Month: December 2008

My casual carelessness and messy computer area finally bit me in the ass tonight, as a loose side panel on my gaming box suddenly fell off, knocked over a bottle of water I was drinking, and splashed it on my beloved old keyboard. Those old models are usually fairly sturdy, but several keys no longer work now.

Fortunately I happened to get a new keyboard with the Dell system I recently got, so after a bit of rewiring (the new one is USB whereas the old one was PS/2, so I had to switch over to my new USB KVM as well) things are working again. It’ll probably be a temporary measure though, as it’s a rather cheap keyboard that just doesn’t feel right. Time to do a bit of research…

(And on the plus side, the new KVM has a much more sensible set of hotkeys using the Scroll Lock key rather than Ctrl. I’d been meaning to switch over to USB for a while now, but had been held back by not wanting to have to replace the old keyboard.)

As I’ve been putting the new system together, there have of course been some minor problems popping up.

The fans in it are still noticeable in a quiet room. It’s not as bad as the old system or an Xbox 360, but it’s still a bit louder than I would have liked. The front also has a BLINDINGLY BRIGHT blue LED that sits right at eye level with me when I’m sitting in the living room chair. It’s like a laser trying to burn a hole in my skull. I’m thinking about moving the box down to the rest of the entertainment centre, so maybe it won’t be as bad from an angle. Otherwise, I’m going to need some duct tape…

I set up the audio cables so that everything gets routed through the Linux box, like it was before, but no sound was coming out. I fiddled with cables and mixer settings and all that for quite a while before finally googling it and discovering that other people had similar problems with Intel HD Audio chipsets under Linux. The solution once again was to go to Realtek’s web site and get their latest drivers. It’s annoying that it didn’t work out of the box, but at least Realtek isn’t one of those companies that tries to pretend Linux doesn’t even exist.

And finally, in order to get those old recordings I mentioned before, I had all sorts of fun trying to get USB enclosures working with one of the old SATA drives. I have three such enclosures, but still have yet to get this part done:

• The first enclosure, from EagleTech, is one that I’ve already mostly destroyed just trying to get the case opened and closed, thanks to a tight fit and lack of grip points. But although it has a SATA data connector, it does not have a SATA power connector, the drive doesn’t have an old Molex power port, and it looks like an adapter between the two is the only little bit of hardware I don’t have in my big pile-o-parts.
• The second enclosure, some generic brand picked up at Future Shop, wouldn’t even power on. Sigh.
• And the third enclosure, from Acomdata, freaked out and generated all sorts of kernel errors when the USB driver tried to put it in high speed mode. It bumped it down to “full speed”, which means USB 1.1 at 12Mbps, and although it behaves at that speed, transferring over 600GB of data at that rate would take a week of nonstop copying.

Maybe I don’t need old TV episodes that badly…

Update: Yay, after a bit more scrounging around I managed to find a Molex-to-SATA power adapter after all and the EagleTech enclosure will work after all. The transfer should now only take about 6 hours instead of a whole week.

I think I have all of the important stuff transferred over to the new system now, and if you’re reading this then I’ve obviously at least gotten the web services working. It’s also recording TV again, after MythTV reinstalled without a hiccup.

The only major remaining task now is transferring all of the old MythTV recordings from the old drives. That’s complicated slightly by the way I had split the filesystem over two drives, in order to use the extra space I got back on an RMA’d drive. I don’t really want to have to attach two USB enclosures to get at the data, but I think I can ‘dd’ one of them onto a local drive, attach it via loopback, and then switch the other drive into the enclosure.

So, the new setup has two internal 1TB drives, as opposed to the old system’s three drives (two 500GB, one 750GB). It’s not that much more total space, but I don’t trust the 1.5TB drives yet and this time I won’t be using RAID-1, so it’ll all be available. One drive is for the OS and /home, and the other will be solely for MythTV recordings, though I’ve set them up as logical volumes in LVM2 so I can shrink or grow them as needed.

One other new thing I’m trying this time around is having /home and swap be encrypted, roughly following this guide. Not that I have any particular national security secrets on here, but I’ve always been the paranoid type and it gives me a little peace of mind. Encryption often slows things down, but there’s a pretty beefy CPU in this box (a 3GHz E8400 that’s faster than my gaming system, even) and there isn’t too much loss. In some simple benchmarks, I get about 82MB/s off of the raw drive and 73MB/s off of the encrypted partition.

The one annoyance is that I have to manually mount /home after a reboot, since automatically doing it would defeat the purpose of encrypting it, but this system shouldn’t reboot too often anyway. Most of the essential 24/7 and MythTV services live outside of /home and don’t really need to be protected anyway.

My new Dell system arrived a bit earlier than expected. It’s not as tiny as some of the other HTPC solutions out there, but here it is compared to the behemoth that it’s replacing:

Despite its size, it’s still a pretty heavy little thing. As you’d expect things are pretty tight inside, with cables just barely reaching the spots they’re supposed to, but it was still fairly straightforward to open it up and put my own drives and tuner card in. The drive bays use this nifty mechanism where instead of being screwed into place, it uses the screws to guide you along channels to slide the drive into place and they’re then held with a plastic locking clip.

Installing Ubuntu was also fairly painless. I opted for a fresh install of 8.10 rather than just directly copying over the old install since some fundamental things have changed (e.g., audio support) and I’m not sure my old install was really set up properly by modern standards anymore. The only problem so far is that the built-in Ethernet driver for this chipset had horrible performance, with a lot of dropped packets. Fortunately Realtek had an updated driver on their site, and it works just fine.

So the new system is up and running, but there’s still a lot of work to bring it back into production…