The goal was rather simple, take my infinitely useful FreeBSD box and scale it down to more practical metrics. Less space, less energy, no noise. The tool for the job: 10 years of technological progress.

Well, I’m not sure if that was the goal or the excuse, sometimes one simply gets an itch. An urge to integrate new hardware and drag old and reliable but bulky and power hungry hardware to the curb.

Maybe I’m being too specific in the details to label this as a recurring rite… but a good intro is a good intro, I’m sticking with it.

Requirements

I had enough specifics in mind that I’m still a little surprised I was able to satisfy every quirky demand. I wanted an Atom based system for the ideal balance of performance and efficiency. I wanted the system to be as ridiculously compact as 2012 technology would allow.

My first thought was the Asus Eee Box. Their size and cost would have been ideal, but contradicting my small form factor requirement was the desire to migrate my existing mirrored 3.5″ tera-byte drives.

Replacing my storage wouldn’t have been a deal breaker, but as I use the FreeBSD box as my gateway, dual high quality NICs was a must.

What started as a few innocent, curiosity driven Google queries quickly escalated into incurable gadget lust when I stumbled on a Mini-ITX board that looked perfect for the task at hand…

Wait, what’s this? A Mini-ITX case that can hold six (six!) 3.5″ drives and an SSD?!

…and it still maintains a sleek minimalistic design?

…also… silent?

These are some of my favourite attributes… I can’t stop now!

The toys for the job

• Super Micro X7SPA-H-D525
• A pair of 2 GB Kingston KVR800D3S8S6/2G modules
• Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case
• An Intel 311 Series 20 GB SSD, SSDSA2VP020G201, for the OS – just because.

Results

Two weeks impatiently awaiting the arrival of my backordered board from NCIX (everything else was in stock), some quick assembly, hours of migration work and endless compiling later…

Inferno is now replaced, upgraded to FreeBSD 9.0 and back to his regular duties (including hosting this very site). Everything is running stable and I couldn’t be happier with the difference in power consumption!

The Athlon Thunderbird 850 MHz system this replaced loaded my UPS to 17% of its capacity. This system… Only 2%! Run time estimates on battery backup have gone from just over an hour to over four hours! This kind of difference in power consumption alone probably justifies the exercise. If nothing else, I can now just play the “going green” card.

Even a lowly Atom runs circles around the ancient ol’ T-Bird. All else being equal, how can you go wrong with more clock speed, an extra core and Hyper-threading?

To summarize: everything went according to my diabolical plan. Let’s see if I can run on this for the next decade.

As a new year approaches, I find myself glancing at this site in realization… Gee, it’s now a matter of months until I can say I haven’t posted here in two years!

That’s quite alright… Unless I have something substantial to justify one of my long winded posts, its just so much easier to spew at 140 character intervals! I’m now a fully formed twitter addict.

No need for alarm though, you can still come here to ease your insatiable need for all things ‘Denis!’

Thanks to the magic of ThinkUp and some custom tweaking, all of my carefully crafted fits of narcissism are available in near real-time by following the “Tweets” link above.

I think this fits well with the “lazy sysadmin” mentality I’ve developed over the years… A quick tweet is all that’s required to distribute a tasty soundbite or hunk of verbal diarrhea to this site, Facebook and a plethora of mobile devices. What’s not to like?

Having a new addition to the family (our new month old daughter, Allison) my wife was itching to begin printing some photos to get started on a “Baby’s first year” type of scrapbook. Unfortunately our HP Officejet printer decided that it was above the task of putting ink on paper some time ago. No amount of pleading with this lousy HP printer would convince it otherwise. Given the circumstances, after some discussion, Jessie and I decided that we had little choice but to fire the Officejet and seek a replacement.

A quick Google search for the MFC-495cw prior to running out to Best Buy confirmed that people appeared to be having success with this printer under Ubuntu. Given that, the decent feature set and the low price of $99 we decided to give this printer try.

Given that the HP printer was just over two years old, we decided against another HP this time around. Although unhappy with the longevity of our existing printer, I was always quite pleased with the cross platform driver support with HP printers. I’ve had this Officejet working with OS X, Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD with minimal fuss.

Unfortunately, much to my disappointment, Karmic 64-bit was unable to support this printer out of the box. A quick browse around the web uncovered a page on Brother’s site that did have Linux drivers but attempting to install them yielded only the following:

dpkg: error processing mfc495cwcupswrapper-1.1.2-2.i386.deb (--install):
 package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)

Apparently 64-bit support is not something that Brother has tackled yet. In addition their instructions and workarounds for getting up and running are pretty scattered.

Essentially, grabbing the appropriate files (you need both the lpr and cupswrapper packages) and running the following commands seems to get everything up and running:

1. aa-complain cupsd
2. mkdir /usr/share/cups/model
3. apt-get install ia32-libs
4. dpkg –force-architecture -i mfc495cwlpr-1.1.2-1.i386.deb
5. dpkg –force-architecture -i mfc495cwcupswrapper-1.1.2-2.i386.deb

Today marks five years since I abandoned Windows on the Desktop in favor of an OS that doesn’t completely suck. At the time, my primary motivation, or excuse, was to familiarize myself with an OS that I was receiving an increasing number of tech support calls for at AirSurfer. Trying to support an OS I had never used was no easy task.

I had actually been eye-balling the Mac since the appearance of the Power Mac G4 Cube and later the iMac G4. The high cost of either of these systems kept me away, but I was definitely drawn to the compact and elegant design of the integrated hardware as well as the rich graphical UI Apple had been showing off since the early releases of OS X.

More important than a flashy GUI, then and still to this day, 90% of my time was easily spent at the shell of some UNIX like operating system or another. Ideally, OS X would give me the best of both worlds: a flashy GUI with availability of high-end commercial apps and a powerful shell on the local machine. This felt like it would be superior to spending all my time SSH’d into a remote system to get real work done.

I probably would have been perfectly happy with just about any low-end OS X capable machine to use as my workstation, but I had also just recently acquired two 17″ flat panel LCD monitors for my current setup. I wasn’t about to give one of them up. Back in 2005, the only system that Apple had that was equipped for driving dual displays was their PowerMac G5. A little bit of smooth talking with the higher ups and several interrogating phone calls to WestWorld to tie up any last minute paranoia driven questions and ensure I wasn’t going to end-up with an expensive system that would be completely useless for my purposes I was on my way.

I ended up with the most entry level late 2004 model of the PowerMac G5. It was not cheap, nor really very well spec’d given the price tag. Nearly $2,200 dollars for a 1.8 GHz G5 with a pitiful 256 MB of RAM and a modest 80 GB hard drive. Anything higher than this spec would have blown the already stretched budget I was allowed for this acquisition so I wasn’t about to complain. Fortunately it was not very long after that I was able to purchase a couple 512 MB modules from a reasonably priced 3rd party vendor to bump it up to an awesome-for-the-time 1.25 GB.

It didn’t take much longer than the initial boot-up for any of my doubts to fade. Everything I used on a daily was built into it’s Darwin base (perl, CVS and vi to name just a few). On the GUI side, there were native ports of both Firefox and Thunderbird so that easily took care of my web and e-mail requirements. Being a geek, I also enjoyed the complete lack of legacy crap that still encumbers modern PCs: no PS/2, no parallel and serial ports, no ancient BIOS. Nothing but modern computing goodness.

Fast forward half a decade later, AirSurfer agreed to let me take the machine home with me when I moved on to Tera-byte. The machine has been through two operating system system upgrades but is still running as flawlessly as the day I picked it up. Though it has since been demoted as “The wife’s workstation.”

I will always enjoy PC hardware. There’s something special about picking up a box of the latest components from the local OEM hardware retailer and assembling a PC to my exact specifications. In fact, the PowerMac was the first computer I had used since 1991 that I didn’t personally assemble. Far too often, PC hardware is also associated with an MS operating system, the two are not mutually inclusive. I use several PCs for various purposes, I just don’t have a need for Windows is all.

I admire the freedom and openness in systems like Linux and the BSDs. I still hope they will some day catch up to the user experience and quality of applications I currently enjoy on the Mac. It’s certainly improved dramatically in the same time period. Indeed, a world dominated by Apple with their cookie cutter one-size fits all stock configurations would be pretty dull. Although I find the design of Apple’s hardware is very appealing, it would lose its luster if one permutation of the five or so hardware offerings was on everyone’s desk.

In the mean time, I’m on my third Apple system at home, a three and a half year old Mac Mini. Though I could probably use a hardware upgrade soon, I don’t have any intent to move to another platform just yet. The momentum Apple has built around their OS and overlying software shows no sign of slowing down.

Admittedly I did write this long winded post on my Sony VAIO laptop (currently running Fedora). It may lack some polish relative to OS X, but being a laptop, it does fit in front of the couch better while I try to multi-task watching a little TV and spewing this out.

After a very inconvenient 9 month waiting period, Jessie & I finally had the opportunity to meet our second daughter. Allison Zoe Lemire was born yesterday evening at 7:23 PM.

Allison weighed in at exactly 8 lbs and is 21 ½ inches tall. Impressed as we may be, we’re told she’ll get heavier and taller over the next several years.

About a month ago, I reached the breaking point of my own curiosity and decided to wipe out my Ubuntu installation in favor of the latest Fedora release. The VAIO notebook I loaded it on has typically served as my ‘plaything’ machine, as opposed to being my primary workhorse computer.

Due to this choice of purpose it changes Linux distributions or even operating systems on a pretty regular basis. More recently I was even perverted enough to allow it to dual boot with Windows 7 Home Premium, but that’s a filthy confession for another day.

I’ve always wanted to like Redhat and by extension the Fedora project. If I recall correctly, Redhat was the first Linux distro I used around the 5.0 release. Though it wasn’t long before I grew annoyed by the RPM dependency hell that was common in that era. My solution at the time was to nearly abandon package management altogether and seek refuge in Slackware. Over the decade to follow I’ve probably experimented with more Linux distributions than I can practically recall, assigning several as personal favorites for specific roles.

The last time I used Fedora for something serious was around Fedora Core 2. Looks like I’ve missed the last 10 releases are so. Things have certainly improved. Though yum doesn’t seem quite as intelligent as apt, it does seem perfectly suited for the task at hand. In my (give or take) month I’ve been playing with Fedora so far, everything I’m accustomed to using appears to be in the standard repositories and nothing has given me any grief in terms of satisfying dependencies on installation. Probably the biggest thing I miss is the whole ‘apt-get autoremove’ command for cleaning out dependencies that were pulled in for packages that I’ve since removed. The closest equivalent I’ve been able to find is ‘package-cleanup –leaves’ which only lists packages without dependencies. Not as intelligent or automated, but it still accomplishes the goal of removing cruft I’ve built up.

As far as package management goes, I’m holding out for the real test. Ubuntu has handled major version distribution upgrades with more grace and polish than I’ve seen relative to any other distro. I’ll certainly hold on to Fedora for long enough to see how well it fares in this regard.

That last point aside, the differences between apt/yum and Debian/Redhat distributions are approaching the point where everything can be boiled down to personal preferences and aesthetics. I am enjoying the default Fedora artwork over the gloomy orange/brown Ubuntu defaults. My preference is not to spend too long tweaking my themes before my eyes stop bleeding.

The Fedora repos also appear to be far less conservative in terms of packaging the latest releases of major applications. Ubuntu tends to lag behind on Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice packages.

Overall, it’s been a pleasant experience thus far. Maybe I’ll keep it for a little while?

Did this post have a point?

Yes!

1. I needed to post something, it’s been too long. You don’t want people to worry, do you?
2. If you haven’t tried Fedora in a while (or at all), give it a spin. You may just like it.

Alright… So not really.

The factory installed 80 GB Seagate (ST98823AS) was increasingly feeling cramped under the weight of ever growing iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

Adding insult to injury the 5400 RPM speed of the rickety old clunker was a painful bottleneck I could no longer endure. Suddenly the unrestful gleam of the legendary Mac Mini opening putty knife caught my eye. It was time.

I sweet-talked Jessie into grabbing me a shiny new 500 GB drive on her round-trip to the local Pita Pit and began a full Time Machine backup in preparation for the ol’ upgrade routine.

Several hours and $129.99 later the Mini began to crawl. It soon became apparent that it had no intention of carrying out the backup I had requested. Figuring this would be a decent opportunity to see if Time Machine would resume a half finished backup gracefully, I powered down the machine and attempted to boot it back up. Unfortunately from this point on, powering the system up left me permanent Apple logo limbo. Uh oh!

After much tedious disassembly, cursing, troubleshooting and more profanity I determined that the original drive – clearly disgusted by my intentions to replace it – had kicked the bucket. How convenient for it to crap out halfway through my backup. Rest assured I was pleased.

Having exceeded the point of no return (and my bed time for that matter) I decided to proceed with a reinstall of Snow Leopard on the new drive. The reinstall went smoothly thus confirming my suspicions on the old drives discontent with its sudden unemployment.

I reassembled the Mini and began rummaging through my backups to see what I could salvage. Time Machine finished backing up my home directory but crapped out before backing up the most critical – my iPhoto Library. Not good!

Seeing as how it was 3:30 AM at this point, the remainder of this fight would have to be postponed. After work today I popped the old drive into a spare FreeBSD box I’ve got kicking around. Unsure how FreeBSD felt about reading data from OS X HFS+ partitions, I instinctively threw in a Knoppix LiveCD to see if that would do the trick. Much to my frustration and in spite of inconclusive Google search results, it appeared Knoppix was not equipped to deal with the EFI GUID partition table which OS X has standardized on. Endless Google queries later I was still unable to find any conclusive evidence as to which Linux live CD (if any) had a kernel with GPT support.

In frustration I replaced the Knoppix CD with a Gentoo Live CD and decided to try again. Whadda ya know! The Gentoo live CD does in fact have GPT support AND HFS+ support. Eureka!

Much to my delight I was now able to use scp to transfer my iPhoto library across the network to my new drive. Everything is now up and running with all my data intact.

Woohoo!

The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

My original plan was to use Prowl as intended and have Colloquy’s Growl notifications directed to my iPhone. This had some limitations, most importantly it required leaving Colloquy running on my work desktop.

Fortunately the developer of Prowl provided an example perl script to push notifications to Prowl independently of Growl. I’ve never attempted to work with Irssi script’s, but it appeared I had all the required pieces to build something clever.

I downloaded BCOW’s awayproxy.pl script as a starting point and began to hack away at it. The result: prowlnotify.pl.

Change the prowluser and prowlpass lines then load this script into Irssi. While you’re connected to your proxy the script will do nothing. When your last IRC client disconnects it will push all subsequent public messages containing your nick as well as private messages to your iPhone via Prowl. How sweet it is!

Of course, this post would not be complete without an obligatory screenshot. Nobody appeared to have anything to say today, so I was down and out. In my desperation I called upon cshaiku to grace me with his words of wisdom:

Update: I have now updated this script to use the new Prowl apikeys. Editing the script is no longer required. Simply copy your Prowl key into ~/.prowlkey.

Another update: Every time I try to search Google for an Irssi plugin to work with Colloquy’s push notification feature instead of using Prowl I find my own page. Amusing, but not helpful!

Just found a Colloquy push script for Irssi written by Nicolas Pouillon that does exactly that.

Almost a week short of two years ago I ported Motorola’s CNUT tool to OS X. I originally did so to satisfy my personal use but also decided to share the package for others who fall into the tiny niche of being responsible for the administration of Canopy networks and wanting to use OS X to do so.

As my need lessened for such a package due to a change in positions and responsibilities, the package was neglected shortly after. Although the original package still works, Canopy firmware 9.0 and later require the use of CNUT 3.x.

Due, however, to overwhelming pressure from the users of the original ports (or comments from three different users, rather), I have decided its high time to fill the niche once again.

Good news, everyone!

CNUT 3.12.3 (the latest release as of this writing) now runs natively on OS X! The new package has been tested (meaning it appears to run) on OS X Leopard. I haven’t tested it on previous releases or attempted any actual AP or SM upgrades using the utility, but I have little reason to believe it doesn’t work. As I no longer regularly roll out Canopy updates, I’ll depend on the feedback of whomever downloads the package to determine if it works as well as the previous package.

The usual disclaimer as per the previous release: if my attempt at being helpful caused your Canopy Network to be annihilated in a fierce and fiery disaster of biblical proportions and voids your Canopy warranty, I hereby disclaim all liability.

In addition, this release is by no means endorsed, authorized or supported by Motorola. It contains their intellectual property including copyrighted and unaltered but substantially repackaged Java byte code and Trademarks.

The package is being distributed with good intentions based on the concept of a community of users improving the solutions used for the greater good of the community.

If Motorola’s legal department becomes offended at the existence and distribution of this package, I will of course have to remove it. Though I am sincerely hoping they recognize this as a useful contribution.

You’re welcome.

I’m now back to my regular ol’ routine, just finished a week long “staycation.” So other than spend quality time with the family, what does a system administrator who doesn’t have to go to work for a week do with his time? Pull some CAT5 and clean up my home network, of course!

Inferno, my FreeBSD home gateway, file, web and everything else server has been irritating me with its typical PC fan whirring for too long. It was high time to uproot the beast from its cozy spot on my office floor, where it sat for nearly eight years and drag it to the basement and finally bring tranquility to my office.

This involved running six new cables from my electrical/laundry room to its new home in the basement’s spare bedroom. One Ethernet run to its LAN interface, one for its WiFi interface (I keep WiFi access to my network on a separate segment), one for my recently acquired Xerox Phaser 8400 printer and one spare for future use. I also needed two RG-6 runs, one for the cable modem which now sits downstairs and one for an old spare CRT TV as per the wife’s request.

After a long day of running and terminating cable and dragging equipment around, I ran into one snag: the NIC for the WiFi segment of my network was not seeing my piece of junk Tranzeo AP. I mistakingly saved this AP from AirSurfer’s dumpster several years ago and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of it ever since. After testing the cable run to the opposite side of the basement where the AP resides, I determined all was well and the Tranzeo pile of garbage was the worthy owner of the blame.

Upon hearing my tales of woe and coming to terms with what this meant for her iPod touch web-surfing habit, Jessie was quick to suggest we give the Tranzeo AP the fate it deserves and replace it with a far more capable AirPort Extreme. Who was I to argue? The Airport has been configured in bridge mode as I still intend to leave the routing duties to Inferno.

In my twisted reality, the aging beige Antec case in combination with the old 19″ CRT I dug up, alongside the Phaser, plain old Fujitsu keyboard and ancient desk (also saved from AirSurfer’s dumpster years ago) give the corner an almost retro-computing look. Somehow I find the whole setup appealing in contrast to my shinier, sleeker, far more modern and most importantly far quieter collection of Apple desktops upstairs.