Skillett.com » Hardware

The Backup Saga is Over! MyXerver!

Keiron — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:31:54 +0000

Ok the backup saga has rumbled on for close to a year now, but I finally decided on my solution last week and it looks fantastic!

I was heavily influenced by the register’s review, and an email from their sales team.

I’ve purchased a MyXerver 1TB along with a 1TB USB drive to run to it, and after the ParcelForce saga I now have them installed, I couldn’t have chose better as they look exactly the same when unpacked (just one in black and one in white!).

After unpacking I plugged in the MyXerver and started to write this post, given that the instructions said it could take anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes to boot I was impressed that by the time I’d finished typing the previous line it was booted and ready for use!

As the adminstrator I had to run the setup utility disc. I decided (unlike my usual self!) it might be wise to follow the instructions at this point..

The wizard looks fairly self explanatory, so let’s get started.

It appears to have recognized MyXerver correctly.

I’ve opted for a fixed IP, just in case I need to enable port forwarding on my router to this box (it will make life far easier if I do this from the onset I suspect!).

Next came the timezone and naming, I resisted the temptation to call it something humorous and left it as MyXerver, I was surprised to find it wanted to know my Workgroup name – not sure why at this stage!

Mission accomplished – I opted not to setup Flash Map as I wanted to keep this proprietary software as far away from this solution as possible (having had to install a CD for every machine with Netgear’s SC101).

Interestingly, the instructions told me to visit http://myxerver to configure the box further, in Firefox this resulted in a 404 after trying to visit http://www.myxerver.com and in IE it was simply a 404 – Page not found. Putting the IP address into the URL seems to have the desired effect though.

Alien Autopsy psp I managed to login and configure the device – I’m sure you don’t need to see all of that info!

Learning

I’ve discovered why it wants to know my workgroup, it has the ability to use Network Neighbourhood for mapping network drives with the users regular username and password – now that I like!

So that means each user has a private area, great – what about the global public areas that I want to dump photo’s and the link into?

This is found in the “Shares” section, and before too long I’d got a shared drive setup and 40GB of Photo’s transferring from my old NAS to this one, a process that took around 2 hours.

NAS > Backup Solution

I know what you’re thinking, I said this was my backup solution, and all I have at the minute is a new 1TB NAS. Here’s the best bit, I plugged in the 1TB USB drive to the back and configured and incremental backup from the NAS to the USB that will copy all changed files every morning at 6am…

Job Done!!

If you found this post useful, why not buy me a coffee or a beer (depending on the time of day obviously!):

USB Motion Detector

Keiron — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:51:54 +0000

Bare Witness hd I was quite impressed with this today from MAKE Magazine, it’s a USB Motion detector!

It's Deceased!

Keiron — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:22:25 +0000

It’s not sycin’! It’s passed on! This router is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet it’s maker! It’s a doorstop! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the shelf it’d be propping open the door! It’s routing tables are now ‘istory! It’s a chunk of metal! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-ROUTER!!

Ahh… I feel so much better!

What am I talking about? – My router that’s what!

My Netgear DG834Gv2 has faithfully served myself and the business for many years (it’s quite a mature router), never so much as letting out a whimper in disgust as traffic is flushed through it for several hours a day and then it is left silent and lonely.

Then unceremoniously at 9:10am on a beautiful morning several weeks ago, it stopped – logged out of the internet and gave up the ghost – never to sync again! Unfortunately it went through this moment quite alone, and to all eyes (well my ISP) it looked like it was just having a little rest!

This caused some confusion (for me not the router!), and I promptly got on the blower to my internet provider, “Do you have any problems in my local area?” I tentatively asked… No, nothing – not so much as a BT man running over a line, or a friendly little lightning strike on the exchange.

Several line tests and some confusion about what our phone number really was (I knew BT would have some part in this mess!), I was asked to perform a further diagnosis on my equipment:

New Filters
Plugged into the Master socket (with nothing else on the line)
I asked whether a new router test should be necessary (apparently not – I was reasonably thankful – I didn’t want to upset the current router showing it it’s understudy in the cupboard whilst it was in such a fragile state!).

Stand clear! – Charging!

Before I know where I was, I was sat on the hall floor, master socket in pieces with the router and my EEE PC, performing a post-mortem on my equipment.

Nothing, it could of course be the line…..

That’s when DigiDave came to the rescue. not two weeks prior I had gained an understudy for my router – a FREE router from DigiDave – no box, no manual – just the router and power supply – postage was all it cost me!

I shielded the Netgear router from the sight of me plugging in the 2Wire space age looking router….

photo credit: Christian Frausto Bernal

3 minutes, that’s all it took to get it up and running! 3 minutes!

Having spoken to my ISP and declared my router officially deceased I was advised to work back through the system, when I explained what I had done – they quietly agreed to sign the death certificate.

Pining for the Fjords?

The 2wire router performed rather splendidly and soon became a permanent fixture in the office…But it appears to be pining for the Fjords (or something else entirely), every evening as the darkness descends it starts to log in and out of t’internet. It’s a little unsettled, bless, but there’s not time for emotion with a router (especially when I’m getting told off for it’s poor performance!!).

I’ve read tales of the Signal to Noise Ratio going up at night, either way I think the time has come to replace it with a new router (especially now I’ve tried reflashing the firmware on the router and it is completely doorstooped) – something equipped for the job in hand! Another Netgear methinks – now what revision is the DG834G on now……..

EEE PC 900 for Free?

Keiron — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:30:10 +0000

I love my EEE PC, it’s small and ideal for everywhere I want to take it! Now it appears that you might just be able to get one for free!

According to Coolsmartphone News Orange are about to offer them free of charge with their data dongle packages – giving you a USB data dongle, and 3GB of Bandwidth for £25 per month over 24 months.

That actually brings the price in at £600 over 2 years (nearly twice what I paid for mine), but I guess at least you’ve got it online semi-permanently without worrying about it too much!

photo credit: Keiron Skillett

GMail Notifier?

Keiron — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:26:45 +0000

Does yours pop-up in the bottom right of your screen (just at that annoying moment where you need to get to the thing that’s hidden by it!?!?). If so take a look at J4mie’s GMail Notifier Lamp.

photo credit: greg westfall

ASUS EEE PC 900 is on the way!!! Finally!

Keiron — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:25:28 +0000

I’d been debating one of these Asus EEE PC’s for a while, particularly after talking to Dan and him saying his was one of the best things since sliced bread. So once we’d booked our holiday and I knew I’d want to take the D-SLR and a laptop in the same bag, I was ready to order one.

I put it off a little bit I guess because I knew the new EEE PC 900 was coming out with a bigger hard drive capacity. So on release day I went hunting for one – I should have realised! I’d forgotten how annoying it can be to be an early adopter and not being able to get your hands on the technology!

I carefully watched sites for stock, at one point I rang a company to check they’d got stock – they had – by the time I walked back to my desk to order it online they’d sold out again!!!

Then finally on the evening of the 21st of May I managed to get my order in!

Now I’m used to dealing with huge e-commerce sites (Amazon etc), or even eBay sellers who don’t want negative feedback – invariably payment is taken and my goods are dispatched the following day, at a push the day after that is normally acceptable.

I know, I know the bank holiday weekend got in the way, and yes I know I’m an impatient so and so….

But here we are a week later – 28th May and I still don’t have my new toy!! I do however have their questionnaire about whether I’m enjoying my new product – I haven’t replied – YET! Payment was taken but I have been assured that my order is still undergoing “Processing…” and when it is dispatched I’ll get an email with tracking notification. I’ve had my suspicions about whether they really have the stock or are drop-shipping, but the company in question assure me they have the stock.

Today’s reply from them said:

I can confirm that your order was sent for packing and it is expected to be dispatch soon. Once the order has been dispatched, an email confirmation will be sent to you.

In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.

Just one, my friends, why is this taking so long!? Apparently my order has undergone various stages of processing including “Quality Control”, I can just see two guys sat at a desk examining my address:

“Do you think that sounds like a reputable area Jim?”

“I’m not sure Bill, let’s get it up on Google Maps”

“Hmmmm fields nearby, looks good – give it the rubber stamp and pass it on to see if his email address looks ok, they’ll check him out on Facebook”

More on this when EEE PC actually arrives!

UPDATE! UPDATE!
The status on the website no longer says “Processing…” It’s “Awaiting Courier Pick-Up”…. I just hope the courier doesn’t drop it!!!

EEE PC 900 for Free?

Asus EEE PC

Keiron — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:33:52 +0000

I had a look at the EEE PC at the weekend, it looks kind of cool and weighs virtually nothing…

I know, I know, I know – it was designed for the younger market, but this laptop has infinite appeal for almost any IT professional, at sub 1kg with a solid state disk?

I quite liked the OS that was installed, but a friend suggested installing XP on it (and upping the disk to 4GB or buying a 4GB version) as then it will support everything XP supports, which means I can plug my phone in as a USB 3G modem – that’s the key thing. I could feasibly get away with this being what I take on holiday (sorry Em – no DVD’s anymore?!).

What are peoples thoughts, does anyone have one?

Some notes on websites I’ve found with info that may be considered useful going forward:

Tnkgrl mods the Asus to have internal Bluetooth
Ivancover’s guide to a variety of Asus upgrades (Bluetooth, USB, GPS, Flash etc).
I found the PC Advisor review interesting, and agree with the weakness that it doesn’t have an internal modem just a phone socket, so I’d need to get a USB link to my phone working – under XP or the Linux built in OS. Tracey and Matt appear to have had the same concern, and found JKKMobile’s review of inserting a 3G modem, I think I’d be happier just knowing if it would support my HTC Trinity out of the box with the Linux OS, or whether I’d really need to install XP.

I was interested to read on The Register in the comments section:

Asus tells me the 3G upgrade’s coming by the end of the year and that it’ll be offered on its own, as an upgrade technical users can perform themselves.

There’s no word on price yet.

Anyone waiting the 8GB model isn’t likely to see one before the new year – Asus’ Eee PC production is current focused entirely on the 2GB and 4GB models, I’m told.

The other colours – pink, green and blue – will be coming in 2008 too.

Although an expansys thread suggest a utility I hadn’t heard of before , WMWifiRouter, which appears to work in WM6 and WM5 AKU 3.3 – looks like my WM5 has AKU 3.0. I installed the trial software and it ran, but wouldn’t work – I’ll try again later with some support advice they’ve given me!

What’s on Your USB Key?

Keiron — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:46:29 +0000

I couldn’t be without my USB key these days if I’m honest, I bought a 2GB one about 12 months before our wedding and it has been my absolute life saver on a number of occasions (and I’ve only left in the office just the once!!!).

Up until today I thought the best thing on it was my WOS server (Webserver on a Stick), but looking at Tiny USB Office it might just have some competition on its hands – does anyone use this software? If not, what do you have on your stick?

photo credit: bbaunach

Backup Space – The minefield just got bigger!

Keiron — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:12:37 +0000

Glenn threw a real spanner in the works just before I went off to buy this damned USB Hard Drive as a backup device!

We both bought external hard disks around the same time, and would probably both do it differently if we were to do it again!

Original photo by Topato

So where do we start?

Glenn’s advice was to get a cheap desktop (circa £200) and stick 4 HDD’s in it and RAID-5 them, this got me thinking – I have my old desktop and I’ve promised Emma I’ll buy a new desktop (that doesn’t have wires hanging out and is in a terrible half working condition) when we move.

Here’s the problem – I’ve not built a PC in years, and I know NOTHING about RAID.

Glenn sent me this article, which discusses RAID in some detail and how to achieve it under Windows. To be fair, I really didn’t want to looking at yet another Windows license.

Expensive “Out of the Box”

So I started looking around at the various “out of the box” solutions that would just require me to populate them with hard drives. Ultimate Storage seem to be the people for this, but the prices are high when you consider I’m likely to be buying four hard disks to put in them! It would be very easy to price yourself out of the market and into a high end solution with this project.

Another Requirement – Futureproofing

That’s another point, looking at hard disk prices, 1TB disk drives are supremely expensive, but that won’t always be the case – I’d be better off with 4 x 500 GB and then upgrading later, so whatever solution I go for should support that potential need for more space, and upgrading the existing space I have.

A Little Project is Born!

The’s when I stumbled across Tom’s Hardware and his Cheap, Fast, DIY RAID 5 NAS box…. This looks like a cunning plan, and we’ve found a card not dissimilar for just over £100 (the 8 port version is probably more aimed at the corporate/server world and hence it’s price hike!). 4 x 500GB Hard disks come in at around £70 including VAT. So providing my old desktop and case can take the pain – I might be able to do this for circa £400.

Just Backup Space?

I know the question most people are asking if you RAID 5 these 4 500GB disks, and you’ve got 1.5TB of data, are you really going to use it as backup space?

The answer is no, it’s likely to become a file server, a huge one at that! but with the four disks in, if one of them goes wrong I can quite easily replace the drive (using Tom’s “sane” method) and be up and running again with no data loss. Why would I then need a backup device?

Offsite backups have to be the next question I guess (but at the bare minimum I would expect to leave a DVD drive in the file server so I can backup data and take the CD’s elsewhere?). I’ll discuss that in another post.

Backup Space – What a minefield!

Keiron — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:20:58 +0000

You would think just a second hard drive would be enough to suffice for something like this wouldn’t you? This isn’t so, neither for the server or home use!

Home Backups

I bought a Netgear SC101 a year or so ago, put a 400GB HDD inside it and it runs like a dream, I’m only using one slot of the two available, so it’s not RAIDed or anything. On recent duplicate file scan I discovered that I’m not actually using it as backup device, it’s simply become add-on storage (and lots of it!). I clearly need to backup the data on that as well! You ought to do a scan yourself, you might find you have exactly the same problem!

Fact: I need backup space for all of my hard disk on both laptops (and probably the wife’s as well), and also for the whole of the SC101 storage device.

Option 1 – 2nd Drive (A)
Get a second drive, copy all the data back to my laptop (not sure it would fit, but we can cross that bridge later), RAID the existing HDD drives in the SC101 for redundancy, copy the data back to the newly RAID’d disk and I have a secure device.
Pro’s: All I need is a second HDD of at least equal size.
Con’s: I’ve read some absolutely abysmal reviews of the SC101 under RAID conditions recently. I’d also still be using the SC101′s proprietary file storage system, so couldn’t just stick the drive in another machine to get the data off, if the box ever blew up I’d need another one to make it work and get the data off.
Option 2 – 2nd Drive (B)
Get a second drive, add it to the SC101 copy all the data to it from all the machines and the SC101. Remove the disk and store it somewhere VERY, VERY safe.
Pro’s: All I need is second HDD of at least equal size, but at least I won’t be using the badly reviewed RAID capabilities of the SC101. I’ll also be able to have it copied over in a day without any major headaches of moving data.
Con’s: I’ll need to store the drive safely, and it still will be in this proprietary format that means I can’t get the data off without another SC101.
Option 3 – USB Hard Disk
Largely similar to option 2 in that the data is on a USB hard disk that I can unplug whenever I feel like it and store it away, alright it’s in the house, but I can probably live with that!
Pro’s: No RAID headaches, plug it in the laptop overnight, stream the data, can even use syncing software to get the data across, it’s not plugged in all the while, nor is it in a proprietary format.
Con’s: I can’t actually think of any, except that the data on the USB isn’t RAID’d, but as it’s a backup that shouldn’t be a huge problem (how many failsafe’s can you put in!!?)
Option 4 – Another Network Disk
Again largely similar to option 2, but it sounds/feels more permanent than a USB disk, yes I know thousands of people use them everyday, there’s just something I dislike about USB!
Pro’s: Use syncing software to get the data across, it can be plugged or unplugged when necessary, and it isn’t in a proprietary format. I could even RAID it with the right type of disk.
Con’s: Probably an increased cost vs option 4?
Option 5 – Online Services
Something like JungleDisk, or the online backup service from my own ISP? This is putting my data in the hands of someone else, and paying for how much I use – not something I’m particularly keen on!
Pro’s: Offsite, way, way offsite!
Con’s: Data security, integrity, internet latency etc. etc.
Option 6 – My own Online Service
This doesn’t actually exist yet, but may well do pending the outcome of a future post on server backup data services.

Which would you choose?

Skillett.com » Hardware

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