Tidying up my home network.
Posted by Mark Dalton in Personal, Technology on January 31st, 2010
This week has been the usual mix of busy but has been largely uneventful. It has been bitterly cold and standing on the train platform each morning I couldn”t help but think it’’s about time I started looking at holidays. What I have done this week however is start sorting out some of those little job’’s I have been meaning to do for a while and start commissioning some of the new toy’’s I have brought over the last few months / years to improve my general home network performance.
Like most people these day’’s I have a DSL Internet connection. My Internet connection comes into my home office upstairs and terminates on a NetGear ADSL Router and Wireless Access Point (DG834GT) , this worked well and provided about 98% coverage throughout the house. The problem was that the 2% it didn”t cover was mainly the seat I sit on in the lounge with the laptop. So I had two other NetGear Wireless Access Points (WG602 V3), one up stairs and one downstairs, that were bridged to provide the additional coverage required downstairs. Now this was great for checking email and casual web surfing but was slow when doing anything heavier, downloading movies to the Apple TV for example. Now with the Sky+ HD installation last weekend I decided to resolve this.
I purchased a dLAN 200 AVeasy Starter Kit and two NetGear 8 Port Gigabit Switches. I ran a cable from my DSL router to one of the Gigabit switches which I installed on my desk and then another cable to one of the Devolo devices which I plugged into a socket under the desk. I plugged the other Devolo device into a socket behind the TV and cabled that to the second Gigabit switch. I cabled the Mac’’s in the office to the Gigabit switch on my desk, and the Apple TV, SlingBox Pro, Nintendo Wii, and Samsung HD TV, to the Gigabit switch behind the TV. Downloading to the Apple TV now takes only a couple of minutes and I have seen a drastic improvement especially when using SlingPlayer and the SlingBox Pro in the office.
Now while I was living in India I also acquired a number of Apple Networking devices, well all of them if I am honest. Since being home I have added these to my home network, but they have never really added any value to the setup, maybe with the exception of the Time Capsule. Up until now I have had the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule (Recently Replaced) installed in the upstairs office and the AirPort Express installed in the garage, connected to some cheap speakers. Now this setup provided 802.11n access throughout the house but wasn”t really the best utilisation of the equipment. After installing the Devolo units I decommissioned the two NetGear Access Points (WG602 V3), which resulted in my original Wireless coverage problem. So I moved the AirPort Extreme downstairs and cabled it into the Gigabit switch. Presto! 802.11a/b/g/n throughout the house!
An added bonus of doing this is I now have two spare Wireless Access Points. One of which is going to my parents as they already have Devolo units and I as I now know this solution works I will be implementing it for them as soon as possible. Happy days!
A Higher Definition Outlook on Life.
Posted by Mark Dalton in Personal, Technology on January 25th, 2010
Last week ended pretty much as it had begun, cold, wet, and very busy, but at least there wasn’t any snow. Friday arrived and I was quite looking forward to getting home and opening a few cold beers and enjoying a long lay in Saturday morning, but you what they say about the best laid plans. So I got home Friday night and went through the normal routine of grabbing a shower and starting dinner. I opened a beer which boy did taste good and then sat down in front of the TV with another cold brew to watch a movie. Now this is where I should have known better as food, beer, and sitting down after a week at work meant only one thing. Yes, you have got it, I fell asleep before even finishing the second can. I woke up just gone midnight feeling a little chilly with a sore neck and resigned myself to the fact that I had at least had the intention of getting rather drunk. Luckily my power nap didn’t affect my ability to sleep in Saturday morning, and I eventually forced myself to get up, showered, and dressed a little before 10:30.
Now I had booked my Sky+ HD & Sky Multiroom installation for Saturday afternoon, but after I had done a few chores it was too late to go out as I risked not being back in time to meet the engineer. Luckily he turned up and was done in quick time although I was left to run the Multiroom cable myself across the attic and down into the bedroom as he wasn’t allowed up there for health and safety reasons. I decided to leave this for Sunday and opting instead to tidy up all the cable’’s behind the TV downstairs. I spent about an hour doing this, for it to look pretty much the same when I had finished, so I think I am going to need to invest in some proper cable management as it really is an eyesore. I think that will have to wait until next weekend. Saturday afternoon I got on with a few more chores and chilled out with the cold beer I had promised myself Friday night. I decided to be lazy and threw a pizza in the oven before taking up position on the sofa for the evening.
Sunday I was up bright and early and although I could have easily gone back to sleep I decided I needed to get on so set about sorting out my personal email and correspondence. Luckily this didn’t take long and I was able to get on with some the remaining chores. I was half way through these when I remembered I hadn’t dropped my brother-in-law’’s birthday present down to him. After catching up with him, my sister, and the kids I came back ready to finish the Sky Multiroom setup in my bedroom. My sister had a newer menu system on her Sky+ HD box and said you needed to have both connected for it to sort itself out. After getting everything setup there was still no difference so I called Sky who talked me through forcing a firmware update. I followed the instructions they gave me but it made no difference, but by this point I had opened a beer and couldn’t be bothered as I still had access to the content via the old menu system. I spent the rest of the evening scanning the TV channels and generally playing with the new features before heading to bed.
Drobo Update
Posted by Mark Dalton in Personal, Technology on January 18th, 2010
I received an email today from Drobo Support, and what was kind of scary was that the engineer had found my blog and read what i had done over the weekend. At the same time it was also kind of reassuring to know that I was dealing with someone that was tech savvy and Internet aware, not always the case these days unfortunately.
Now in all fairness I probably didn’t help myself with my impatience but in my own defence I wasn’t really expecting Drobo’s support to come through for me. Why? For absolutely no good reason if I am honest other than my experience with other companies support organisations. Something that I may come to regret! Anyway by deleting and recreating the volume I had removed the problem so there wasn’t anything to troubleshoot, although that said I feel that I have proved something to myself, I am just not sure quite what yet! However, the Drobo support engineer did quite honestly state that they have had a few customers with similar problems that seemed to be down to insufficient power from the power supply when used with the splitter and the DroboShare. What more the engineer asked for my mailing address so they could send me another power supply.
Now to me, this is the first sign of good customer support! There has been none of the “you must be doing something wrong”, there has been none of the “do you know what you are doing?”, in fact thus far every email has been polite and to the point with useful steps to try and a general willingness to get to the root of the problem, even given the fact that I obviously have the patience of a rattle snake being poked with a sharp stick 
What’s more the Drobo engineer even conceded that if we couldn’t get to the root of the problem, they would probably need to swap out the unit.
The best bit is that a no point has the sordid detail of money been mentioned! All of this together makes me want to work with them until I can understand the root cause of the problem, opposed to just swapping the device out and being left doubting the product.
So far I am happy! Now don’t misunderstand me I am not happy that the problem happened in the first place, but we are dealing with mechanical devices here and they do break. Hell that’s what I brought a device that amongst other things sells itself on it fault tolerant capabilities. What I am happy about is so far the response has been, bar the no weekend coverage, in line with what I would honestly expect from a professional organisation.
However I am not sold yet so will be copying my data back to the Drobo only after soak testing it until the new power supply turns up. Even then I will be backing it up several times a day before trusting it 100% with my data, and before purchasing another unit.
That’s what my Drive Way looks like.
Posted by Mark Dalton in Personal on January 17th, 2010
The second week of the year back at work started out a little better than the first. To start with I had a train ticket so didn”t need to go through the Monday morning hell of queuing up, and the trains were also running fairly smoothly with delays of only a few minutes here and there. All went well until it snowed again on Tuesday night and I couldn”t get the car out on Wednesday morning. This was a major pain in the butt as I had ordered something online, which I”ll come on to, that was due to be delivered on the Wednesday that I needed urgently but also because I hadn”t been shopping. Luckily I have access to all the work systems from home so could get on and after a several attempts on Wednesday afternoon I managed to get the car freed up. Thursday I was able to slip and slide my way to the train station and make it into the office. Thursday and Friday were busy but uneventful thankfully and I managed to successfully retrieve my package. Friday night it rained and for the first time since Christmas I was able to see my drive way. Saturday I was able to escape and get some shopping done before meeting up with some friends for a couple of beers (read hungover this morning).
So today is a house day! The chores done I can get on with catching up with the paperwork, first task my 2009 Tax Filing, oh the joy. That done and with the next major task being the ironing, which is Sunday evening in front of the TV job, I decided to get on with sorting out a couple of issues that had popped up during the week.
Now when working at home I often fire up iTunes as I find working in complete silence a little weird. Now since buying a Drobo and DroboShare I have been playing around with using it for both file storage and as a backup device. Now to cut a long story short I had copied my iTunes library over to it and all seemed to be going well. Well, Tuesday evening while catching up with email on opening iTunes I was told met with a default iTunes library screen. After a little messing around I found that iTunes kept telling me the Library file was damaged and it had created a new one. It wasn”t until I looked at the Drobo I found one of the drives was showing as failed. Now I didn’t have any spare ones so as quick as a flash I ordered two spares. Now what puzzled me was that the Drobo is supposed to handle a failed drive without any data issues. Mmmm interesting.
As I couldn’t get into the office on Wednesday and had selected the office as the delivery location for the drives I had to wait until Thursday to pick them up and until Thursday night to replace the failed drive. Imagine what I said when I plugged in a new drive and it went through the motions only to also show up as failed. So I dropped a line to Drobo Support. They came back to me on Friday suggesting I follow the following article, which I did as well as some other basic trouble shooting tips.
These tips basically involved testing to see if the fault followed the disk or if the slot was the issue, so they had me remove the failed drive and swap the other drives around to see if the fault followed the drive. Now this was interesting in as much as SLOT 1 was showing the failed drive but if I move the drive from SLOT 2 to SLOT 1 all three drives showed as good. However if I either inserted the failed drive from SLOT 1 or a new drive into SLOT two, the drive in SLOT 1 (which was the one I had moved from SLOT 2) showed as failed.
I tried moving drives around and inserting new drives in the vacant SLOT but what every I tried the drive in SLOT 1 showed as failed when all four bays were populated. So I emailed Drobo Support with the results Friday evening. Now it would appear that Drobo don’t do weekend support as I haven’t had anything more from them, but I needed to play a little more. So today I (having a full backup of all the data) reset the Drobo with the original four drives and recreated the volumes and formatted all the drives. Thus far all four are showing online and good so I am none the wiser as to what the issue is / was, but am loathed to trust it at this point. I will be testing it out a little more but look forward to Drobo’’s next response, especially as I was on the verge of ordering another one to use with my Mac Mini Media centre.
Back to work, well kind of!
Posted by Mark Dalton in Personal, Work on January 10th, 2010
Wow it was hard getting up on Monday morning. I mean I knew it was going to be, but when the alarm clock went off I just wasn”t expecting it. It was almost as if the alarm clock was mocking me. I got to the train station and had forgotten to renew my ticket over the weekend, so had to stand in the queue which isn”t great at the best of times let alone the first working week of the new year. There was such a demand for tickets the system kept crashing meaning that they could only issue weekly tickets. So I brought the ticket and stood with all the other happy souls on the station platform waiting for the train. Monday flew by after catching up with everybody and before I knew it I was homeward bound with several hundred emails to still wade through. The only problem with taking time off is that the work just waits for you to return.
Tuesday night it snowed and snowed hard so by Wednesday morning we had 6-8″ of snow on the ground and the roads were impassable, this continued all week so I worked from home. Luckily with technology today this is not a problem and I can access all the systems I need to, but I do miss the social interaction and by the weekend I was starting to suffer from cabin fever, and a distinct lack of food.
Saturday I tried to venture into town but the roads were still very slippery and the car parks were closed, so I decided to pop down to see Katrina and the kids as it was Katrina’’s birthday on the Friday and I hadn”t given her the iPod that I had brought her.
Katrina was equally frustrated as the schools had been closed and the kids were also starting to show signs of being cooped up to long. We had a cup of coffee and complained about the weather like good British citizens, while the kids climbed all over me, but it was really good to seem them again.
Sunday it was still to risky to go to far but I dug the car out and cleared the drive somewhat and made it to the train station and renewed my ticket. I just couldn”t stand the thought of doing it at 06:30 Monday morning. After doing that and getting some shopping I walked up to Mum & Dad’’s for Sunday dinner. We chatted about the snow as they hadn”t made it out too far either and then moved on to holiday’’s to try and brighten up the mood.
I walked home slipping and sliding all over the place and then settled in for the evening with a rented movie.
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