2 Bit Hacker

I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.
2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.
3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.
4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything to my blag, but since Hindenburg is up and running again and I just upgraded WordPress, I suppose I should actually write something.

Work is going well, with the next couple of months looking to be pretty busy. I’ll be traveling to Virginia next week to rework our servers there. It’s the first time I’ve been to a datacenter other than Boston, so it should be pretty interesting. Sounds like I’ll also be going to Chicago and San Jose, but I don’t know the details on that quite yet.

On the home front, I’ve got a couple of projects I’ve been working on, a NanoBSD based home router using a MiniITX board I’ve had sitting around for the past couple of years, and I recently purchased an inexpensive Dell system which I plan to use as a Home Theater PC running Ubuntu. I’m planning to rig it up to pull shows off of my TiVo and automatically transcode them into formats suitable for watching from my Treo or iPod. Should be pretty neat once I get it set up and running.

I’ve also been studying to get my amateur radio license. I’ve been taking practice tests on my Treo using EggsHam and am getting to the point of only getting 2 or 3 questions wrong per test. The next testing session in the area is on June 16^th, so I’m hoping to go down then, get my license, then head to the MIT Flea on the 17^th and maybe find a handheld transceiver.

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occasional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintenance roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rather liked in Merrimack. Unfortunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

It’s been a fairly geeky weekend for me so far. Friday night I helped Jason get Hindenburg back on it’s feet after an OS upgrade, which allowed us to finally start using the two 250GB Serial ATA drives in it. So far we’re only using one, the idea being to mirror the drives for a bit of data redundancy. It seems to be mostly working again, though some people are having minor issues with various web things. It was a fairly major upgrade, so I guess this is to be expected.

Yesterday I ended up taking my gaming system apart, originally to just put another hard drive in it, but I ended up spending some time to get the cabling a little bit neater, and I think it looks a lot better now. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to have enough power to spin both hard drives when I start playing a 3D heavy game, so I think I’m going to need to throw a bigger power supply into it.

That got me thinking about all the other hardware I’ve got lying around here, and I started coming up with a plan to reallocate some stuff so everybody is happier. I figure I’ll take the guts of the HTPC and make a new computer for Delia, since it’s faster than both her current comps, then we can move her old Dell back to her office. I’ve got an older Shuttle box from work that I think I’ll put the PVR card in, and use that as an HTPC for a bit. Not sure what I’ll do with all the leftovers at that point. I’ve been meaning to build a home storage/print server, so maybe I’ll throw some stuff toward that. I should still have enough parts after that to build one more system, maybe I’ll build it and donate it to someplace for Christmas.

Still haven’t gotten the OpenBSD box in place as a router, and now that there’s a new version of OpenBSD out, I think I’ll redo the box from scratch again. It wasn’t that hard to get stuff installed on it. Just need to actually get it done, since I’m sick of the Netgear thing crashing all the time, and I’d like to be able to do some bandwidth management for the VoIP line and whatnot.

Amazingly, I actually did some of the stuff I was talking about in my last post. Shadow, the Home Theater PC, is now running Windows XP instead of Linux. I played around a bit with the SnapStream demo software, and I think I’m going to buy the card/remote/software bundle once I have some spare cash lying around. I also reformatted Vincent, my gaming box, and it’s been running Linux with the 2.6.6 kernel stably for about a week now. I’ve started playing Neverwinter Nights again, this time under Linux, and it seems to actually run better than when I was playing in Windows. I still need to get around to reinstalling WinXP on that box again, as there are some games that don’t want to run very well in Linux, even with the Transgaming version of Wine. Ah well.

I’ve also been thinking of the home router project. Rather than getting an EPIA CL board right away, I’ve been thinking of using my old K6-2 350 board and throwing OpenBSD on it. It’s mostly just to get used to using OpenBSD as a router/firewall, since I’d like to switch the firewalls at work to it. Maybe I’ll get to that in the next few nights. This will be replacing my Sparcstation 10 running NetBSD, which is doing a fine job as a home router, but the hard drive makes annoying noises.

Just a list of stuff I would like to do computer-wise at the moment. Most of them will probably never get done due to lack of money or time, but I can still dream, right?

• Get a VoIP phone for home. Currently looking at VoicePulse, which has some pretty good rates, like unlimited local and 200 minutes long distance for $15/mo. I might actually do this in the near future. I’d like to build my own voice system thing with Asterisk, but then I’d need to buy more expensive parts to use analog phones again, or buy VoIP phones.
• Build a home router. Been thinking of this for a while. I’m currently using Interceptor, my sparcStation 10 for this, but it’s hard drive is noisy and it’s extremely slow, so I can’t really play around with Snort on it. Ideally, I’d like to build a small box using a VIA EPIA CL board, but they’re kindof expensive. I might build up one of my current systems to do it first, just taking out the hard drive and putting in a flash device. Probably going to be putting OpenBSD on this one.
• Reformat my HTPC and put Windows XP on it instead of Linux. I’ve had way too many issues trying to get Linux to get decent TV output, so I’m going to let Windows have a shot at it. Also, I’ve been eyeing a bundle from SnapStream that includes their TiVo-like software, their RF remote control, and a Hauppauge TV tuner with MPEG encoder. I’ll see how it goes. I don’t really watch enough TV to justify it at the moment, but I would like to be able to catch a few things.
• Reformat my WinXP box. It needs it anyway, it’s got a bunch of funky things going on, so it probably needs a good brainwashing. I think I’m going to try dual booting it with Linux again now that the 2.6.6 kernel is out, along with some patches to make it more stable (hopefully) on nForce2 boards (which I have.)
• Redoing the I-Opener. I never really got it to the point I wanted to before, so I’m thinking of taking a stab at it again. I found a neat CF board that’s the same size and shape as a 2.5” laptop hard drive, so I was thinking of replacing the drive in the I-Opener with a flash card, so as to cut down on noise. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to put the stock heatsink back on, then it would run fanless. I’d like to be able to use it as a basic terminal for checking email and doing IRC and AIM.

That’s all I can think of for now. I still want to do the car computer at some point, but my bank accounts are telling me to wait for a bit on it. There’s also the 1 terabyte storage server I’d like to build, just for the fun of it, but again, those drives get expensive. Maybe later on in the year.