Asgrim

You’d think something as basic as syncing with a network disk would be available to everyone… but no, one of those annoying things I’ve found about Home Premium is this:

The ability to sync with network folders is not included in Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, and Windows Vista Home Premium.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t cost £100 odd quid to upgrade! I don’t have that sort of money, damnit!

I’ve managed to sell the server cabinet now, but I’ve still got a few things to sell. If you might know who would like a server for their birthday… please send them this way:

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz (bidding starts 4th August)
  
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz (open to offers!!)
• Air Conditioner Unit Silver 9,000 BTU (bidding starts 4th August)

Please buy them, we have a wedding to fund, and they don’t come cheap!

Now, even though I still don’t have Internet due to BT crossing my lines, I am already singing Newnet’s praises. Their customer service is simply supreme. The difference is quite simple… call centre in England, with English speakers, but the important part is this, so I will emphasise this a lot:

The technical support know what they are talking about.

I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!

So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.

Inspired by this tiny gadget, a thin client in a wall socket, I got thinking about hiding away your computer in the wall. I came up with this solution…

You could probably hack the Jack PC thin client so that you have the corresponding connection on the wall-facing side of the socket. That would enable you to run cables down from the attic and simply plug into the wall socket, and install.

With that sort of setup (although slightly hacky), as opposed to being a thin client and requiring a Terminal Server, you would literally have a PC in the wall that you can just plug into. You could even have a whole network of PCs.

Of course, the original design of this is meant for thin clients, so converting it into a solid PC would defeat the point of the thin-client-ness. Thin clients are there to save money, and my idea basically just hides away your ugly PC case, and puts it into a nice neat wall socket where you just plug in your monitor/speakers/keyboard/DVD/Blu-ray drives.

An issue thats been annoying me a little over the last few days was trying to get my nVidia nForce RAID array working. I’d taken 4x 300GB hard disks out of one of my servers as I wanted to keep them. Initially I tried to set up the array using my shiny Adaptec 2410SA. Alas, on a brief check, Adaptec don’t have Vista drivers. I tried hacking it a bit, but didn’t get it to work.

I gave up on that and tried setting up the array using the onboard RAID device… which actually makes more sense as it’ll probably be a lot faster and efficient than using a PCI RAID device. Anyway, I enabled RAID in the BIOS, set up the array in the nForce BIOS, and it was happy and existing as a nice big striped 1.2TB (!) array. Then it came to Vista, and the annoyance began.

The array appeared in Disk Manager as four seperate drives. My first instinct was to reinstall or upgrade drivers. I tried re-installing, to no avail. Having no internet meant I had to go round a friends house and download the latest nForce drivers (and get exceedingly drunk in the process…). I installed these, and still the same result. I did a lot of Googling, and some people recommended upgrading the BIOS. I managed to get my mobile phone to connect my PC to the internet just long enough to get on the ABit site and download the latest BIOS. No difference…

I tried various hacks that were suggested, and I finally gave in and posted on the nVidia forums. A bloke called Fernando responded telling me that the latest nForce drivers (15.17) didn’t support nForce 4 for RAID. Nice one, nVidia. This guy has obviously done a lot of work on this issue as he’s actually made a driver pack (even WHQL’ed!) for nForce 4 systems that worked straight off. If anyone has any issues at all with nForce 4 boards, I highly recommend installing this driver pack at the first instance. I am now happy with my 1.2TB hard drive… now I just need to fill it!

More detail, and the download links can be found here.

And lastly, thanks to Fernando for putting the effort in and making the solution so simple.

I just found a good article regarding what I spoke about here. It’s called The Seven Deadly Sins of IVR (Interactive Voice Response), and it is just so true. When I rang TV Licensing the other day, my conversation with the machine went something like this:

Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James: Eighteen
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Please say your house number
James (slowly and clearly): EIGHTEEN
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (smacking forehead)
Machine: Please say your postcode
James: PO15 XXX
Machine: Please say your street name
James: XXXX XXXX Road
Machine: Please say your house number
James (clearly): One eight
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response. Lets try again from the beginning
James (shouting): EIGHTEEN YOU STUPID MACHINE HOW HARD IS IT TO UNDERSTAND?!
Machine: I’m sorry, I did not recognise your response.
James hangs up in anger and disliking the total lack of customer care.

As you can tell, I was pretty fustrated. I did call up and try again, but it totally failed at recognising something as simple as the number 18. It didn’t even understand “one eight”… and there was absolutely no way to transfer to a human operator, which I thought was stupid.

Rant over…

Yep, as I said in the last post, they’re for sale:

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz
• 12U Metal Server Cabinet (black)

Please buy them, or at least tell your friends! The proceeds are going towards Hannah & I’s wedding!!

Well, I have finally decided to stop all this home serving malarkey. I just don’t have time to do it any more, and trying to maintain a comparable up time to other hosts is simply a nightmare. Not only that, it’s expensive on electric, and at the moment I still have no Internet (gah!), so it sort of rules out any hope for now.

Last night I spent some of the evening taking apart the server cabinet ready to sell on eBay. One thing I am particularly cautious about is data on the hard drives. Most people think that they need a whopping great magnet (like the ones that pick up cars in scrap yards), or that they need to drill holes in the drive and damage it irreparably. Well, thankfully, this is not the case.

All you need is DD. And, no I don’t mean my friend from Portsmouth, I mean the ancient UNIX command “dd” (sometimes nicknamed “disk destroy”). dd is a low-level data copier or converter. It works by writing blocks of data from one place to another. The very useful thing about UNIX/Linux is that it has these things called “devices”. One of these devices is called “/dev/zero”. It is a constant stream of 0. Lots of them.

Technically minded people might see where I’m going with this (well, they should already know what I’m talking about really…). Basically, an irrecoverable way of properly formatting a disk is top copy zeros all over the disk.

[root@oblivion /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

The above command is all it takes to completely destroy a disk. If you are really paranoid, you could do it a few times, or intersperse it using /dev/random, like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

According a data recovery company, there is less than zero percent chance of recovering data after using a single dd command. Some guys have even decided to make it a challenge.

If you’ve not heard of them, read about UK2 here. The original article was written by a guy called Andy Crawford, but I’m having exactly the same fustrating troubles as him.

Basically, UK2 are trying to charge me for each domain I want to transfer away, even though I have already thrown tonnes of money at them. This is what Andy Crawford said:

[1] They are not cheap
Ok so they might look cheap at first, but after you register your domain everything else is an add-on. Your website(s) will posssibly cost more in the end.

[2] Pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner
You will have to pay for removal of pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner.

[3] Webspace is extra
Webspace costs extra and it will be assigned to only one domain name. If you have more than one domain that you want to run separately, you need to buy webspace for each and every domain. This now becomes very expensive.

[4] Upgrades and add ons are assigned to each domain
You must also pay for upgrades for each domain separately (CGI-PHP, Statistics etc)

[5] Email is a forwarding service only
If you want a POP3 Mailbox or use IMAP, you will need to create a separate UK2.net mailbox address. Even if you pay extra for unlimited email address forwarding you will not be able to forward to multiple recipients.

[6] It’s pot luck whether your CGI scripts will run
Even something as simple as FormMail will not run on the UK2 servers. If you use their own version of FormMail, any mail generated can only be sent to a UK2.net mail box and cannot be forwarded.

[7] Support
My own experience of the support team is that:They will reply with a block of standard text which does not answer the query, or, they reply with various conflicting and incorrect answers.

[8] Transferring your domain
When you have had enough of UK2 and want to move away, they will charge you to have control of your domain and allow the transfer to proceed. But they will not make it easy, they seem to do everything in their power to stop the transfer proceeding.

[9] Renewals
They will renew your domain and services and charge your credit card even when you have asked them not to, and even after you have transferred you domain away from them.

All of this is totally true. I advise anyone to stay well away from UK2.net, they are just money grabbers.

I’ll post more of my experience when (or if…) I’ve resolved my situation.

Well this time it’s not Pipex’s fault, it’s BT now, and the stupid invention of TPON - Telephony over Passive Optical Network. I’ve been without internet (and thus currently forking out £25 a month to host the most important websites I run on Newnet) for two weeks, and it’s really annoying.

To outline, I’m trying to get Be Unlimited which allows the use of Annex M, allowing higher upload speeds (ideal for running my servers). From the outset, there were problems. When I first ordered, Be said that there was a problem with my line. I rang to/fro between Be and BT trying to understand the problem, eventually getting the blood out of the stone that my line had a TPON tag.

Nevertheless, a few days later I was given an activation date and my activation pack was sent through. Hooray, I thought! Along came 10th July… I got home, no internet. I rang Be, they told me it could be up to 9pm until it gets activated. 9pm came, and went with no sign of internet. Today, I have been told this by Be:

Dear James, I just spoke with BT Openreach and they told me that unfortunately they can not replace the fibre optic line to a copper in that area and they advised me to cancel the order because the fibre optic line is not compatible with broadband orders.

Well that’s just great. I went on the Think Broadband forum (see thread here) to enquire (as well as replying to Be essentially saying, I don’t care, get BT to sort it out pronto). If the case really is that I’m still on TPON and there’s no copper overlays left, then it looks like I’m screwed. That’s just great. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on server equipment recently, which will now be wasted.

However, I’m not letting this lie - I am determined to get Be Unlimited service, and I will do everything I can to make that happen.

And if it doesn’t work, then I will be a failure - a web developer… without internet?

Interesting concept… thanks a bloody lot BT.