MAXimum Computing

2011-09-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

For about a week now I have been trying to make sense of HP dropping the Touchpad like a hot potatoe. Why HP would kill Palm after buying it and raking off WebOS is still making me scratch my head. Noted : The HP slate (which still appears to be in production and available) is truly a NOGO device with Windows 7 but the Touch pad with the touch stone technology and WebOS and the R&D muscle of HP was seen to be the only true contender to the Apple iPad / iPhone jaugernaut!

Frequently I get into discussions about Android with people and as a technocrat, I like the semi-Opensource origins of Android as a platform but there is a such thing as too open. It is very difficult to all things to all people and without being married to a hardware platform, it is difficult to become a market leader on such a broad level. Just ask the Linux Penguin.

I love Linux and have been a fan since the days of the Slackware Floppy drive distribution but not even I (eUnix aka The Magnanimous Computron) can decide on one flavor over the other. Yes, I use Ubuntu , Kubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD and even Puppy Linux but I also run HP/UX, AIX, OpenSolaris, Windows 7 , Vista, OSX and iOS in my home network in search of the elusive homogeneous environment.

I have even ported Android to the PC but it will suffer from Linux Syndrome until they marry it with a hardware platform and invoke quality control like what Apple has done!

Maybe this is what Google is attempting to do with the purchase of Motorola and as I was reading through my news RSS feeds I found this article that may give some insight as to what HP may be planning with the trash of the TouchPad.

Possible Responses to Motorola-Google Merger

Proceed to item #2

2. Amazon and Hewlett-Packard team up via WebOS
Google, Apple, and Amazon have increasingly become competitors in the wider online world. Each of these companies now offers cloud-based content, and they're vying for consumer loyalty to their services. Devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google's Android devices provide that link to the cloud the services. And as portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets replace desktop and laptop computers, the battle for consumers hearts and minds will be fought in the mobile market.

While Amazon and Google are rivals when it comes to cloud services, they are also budding partners. Amazon is rumored to be developing tablets using the Google Android platform. But Google's purchase of Motorola may threaten this relationship with Amazon. And as a result, force Amazon to look for an alternative to Android.

Hewlett-Packard could be the perfect partner, according to ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow. HP, which bought Palm for its WebOS mobile operating system, hasn't seen much success with its first tablet, the TouchPad. But the WebOS software has actually won a lot of praise from experts. Perlow thinks that HP should cut a deal with Amazon.

He said that HP could continue to advance the WebOS technology, while leveraging Amazon's sales and distribution network for the tablets and phones that use the operating system. But more importantly, Amazon could provide the cloud services and content for the WebOS devices, including books, video, music, storage, and e-books. Currently, one of WebOS's biggest problems is that it doesn't have any content relative to Apple and Google.

On the hardware side, Amazon already has lots of experience partnering with Asian device makers for its Kindle e-readers.

Amazon could serve as the primary brand for the WebOS devices, giving HP much-needed marketing and distribution for its products. It could be a win-win for each company. But Perlow points out that this also means that Amazon would have to abandon or curtail its existing strategy for its Amazon Appstore for Android and its plans to build Android tablets.

With only a few weeks on the market the buzz amist the masses was that the product was good but everyone was waiting for the price to come down a little bit. Now where will you find a new artist, sport figure, public speaker or anyone who will try to enter a market and demand top billing.

The net buzz was that HP was not satisfied with the number of sales they were generating for the product and conventional wisdom is that they should have entered the market at #3 and allowed their popularity to swell up and quickly build up the web store.

2010-10-16T04:23:00.001-07:00

My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Part 1b : Infrastructure Decisions

Well, after a long week in the workplace, it is time to kick back, watch a little SciFi and play with my toys. So back to my project. Unfortunately for you I am going to take a little detour and then go back to go over the details as I got a little case of impatience and went ahead and go my server up an running.

I found out that my first candidate machine [Compaq Deskpro EN] actually had a PIII processor which was about 500Mhz. but it only had about 384 MB of ram. so I started digging through my boxes of memory to see if I could find some Compaq compatible ram that were 256 MB. The board only has 3 slots so I can only hope to get 768 MB. of ram.

The recommended minimum is 512 MB as I have opted to use the FreeNAS product since I have played with it years ago and thought that it had potential for such a frugal geek that I am.

Now I want to tell you that my primary motivation for choosing this project was because I WANTED to have SAN fabric in my home network for the massive amounts of data and files that I have but I just could not find reasonable used products on eBay and I don't think EMC sells used Symmetrix for home use. ;) There for the next best thing would be to institute NAS and since I have a Gigabit network in my basement datacenter ;) I felt that I could get reasonable performance. I also did not want to be tied to using a dedicated OS platform like Windows as I have a mixed network with Mac OSX, OS9, Windows (2000,2003,XP,Vista, W7,95/98), Li nux (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Puppy, SLES, RHEL,), UNIX (AIX,Solaris,OpenSolaris,HP/UX, True64) and even some unusual OS such as Plan9 and Haiku. :)

I also wanted to setup iSCSI initiators to be able to emulate the same functionality that you get with SAN fabric like SRDF (which is why I wanted to do twin server but we are not there yet and will be a later project). So for now a single place where I can backup up my various usb external drive to a single place where I can implement raid and have connectivity from various machines regardless of OS platform is my goal. If I am able to integrate my XBOX 360, WII and PS2 and Dreamcasts will be a plus!

ASIDE : I also have a couple of Apple IIes that I play with from time to time so if anyone has any old Apple Ethernet cards that they want to donate, just send me a not here and I will be happy to take them off of your hands. ;) ;).

Now, I downloaded FreeNAS and installed it on the smaller 4 GB IDE hardrive that was on the machine and left the 40 Gig disk to use to server up. I then pulled out 6 18 Gig SCSI Ultra disk that I had retired from service a couple of years ago but still had data on them. The machine had a Fireport40 SCSI controller in it which I knew would be fine for these test.

I was curious to see if FreeNAS would recognize it and when I fired it up, it picked it right up and immediately I heard the awful sound of one of the SCSI disk clicking.....click.....click.....click. So I knew that I had one that was bad.

Here are a couple of pictures of my drives. I will update them with some better pictures soon.

Note : Don't pay attention to the dates as my little camera needed to be reset! :)

After I removed the bad drive, I was able to fire it up and one of my volumes had one of my older music libraries on it so I decided to set it up as a CIFS/SMB file share and also as an iTunes media share which went very well. I was able to have 6 PC (Windows, MAC and Linux) streaming tunes from the same share. NO dice on the xbox 360 as it only likes Window Media server.

I am going to close this out for now, as I will come back to update this blog and continue with my little diversion as I try to resolve a couple of technical issues and get the media server setup the way I want and then I will go back and add the infrastructure details.

Eunix

2010-10-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Part 1 : Infrastructure Decisions

After searching around on the web for storage solutions, I have decided to go for a NAS solution because it is the least expensive. I already have a WHS (Windows Home Server) setup in my environment (that I will recycle later for reasons that I will explain later) but I have decided to go with FreeNAS for reasons that I will go into detail later when I have time to post the supporting reference links.

Today I want to outline the options of computers that I am going to use for this project.

I have severs older Compaq racmount servers with Xeon processors and loads of SCSI disk but they just suck too much power and most people won't have them laying around at home. I also have a bucket load of older Pentium and AMD class desk tops that may be fine but I don't feel like digging through boxes of old RAM to find matched sets.

I do howerver have two older Compaq Deskpro Pentium II towers that I used as servers (up until last year) that I have already modifed the cases to support additional SCSI drives inside the cases. I also have three small HP/Compaq presario desktops that have more flexible cases that I can upgrade the microATX motherboards to Quad Core processors to use for virtual environments so I will hold on to those for another project.

My favor with the old Deskpros is that the back end bus has very good thru-put and even though they are the older slot Pentium II machines, they are still viable for what they did.

Here is a picture of the two cases. This is a solid case that I can expand later and mod the case and upgrade the guts but I will use them as is for right now!.

Ok let me pull these things out an put them on the bench to get ready! The next thing that I am going to look at is changing out the disk controller. I already have some nice SCSI w and wo raid but SATA and SAS drives look very promising. I would like to have each machine to support 3-5 TB in a single cabinet.

eUNIX

2010-10-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

My Ultimate Home Storage Solution.....

Problem Definition and Goals

Quite frankly, the problem here is that I have a basement full of aged technology that I don't know what to do with. Many of the computers, servers and stacks of hard drives are still useful and I am one to squeeze every ounce of use out of what I have for my money.

So now I want to create a home storage solution that I can use with my Windows machines, My Macs, My Linux boxes, My Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and various other off brand operating systems. I also want to have a totally integrated solution that works with my Wii, my XBOX 360s, my ITunes libraries and my DVD collection and my GAZILLION photos.

In my quest for an ultimate HOME solution that can also suffice as my work playground, I have decided to start with a universal storage solution. At one time I wanted to pick up an old MTI SCSI storage array and secretly dreamed that my EMC rep would donate an old Symmetrix frame and a set of Brocade switches to my cause. But alas, the cost of HBA would keep me from buying that new BUSA next year! :)

I don't want to create a monolithic solution that will tie me into Windoze world but I want to be as universal as I can and re-use some of the older motherboards and drive cabinets that I have!

My goal is to find a solution that will fit my tight little penny pinching fingers and will also be functional and provide redundancy. I am NOT seeking to have the fastest storage solution (as it may not be required ) but if it turns out that it is not that costly to do so, then I will do it.

Hopefully with your help, the solution that we come up with will be a base line that you can do also and if you are able to base your solution off of a core-i7 then great! For me, if I can do this with an old 6502 Apple IIe....I Will! :)

Goal Summary

Design a low cost home storage solution that is vendor neutral that will allow for the re-use of older technology that you may have tucked away in your closet! :)

eUNIX

2010-10-09T20:12:00.000-07:00

First a little blog clean-up!

Before I get started or should I say re-started with this blog, I want to apologize to those who have posted comments whether I posted them or not for taking a look at my blog. Those of you who know me, know that I am extremely busy and that I have quite a few irons in the fire.

After long hours at work, helping other and seeing about family, it sometimes difficult post in my blog.

I also have to make a confession! When I started this blog I took for granted the amount of time and work that would be involved. I thought that it would be easy and quite similar to writing in my daily journal (which I don't do every day :( either). The good thing about a journal, you can mispell, scratch out and if anyone reads it after you are dead and gone....who gives a crap anyway!

Well such is not the case with a blog because you want readers and you also want to have information that will captivate them and have your audience grow with you!. I also created a secondary blog where I could re-write some of the on-goings in my corporate life into a story form but decided to abandon that because It was starting to look a little too much like some of those shows that we look at on TV and we would not want that would we! ;) ;).

Well, as I was passionate about some high tech things and wanted to share with you, I am going to try and re-start this blog with a slightly different flavor. This time I hope to talk about things that you want to hear about and I am going to encourage some interaction where we can make this Journey together.

I also have to make another confession that I was highly distracted by that thing called Facebook with Farmville and that Cafe thingy. Hell, my sister sent me the invitation to that Cafe game and as you may know, I had to get my COOK ON because I just could not let my little sister out cook me!

Well, I am going to close out this "Header Blog" and the next post that you see will be the beginning of a new era for Maximum Computing!

Eunix

2010-06-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

HP Slate Update (Cancelled)

Google and HP Creating Android Tablets

Ok, I had to do a little catching up. It looks like HP canceled the Slate project (which was rumored to run Windows 7) after the acquisition of Palm and is now working on Android Tablets with Google. This should be a pretty cool device but I think WebOS would be pretty cool also. I wonder if ChromeOS will only be for netbooks?

2010-06-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago I posted some links in regards to news article about the iPad launch. It seems to have been a big hit with sales skyrocketing through the roof. As other companies ready to launch competing devices, I see competition coming from both the PC market and the Phone market.

One such challenger, I find to be quite interesting will be brought on by HP. As many of your know tablet computers have been out for a while but have only found marginal success. I had the opportunity to repair an IBM tablet of a friend of mine and while I had it, I too the opportunity to take it for a spin and I found it to be quit cool but there was nothing that was compelling that made me want to get one. The form factor is so much like a lappy, I was not taken by the fact that I could use it like a clip board and I found the pen interface technology needing a little bit of work.

Granted this was yester-year's technology and what will make the iSlate and other iPad competitors is the new finger gesture technology and there will be numerous devices that will come from the mobile market.

Recently HP also purchased Palm and at one time I was a Palm fan. I have a couple of older devices (i.e. Palm V,VX, III, LifeDrive) and a couple of Treos. I really did like the V/Vx and the Life Drive was cool but my discust came with Palm's lack of support and ever shrinking keyboard. When Palm came out with the Web OS, I just could not take the every shrinking form factor. I hope that now with the R&D of HP, WebOS and the iSlate, we can get a set of products that will give us scalability to compete with Google.

Now that I put in about 1.5 cents, I would like to hear from you your thoughts in regards to the converging markets and devices? I see Google and Android pushing the angle of multiple devices, Open Source driving from the phone platform up to the PC market, possibly HP driving from the PC, iSlate market down to the mobile phone with WebOS both with Apple in their sights who is radiating outward from the iPad with iPhone / Mac OS 4.

Let me hear from you.

Thanks,

2010-01-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Yahoo - Finally something to write about! The new Apple iPad

I will follow up with my prediction on how this will impact the industry later today! :)

Here are a couple of good article to read if you haven't found them already.

CNET : Apple iPad tablet makes debut (live blog)

CNET : Apple's iPad tablet touches a nerve in Redmond

2009-11-19T07:16:00.001-08:00

Windows 7 Ultimate Migration/Upgrade.

Background Information

I wanted to start out with a little background information on the system that I am upgrading and how I am going to proceed. The system is an older Dell D810 with 2 Gigs of Ram. This machine has been running XP-Pro and has been heavily used. I would have preferred an upgrade option from XP to W7 because I have a lot of documents and tools all over the place. I primarily used this machine as a supplimental machine for my puny COE PC. I upgraded the hard disk to 100GB 7200RPM. I bought the machin refurbished and it came with the WUXGA screen so I got a lot of realestate for the great price that I paid for the machine. To my regret, I exercised the warranty before it expired for Dell to replace the screen because it got a couple of lines in it. Dell replaced it with a WXGA+ screen (something like that) which dropped me down 1 resolution step. Not much difference but I just felt a little pimped and did not want to go through the ordeal of another repair call.

Well, I had a blank 40 G drive hanging around so I have popped it in and have attached my old drive as a USB external. I am not sure of how I am going to approach this but I hope that I can find a way to move over some of my applications in place. I keep redundant backups and copies of install media, but I have to be honest with you folks, My software filing system has much to be desired and I don't want to re-install a bunch of stuff, much of which has been patched and upgraded from the initial installs.

Well, that's it for now. Let me get my install on!

Eunix

2009-11-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

Windows 7 Revolution

Ok. It is time for the slumbering giant to get back in action here! With Windows 7 having been very impressive, it is time for me to do some upgrades around the house here!. Currently I have a little bit of everything...Ubuntu, Open Suse, Puppy, Solaris 11 (x86), HP/UX 11.23, AIX , Vista 64 , Vista 32, and lots of XP.

Unlike all of the people that I see in the forums who have ordered new machines with W7, I squeeze every ounce of computing out o my machines and I am excited about W7 because it breathes new life back into older machines. I was about to get me a quad core laptop but don't need it now. Not for a lappy. And I broke down and bought me an Xbox 360 so I am upgrading ye olde home network to Gigabit and will save my coins to a new server build core i7 and I am going to build out some NAS storage just to keep a few of the older machine running until the wheels fall off!

Hang in there with me as the first project that I am going to share with you is how in the hell do I upgrade/migrate my favorite XP Dell D810 to W7 and keep my software in tact!

Eunix

2007-03-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

Out of Beta and More!

It has been several months since I have posted in this blog but it has been because I have been very busy. Those of you who have seen some of my work elsewhere then you know that I am a pretty busy guy but I have to give shout out to Google and Blogger for this consolidation. This combination will make it easier for me to blog more regularly.

As a follow up from my last blog...I have to say that I am pretty happy with Vista. I would not go out an buy it just to upgrade my PC (XP is just fine). I some cases I am still running 2000 and will not change but since I have MSDN/Technet and a new SUN Ultra 20 with a dual core Opteron (next gen) Processor, (Which I won at the Open Solaris Conference BTW) I have to say that it is pretty slick.

It is not perfect and seems like XP on steroids but I do like the new AERO engine. I have also installed it on one of my test laptops (AMD Athlon64 3200) and the performance is not that stellar but do-able.

I am not more convinced than ever that the Software companies are in cahoots with the Hardware companies to keep you buying more stuff. My machines today do no more than my old and favorite IBM Microchannel 386 Server (Geez I miss that machine!)

The same is with the web. Back in the days of DARPA the web was a wonderful thing but with all of the extra media and junk that graces our web pages, you have to buy more bandwidth!

On a more serious note, I would like to hear from any of you who would be interested in pulling together to form a techie/engineering group for the purpose of competing for some of the X Prizes!

Chow for now!

eUNIX

2006-06-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

Windows Vista

(First Impressions)

Being a UNIX person, you may think that this blog comes with the usual biggotted Windows trashing, but I assure you that I don't quite feel that way. There is a place for Windows, Linux, UNIX, OSX and any other operating system.

As you take this journey with me through the recently released Beta 2 version of Vista, I will point out the good, the bad and the ugly. If you choose to comment on any of my comments, I want you to know right not that I have a few rules.

(1)Do not bring biggotted techno-babble that is not based on true merit. There is enough of that and you can post that crap to the c-net talkback forums if that is what you want to do.

(2) No Flaming.
(3) No advertising for college degree programs or things like that.

BASE

I downloaded both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista Beta 2 and burned them to DVDs.
The 32 bit version will be installed on a Dell D810 with a 2.1Ghz processor and 1.2 Gigs of Ram. The 64 bit version will be installed on a eMachines M6811 or a Gateway 7422GX with a Mobile Athlon 64 bit processor.

I did not want to use a desktop because more people are moving to using a laptops so I figured that these two machines would be good candidates. They are solid performers and as I have extra laptops to test on, my desktop machines and servers are in full use.

The Installation (32 Bit on Dell D810)

My first installation is on the Dell D810 and the 32 bit version of Vista. This installation took about 2 hours. I can not be exact of the time because I put a nice blotch of paint on the wall at the same time and watched it dry while the installation continued. I may have nodded off for a short period of time but finally the installation completed.

I have to say that this is the longest OS, installation that I have every done. Installing AIX or HP/UX does not take this long even with patching after the initial install. (Now a mksysb recovery may take that long if you have a 74G rootvg! ).

All that I can say is that I hope the final version improves the installation because it takes too long in is impractical.

Installation GRADE : D+

Initial Asthetics

The new look of Windows under Vista is really good. The system automatically recognized the maximum screen resolution and the fonts are crisp and clean. The start button is now a nice circular icon which fits nicely on any size resolution. I like the shadowing of the windows and the large clock widge is very readable and clear.

You will find that the right side of the screen has a transparent panel that holds all of your gadgets, widgets that are good to keep on your desktop. The slide show picture viewer, Clock and Internet Explore boxes come standard on your initial boot up. You can also place a calculator, CPU Meter, Currency Converter, RSS News Feed viewer and watcher, Sticky Notes, Timer, Stock Ticker and Number puzzle.

You can download additional gadgets (widgets) from Microsoft and probably some third party vendors eventually. For those of you who would like to get this type of functionality from your current windows installation, you can thank the Konfabulator project that was subsequently bought out by Yahoo and is now known as Yahoo Widgets.

I have now moved the start bar from the bottom to the top because it makes more sense to have "drop down" menues come from the top.

I will have to explore the primary start menu panels more. Besides the sluggishness of the OS, I do like the look and feel. It is a very good copy of Mac's OS X.

Aesthetics GRADE : A+

Eunix

2005-06-22T05:48:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have seen many reviews on hardware and software. Much of it is geared towards selling units, and it is often filled with technical statistics that mean absolutely nothing in real world performance.

In my opinion, we have hit a plateau where marketing generates sales more so than good olde engineering. Being a permanent member of the Geek Squad and overall cheapster, I have repaired countless machines for friends, and found many ways to MAXAMIZE an investment.

I am starting this blog in order to help you do the same. You Don't have to pay a lot for the computing power that your need! I have given away probably a couple of million dollars worth of equipment (street value) that just needed an inexpensive shot in the arm to people who could not afford to go out an buy the latest FXTHQ M1000 Plus Super machine.

The purpose of this blog will be to dispell the myths and give you the skinny on what a real value is and how to make your machines run longer and faster.

The opinions expressed here will be my own and will be based on real world experiences. I challenge you to challenge me as a move from one extreme to the other. PCs to Midrange. Sorry no Mainframe info will be posted here.

So sit back relax and participate!

Magnanimous Computron