on my linux box, which I use to archive my email, I decided to install Dovecot, which is available through ipkg.

That’s where the trouble started. The installation replaced some critical shared libraries such as libc6, which broke almost everything. The result was a bricked LinkStation that can’t be reflashed by normal means. I should be able to repair it by removing the hard drive, which will put it in EM mode that allows flashing when it powers up. At worst, I could put the ext3 formatted drive in a USB enclosure and copy the data from my Linux box.

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