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HP MediaSmart Server ex485 review

I bought my HP MediaSmart Server quite a while ago and I have had a few random posts about it but I wanted to do an official review to let you know what I think of it. In order to successfully review this I am going to break it up into 2 sections: hardware and software.

Hardware:

The hardware is almost identical to HP’s old ex475 MediaSmart servers on the outside but the inside now has a Intel Celeron 2.0 Ghz processor with 2 GB of RAM. That is a pretty big upgrade compared to the old AMD 1.8 Sempron with 512 MB RAM. One of the biggest jumps internally for the ex485/ex487 is the jump to a 64-bit processor. While this currently doesn’t matter to much, Microsoft’s next version of Windows Home Server is going to be built off of Windows Server 2008 R8 which is 64-bit only. This means that the ex480 family can technically run the future software without another hardware upgrade.
Externally, the hardware is great. Four hard drive bays right where they should be, three USB in the back, eSATA, and gigabit ethernet. At first I didn’t even think I would use the front USB port but I find that I use it quite often when copying large amounts of information to the server.
I can’t say much about the hardware except for the fact that it is wonderful. I haven’t had any hardware problems and the device is small enough and quiet enough to leave next to my laser printer and no one knows it’s there. The device is fairly quite, but one of my hard drives is a bit old and I think makes more noise than necessary. I would say I have never heard the device over the TV being on, but when the room is completely silent, the hard drive noise is enough to not let me fall asleep.

Pros:
Small
Relatively Quiet
Lots of storage options (4 hard drive bays, 4 USB ports, 1 eSATA port)
Plenty of speed

Cons:
The bays were a little awkard at first
eSATA not replicating (no daisy chaining eSATA devices like you could with the old systems)

Software:

First of all, the NAS solutions I have used in the past have always been DIY solutions. Even the Buffalo Linkstation I hacked so that I could load a full Debian Linux install on it for more flexibility. Other than that I have used Ubuntu Server, FreeNAS, Windows, and a few other solutions, and have looked at solutions like unRAID, Linksys, and QNap. So far every single system I have used just seemed pieced together and not a finished product. That was until I used Windows Home Server.
Windows Home Server is built off of Windows Server 2003 and this is a very good thing. Windows Home Server is available as a retail purchase or you can buy it pre-installed on a lot of NAS systems out there. The retail version allows you to build your NAS from the ground up. Everything from the hardware, OS, and add-on software can be customized which is great for people that want a bit more control but don’t want all the headaches of some Linux incompatibilities. Plus if you buy the software retail you can start with cheap hardware and then work your way up as you get small amounts of budget instead of plopping down ~$600 for a all-in-on retail solution.
The key feature of WHS is the folder duplication. It allows you to use any hard drive and adds all the storage to a pool of available space, similar to the Drobo. The reason this kicks the Drobo’s ass is if your WHS machine dies, all of the drives are formatted with NTFS so you can just pull the hard drives and get the information off of a new computer. With the Drobo, if your Drobo dies, so does everything stored on it cause it uses a proprietary format. This type of storage is really the way things are moving because people are finally realizing that RAID is not a backup solution. RAID is for speed and eliminates down time, period.
The software does what you would expect and the configuration is handled in a stupidly simple Home Server Console. I actually dislike the console just because I feel like it makes things too easy. As much as you can do with the console some things just aren’t there yet (such as copying from a local USB drive to a share). But because the system runs Windows Server you can just RDP to the machine and copy things that way. I hope small tasks like this are fixed in future releases and it would also be nice to see some sort of official add-on store/repository or at least a official Microsoft site for them. It gets annoying trying to rummage the internet to find the best add-ons.
Add-ons is one area that I find very feature lacking and yet is something that should be so much better. Where is the add-on to let me ping my DNSomatic account? How about the one that integrates with my webcam for security viewing/recording when there is movement? Home automation? Game server? Heck even some more advanced features like Active Directory would be nice for the power users, and people with more than just 1 computer in the house.
I haven’t tried printer sharing through the system but the good news is, if it works in Windows Server 2003 it will work in Windows Home Server. And that is the main thing that separates Windows Home Server from all of the other DIY and Linux systems I have used. Windows Home Server takes a very successfully platform and strips it down to just what you need, and then they allow anyone to make minor additions to the system using add-ons. The software is the same across all platforms that use Windows Home Server. It doesn’t matter if you build it yourself or buy it from HP, Acer, or Shuttle.
This kind of flexibility makes me very excited for the next release which is based off of Windows Server 2008 R2 (a.k.a. Windows 7). If the next version of Windows Home Server lives up to 1/2 of it’s expectations it will still be a killer system that will be worth every penny for a upgrade.
Pros:
DIY availability
Add-ons are compatible with any WHS system
Easy to use
Remote desktop
The first NAS I don’t manage on a weekly basis
Cons:
Console can sometimes be too simple
Key Add-ins are missing
Network warnings for stupid things (firewall turned off, updates needed, etc.)

The HP MediaSmart Server came with one other thing that you won’t get on any other WHS system. Custom HP software built just for the MediaSmart servers. When I first bought the MSS the software wasn’t very feature rich for my needs. I don’t use iTunes so I don’t need the iTunes music server, I don’t have a Mac so I don’t need Time Machine backups, I don’t use snapfish, flickr, facebook, or Picasa for my pictures so I don’t need the Photo Publisher, and I don’t want the server collecting all of my media and putting it wherever it wanted to so I don’t want the HP Media Collector. The other features the MSS includes that retail installs of WHS don’t get are Twonky Media Server, Remote Access, HP Media Streamer, and HP Video Converter. Here is why they all suck.
Twonky Media Server is basically why I bought a MSS and didn’t build my own. You can easily buy Twonky from their site for $30 and install it and you are probably better off. HP by default locks me out of a lot of the advanced settings (but there is a way around it), but at the time I thought I might actually use some of the other features HP includes. Also to compare, I had Twonky on my Linkstation Live and it worked wonderfully with my PS3. With the MSS, Twonkey reports that I don’t have any music, photos, or videos stored on my MSS.
Remote Access lets you set up a website so you can access your WHS from anywhere in the world. While this is just fine (and Microsoft allows for free sites using *.homeserver.com), HP wants you to pay for a TZO site at $30 $10 a year. Not terrible but when free sites like www.dyndns.org and a million others let you do this for free it just seems like a waste. As a matter of fact before the HP 2.5 upgrade there was no option to have a *.homeserver.com site so you had to pay to get access to your server. Unless of course you set that portion up on your router.
HP Photo Viewer is probably the best software out of all the crappy software HP includes in the MSS. Of course first you have to publish all of your pictures locally to the HP Photo Viewer and make sure you put them in albums manually. Once they are “published” you can password protect them let users order prints download a full album view pictures full screen view the pictures in a small area of your web browser. OK maybe this software does suck. Don’t use it. The only benefit it could possibly have over online sites is you have unlimited storage because it is served locally. But if you need that just buy a domain and set up a gallary2 installation, or pay for flickr, Picasa, etc. At least then you get a off site backup of your pictures at the same time.
So how about the HP Media Streamer and HP Video Converter those at least are worth looking at right? Not for me. The idea is the Video Converter runs in the background and converts your files so that you can share them in the HP Media Streamer and to your iPhone/iPod Touch. The media streamer is supposed to play your music, pictures, and videos to a flash player in your browser wherever you are. The good news is the HP Media Streamer is password protected so at least not just anyone can access your files. The bad news is, ever since I upgraded to the 2.5 version software the HP Media Streamer doesn’t see any of my music or videos. That seems to defeat the purpose. Oh and the video converter converted all of my video files and then seems to have misplaced them because it started to convert all of my video files again, thus overwriting the old video files it just converted. So I just turned it off and forgot the feature was even there. I also have yet to be able to play any music, photos, or video to any of the 3 iPhones I have tested. Every single one either says it cannot connect or there are no files to be played.
Pros:
A good feature list to compare to other WHS’s on the market
Cons:
Nothing works the way it is advertised

Closing

My next WHS box will probably be a home built system with 8-10 hard drive bays. In the long run that will probably be cheaper and I can make sure only the software I need is installed. I still do like the MSS and if you don’t want to mess with it (or have Apple products) it really is the way to go for mass storage on your network.

Removed Automatic Twitter Updates

I just wanted to let everyone know that I just removed the automatic Twitter updates from my site. While I like the idea of having content automatically updated from other things I am doing, I just felt like I was almost spamming my own site. I will still be using Twitter/Identi.ca and I like the idea of their service but having it post stuff on my site isn’t really what I intended for this site in the first place. I am sure most of you won’t be sad about this and if you really want to see these updates go ahead and follow me on Twitter.
I am still going to try and update my site with a article/how-to once per week but I won’t have the weekly Twitter posts anymore. I just thought I would let any of my readers out there know about the change.
If you have any other things you would like to see updated often on the site let me know in the comments.

*update* OK I thought I disabled them. I disabled the “feature” in the plugin again. I will have to check it later in the week to make sure it is still disabled.

Video Podcast 3

I recording a “video podcast” which was more of a review of the Logitech PS3 bluetooth to IR adapter, Windows 7 media center, SecondRun.tv, and Hulu desktop.

And here is part 2

Software Recycler

I had an idea a while ago for a website that I know I will never be able to act on so I thought I would just post it here and maybe someday someone will find it and have the time and know-how to complete it.

The basic idea for the website is to be a software recycler. The site allows you to donate your old/unused software either digitally or by mailing in the CD/DVD, and it also allows you to download software you are looking for completely free (donations accepted). With so many software companies just allowing you to download installers and emailing you a key this would be fairly easy to implement.

The site’s main goal would be to support free and open source replacements like Linux, Open Office, and Gimp for common applications, but there would also be the opportunity to get a license key for Windows XP, Microsoft Office, and Photoshop. Most of the funding for this site would come from donations of people downloading software and ads for the open source counterparts. I would imagine this site would mainly be non-profit though simply because of the amount of server storage and bandwidth needed to host this.

Large companies often buy software only to phase it out in two or three years. The software works just fine and for third world countries, non-profit companies, and individuals this could save a lot of money and stop the needless purchase of software if someone is no longer using the key for software they just upgraded. Similar cases would be when companies like Microsoft stop supporting Windows XP. There are going to be countless unused keys for legal versions of XP that I am sure a lot of people would love to have and countries can take advantage of.

The idea of donating your unused license I am sure would have a lot of legal implications, but I think once the software has been purchased it is able to be sold/given to anyone once the initial purchaser is done with it. There would also need to be a verification process when the software is donated. The way I think of it would be to have some sort of VM running a installer to verify its authenticity, but for volume licenses a phone call would probably need to be made to the developer of the software.

I think a website that could allow this service could not only help open source projects but it would also help the world by saving money and getting the word out about free alternatives. Let me know what you do with your old software and what website you think the world could benefit from in the comments.

Linux Mint 7 review

Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” RC came out this past week and I spent some time installing it this morning. While it is based on Ubuntu 9.04, my first impressions of Linux Mint 7 are drastically different.
Here is a mini review of why I still use Linux Mint as my main OS at home.
The install was painless, as usual, and the theme was just as elegant and smooth as ever.
After the install I went ahead and updated my video card drivers and turned on advanced desktop effects. From there I needed to install some software that I use day-to-day. Instead of turning on the package manager like I normally would I opened the mintInstall tool expecting the software to refresh it’s list for the next 30 minutes. I was very surprised to have mintInstall ready to install software right when I opened it. I was even more pleased to find the featured applications option. One click on that button and it had a list of popular software that isn’t install by default. With a few check boxes I installed VLC, amarok, f-spot, picasa, etc. The only software not on the list that I needed to install was Audacity and Conduit. Ten minutes past my fresh install I had all my software installed and I was back up and running. Thanks to storing all of my information on either a network drive or a separate partition I had a fully functional Linux Mint 7 installation at this point.
One of my biggest complaints with Linux Mint in the past was the mintMenu application. While I loved its functionality of allowing you to search for programs and documents all right when the menu is open, it never had the ability to open with a hotkey, until now. I found out by accident. I pushed the “Super” key and started typing Firefox because that is what I usually do in Vista. About half way though “fire” I realized I had opened the mintMenu with the “Super” key. After reading the changlog I found that you can also change the key which is very helpful in Linux because many other programs use the “Super” key for activation (Gnome Do, Compiz shortcuts, etc.).
One other change that I didn’t expect, but am OK with, is the fact that Gnome Do does not start up by default. Because past mintMenu’s could not open with a shortcut key I began relying on Gnome Do to launch my programs and find my documents. I very much like the program but with mintMenu being able to open with just a keypress I don’t know if Gnome Do is needed any more in Linux Mint, at least not for program launching.
The only other surprising feature to find was that Evolution was not the default mail client and instead Thunderbird still held that title. While I still do like Thunderbird I feel like Evolution is a step in the right direction and I love that it can not only manage all of my personal email addresses but it can also painlessly get my works Exchange email.
In summary, Linux Mint 7 is absolutely wonderful. I have all the features and support of Ubuntu with all the polish and software I have come to love in Linux Mint. I look forward to using Linux Mint 7 more and hopefully I will be able to keep this install for at least 6 months until Linux Mint 8 comes out. Great job Clem and team, another success in my book.

Ubuntu (9.04) Jaunty Jackalope first impressions

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my main laptop (HP Compaq 8510p) and I wanted to post what my first impressions:

My first issue was with the installation. I am not sure if this feature was taken out or if there was just some other reason I couldn’t do it, but what happened to the ability to resize your Windows partition to install Ubuntu on the newly created free space? I only had two options on my install, use the entire disk (erasing Windows), or manually select which partitions to use (without the ability to resize a partition). What I ended up having to do was boot back into Windows Vista and resize my main partition to free up unallocated space on my drive manually. While this wasn’t horrible to do, I can imagine there are quite a few people out there that don’t know how to do this. After I had freed up 15 GB on my drive I had a third option to install Ubuntu on the largest available free space but it was still a bit of a hassle to do in the first place.
Once I actually booted into Ubuntu I was greeted with all of my hardware working out of the box…until I rebooted.
I am not sure why but my sound wasn’t working past the login screen. It worked just fine on the first boot and it has never failed to work in any previous Ubuntu installation on this laptop (8.04-9.04). I was eager to play some of my music, but I soon remembered one of the reasons I switched to Linux Mint…and that sent me to the package manager to install the restricted extra’s package so I could listen to my music in MP3 format. Once I finally had the package installed I then realized I couldn’t hear any music coming from the Rythumbox player. I started up Firefox and headed to YouTube to see if I had any audio there. Back to the package manager to install flash and then restarted Firefox to see if I had sound from YouTube. This confirmed that I had no sound working whatsoever. I went to the forums and installed the Gnome ALSA mixer cause I heard it solved the problem for some people but for me it would just open up with a blank window with no options but to exit. So I gave up on my sound thinking I could just use my USB sound card that has worked with every other distribution of Ubuntu I have tried it on (back to 7.10). Wrong I was. The USB sound card did not work with Audacity however after 3 more reboots all of a sudden my onboard sound worked again. I tested it with Audacity and I was set to record the next mintCast.
During all of this work to get my sound working again I probably had Firefox crash on me, I’d say, 6 times. While I am not new to having Firefox crash, especially not in Linux, I was quite surprised to have this sort of instability for a newly released OS. Sure I installed the Adobe Flash add-on but in the past when Flash crashed it just wouldn’t play videos anymore until I rebooted the browser. These crashes were full system locking, power button holding, not even RSEIUB would help kind of crashes. I will admit in the second day I used Jaunty I haven’t had Firefox crash on me once but the bitter taste of a unstable browser still frightens my every keystroke.
With everything working as it should I decided to test this famed boot speed improvements using ext4. I have seen video’s of sub 20 second boot times and I am very curious what my laptop can do. With Linux Mint 6 installed my boot times from the time I pushed the power button till the time I loaded a webpage with Firefox was about 50 seconds. I defiantly felt like Jaunty was faster than that, but after 2 tests (with auto login and and Firefox set to auto run) my best time was still only 41 seconds. Once again, a little bit of a downer.
Next thing to test was one of my outstanding problems with Ubuntu/Linux Mint. At work and at home I use a docking station to dock my laptop to be able to use a full keyboard/mouse and large monitor. When my computer is docked I get video on the external display but it never detects as a second monitor through the docking port, and instead it just mirrors my display and never lets me change my resolution on the external monitor. If I plug the monitor in to the VGA port on the laptop it is just fine however. I tried to open system preferences and all I was greeted with was this empty window that I had to force quit every time I opened it. This was finally another strike that made me very sad and disappointed that Jaunty isn’t what I thought it would be.
The final little nagging feature was the pop-up that asks you to confirm your shutdowns and restarts just like OSX. I heard an interview with Mark Shuttleworth and he said that this was necessary for the new desktop notifications so I wasn’t too bummed about it but it does make shutting down a little more annoying.
On the plus side I do like the pop-up notifications, which I didn’t think I would, and I like the improvements made to Evolution (and it is really winning me over from Thunderbird). I think 9.04 isn’t a step backwards like 8.10 was compared to 8.04, but I don’t feel like 9.04 is living up to the hype.
I have no plans to stop using Linux Mint or Ubuntu (or Linux in general). I think they are both fantastic operating systems and I am so thankful for the countless people that put in all of their free time and talent into the system. I try to contribute in as many ways as I know how and will continue to support the community whenever I have the chance.
For now, I am looking forward to what Ubuntu 9.10 will have in store.
Let me know what things you love and hate about 9.04 in the comments.

How-to format a disk to FAT32

When backing up my PS3 for repair I needed to plug in a external hard drive to back up the system. My PS3 is only 40 GB but even that is larger than any USB flash drive I have so I needed to pull out one of my USB hard drives for the backup. I started the the backup process and when it asked for a hard drive I plugged in my terabyte external hard drive but nothing happened. I soon found out that the PS3 will only read FAT32 formatted hard drives. I did not think this would be as much of a problem as it was.
First I tried the format tool built into Windows but I found out that Microsoft decided not to let any drive larger than 32 GB be formatted in FAT32 because…well because they suck and wanted everyone to move to NTFS. So I tried formatting from a command line with: format d: /fs:fat32But I got an error saying the drive is too large for FAT32. I know that isn’t true because FAT32 is technically able to format drives up to 2 terabytes. So I decided to try gparted in Linux. Of course gparted wouldn’t have any problems right? Well in gparted I only had the options for ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and unformatted. That’s a bummer. So how about from the terminal? I tried variations of mkfs and mkfs.vfat but I know there was something I was doing wrong because each time it would just give me a error.
Finally I found a way to do it! There is a program called Fat 32 Formatter. This is a command line program that works in Windows XP/2000/Vista and all you need to do is open a commend prompt and type in:fat32format.exe d: You need to replace d: with whatever your drive is currently mounted as. Once the process completes you have a fully formatted FAT32 drive for your PS3 backup needs. There is a mirror of the fat32format tool here just in case it is removed from online.
And yes this was far more complicated than it needed to be. If you have the commands for completing this task in OSX or Linux please leave them in the comments.

How-to map network drives based on network location

This has been driving me crazy and I cannot figure out how to do it. Here is my problem:
I have a work laptop that I obviously use at work as well as at home. At work I have 6 network drives that are mapped automatically if I log into my computer while at work. At home I have a Windows Home Server with 5 shares that I wrote a batch script to connect to them when I get home. The WHS Connector also adds a shortcut to the shares on my desktop but I want the shares mapped so I can use them as local drives in programs. I also had to write 3 more scripts (1 to disconnect my work drives, 1 to connect my work drives, and 1 to disconnect my home drives) in case I go between work and home without fully turning off my computer and instead just putting it to sleep. I am fairly certain this problem can be fixed with AutoIT or some other tool but I am just surprised this sort of functionality isn’t built into ANY operating system. My laptop has Vista and Linux Mint on it but I know this functionality isn’t in OSX either.
Is there anyone out there that can can suggest something to accomplish this? All I want is something that monitors what network I am connected to, and if that network happens to be home or work, map the appropriate drives. I am going to work on this in AutoIT but I am open to suggestions if you have any.
As soon as I find more information or someone points me to a solution I will update this post with how it works.
Leave your idea’s in the comments.

Google Voice

Grand Central was purchase by Google and is Google Voice now. I am not going into what the service can do for you (that is what Google is for), but the cool thing is my account was eligible for a upgrade today so I click the “upgrade” button to see what was new.
Not a whole lot was new but I did get a chance to test out the transcriber on my voice mail. It was actually fun because just after I left myself a voice mail I got a text message with the transcribed voice mail as well as a email to a link to a mp3 to play the voice mail. Lets just say they need to work on it a little bit. Here is the message I left for myself.

Oh, I wonder if this works. Test, test, oompa loompa, supercalafragilisticexpealadocious, Shaun.

Here is the text I got:

all the i wonder if it’s a work test test hello michael super callus i just got a delicious john

On the plus side, it actually makes voice messages more fun! I mean who wouldn’t want to get a voice mail when it contains hilariously translated messages from your friends.
I tried this with one more voice mail but sadly I just got a error that said “Transcript not available”. I am not sure why, but I could not find a way to make it force a transcript which is disappointing.
Let me know if you have been able to use Google Voice in the comments. If I ever get invites I can send one your way if you ask for it.

How-To Create a UBUD

I just made that up. UBCD is a great tool for tracking down hardware and software problems with non-Apple computers. To be honest I am not sure if it works on Apple computers but I assume most of the tools would not work even if it boots on the hardware. UBUD is my abbreviation for UBCD on a USB Disk (a.k.a. thumb/pen/flash drive).
I ran into a problem on my last road trip fixing someones computer and I was without any CD’s to burn UBCD to. So I ran across these instructions at pendrivelinux.com and they worked perfectly for turning my USB drive into a bootable UBUD.

USB Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) prerequisites:

* ubcdfix2 (does the USB conversion) <--I found that this file doesn't download so you can get it from the link above
* UBCD ISO
* USB flash drive (fat32 formatted) Sorry there is no download link for this.
* A windows host PC to perform the build

UBUD How-To:

1. Download and launch UBCDfix2.exe, a UBCD folder is created
2. Download the UBCD ISO and move to your UBCD folder
3. From the UBCD folder, click fixubcd2.bat and follow the onscreen instructions. I ran into one problem where it said I needed to run the program again because I was using Vista but really I didn’t have to. So if it gives an error in Vista go ahead and try rebooting anyway.
4. Reboot and set your computer to Boot from the USB device

I hope this helps with any problems you may run into when you find yourself without a blank CD.
Let me know in the comments if there are any other tools that you always keep with you on the road for fixing those random computer problems.
Also, has anyone tried UBCD4Win? It seems like it could be interesting for Windows specific (a.k.a. virus/spyware) problems.