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Month: January 2016

[Personal] Turns out I didn’t actually need a new NAS

January 17, 2016
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drobo_nas_frontplateOn Friday, I (well, the company), purchased a brand new Synology DS1815+ 8 Bay Desktop NAS (Network Attached Storage) device as the 4-bay Drobo (non-networked) storage device we were using for backups/file storage just seemed to be eating through hard drives – every few months, a red light would appear next to a drive and so we replaced it… The Drobo is quite slow (USB 2 only – so to network it, it has to go from USB 2 to a RaspberryPi to the network: maximum of 20MB/s transfers if we were lucky).

As you can see from the diagram, a “steady red light” indicates “Add A Drive Here”. If the Drobo is fully populated with drives, do you:
a) Take that as an indication the Drobo no longer recognises the drive in that position for whatever reason (not properly inserted, drive failed etc). After all, if the light was blinking, it’ll indicate “Drive failure, replace”
OR
b) The drive is actually fine, but just needs replacing with a higher capacity drive.

For around 6 drive replacements, I’ve thought it was (a) – but it turns out, it is (b)…. So, I could have perhaps saved myself/the company over £1,000 in buying a new NAS and drives for it (okay, I perhaps couldn’t as the Drobo has got 3x4TB drives and 1x3Tb drives in it, so it would have only been a short term storage solution – the Synology does a lot more besides!)… If the “Drive capacity” lights at the bottom of the Drobo flashed/turned red or the drobom status reported “Drive at capacity, replace with *larger* drive” (instead of “Replace drive”), it would have been helpful…

Oh well, at least we have a file store, backup storage solution (with synchronisation to Amazon Glacier), in-house cloud-sync system, media service and a central “single store” for all our files instead of 4 different Drobo volumes….

[Techy] Directly connecting a NAS to a Windows 7 machine

January 15, 2016
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I’ve just purchased a Synology DS1815+ 8 Bay Desktop NAS Enclosure
(Network Attached Storage) device to replace an ageing 4-bay Drobo non-NAS device (well, I made it a NAS via a RaspberryPi) and I’ve started to transfer data across to it.

However, despite the fact it is sitting next to my Windows 7 Professional machine, the data would need to travel out of my GigE network port to the 500Mbps TP-LINK AV500 Two-Port Powerline Adapter that my Win7 machine and the Synology NAS is plugged into, travel down to the router (connected to another Powerline adapter), be routed back up through the electrical system, back through the same Powerline adapter to connect to the Synology’s own GigE Lan port…. Because of that, a transfer of about 500Gb was estimated to take in excess of 14 hours….

So how to speed it up? Well, my PC has 2 LAN Ports and the Synology DS1815+ has 4 LAN ports so I should be able to directly cable them together shouldn’t I? Well, I should – but when I did that, I lost all network connectivity on my machine (I’ve got no idea if the NAS lost it as well as I couldn’t see it’s status). But thanks to the lovely Kat (full disclaimer: I married her 😉 ), there is a solution and it’s got a 14hour+ transfer down to about 1 hour and transferring data over 100MB per second (it would probably be faster, but the Synology is still checking the new disks). So what’s the secret I hear you ask?

Continue Reading[Techy] Directly connecting a NAS to a Windows 7 machine

Plans for 2016

January 2, 2016
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Well, here’s my plans for 2016 – let’s see what works out.

  • Blog more. In 2015, I made just 4 blog posts which is a bit crap and I want to address that and provide more high quality content which leads me on to…
  • Aim to release a substantial bit of free open-source content at least every two months. Whether this is a PHP library, a YouTube video, a tutorial series on this blog and details of a talk – it’s up to me. Just something to help “give back”. In December (just), I released the PHP Packagist package Bairwell/Cors and have another piece of work in development for January.
  • Get enough Patreon supporters that I can afford to spend all my time making and supporting open source software and content.
  • As part of the Patreon, have a public list of where my money comes from and where it goes – I spend around $90 per month on supporting other Patreon creators and donate around the same again each month to various projects/organisations that have, in some way, helped me or that I like the thoughts of.
  • Present a talk at a user group
  • Attend a user group/conference at least every other month (for February, I’m already booked in for the “Be a brilliant people developer” conference on the 12th and The PHP UK Conference on the 18th and 19th).
  • Read more. If 2015, I read less than a dozen books – yes, I’ve been getting content/enjoyment from other source (mobile games, YouTube videos etc), I but I want to get back properly reading – I used to get through at least a book a week, but it just really stopped dead around July.
  • Move all websites from our (getting on quite old) Dedicated Server to individual virtual machines and consolidate the sites/resources/admin.
  • Get certified in something.
  • Improve my health/general wellbeing
  • Increase the size of the household one way or another
  • Try and remember the mock Latin phrase “Non illegitimae carborundum”

Quick review of 2015

January 1, 2016
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Well, 2015 happened.

For us, it was quite a mixed bag. Good news was that in May, we managed to purchase a house instead of renting (after 7 years) and in July we added a little friend to our family – Max the chihuahua. The bad news front was that in September our cat was found to be suffering from hyperthroidism and bad teeth and needed quite a bit of dental work. She’s on pills now, but still not quite herself. And then in October, my Grandmother past away after trying to beat cancer for around 2 years. And there were quite a few other things on the bad news front which I don’t want to make public (some of them related), but meh – it’s been a year of ups and downs.

On the blogging front, it was quite a crap year – just 4 posts throughout the year (I’m hoping to change that for this year) – since there were just 12 in 2014 and 36 is 2013, I really need to stop the decline now 😉

Here’s looking forward to 2016 and hoping that some (if not all) of the plans I’m putting together come off.