I want a Drobo!

Perhaps it’s the fact that it is 3 AM now, and I’m really tired…  But I really think I want a Drobo.

Currently, I’m using the excellent ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer, which comes with a huge up-front price tag.  It is approved for use with mostly “Enterprise” level drives, which are also quite pricey.  Currently, I have three 500 GB Seagate drives of a model that, according to what I’ve read, have a horrid failure rate.  (A fact I only found out after one of mine started producing a significant number of errors.)

Anyhow, it is recommended to keep the drives all the same model.  I could simply add another of the same drive, but I’m not about to drop another dime on a bad model of drive.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had plenty of other Seagates that have worked fine, but a few of their recent models have had issues, and this happens to be one of them.

So, with that in mind, I really need to replace all three of these drives, one after the other.  What, you say?  Yes!  With X-RAID, only once the final drive has been replaced and integrated into the array will it upgrade the capacity of the array.  Now, it is impressive that it will do this, especially while still serving users, but this isn’t exactly the most home-user friendly way to do things.

Back to my issue, though.  I’d like to replace my drives with ones from the Western Digital Enterprise line that were about $159 each from Newegg.com the last time I checked.  Add shipping to that, and you’re talking close to $500.  In the end, I would have doubled my redundant capacity from the approximately 1 TB to 2 TB.

If I had a Drobo, on the other hand, I could just buy whichever model of drive is currently on sale, of whatever capacity I like, slap it in, and it will automatically maximize your redundant capacity.

Heck, if I simply took the three 500 GB drives I have now that the ReadyNAS gives me a total of 918 GB of usable space.  According to the Drobo Calculator tool, I’d have 929.3 GB of usable space on a Drobo with those same drives.  Somehow, it squeezes an extra 10 GB of drive space out of the same three drives… ??

What I’m really getting at is if I had a drobo with these three drives and ran low on capacity, I could just buy one of the recent $80 1 TB specials I’ve seen, and my redundant capacity would jump from 929.3 GB to 1.4 TB.  Then, I’d have added 50% more redundant storage for very little money.  If within a few months I ran low again, just grab whichever drive is the best value at the time, say another 1 TB drive, replace an existing 500 GB drive, and I’m at 1.8 TB.

Now, some smartie pants is almost sure to offer to trade me, as the Pro Pioneer is still worth over $1000 with these three crummy drives in it.. (Heck, it may be worth that even without these three drives!)

I know that the Drobo isn’t really a NAS, unless you buy the droboshare, which is basically an Ethernet to USB bridge, if I understand it right.  That’s another $200.

I know too that there are apps that run on the Pro, many of them ported by Netgear customers..  But, I did not know that the same thing exists for the Drobo/DroboShare.  There is a catalog of a about a dozen or so droboApps ranging from media servers, rsync, SSH, a torrent client, a web and FTP server, etc…    Not quite the selection of Netgear, but not too shabby either…

Anyhow, a Drobo would fit nicely with what I need right now…  I’ve actually often admired it, but never truely considered buying one because of the lack of power in the box (the 1st gen one, at least), and the lack of network connectivity (without buying an add-on)…

Who knows, perhaps I’ll buy one and sell my ReadyNAS Pro, using the left over money to buy a Droboshare and a larger capacity drive or two.

ReadyNAS Pro Drive Replacement

After getting almost daily alerts that the number of Reallocated sectors was increasing on one of my 500 GB Seagate ES.2 drives, I gave in.  Using the model number and serial number information from the SMART information screen within the ReadyNAS, I set up an RMA with Seagate for a replacement drive.  It was a pretty painless process.  I paid the $19.95 to get the advance replacement shipped to me with a pre-paid shipping label to return the failed drive.

They shipped it via 2 day shipping.  It got here today and was packaged extremely well.  Imagine a single drive packed with no less than 2 inches of foam on all sides, and you’ve got the picture.

I pulled the failed drive out of the ReadyNAS at 17:11, inserting the replacement drive at 17:14.  A few minutes later, it began re-syncing.  It was completely done at 20:56, so it took about 3:40 to completely re-sync my mostly full RAID volume.

I’ve been looking to increase the size of my RAID array lately since I’m down to under 100 GB of free space.  The easiest way to handle this would be to simply buy another drive of the same model and add it to the array, which is what I was planning to do, but after reading up on these ES.2 drives, I’m thinking that perhaps avoiding them altogether would be a wiser decision.  Some people posted saying that they had multiple drive failures.  One memorable post said that of the 4 drives he bought, he had 5 failures.  Yes, he means that all four of the drives he bought failed, and one of the replacements had also failed.  That’s a horrible track record in anyone’s book.  That’s a staggering 125% failure rate!

With that said, I have been pleased so far with Seagate’s replacement process.  About the only thing that could have made it easier and better is if the drive didn’t fail in the first place.

As for potential replacements for my Seagates, I’ve read good things about the Western Digital series of Enterprise drives.  They are among the fastest drives out there, and are certified for use with the ReadyNAS.  Unfortunately, the 1 TB model I’m looking at is about $159 each currently.  Since I have three drives in my array, I’d really need to replace all three of them to get any capacity boost, for about $500.  Hopefully, I can hold out a few more months and perhaps they will drop in price.  Even a modest per-drive drop in price can make a big difference when you are buying multiple drives!  Perhaps I could then sell the three 500 GB ES.2 drives to someone who has no idea of how often they fail (like me, 6 months ago!)…

The iPhone 3GS – Yes, it is worth the upgrade

When they said the “S” is for Speed, they weren’t kidding!

In just about every aspect of using my new iPhone, I can most definitely see the difference in speed.  To put it bluntly, everything is faster!  Navigating around is faster.  The onscreen keyboard is smoother.  Launching apps is faster. Getting GPS lock on my location is faster.

I’ve seen reports on the web that AT&T’s network upgrades aren’t yet in place, so we shouldn’t expect to see any speed improvements due to the faster 3G capabilities of the 3GS.  So, surfing the web isn’t any faster, right?  DEAD WRONG!  Heck yea, it’s faster!  Much faster!  It’s probably just page rendering speed, but you can most definitely notice the difference when using the 3GS for surfing, as compared to the 3G.  The extra 200 Mhz and double the RAM is huge.  Even just scrolling around a large page is so much smoother than it was on the 3G.

Basically, anything you want to do on the 3GS happens faster and smoother than it would be on a 3G.

So, if you’ve been holding out on upgrading from your 3G (or the original iPhone), do yourself a favor.  Go to an AT&T store (or the Apple store, if one is nearby) and check out the 3GS in person.  Try navigating from screen to screen.  Load the apps.  Disable Wifi and surf the web in 3G mode.  Just spend a few minutes doing these tasks on it, then whip out your old iPhone and do the same tasks.

But, if you really, really, really don’t want to upgrade, please don’t go check it out.  Because if you do, you’ll probably be whipping out a credit card on the spot to upgrade.

Snes9X on the Wii

I admit, I didn’t see this one coming.  Since getting Snes9X installed on the Wii (Sunday night, I think) along with the 15 ROMs from the SNES games we actually own, my kids have almost exclusively played SNES games.  They’ve happily jumped back and forth between Tetris and Super Mario All Stars mostly.  The Wii games (mostly costing around $40 each) have almost went unplayed.  Even Mario Kart Wii.  I guess the classics are still in.

Snes9X GX for the Wii

Most of us have (or had) old SNES games that we loved.  With Snes9X GX for the Wii, we can play them all again!  If you still have your old SNES cartridges, there are devices that you can get to Rip the ROM files right off of them, though they are relatively rare.  Instead of going to that trouble, there are lots of sites on the Internet where the ROM files are freely available.  Of course, I only recommend actually using the ROMs that are from games you actually own.  We don’t want to encourage piracy.  If you do happen across a ROM for an old game that you don’t have, you may be able to pick it up at a fleamarket or garage sale.  Then, the way I see it, you’d have every right to run that ROM.

Back to the point, though.  Snes9X GX for the Wii is simply awesome.  If the initial user interface (game selection screen) were more polished, you might even think it was a Nintendo product.  The interface is easy to navigate with the Wiimote, even to the point of setting up your network connection so it can find your ROMs.  (In my case, I can read the remote directory fine, but can’t seem to write to it.  That’s OK, as Save Game files are small and it can write them to the SD card.)

When you are actually in a game and hit the Home screen, the game pauses and up comes a very Wii-looking screen, with dark bars coming in from the top and bottom, the close button in the upper right, even battery level indicators for all four Wiimotes.  Easy enough for even my 5 year old to navigate, I think…

Great work guys!

Wii HomeBrew Browser & FTP server

After you install the Wii HomeBrew channel, pretty much the next thing you should do is install the HomeBrew Browser and ftpii, an FTP server.

The HomeBrew Browser is a 10 foot GUI interface that lets you browse different categories of HomeBrew software that has been released by the Wii HomeBrew Community.  This includes Demos, Games, Media Players, Emulators, and Utility software.  It has descriptions, icons denoting the supported controllers, and most importantly, allows you to download and install said software directly from within the application. It does not have the USB Loader stuff in it… Perhaps for legal reasons, or perhaps because of all the behind-the-scenes work you have to do to get that stuff to work, but it is easy to use.

ftpii is a FTP server, allowing you to FTP to your Wii, writing to your SD card across your network.  This lets you add programs to your HomeBrew channel that aren’t available via the HomeBrew Browser.

Loading Wii games from a USB drive

There have been a recent rash of people posting instructions on how to add USB drives to their Wiis.  This is something I was very interested in, but in all of the posts I’ve seen recently, none of them seem to fully address the issue.  None of them seem to go into any detail on what to do if things go wrong.  Performing this mod is not for the faint of heart.

In my case, I first started following the directions here:  Kringg.com

It’s very light on explanation, just giving steps to follow, which made me think it would be a very straightforward process.  Truth be told, it is, but there are some gotchas along the way.

Following those instructions seemed to go smoothly until I got to the point that I was actually ready to Rip my collection of games.  When I attempted to do that, I got crash after crash, no matter which game I tried.  I had two USB drives to try and both had the same failed results.  And while parts of the installation when fine via the network connection, later I was unable to get to the network from the WAD manager.  I later determined that the problem arose when I attached the USB drive.

I had an alternative way in mind from the beginning: mikeandheth.com

Unfortunately, this did not overcome any of my issues.  The crashes continued.

At this point, I was wondering if these software mods to my Wii were doing something to break my Wii.  So, I tried running Zelda.  To my surprise, the Wii did not see my Zelda disk at all.  I ejected it and re-inserted it and was relieved to see that it finally recognized it.

One thing that bothered me about these guides was at just which level of Nintendo software did they expect me to be at when starting?  In searching around, I found some posts saying that you’d have issues if you had some older software installed when you started, so I updated to the latest software via System Update.  That got me to 4.0U (shown on some of the Wii settings screens).

I then followed this post: gbatemp.com

I used the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure.  Since I still had the homebrew channel installed from my first attempt, I only performed steps 1 – 3, A, B, and 9 – 15.  The scariest part was step 11, where you have to install 18 WADs in sequence.  Note the item “If WAD Manager freezes during installation just try again from the WAD it froze on.”

Well, it froze on me.  A couple of times.  And just after finishing one WAD installation, it crashed.  But, true to the instructions, I rebooted, and picked up with the failed WAD (except the crash, since it had completed that WAD first, so I didn’t reselect it).  Each time, on the second attempt at installing the WAD, it completed just fine.

One appendix to these instructions – After installing the pre-loader (step 13) and rebooting, the pre-loader comes up by default.  There is a setting to make it boot to the System Menu at startup.  Set that, then I assume the “Hold Reset” while starting will cause it to go into the preloader (though I haven’t tested that).  Also, in my case, I didn’t have to do step 15.

After going through all this, I had determined that part of my problem was with my network connection.  I use a wired USB adapter, and found that when I when to “download missing covers” from the USB loader that I got a crash.  So, off to using wireless I went.  So far, so good.

Last night, the kids played Mario Kart and Wii Sports, and everything worked just like always.

One potential caveat to using this method is found a bit down in the post:  “If you want to load games from the disc channel you must install CIOSCORP”.  Well, I haven’t done this yet, and I haven’t tested to see if I could still play games directly from the disk.  But I’m not terribly concerned, as the games seem to be working well from the hard drive.  I’ll probably undertake this, if I find that some games don’t run properly from the USB drive.  (I’ve read that some don’t)

Edit:  Since this original post, I have successfully ran a game directly from the disc with no problem.  Since I updated to the original 4.0U software before undertaking the “Offline Downgrade/Upgrade” procedure, I didn’t expect this to work, as my Wii should have been a clean slate at this point (except for the HomeBrew channel).   Back to the original post:

Anyhow, take it from me – this mod is not for the faint of heart.  I see the advantages in that my kids aren’t likely to break the Wii’s mechanical parts, but it sure was a pain to install.

CheckPoint Safe@Office continues to surprise

Back about 9 months ago I got a CheckPoint Safe@Office unit.  These are very low powered boxes suitable for protecting small office networks from attackers.  It is essentially the same hardware as the ZoneAlarm Z100, but with a few more software features (I believe – not sure on this as I don’t have a Z100).  I can say that if the Z100 is as full featured as this one, I would highly recommend it to any home user.

Anyhow, I’ve posted before about how stoked I was to see the feature set of this puppy.  It’s an amazing little box.  It’s a firewall, access point, can be its own radius server (for Enterprise Authentication), supports 802.1X on the internal ports, supports VLANs, etc.

Since I’m a security NUT, I set up Enterprise Authentication after the 8.0 firmware came out late last year (It was the version unleashing WPA Enterprise support without needing an external Radius server).

Anyhow, I started working seriously today toward enabling the USB Loader for my Wii.  I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s a long process that ends up with my kids being able to play our Wii games without needing the game disks.  (I decided to do this after my 5 year old broke our Wii inserting a disk and it cost $85 to get it fixed!)  Anyhow, the problem I ran into was that while I can get the Wii to access the USB drive, I can’t hit my wired network at the same time via my network USB adapter.  I thought that the internal wireless NIC would probably not have this issue, but the Wii doesn’t support WPA Enterprise.

So, I figured I would take my spare Apple AirPort and bring it up as an additional AP, plug it into a port on the Safe@Office, VLAN it to that port and add firewall rules so it was only able to reach the Internet, and not any of my wired (or WPA Enterprise wireless) machines.  I didn’t really want another wireless access point, especially when it would only serve one device, but figured it was neccesary if I wanted to move forward with my Wii/USB project.

When I went into the Safe@Office to add this, I found myself on the “VLAN Network” page when I selected Add Network.  The “Typ”e field defaulted to “Tag Based VLAN”.  Thinking that “Port Based VLAN” would probably be my other option, I hit the pull down menu, only to be suprised by two items (other than what I was looking for):  “Wireless Distribution System” and “Virtual Access Point”.

Whoa!  Virtual Access Point?  Was this what I thought it was?  I selected it, and a Wireless Settings section appeared near the bottom, where I could set a new SSID, along with its own security mechanism.  After adding a rule to let devices on that network go to the Internet, but blocking all other destinations (my highly secured networks), I tested it out and it worked fine!  My Wii could connect to this new SSID, running on the same hardware as another SSID with different security.

This little box is full of surprises!

AT&T/BellSouth DSL Ultra is not so Ultra…

I recently ordered DSL direct from AT&T (formerly BellSouth in my area).  DSL direct is their name for naked DSL.  It costs $5 more than if you had it with a regular phone line.  So, I chose the “Ultra” level of service.  It has a whopping 1.5 Mbps downstream and 256Kbps upstream, according to their marketing materials.  I ordered this because I thought it would be sufficient for our uses, figuring that one VoIP call was about 64K – 96K or so.  Yes, it would be a major step down in speed and a small step down in cost (about $10/month less than Comcast), but I thought it would actually be fine.

Color me wrong.  Using Speedtest.net, I’m maxing out at 1.25 Mbps download and 210 Kbps upload.  That’s about 83% of the advertised rate. Sometimes this test has returned rates as low as 800 Kbps download and something like 120 Kbps upload.

To be completely fair, when it was originally installed, I had issues with the DSL sync light dropping out on me at random, dropping me off the Internet with it.  This was annoying, but AT&T does seem to have cleared this up (or perhaps it’s better because the weather has improved).  And I don’t think I’ve had any of the 800/120K speed tests since they’ve fixed the DSL Sync issue.

Now, I’m thinking that I’d need to upgrade to AT LEAST their 3 meg service to have enough bandwidth for our needs.  (Apparently, Hulu thinks you need 2 Mbps to get their videos down in HD with Hulu Desktop.)  So, I’m seriously considering scrapping the whole DSL thing…  I’ve not put the Ooma system on DSL yet, so I can’t say if calls through it are any better, but I’ll try to test that this week.

Use an external drive with your Wii!

The weakest link with a game system like the Wii is the optical disks and drive.  With children handling the disks, they get tons of fingerprints and probably occasional scratches, and that’s if the kids are good about being careful.  I imagine some people have had to buy a second copy of a game that their children have accidentally rendered unreadable.  Add to that the fragility of the slot-loading optical drive that I recently discovered, and issues like what happened to my Wii can happen.

So, when my Wii gets back from being repaired, I’m doing this:  Load / Save Wii Games to Hard Drive

I’ve not done this yet, so what I’m posting here is my general understanding of how this works, but it seems pretty straight forward.  This “hack” basically consists of some software you install via the HomeBrew channel that lets you rip your Wii games to an external USB drive.   Then, you play them off the external drive, never needing to insert the optical disks again.  This keeps the expensive game content free of fingerprints, scratches, the possibility of getting lost, plus from what I understand it is faster to get to the game itself (since there’s no disk spin-up time).  Each game is generally between 1-2 GB, so I should be able to put about 40 games on the 80 GB drive that I removed from my G4 Mac Mini (it’s now in an external case, of course), assuming that it works with the Wii (some drives don’t).  I only have 15 games now, so that should last me for years.  If this drive doesn’t work, I have some others to try too, but I don’t feel that a 250 GB drive is appropriate for something with such a low need for storage.

Once my games are ripped, I’m planning to pack the disks in their original cases with the instructions, and put them in a locked drawer, away from the Wii.  I mean, why will I need the disks again, if they are ripped to an external drive.  (Short of drive failure, or Nintendo breaking this hack in some way with a future software update.)

If you are considering doing this because you want to pirate Wii games, then don’t bother.  Borrowing a game from a friend and ripping it this way is piracy.  So is renting it from a store and ripping it.  Buying a game, ripping it, then returning it or trading it in is still piracy.  Basically, once you no longer have the original disk, but still have the ripped copy, you are pirating the game.

If piracy grows to be rampant on any platform, the people that make a living making the games will simply switch to a more secure platform where they can make a living.  And nobody wants that.