Category Archives: Hardware

CrashPlan for Large, Distributed, Cheap, Off-Site Backup

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In the early 90s, my friend’s father took me to EDS where he worked at the time.  I remember him saying, “this is one of the largest data centers in the world.  They have over 3 terabytes of data in there.”  In the homemade box tucked away quietly in my hall closet is a 6x1TB RAID with another 1TB disk for the OS.  Add in the media center and 3 laptops and I’ve got a lot of data just waiting to be lost with a disk failure, theft, or an accidental rm -rf.

What I Need in a Backup Solution

As I thought about my data, I came up with a few criteria before I started scouring the net for a solution.

  1. No constraints on backup size – The data I want to backup exceeds 2TB and is growing.  I’ve used cool apps like DropBox that have arbitrary upper limits like 100GB.  However, the coolest app though won’t do me any good if I can’t backup everything I need. (To be fair, backup is just one tiny element of what DropBox does.  I highly recommend that app for the other things it does, like sync.)
  2. Highly configurable – That 2TB I mentioned lives amongst tons of other stuff that I keep as sort of a cache, but wouldn’t miss it too much if it got deleted.  I need to be able to clearly specify what data I actually want backed up.  Moreover, I need a high degree of control about backup policies, security, etc.  I like solutions that make things simple, but in this case there also needs to be a way to get as complicated as I like.
  3. Distributed backups – Part of the reason I have that 6x1TB RAID array is for super-fast local backup.  Obviously that won’t do me any good if my house burns down, but if a laptop crashes is way easier to grab 500GB from a local machine than it is to pull it across the net.  I want to be able to backup to a service as well as many other computers that I specify both in my house and on the Internet.
  4. Smart, low profile application – Modern OS’s like Mac OS X keep a log of what files have changed.  I don’t want a dumb service that does things like that on its own and consumes my computers’ resources.  I need something that will run in the background and not make any noise.
  5. Accessibility – I need a service that runs on any platform, specifically Mac OS X and Linux.  Moreover, I need to be able to access my backups from the web.
  6. Cheap – I want to pay for storage, not bandwidth.  Less than $10/mo is my general rule of thumb.

There are other minor points, but those are the non-negotiable items.

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5TB LVM Volume with an LSI 9265-8i RAID Controller

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This article outlines how to get a 5TB LVM volume created with an LSI 9265-8i RAID controller.

Background

RAID Array

I’ve been running software RAID for a while. Specifically, I’ve got an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard with 6 SATA ports. Up until now, I’ve had 1 SATA connected to a single 1 TB drive with the Fedora OS on it, one to a SATA DVD/Blu-ray drive, and the other 4 to a 4x1TB software RAID 5. This has worked great. When I started to max that out, I had a decision to make. It seems I could either:

  • Continue with the small array and just continue to increase the disk size.  This is easiest, but given that 4 disks in RAID 5 give you a 25% loss of storage space (i.e., 3 used, 1 for parity), you have to buy bigger disks and the biggest ones usually cost the most.
  • Make the 1-time investment to get an 8-port RAID card and grow the array with disks that are large, but not necessarily the largest out there.

I decided latter made more sense for me and went with the LSI 9265-8i based on various reviews.  My plan was to build a 6x1TB SATA array (5TB storage) with 2 available ports on which I could add 2 additional drives when/if needed.

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Converting VHS to Digital Video (DV) With Canopus (Grass Valley) ADVC-300

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Canopus / Grass Valley ADVC-300My parents have mountains of VHS tapes that are slowly degrading in various boxes, cabinets and shelves throughout their house.  For Christmas, I got them a Canopus (now Grass Valley) ADVC-300.  The results were pretty awesome.  Here’s what we did:

  1. Purchased the ADVC-300 online from Electronica Direct via Amazon.
  2. Went to Wal-Mart and got the cheapest VHS player they had.  I think this is important.  If you’ve got a ton of videos to convert, make sure you have a player that’s ready for the load.  If you dig out the old player from 1987, you might get poor results.
  3. Went to Best Buy and got a Firewire 400 to 800 converter cable.  The ADVC-300 comes with a 400 to mini-400 cable, but my parents have a newer iMac that has a Firewire 800 port so the extra cable was necessary.
  4. Plugged everything in: VHS player to ADVC-300 to iMac
  5. Opened iMovie, clicked import, pressed play on the VHS player

The results were very nice.  Obviously quality is determined by the tapes, but the process was generally hassle free.  The only pain point was that iMovie stops importing every time it reaches empty tape.  So if you’ve got several things on one tape and a few seconds between each video set, then iMovie will stop importing at the end of each and you’ll have to manually restart the import for the next set.  I’m guessing that if you used a “pro” application like Final Cut, this could probably be avoided.

If you’ve got a stockpile, now’s the time.  I found tapes with mold in the cassette and one tape broke during playback due to brittle plastic.  I’m glad we converted to DV because I’m not sure those tapes would last much longer and it would be a shame to lose 20+ years of video records.

Bottom line: the ADVC-300 is a solid purchase for anyone looking to convert VHS tapes to digital video.

Power Book Broadcom Wireless In Fedora Linux

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Man do I hate Linux sometimes.

So I’ve got an old PowerBook G4 867Mhz that is just not keeping up with the latest Mac software. Rather than scrap it, I thought I’d see if I could give it a second life. I decided to try Fedora 8 as I’m very familiar with that OS. My wife only really uses this computer to surf the net and check email, so I figured a base install would be perfect. All went well until I got to the wireless card. It didn’t work out of the box so I started Googling only to find tons of incorrect information.

The most common was the application of a program called bcm43xx-fwcutter which is used to extract data from a proprietary driver and create useful drivers for Linux. Well, 99% of the information surrounding this kept leading me to the same error:

# /sbin/modprobe bcm43xx
FATAL: Module bcm43xx not found.

# sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory

After literally 2 days of trying variations of the bad info, I had a sudden flash of common sense: check dmesg to see what’s failing. I ran the following:

dmesg | tail -n 30

Buried in the output was a message telling me to go to linuxwireless and get new drivers. I followed the simple instructions there and bam, it works like a champ. Spread the good word!