Category Archives: Technology

Ustream.tv Audio Issue Fixed and a Suggestion

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So, I was having some serious issues with Ustream.tv recently, and it didn’t look like anyone could help me out. It took a while for the Ustream.tv live support to realize I am not an idiot and the problem wasn’t between the keyboard and chair. We narrowed it down slowly to their client system. Why would neither computer be able to record audio, despite using different browsers, different flash versions, different microphones, on computers with different operating systems?

The answer was one of those moments where you slap yourself in the head. There is an audio quality slider. I assumed it didn’t do anything but improve or decrease the audio quality, but when I moved the slider to its maximum, suddenly, my audio was getting through. As I slowly moved it down, it continued to work until I got to around 13kHz, where it just stopped.

I was never able to find out why the audio slider was responsible for the problem, and frankly, I don’t care. I am just happy to be able to record audio with my videos on Ustream.tv once again.

So next time I have a live session, hopefully more of you will show up, and I will have working audio next time. I really love the Ustream.tv platform, and having tried some of their competitors, I am ready to say that Ustream.tv is the best and despite the issue I had, it was worth figuring out so that I didn’t have to deal with the quality issues and user interface issues that other services have.

Sidenote Suggestion

So, if you work at Ustream.tv and are reading this, I have a suggestion for the company. Jonathan Snook and I realized that while video is great, being a talking head isn’t always what I want to be in front of a large audience. I know there is an easy way to just broadcast audio, but it would be nice if it offered MP3 downloads of all shows. That way people could subscribe to the audio portion of my video streams, if they don’t want to watch me talk.

If you could make it so people could download MP3’s from the videos, be they recording video and audio or just audio, I would really appreciate it, as your sound quality is so much better than most of the other services out there today, and you would quickly become one of the biggest one to many audio broadcasting services out there.

Originally posted on March 18, 2008 @ 12:16 pm

Backup Concerns: Operating System, RAID and Giving Up

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This is a continuation of my Backup Concerns series. Part one covered my choices and I decided to go with a Network Attached Storage box. Part two covered the equipment I decided to use, namely my old computer, and around $300 in parts to convert it into what I needed since I decided to build my own network attached storage device and unfortunately, putting it together wasn’t the last step.

So far, I have spent half a dozen hours trying to get this whole thing to work. After installing Ubuntu linux, I found that I couldn’t get RAID 1 to work for the life of me. You think it would be easy, but Ubuntu doesn’t support serial-ATA configurations out of the box. This was very frustrating to me, and after tinkering with it for a long time, I eventually gave up.

Most instructions I have found assume I am going to be installing the operating system on the RAID drives, rather than an independent hard drive. I thought it was smart of me to use a different hard drive for the operating system to reduce the reads and writes on the RAID drives. So far it has only created trouble for me.

I really didn’t think that setting this up would take me this much time, and after the time investment I have already put in, the Drobo is looking better and better.

I am also spending some time trying to figure out the best way to keep my information backed onto these drives, and creating a shared hard drive space that all the computers can access seems to be the best. I can then save data quickly and easily to the network attached storage computer.

I have decided instead to not use RAID, and just run a cron job twice a day to copy files from one drive to the other. I know it isn’t as cool as having a working RAID setup, but for my purposes currently, it will work just fine. I will have more details on the final setup, cost, and the time it took me as soon as I test everything to make sure it works.

Originally posted on January 21, 2008 @ 8:24 am

Backup Concerns: Building Process

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This is a continuation of my Backup Concerns series. Part one covered my choices and I decided to go with a Network Attached Storage box. Part two covered the equipment I decided to use, namely my old computer, and around $300 in parts to convert it into what I needed since I decided to build my own network attached storage device.

Now, I finally have all the pieces to build my network attached storage box. I have two 500 GB serial-ATA hard drives from Western Digital, and a PCI serial-ATA controller card that supports Raid-0 and 1. I ordered all of these parts from NCIX, my favourite online computer store.

I dusted off the old computer, and checked to make sure it still was able to boot. Thankfully, it was able to, but for some reason I couldn’t get into the BIOS. I removed the small battery on the motherboard, which resets the BIOS, and after fixing the lost configurations, I was off to the races.

The hard drive it currently had in it was 120 gigabytes, and so I decided that I would use it as the operating system drive, and maybe put a copy of my music collection on it, as it would have more than enough room. Having this drive already in the system was paramount to making this all work as I envisioned it. I wanted to make sure that I could use the two new hard drives in RAID 1, which would allow me to save backups to one drive, and have it mirrored over to the other. That way, there is redundancy.

At first, I was going to use FreeNAS to power my computer, but I decided to try Ubuntu first. Pretty much any Linux distro can be changed into a headless server. And really, that’s what a network attached storage device pretty much is.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a current Ubuntu CD laying around, and without any blank CD’s, I decided to throw Ubuntu 6.10 on the computer. I put the CD into the CD burner that was already in the old computer, nicknamed beastly, and began to install the operating system.

The biggest issue that I can currently see is that there are no instructions on how to get RAID 1 set-up easily on the new computer, as well as making it easy to send my backups to the RAID drives. So now I need to learn how to make my Ubuntu box into a headless server that allows for SSH, FTP, and of course serial-ATA RAID 1. Each of these issues will require a fair bit of reading, and lots of guess and test work, but in the end it should hopefully fulfill my needs.

If you have any tips, tricks or advice. I would love to hear it as I continue to work on building up a reliable and fast backup point for all the computers in my home.

Originally posted on January 18, 2008 @ 8:13 pm

Backup Concerns: Building My Own Network Attached Storage

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This is the second part of my Backup Concerns series. The first post, Backup Concerns: Network Attached Storage, explored the options that I have with regards to keeping all my data backed up. As the title implied, I knew I really wanted some form of Network Attached Storage, but my options in that regard were wide open.

I have since decided to use an older computer I have sitting doing nothing, and transforming it into my network attached storage box.

The current specifications include a 1.83Ghz AMD Athlon 2500+ Barton Core Processor, with 512MB DDR RAM, and 120GB P-ATA (IDE) main hard drive. It isn’t really anything too fancy, and has more than enough processing power and RAM to make a great NAS box.

I have purchased two 500GB Western Digital serial-ATA hard drives which will be the storage drives for all my backups. Unfortunately, the motherboard I have doesn’t include any SATA ports to plug in the drives. This means I am now waiting to purchase a PCI card that has at least two serial-ATA ports on it.

I made sure to select one with RAID functionality on board as I am going to use RAID 1. RAID 1 will mirror the data on both hard drives, meaning that if one of the two hard drives ever fails, I won’t lose any data. The chances of both drives failing at the same time are very low, and as such, I should be relatively safe. This was the most cost effective RAID level for me, as I didn’t want to purchase any more than two hard drives.

The other option I had was to not use RAID at all, and just have two 500GB hard drives. I would then place certain data on each one, and have to make sure to be vigilant about drive testing. With RAID 1, since the data is mirrored on both hard drives, I will only have 500GB of backup space.

For my needs, this should be just fine, as I am currently only backing up around six to eight gigabytes of data a month. This means that I will have upwards of fifty months worth of data backup space at this point and time, barring too much increase in the data I output and manage each month. Even if I fill the drives in half the time, that is still two years worth of backups, and that is without removing past backups, something I can do to reclaim space as I need to.

This whole set up, if I had to purchase everything would have set me back around six hundred dollars or so, as my computer I will be using could be bought on eBay for under three hundred dollars, easily. Add in the brand new hard drives, and the Serial-ATA controller card, and you are building a system that is more expensive than the Drobo, a device I am interested in, but can’t afford to purchase at this point.

The difference with my set-up is that I will have much more versatility, and the ability to do a variety of different things with the completed project.

I am hoping to use the FreeNAS software to power my NAS box once complete, but I am unsure yet if that is my best option. I haven’t heard of too many other options, but could a properly set up Ubuntu box do something similar for me? I will be exploring the software options over the coming weeks as I get closer to implementing this project.

Here is hoping that it all turns out well. Expect another update on my Backup Concerns project in about two weeks or so.

Originally posted on January 10, 2008 @ 8:41 pm

Backup Concerns: Network Attached Storage

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So, I am looking at getting a better backup solution set up for my data. I have a desktop and two laptops to keep properly backed up. Each using a different operating system, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X.

About two years ago, I was doing monthly backups on three 700 MB CD’s a month. About a year ago, I started doing them on one 4.3 GB DVD each month. Now, with the increase in the amount of computers, and the raw data I am creating, I am thinking about going to a hard drive backup system.

I have an external hard drive that I use for backing up before formatting a system, but it is only 120 GB, and I would like to keep it as that quick, one time use backup solution for getting my machine ready for formatting.

So I am considering buying two 500 GB SATA hard drives, and an external USB 2.0 drive bay. This is the cheapest way to start backing things up regularly, but not the most effective. I will have lots of space, and I could stagger my backups so that one week they are on the first hard drive, and the second week they are on the second hard drive, and back and forth. That way if one hard drive ever fails, the most I would lose is a week of work.

What I am seriously considering though is going a step further and getting a small, two bay, network attached storage device. I could put the two hard drives inside, and set them to RAID-1, which would mirror the data on both hard drives. This would give me only 500GB of space, but if a single drive ever failed, I would be protected from any data loss. This is also one of the more expensive options I have to keep my data backed up, as it requires two drives, but really only gives me one drive worth of space.

I could take my computer tower that isn’t really being used for anything, buy a serial-ATA controller, throw some hard drives into it, and using some software, change it into a network attached storage box. This could also provide me with a RAID-1 setup, as well as some other features. I haven’t really looked into doing this as of yet, but it seems like a cheaper, and infinitely more expandable option. I am not sure which software I would use to do this, and would love to hear some options if anyone knows of some.

Of course, some might wonder why I don’t consider a Drobo, despite its popularity, the device, while really interesting, is far too expensive for me to splurge on. At nearly $500 for just the four bay device, Drobo would set me back over $700, where my other options are around half as expensive.

Yes, Drobo has some interesting features, like a light that tells you the status of the hard drive, and being able to used mixed size drives, among other things, I don’t think its features warrant the current price.

The last option on my list is to get some storage online. I haven’t really investigated something like this yet, but I think it would be interesting. Either something like using Amazon’s S3 service to back up my hard drives, somehow, or a data server from some web hosting-like company. If someone has done research into using a web service as an online backup solution, I would love to hear it. My main concern though is that the cost will mount quite quickly compared to a hard drive based solution.

How do you back up all your files? Do you have an automated system, or do you have to remember every week, month, or quarter? If you were going to buy a backup system today, and your budget was under $500, what would you select? I would love some advice if you have any.

Originally posted on January 5, 2008 @ 1:57 pm