I said Hello to Drobo

Shortly after Carolin got her Mac Mini, I noticed the need of a central storage solution in our home, both for Time Machine backups and shared files. I shopped around a bit and purchased the Buffalo LinkStation Live with a 1 TB disk. It was inexpensive and offered nice functions like auto-wakeup: the NAS (Network Attached Storage) only goes out of standby mode when there’s a computer active on the network.

But the honeymoon was over when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. That’s when the NAS Navigator Software coming with the LinkStation stopped working — and with it the auto-wakeup function. My support request was answered in the way of “Apple broke it with their OS upgrade, so pester them instead of us”. Take the “inexpensive” and put in “cheap” instead.

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was when, two weeks ago, the status LED on the LinkStation started blinking frantically and I couldn’t switch the device off any more without yanking out the power cable. Trying to log into the administration interface didn’t work any more either. Looking through the support forum, I found that it’s a common problem that the LinkStation forgets its administrator account! And it seems the support staff couldn’t come up with something other than “Pull the cable out a few times, which will enable emergency mode, then you can do a firmware rewrite”. Well, I value my data. And I value my time as well, so I spent it instead on ordering a Drobo.

Fortunately, Cyberport currently offers a discount on the Drobo bundle which also contains the optional network extension called DroboShare.

First, I have to admit that the Drobo plays in a different league than the LinkStation Live. Since it houses up to four disks, it’s a good deal larger and, of course, more expensive. But you get back a lot more value, too.

Data stored on the Drobo gets replicated across disks (obviously you need at least two then), so if one disk fails, you can replace it without losing any data. What makes Drobo different from the usual RAID storages is that the disks don’t have to be of equal size. If an old 250 GB disk fails, you don’t have to look for a used one on eBay. You just replace it with a 1 TB disk and Drobo uses the additional space. Also, if you run out of space, you simply pull out a disk and put in a bigger one.

After the first week, I can say that it’s working very well. The only thing the storage is missing is a proper standby mode, because the heat generated by the disks is pushed out by a not so quiet fan and the Drobo sits right outside of our bedroom.

But with the good reputation the Drobo has in the tech community and the data security it provides, I might now sleep even better than before.

Inside Rackspace

This short clip takes a peek into the Rackspace Hosting headquarters. They’ve just opened the 120,000 square foot second phase of their headquarters facility within a former shopping mall in San Antonio.

(via DataCenterKnowledge)

Small causes

Like every self-respecting Mac user, I upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as Amazon could deliver the package. Since then, I’d been having the worst WiFi experience of my life.

Every few minutes, the Macbook got disconnected from my home network and would reconnect after about 30-60 seconds. Of course that put an end to successful Timemachine backups to the NAS and to fulfilling evenings in the World of Warcraft. But most annoying were the little problems:

• iChat dis- and reconnecting regularly.
• Music played over Airfoil to the Airport Express in the bedroom breaking up every few seconds.
• Marco Polo telling me that there’s no evidence of a home network and therefore switching to mobile operation; just to switch back a bit later.

Marco Polo is an utility that checks some predefined rules to determine my working environment and changes system settings accordingly. For example, if a certain monitor is attached or if a certain WiFi SSID is visible, Marco Polo would change the default printer and deactivate the screen saver password.

Everything pointed to Snow Leopard as the cause of my problems. After all, the problems started with the upgrade and the computers running Leopard still had fine WiFi reception. On Google, I found a few other people having similar problems, but there was no indication of a serious bug.

I played with the WiFi settings of my router. No success.

I adjusted the router’s antennas and removed devices that could jam the signal. No success.

I purchased an Apple Airport Extreme base station, replacing the WiFi part of my router. No success.

Finally, last sunday, I was working on the Macbook when I noticed that WiFi was working okay for quite a while for a change! But there were some applications that hadn’t been started at login time. And as soon as I manually started Marco Polo, the WiFi dropouts started again.

WHAT? THE? FUCK?

Yes, not running Marco Polo any more solved my WiFi problems! Connection to the base station: great. Music transmission to the bedroom: back to normal. WoW performance: fine.

My explanation, purely speculative: When Snow Leopard came out, people found out that Marco Polo’s WiFi network detection didn’t work any more. But soon, one user put out a patched version that closed that gap. And it looks like that patch somehow disturbs the WiFi driver, causing the dropouts.

Weeks of anger and despair could have been avoided just by quitting a simple application. Into this blog post I put my hope to save another desperate Snow Leopard user’s money and mental health.

Shooting closeups with the iPhone

If you’ve tried to do short distance photos with the iPhone, you know that it can’t focus any more if the item is only a few centimetres away. I noticed this shortcoming when I had the idea to photograph all my collected business cards and make them searchable in Evernote. Their OCR just couldn’t make sense of those blurry letters.

But I’ve found a solution. The Griffin Clarify case not only protects my iPhone from hits and scratches, but also adds a lens that I slide over the camera window when I’m going to do closeup shots.

With the Clarify, I’ve got rid of all business cards. I now can search for a name on Evernote and get a sharp photo of the card back.

Goodbye Rolodex. Hello iPhone.

A look into a Google datacenter

Following up to the recent entry about Google’s custom server chassis, in this video we get a glimpse into one of Google’s datacenters where those servers are in operation.

Again, Google does it their own way by using separate containers with the necessary infrastructure built in instead of having different rooms for all the racks. The data center building itself delivers power and cooling. I guess it’s because of the more modular structure that allows replacement of a complete server “room” why Google chose that approach.