Getting Dirty

Ubuntu 9.04 was just released, so I upgraded over the weekend and it went fairly smoothly except for two old friends: the sound drivers had to be rebuilt from the ones from Realtek’s site like I had to do before, and Amarok.

Oh, Amarok… This Ubuntu release includes the 2.0 version for the first time, but as far as I can tell, it’s actually a huge step back. There’s an all-new, pretter interface, but a lot of functionality seems to be missing, or is so well-hidden that I couldn’t figure out how to use it. In particular, all of my carefully-crafted smart playlists were gone, with no apparent way to recreate them. It also didn’t help that it kept crashing on me, especially while trying to import my old collection.

I was disappointed enough in it that I tried out some other programs as well, like RhythmBox, but they didn’t even recognize my iPod, since support apparently hasn’t been added for 4th gen Nanos in the library it uses yet.

In the end I removed Amarok 2 entirely and actually went back and completely rebuilt Amarok 1.4.10 from source. It’s literally been years now since I compiled a major program like this manually (just minor utilities), and it took a while just to figure out what it required and get the packages needed to satisfy all of the dependencies, but I finally seem to have Amarok working again.

A Sneaky Bastard

I’ll be trying to set up Internet access for my mother soon, so I went out today to buy a wireless router for her. But as I was researching, I wondered hey, why should she get a better router than me, since most of them are Wireless N and gigabit nowadays and mine wasn’t. So I ended up buying a new one for myself instead and she can have my old one. Hey, she won’t know the difference…

I wound up picking up the Linksys WRT310N, since it’s the easiest one to get hold of around here that’s still hackable. I would have preferred something like the WRT610N, with its dual radios and USB support, but it’s still a work-in-progress for custom firmwares. The 310N’s not supported in Tomato though, so I’m back to using DD-WRT instead. It doesn’t really matter now that DD-WRT has bandwidth monitoring as well, since that was why I switched to Tomato way back when.

The performance is definitely improved over the old one. Wireless, I can get around 40-50 Mbps, versus maybe 25-30 before. And wired I can do 160-200 Mbps, which isn’t coming close to maxing out the Ethernet speed like I could before, but is still a decent improvement over the old 100 Mbps. I might actually be bottlenecked by the SSH encryption speed there. It’ll take a while to see how the reliability is, though. It’s not on the 5 GHz band since I need compatibility with 11g, so I’m still subject to all the same old possible interference. It’ll be nice if I can reliably stream MythTV…

It Only Slightly Sucks Now

I think I finally figured out the problem I was having with syncing my iPod via Amarok. The key seems to be that some other KDE services need to be running in order for the iPod to be fully identified properly. Without those services, it shows up but gets treated like a generic, unidentified iPod and there’s no history for it to sync against.

The thing that made it inconsistent was that I wasn’t always running the full KDE environment. Sometimes I’d export it via X11 to my laptop, and after the recent reinstall I was running Gnome instead of KDE for a while. I should be okay as long as I keep using KDE as my desktop and always run it at the console, which shouldn’t be too big a deal as it’s about the only thing I use the console for nowadays anyway.

The Spam Rolls On

Subject: Be satisfied for life!

You know, most DMs fulfill that kind of Wish request by doing something like killing you instantly…

Subject: Enter the New Year without ED dysfunction

ATM machine. PIN number. ED dysfunction.

Subject: Your dream is reality You have 70% cut off in our software shop

Er, which 70% of me do you intend to cut off?

Subject: Amaze your gf with your new dimension

Hey, I have enough trouble navigating through three dimensions already.

Subject: Embarassed over what you have in your pants?

I swear, officer, I have no idea how that squirrel got in there.

(En)Closure

After all the trouble I had with various hard drive enclosures earlier, I’ve finally found one that works well: the Antec MX-100. No problems at all with reliability, speed, or physical construction quality with it so far.

I ordered two, so that I can finally put my offsite backup plan into effect. They’ll each have the same size hard drive in them, formatted as an encrypted filesystem and set up to be the same mount point, but only one of them will be hooked up at a time. The daily backup script will sync everything to the drive, and then once a month or so I’ll disconnect the drive, swap in the other one, and take the old drive to the office and stick it in a desk drawer. That way I’ll be covered even if fire, theft, or some other catastrophic event takes out my system and the currently-attached backup drive at the same time.

Unfortunately they only support SATA drives, and I still have a couple of 500GB and 750GB PATA drives that are still perfectly good, so maybe I’ll throw them into the gaming box. Or put one in one of the sucky old enclosures and hook it up to the PS3. Or play Frisbee…

Musical Crisis

I’ve been using Amarok as my music collection manager for a while now, and it works well for that purpose, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated at trying to use it to sync to my iPod.

The problem is that it often doesn’t seem to recognize when the same device is attached again, and fails to sync back any updated ratings, play counts, or last.fm updates. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s frustrating to spend two weeks using my iPod and then hook it back up only to have it completely throw out all the updates made through it over those weeks. A huge chunk of my library is still unrated, and I’d much rather rate them on-the-fly as I’m listening to them than to have to sit down and go through the whole list one-by-one.

Amarok just seems to have a poor model of MP3 players as persistent devices, treating them more as just arbitrary filesystems to copy songs to. Playlist syncing is confusing as well, with it being unclear what the functional difference is between ‘Transfer Playlist’ and ‘Sync Playlist’, playlists queued for syncing disappearing for unknown reasons between sessions, podcasts requiring more manual management than expected, the inability to limit playlists by device size…

I’m tempted to just revert back to doing proper iTunes syncing, but then that puts the management software on a different machine than the actual library, scanning of files is less automatic, there’d be a ton of metadata lost or needing to be manually transferred… Ugh.

Karma

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.)

Unenclosed

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.

Back Online

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.

Beauty And The Beast

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…

Back…Sort Of

My old Linux box keeled over and died on me on the weekend, I’ve narrowed the problem down to either a bad motherboard or CPU, and it’s far too old to bother replacing individual parts on it, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered a replacement system. I’m kind of tired of assembling my own systems, for once.

It’s hard to find something that perfectly suits my needs: I wanted something that was small, quiet, capable of recording TV, could have lots of storage, had DVI or HDMI video output, and a powerful enough CPU to do some video work (potentially playing HD in the future). There are a lot of options that fulfill *some* of those requirements, but not *all* of them. The Dell Studio Hybrid lacked eSATA or FireWire 800, so storage would have been slow. The HP Slimline only had 100Mbit Ethernet. The Mac Mini is getting old and a potential refresh is too far away. And so on…

I eventually settled on the Dell Vostro 220s. The base spec isn’t perfect, and it’s a bit bigger than the Studio Hybrid, but the inadequacies can be overcome via the PCI/PCIe slots. I upgraded the video card and ordered a low-profile TV tuner card, which takes care of the DVI/HDMI and TV recording. There’s two internal bays, so storage won’t be a problem, and I can add an eSATA card later on if I want fast external storage.

It could be a few weeks before the new system arrives and is set up though, so for now I ripped the main boot/home drive out of the old server and have it running it on my gaming box. It actually booted straight off of a USB enclosure and ran with no major problems (just some device names changing), other than being a little on the slow side…

Double-Whoops

Amarok crashed on me just as it was completing a collection database scan, and it popped up a crash reporter and asked me to fill in some more information about what it was doing. I dutifully filled it out, and noticed that it was going to email the crash dump. I hadn’t configured KMail yet, so I went to the Tools/Configure KMail menu…

And then KMail crashed on me. No bug report for you!

Salvage

I upgraded my Linux server box to Ubuntu 8.10 tonight, and it went smoothly enough. Well, mostly… The big, complicated things like Apache, MySQL, and MythTV actually worked perfectly after the upgrade, and instead the glitches showed up in relatively small things, like the MP3 player. The files themselves were fine, but the collection database didn’t survive the change in version of Amarok, and I lost all of the non-ID3 metadata like ratings, play counts, etc.

I was able to recover some of it, from syncing back from the iPod and the playlist I still had loaded at the time, but it looks like I’ve lost about 2/3rds of the ratings. And I have backups of the MP3 files themselves, but not of the directory where it looks like Amarok stores the metadata, though it’s not clear if that would even help if it’s a version problem. Oh well, at least it’s easier to re-rate them on the fly through the iPod…

I Don’t Got The Power

I used to leave my gaming box running 24/7, partly out of laziness and partly because I would occasionally log into it during the day to kick off some kind of maintenance, or start downloads, or other things that I wanted done before I got home. It was a bit of a waste of power though, so for the last month or so I’ve been leaving it turned off as much as possible.

I got my power bill today, and I am indeed paying less — it was down from $57 to $42, and according to the stats I used 204 kWh this month versus around 260 kWh last month. It was also reflected in a nice little graph that remained fairly steady and then suddenly dropped.

Still, that was only about 21% of my usage and I could probably drop it further. I have a server system as well, and if it draws 200W on average, that’s 144 kWh per month right there. It does have to run 24/7 though, so I’d have to replace it with better parts (as previously discussed) rather than eliminate it, and if doing so saves another $15 per month, then it would pay for itself in a mere…80 months or so. Yeah, I know, I should be doing it anyway just for conservation’s sake. If I think of it like a game, then my min/maxing instincts start kicking in…

Field Test

I’ve put in a couple days of use of my new iPod Nano, and it’s working out well so far.

My main worry was about its ‘pocketfeel’ (hey, if food critics can have ‘mouthfeel’…) so that I can fiddle with it without having to take it out and look at it, and it does have a few quirks there: the shake-to-shuffle feature requires a *really* vigorous shake, which would be kind of embarrassing to perform in public and can’t be done within the confines of a pocket, but using the dial to advance to the next song isn’t a big deal. The ‘hold’ switch is a bit tricky — I can run a finger along the top to turn it off, but have to get the edge of a fingernail and find the switch to turn it back on. And I have to watch out when adjusting the volume. If it’s lying too horizontally, it switches into Cover Flow mode and you can’t adjust the volume there, so I have to make sure it’s tilted a bit upwards before changing the volume. They’re only minor problems, though.

I also managed to get it working with Amarok by installing iTunes on my XP machine and reformatting it with a Windows filesystem. And, as I hoped, it does indeed sync back updated ratings, play counts and times, and updates last.fm. The only quirk is that unmounting it still leaves the iPod saying “you must eject first…” on its screen, but it seems like unplugging it at that point doesn’t cause any harm.

Update: And it turns out I can sync it to both Amarok for music and iTunes for automatic podcast management, if I disable automatic syncing in iTunes and I make sure to sync to Amarok first or the rating and play count updates will be lost.

Update update: Ugh, okay, podcasts have some problems when I do it that way, with multiple copies of them showing up each time I switch between clients. I’ll have to try doing the podcasts from within Amarok as well.

Thin Is In

My iPod Nano arrived today, so here’s the obligatory vanity shot, showing off just how tiny even the retail packaging is:

There are apparently still some kinks to be worked out with its support under Linux, since it’s still brand new, so for now I’ve only fooled around with it in iTunes. I’d prefer to get Amarok working with it though, since the collection database is more easily synced there and I’d rather not have to reenter all of the ratings and such into iTunes.

Oh well, I’ve just filled it up with random songs for now.

You Can Have Too Many Backups

It’s time to wipe and reinstall my Windows box, since the accumulated crud on it is apparently interfering with games, so I’m in the middle of archiving all of the files on it onto the Linux box, since it still has plenty of space.

While setting it all up though, I noticed that one of the directories being copied contained a set of backup files I’d made earlier. And the destination directory also has a couple other archive files from previous incarnations of the system. And some of those archives probably contain other backups within them, leading to backups-within-backups-within-backups…

I could just delete them all, since if I haven’t touched them recently they probably don’t contain anything all that important, but my inner packrat tends to balk at such impulses. I’m always afraid of things like wanting to return to some game that I was mostly finished but whoops, I deleted all the save files inside an old backup… At some point I’m going to have to just expand them all out and merge them into one consolidated set of files, and then pick out the pieces I actually want to keep…

Surrender

Alright, uncle, I give up. I’ve fretted about choosing an MP3 player for far too long, so there’s a shiny new 16GB iPod Nano on its way to me now.

There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.