Dustin’s Blog

I don’t typically blog about where I work but I will say that I’ve changed where I work. With this change may come a small shift in focus on what I write about. My new job brings me back into the Linux world whereas my previous one saw me doing Windows 90% of the time (though you wouldn’t have known it from what I wrote about). This does mean however that I won’t be writing about OpenSolaris as much unless something changes with how my home setup is done.

Some comments I made on the an apple discussion website has made the geek news. http://tinyurl.com/4ueslk The comments by miniconvert are from me.

A number of people have pointed out that newer camcorders don’t use firewire anymore. That’s cool, but the issue isn’t just camcorders (though for me it primarily is). Others have pointed out that Apple likes to lead the way, they dropped the floppy first as well as PS2. At the time, very viable solutions existed, it was time for these interfaces to go away. When Apple introduced the iMac it lacked PS2 ports (or really, the Apple keyboard/mouse ports) but it didn’t really matter. That new computer came with a USB keyboard and mouse. By removing firewire they’ve left a lot of potential customers in a bit of a conundrum. What to do with those peripherals that are based on firewire?

How Apple reacts to this backlash will be very interesting. I’ve always understood why people dislike Apple products, this is one of those reasons but in this case I think they’ve gone too far too fast. I do of course realize nobody is forcing anybody into buying a Macbook. It’s just that, when you want to live in the Apple world you choices are already limited.

Here is a copy/paste of a post I did on a forum. It describes in very light detail how to add iSCSI based storage to a Mac. With the new Macbook lacking firewire, this might actually become a more popular method.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with a few different bits of technology, one of them being iSCSI. iSCSI is a relatively cheap and efficient method of adding storage to a computer that uses your existing network infrastructure. If you have a gigabit network and a Linux server (I haven’t tested other solutions) you can add as much storage to your Mac as you can fit in your Linux system.

You might be thinking, “I have a 2TB USB/FW drive why would I want iSCSI?” USB and FireWire drives are a fine thing but lets look at some of their disadvantages.

* USB2 is actually slower than many FW400 devices
* If you have a mac with just one FW port and your external drive doesn’t include a FW port, you can’t attach anything else to that FW port AND use your drive
* External drives add noise
* External drives must be located close to the computer, not ideal in a HTPC setup

Here a really quick overview of how it is done, I can certainly provide more detailed information however. Here is a list of what you need to get the job done.

1. Linux server with gigabit ethernet
2. A hard drive or RAID set that you want to share to your Mac
3. gigabit switch
4. Mac with gigabit, the more recent the better
5. GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator for Mac
6. iSCSI Enterprise Target for Linux

Setup your Linux system and install IET. If you’re using Ubuntu, IET might be available in apt. I use Fedora so I compiled IET from source. Edit the /etc/ietd.conf file to point to your disk or RAID set (or even a file that was made using dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1024 count=1 seek=n where n is the size of file you want in bytes). Start the ietd service, /etc/init.d/iscsi-target under Fedora.

Install the GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator on your Mac. Enter System Preferences and click the new GlobalSAN button. Add your Linux server’s IP address to the Discovery screen. Click on the target tab and your disk should be shown, click it and logon to it without a username or password UNLESS you configured one in IET. Be sure to check the persistent tab if you want this drive to appear each time you boot your Mac.

Open Disk Utility and format the iSCSI disk. Your Mac will format the new drive and it’ll soon appear on your desktop. You can use it like any other disk you’ve ever used. You can partition it, copy/delete files, whatever. As far as the Mac is concerned it is a normal hard drive.

In my setup I have an Intel Mac mini, 1.83Ghz C2D and a Linux server built in late January, 2.2Ghz C2D. The disk being shared to my mini is a single 120GB PATA drive. I am able to copy files to the drive with a top speed of 44MB/s. Reading is actually slow but I attribute that to a limitation with the mini’s internal drive. I haven’t been able to test using OpenSolaris as the iSCSI target though OpenSolaris would be a fantastic choice as a storage server.

To be fair, there are some negatives to this setup. The biggest one being you can’t have multiple Macs using the same disk at the same time. You can unmount the disk on one mac and mount it with another one, but having two macs connected at the same time risks your data.

Ugg, where to start. Apple released yesterday an entirely new Macbook and Macbook Pro. The primary chassis of the laptops, the upper part that holds the keyboard, palm rests and touch pad, are now made from a solid piece of aluminum. This is great because it improves structural rigidity and the laptop can be made from fewer parts. The Macbook also gets to take advantage of some new nvidia chipset/video card which improves performance greatly over the old intel option.

Now for the bad part. There is no eff’n firewire port. None, just two USB ports. WTF? Why would Apple ditch a port they created on a consumer level laptop that costs $1300? “Hey, look at this laptop, it comes with iMovie so you can edit all those family vacation movies that you CAN’T GET OFF OF YOUR CAMCORDER.” Want to edit video with a firewire camcorder, pony up $2000 and get a Pro model! Got firewire external drives or peripherals…get a Pro model!

I’ve always recognized and understood why some people are so anti-Apple. They hate that lack of choice in hardware, among other things, but it has never bothered me. Apple hardware has always been pretty good and looked ok. Looks are subjective but I’ve always found Apple’s products agreeable. But when a company decides to strong arm you into buying their more expensive product by cutting out a key part…it’s ridiculous.

I’ve been battling with a video tearing issue on my Linux HTPC for the past few weeks. This morning I finally found an answer that works.

Yeah, its a problem with the intel driver… a workaround for mplayer is:

Run xvinfo to find the overlay port, mine looks like this:

Code:

Adaptor #1: “Intel(R) Video Overlay”
number of ports: 1
port base: 79

Then:
Code:

mplayer -vo xv:port=[portnumber goes here]