Because the update process of my old site was much more hassle than typing a post, I noticed that my blog was better maintained than my site. Therefore I have decided to redirect traffic to my domain (rolfje.com) to my blog. You can still find the original content of www.rolfje.com at http://www.xs4all.nl/~rrolfje/.
Author: rolfje
Monique Pels
This morning, Monique Pels passed away after a long period of illnes. Even though I’ve only met Monique a few times, she always left the impression of being a strong, witty, and loving person who enjoyed every minute of life. I can only imagine how big this loss must be for her family, relatives and friends.
My condolences to Bert, Nikita, Indy, Marianne, Ton, Vincent, Annemieke and Jaimey. I wish them all the strength to cope with this loss.
Part of this text was sent to ian king to be placed on the Monique Pels Tribute Page. If you would like to send your own tribute then please E-Mail ian@kingracing.com.
Other places with tributes for Monique:
eurodragster.com
Ian’s Pitlane Gossip
German Drag Racing board
OSX: USB Fat32 drives trouble samba
Okay, I found the answer to my problem. Mounting an USB drive on OSX which is formatted as Fat32, will not behave nicely when being accessed through samba. Trying to start multiple copy processes simultaniously will cause seemingly random “file locked” errors. I just formatted the drive as HFS+, and the problem dissapeared. This is a screenshot you’d expect when copying, but I was very happy to see it just a minute ago:
Now that I’ve cleared that problem, I can start working on the backup and virusscanning processes, and writing a nice “how to” so you can do the same with your mac mini!
I should have done this right away like I planned. HFS+ is far better than Fat32 (journalled, auto-defragmenting, case preserving, and better in preserving file integrity).
Samba shares and USB drives
I am very close to migrating the data on my bulky PC to my new Mac Mini fileserver and mounting the IDE drives in the USB drive brackets. Once I’ve done this, I will have the screenshots and data to write a nice “how to” on using the Mac Mini as a file server. There is however one slight problem which could prove to be a showstopper…
Samba test 1: local directories.
I created a directory in the root of the HD in the mac mini, and made it R/W for everybody. Then, I used SharePoints to make it available to all password-less Guest users on the network (which happens to be the default Windows user for connecting to drives without asking for a password). All was well. I could access the share, and could copy as many files from as many machines imultaniously as I wanted.
Samba test 2: USB mounted volumes.
I mounted a HFS+ formatted USB disk to the Mac Mini, and made it available to the network in the same way as in test 1. Everything seemed to be working fine and as expected, but while running some tests I discovered a strange thing: I can only copy files onto the USB drive from 1 machine at a time, 1 file at a time. When starting a new copy while allready in the process of copying an older file, one or both copy jobs crashed with a “file in use” error.
I am now trying to find out what is causing this problem. I have a firewire drive I can use to determine if it is the USB protocol or driver which is causing this problem, or if it is the fact that it is a mounted volume alltogether. If anybody has tips I’m glad to hear them. Meanwhile I’ll be searching the web…
Update
Using a firewire drive does not solve the problem. I did find some articles on fast user switching which state that only 1 user can access pheripherals at a time. This seems to be related to this problem.
Update 2
Creating a symlink to the mounted volume and sharing the link through samba will not change behaviour. I was expecting this, but tried anyway because it only costs 1 minute to test. Maybe a virtual drive would be an option. I can create virtual RAID disks in OSX, but I don’t want my setup to be complex. This will add to the complexity when recovering from a sever crash. Simple, full and fast recovery from hardware problems is my top priority.
Tryout Mac Mini as Fileserver
The past 5 years (or more, I can’t remember exactly) I have had a windows server which provided 4 “shares” or “network disks” to the users of my local network. Simplicity was it’s power. All network users would connect with the default windows “Guest” account to prevent complicated logon screens and forgetting of passwords. To prevent damage to files, all shares are read-only, except for one, where people can drop files. Only the administrator of the machine can move the files from the drop box into the different read-only shares. All files on the server were backed up twice a week to a different (physical) drive, and all drives were automatically virusscanned each day and on-access, and defragmented once a week.
My dad is also using this server (we have a wifi bridge between our homes and yes, it is military grade encrypted). A few weeks ago we ran out of diskspace (bought new cameras :-). So we bought a 320GB drive. The old server with the passivly cooled 600MHz pentium 1 processor decided it didn’t like the large drive so we had to upgrade the hardware. I built a new server from my old desktop PC, which was collecting dust because I am now a happy Mac user. When the new server was ready, it was much more noisy than the old one (more fans), and slurped 105 Watts while doing nothing, and up to 140 Watts under booting or serious disk/network access.
Just for fun, we also measured the power usage of my Mac Mini. It was using 40 Watt under heavy disk access, and only 20Watts when doing practically nothing. In sleep mode this even dropped to 3 Watts! This, plus the fact that the PC was producing so much heat that we actually started to worry about it catching on fire when placed inside a closet, convinced my dad to use a Mac Mini as a file server.
The next day, he called me to tell me he had bought a G4 Mac Mini to be used as a fileserver for around 300 Euros. I picked it up and re-installed OSX on it. This only took 30 minutes or so, and I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the performance of the G4 in comparison with my Core duo Mac Mini with 2GB memory.
Tonight, I installed Sharepoints on it, which is a utility to efectively edit the smb.conf file on your mac. I hooked up an USB disk, and got it running as a samba share in less than 5 minutes, complete with Windows Guest login. Just now, I also managed to make one of the 2 shares readonly, which prooves that the mac Mini can behave itself exectly as the PC server I had to the outside world. This would be great, if I give it the same network name nobody will even notice that their files are now served by a Mac.
I will try to mimic my fileserver completely soon (somewhere next week) and will post a complete description of what the original server did, and what I did to get the Mac Mini to replicate that behaviour.
Now go buy your own Mac Mini G4 and some USB (or better: firewire) harddrives (with spindown capability!) and join me next week in building your mac Mini fileserver. Have a proper place and a proper backup for your files and photos!
Soon, your house will be free of PC’s… 🙂
“I have not actually read this book”
Curing lens envy
Do you still want “that last lens and that’s it”? According to the statistics on this page, you probably already have the right lens in your camera bag. Chances are that you are using your cheapest lens most often. The best quote from this page must be “The cost of the lens is inversely proportional to the frequency of its use.”.
Where did I get that link from? Well, from a brilliant text by Ken Rockwel titled “Your Camera Does Not Matter”. It states that you may not only have overspent on lenses, but on your complete kit alltogether! According to Ken, “Buying new gear will NOT improve your photography.”.
Next time you see a guy with a D200, don’t be impressed. The guy behind him with his old Holga camera could be shooting far better pictures!
I have had a Canon EOS 300 (35mm film), a Canon Powershot A20 and now a Canon 350D. I also have made photo’s with some of my dad’s camera’s, a Canon FT-QL, and an Exa IIB. When changing from one camera to another, my photography (in particular composition) did not change. It just took some trouble away from the process. EOS 200 to Canon A20: no more film hassle. Canon A20 to 350D: Faster bootup and shot-to-shot times. Canon FT-QL and Exa IIB: The romantic feeling of craftsmanship when holding the camera 🙂
Sure the 350D gives me nice resolution and more freedom to play with aperture and exposure times and I still like the camera after reading Kens article. But he is right. Period. I recently spoke to a guy who owned an EOS 300 just like I did. He looked at one of my photo’s from the 350D and said “I’ve got to have that camera, how did you do that?”. I explained “aperture” to him and told him that he could do that with his own EOS 300 if he had taken the time to learn how to use it.
I guess some sales people translate “I want a good camera” to “I want to spend a truckload of cash on a camera of which I’ll only use the full-auto mode to shoot pictures of uncle Zed with.” People who don’t know what “aperture” or “exposure time” means just want a snapshot camera which automatically will produce clear, colorful, crisp foto’s of uncle Zed 95% of the time.
Before buying a camera, read Ken’s article, get out of that chair and start shooting with whatever camera you have right now. That one brilliant moment is waiting for you!
EyeTV Export, done right
A while ago, I bought a Miglia TV max for my Mac Mini. With it, you get EyeTV, the PVR recording software. I was very happy using it, but I recently discovered that all exported MPG files are missing the last part. Arg!
This is a VERY serious bug. It also means that each and every recording I have archived on my external HD is crippled, so I can start all over with collecting series. Lucky as I am, each and every serie gets rerun after rerun on Dutch TV. They have many channels to fill, much commercials to sell and very little (interesting) new material to show.
request a password at the command-line without display
For those of you trying to request a password from the user at the command-line, without the password being displayed on-screen, Java 6 finaly has the answer, along with better access to the console.
I hope that soon we will never see this hideous construction to do the same again.
Apple WWDC 2006 Keynote Address problems?
Trying to view his Steveness in the Apple WWDC 2006 Keynote addres? Me too, and haven’t been lucky for 3 days in a row. I actually managed to view 3 minutes of distorted, half-audio presentation, but then it died, and has given me an error 400 ever since. It’s not nice to see Apple not being able to cope with the demand. A bittorrent would be nice I guess.
In my first edit of this post I thought I’d found a mirror, but it was an old keynote. Searching on, I found a terrific tip which solved the problem of not being able to view the keynote. It actually turns out it’s the default Quicktime settings are causing the problems. Quicktime fetches the stream over UDP, which makes no guarantee over lost packets. You can set Quicktime to fetch the stream through http, which has a few advantages, such as losless transfer of data, and ability for proxy server to cache data.
To set Quicktime to fetch the video accros http:
- Go to System Preferences
- Open Quicktime preferences from the system preferences screen
- Click on the “advanced” tab
- Choose “Custom” for transport setup
- In the window that pops up, choose the HTTP transport protocol
- Close the system preferences
Now go to the WWDC 2006 Keynote address page and view the video. I just did, it worked fine, no dropped frames or audio.
Enjoy.
p.s. Tiger shipped for 80 euro’s when it was released. If Leopard is anywhere close to that same price, it will be hard to find an operating system which gives you all this, with this quality, for this price. Professional grade OS, for the price of a SuSe distribution! I love Tiger, I know I’m going to love Leopard. Since I have my Mac, my Windows laptop (which was an expensive one I might add) is sitting in a corner of my desk, covered under a layer of dust. It’s simply not good enough anymore. My Mac mini will beat it any day.