Yes, yes.. I hate it too how intolerably smug a person often becomes upon becoming acquainted with a significant other (looking at you, Scuzzy), and how frustrating it is when they feel the need to tell the whole goddamn world all about it. So it’s a good thing for me that I loathe my fellow man so very, very much - as I take great delight thrusting my smugness upon you, the reader, by mentioning that my current partner no longer consists of just four digits and a thumb. If you happen to resemble my previous state, then all the better for me. :keke:

Naturally, due to privacy and the sheer idiocy of the fact that I gave her the URL to this site, I really can’t go into much more detail. Suffice to say that, while I’ve been quite content, and somewhat pleased with my life thus far (of the past few years or so), I’m not really sure I’ve been quite this happy. I guess I want to try be a bit more sensible this time around, and not rush into anything so it’s all I’ll really say in regards to that.. but despite my worries and concerns, I feel this is a good thing. I mentioned to a friend earlier, that I saw this potential event coming like a freight train, which carried all sorts of implications and complicated matters - but I was far too stupid to avoid it. On reflection, I’m very glad I didn’t - regardless of where things will take me next.

And finally, to that certain someone reading this. I can’t promise I’ll stop being a worrywart and think of various concerns and worries, etc.. but I can say I’m truly happy things worked out the way they have, and above all - I’m happy being with you. Happier than I’ve been in quite a long time, and I only hope I can make you as happy as you make me.

So now that all that sappyness has left me with a load of excess bile, I’d just like to take this time to mention that the rest of you can go and choke on a bag full of dicks.

Now, you can’t spit in Australia without it landing on someone who has all manner of bad things to say about Telstra, so you’d expect that the best way to compete against them would be to have a company that doesn’t follow Telstra’s guidelines on dealing with customers, and actually provide a good service, be easily contactable, and will bend over backwards to help you with enquiries or issues you may have. Right? Right? Well, unfortunately it appears that Optus are so smitten with the notion of doing everything better than Telstra, that they’ve gone out of their way to not only emulate Telstra’s wonderful customer relation policies, but take them to the next level of ungodly asshole-ness.

So I get my phone and internet service through Optus. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the phone - it’s purely there for the internet service. I arrange to get them transferred to the new place, and with Optus being such absolute pillocks, I prepare myself for the fact that the internet connection may lag behind the phone connection. I’ll be moving on the weekend, so I tell them to disconnect my service on the Saturday. What do they do? The second that 11:59PM, on a Friday night, rolls around - fucking BAM! Phone line and internet service is dead. Okay, so I was hoping that Saturday would mean, like.. that Saturday night, or sometime during Saturday, and not when I’m spending my last few hours playing WOW on the Friday night. So the precision of “Saturday” was most unexpected, but hey.. if they’re that picky about this, then maybe I’ll be fine in regards to the phone and internet getting hooked up. Right?

Sure enough.. the Tuesday I specified as the date to get it put on rolls around, and they connect the phone line up. I’m a little alarmed, because my DSL modem reports that there’s no DSL synchronization whatsoever, but hey.. maybe that comes later. A week rolls past, and I’m wondering what’s taking Optus so long with my internet connection. I ring them to find out. A few hours later, I get on to somebody, give the pertinent information, and they draw a blank. They can’t find any records, or they do find records stating I disconnected my service back in some arbitary month, last year. Kind of odd, seeing as I was using and paying for it still, just a bit over a week ago. To cut a long story short, they seemed to completely lose all record of me ever wanting to transfer my internet service, and probably did so because I was so insistant that I’d keep my original bandwidth limits, and not this bullshit “10GB flat with uploads included” plan they were going to slap me on.

Fair enough. Maybe this is a good opportunity to go with those awesome plans TPG have at their disposal. I inform Optus very politely that they can go fuck themselves, and immediately get in contact with TPG. TPG tell me they’ll have me connected within the week. Sure enough, a week later - I get an e-mail whilst at work, stating the work on the line has been done, and when I get home, I’ll have lovely, lovely internets at ADSL2 speeds, and with TPG’s significantly higher bandwidth limits (100GB a month, and only shaping down to 256k when I go over).

Thing is, when I get home - not only is there no internet, there’s no more goddamn phoneline. In fact, when I try calling my number - some guy named Tom picks up the line, and tells me his phone number is nothing like mine. Awesome. I wait until the next day to promptly call TPG, and inform them of what went down. They play the “Oh, it’s a problem with your phone line, call your line provider” game, obviously not wanting to own up to the fact that whoever “connected” the line obviously had a case of the passion fingers. Fuck it, then.. I’ll give Optus a call. An hour of waiting on the phone with Optus later, and I get on to somebody. They then inform me that

1. I have to wait a week or two.
2. That I will most likely have to pay for the tech to come out.

Naturally, this has me seething with rage. After this, I make two more calls. The first, is to the TIO with a complaint against Optus’s behaviour, and a statement that I want them to fix it by today or the next business day, and to not charge me a contract cancellation fee when I change providers, as they have routinely failed to provide me service, or actually do what I request of them (the internet transfer, for example). The next call is to Telstra, to get my phone line ported back to them. This all happened on Friday of last week.

Monday afternoon, as I’m coming home - I get a call. There’s going to be a Telstra technician waiting for me when I get home to re-install my phone line and internet service. So, there’s something to be learned in all of this. When your ISP or telco try to pull some kind of bullshit on you, demand proper service from them. When they come up with a bullshit excuse as to why they won’t, take it to the TIO. Be sure to post all about it on places like Whirlpool, as well or do your best to make your ordeal as public as possible (ie, this blog post). Morale of the story is that when your ISP or telco hands you a pile of shit - you don’t have to take it.

However, seeing as I’m actually gainfully employed now, as opposed to being a student slash jobless dole bludging bum when I played the two forementioned muhmorpegers, you’d think my grind quota would be taken up by doing the same boring crap, day in day out at the company who’s name shall not be named to protect the innocent (i.e., me - from being fired). However, WOW isn’t so much grind.. it’s kind of like playing an older style of RPG, like.. y’know.. Neverwinter Nights or something, only with a fuckton more people playing with you, and without the boring statistical bullshit that would give dice wielding nerds raging erections. You don’t have to worry about which stats do what, and for what class or whatever - WOW does a good job of allowing you to not worry about that sort of shit.

That’s not to say it’s not dumbed down for ‘tards like me, if you have a hard on for Excel spreadsheets then WOW can suit those needs as well. But the important thing for me, is I don’t feel the game penalises me for not caring about what stats go where, or any crap like that. I just continue to get experience for killing the local populace of monsters for stationary lazy-ass dickwad NPC’s. Being a rogue, all I need to worry about is things that affect my stamina and agility, putting points in the talents that interest me, and if I poke things in the butt, it really fucking hurts them.

The point I’m trying to make is that WOW is fun for me. I guess it’s also because I’m currently playing and levelling with a friend that keeps it interesting. Not sure how long it’ll last, but the whole running-around-the-countryside and killing-x-amount-of-crap-for-some-lazy-dickhead is still fun for me, and this is no doubt simply due to my inexperience with the game, and once I’m more familiar with everything in it, I’m sure I’ll be as jaded as the rest of you.

Astute visitors may have noticed that I updated the hardware page a couple of weeks ago, with the purchase of 8GB of RAM for my beloved-yet-sometimes-temperamental Mac Pro. No, that’s not sticks of RAM to bring her up from the default 2GB to 8GB.. that’s 4 sticks of 2GB DIMMs, with the original 1GB DIMM pair slapped aside into a box, awaiting the day I pull my finger out and sell it to someone needy.

Interesting thing of note, was that when I purchased the crap - 800MHz FBDIMMs were impossible to get in this country, so I went to Other World Computing and bought it there. I even threw in the most expensive shipping offered, in order to get it in roughly a week after placing my order. Sure enough, it arrived fairly quickly and without incident - costing me a whopping $600 odd AUD.

Today, I found that ePowerMac, an Australian Mac vendor, are now selling 800MHz FBDIMMs via their website. How do they compare? Well, see for yourself. $900 odd for 4×2GB sticks (I think, their site is a tad confusing in that regard), or a whopping great $1,600 odd for two 4GB sticks. Jesus. However, ePowerMac aren’t the only ones to do this. Just two 2GB 667MHz FBDIMM sticks for the previous Mac Pro models from MacOnline will set you back just shy of $600, and that’s for a grand total of 4GB. Almost what I paid for 8GB from the states… with postage.

But, this isn’t just shops suited for Apple products that are getting in on this. Even my old time favourite PC component store, AusPCMarket, has the price way up the bum. You can do some more price comparisons on Shopbot, with Abit being “a bit more like it”, neglecting the fact that it’s for 667MHz stuff with heatsink spreaders not suitably designed for the Mac Pro’s unique cooling needs. Futhermore, they advertise their stock availability as “Ask”, which often translates to “Months” or “When Hell freezes over” in computer shop lingo, whichever occurs first.

So, that’s the state of RAM here - at least for FBDIMMs, anyways. Maybe there’s some kind of anal importing tax, or there’s some financial reason that I can’t understand which causes it to cost so fucking much, or just maybe they have shitty suppliers who are bending them over a barrel and assraping them - but I fail to see why buying it overseas, and getting the most expensive shipping one can, still works out to be half the goddamn price than what people are trying to pass it off for over here.

Feel free to add your own thoughts to this goddamn shitheap.

Well, it’s been a long time coming because every time I tried to upload forum code onto the site, Transmit would bomb the fuck out and die somewhere in the middle of some horrendous directory tree, making resuming the transfer next to impossible. That, and every time I ran into this issue, I’d yell at the top of my lungs, delete everything, and walk away for another day/week/month/whatever.

So, everything’s now up there. I’m getting ready to recreate things under a similar vein to the beloved AusAnime of yore. It’s pretty much blank right now, so for the love of God, please visit, sign up, and start posting goddamnit. I’ve also put up some rules to abide by, and an awesome starting collection of avatars, some of which you’ll recognise as being picked randomly in the blog comments for those who haven’t signed up with gravatar.

In any case, check it out and let me know what you think.

Now, before I get a whole stack of Windows fanboys poking their faggot fingers and saying “Ha ha, I told you so”, I’d just like to announce that I still believe Mac OS X is the right choice for me, that my new shiny Mac Pro is still the best damned computer I’ve ever owned, the iPod touch is the best portable media player I’ve ever used, and I don’t regret making the switch. If given the chance, I’d do it all over again, only much much quicker than the 4 or so years it took me. Now, is that all out of the way? Let’s talk shitty-ness.

Apple is apparently partially-world-renowned for it’s great support and quality of its products. I say partially, because the whole support thing only seems to matter if you live in a country lucky enough to have one of these. Now.. I’ve been a PC user for approximately 14 years, and it’s almost always been DIY components that I’ve bought myself, and put together myself. Being relatively tech-savvy, and keeping my ear to the ground in regards to what other people have had issues with, I haven’t had to worry a great deal about support in the past. That said, support has always been a pain in the ass, because you don’t have a single warranty or support contact for the whole system - it’s always per component, and more often than not, the cheap store you bought this shit from are the last people on Earth who want to hear about your problems.

So imagine my surprise, when I decided to move to a single primary platform, with a single vendor, that support would still continue to be an issue. Okay, so I wasn’t expecting to be able to “phone fruit” and have some guy drive up to my house in a limo, dressed with a tuxedo, and offer a replacement machine/iPod/component/whatever on a silver platter within 15 minutes of my phone call, but I mistakenly assumed that it couldn’t be any worse than the old days where I had to keep track of every component within the system and try diagnose what exactly was causing the fault. Right? Right? Truth is, the “bad old days” were actually slightly better in the case of my recent purchase, the Mac Pro.

I recently hit the big three-oh, roughly a month ago. I celebrated this by laying the smack down on a brand shiny new Mac Pro. Problem is, it appeared to have a bad case of the Gremlins. Not a day after unpacking and loving it a whole huggy-buggy bunch, it decided to crap out on me. What happened, I hear you ask? Well, I could go into detail, but basically check out this dude’s page, copy and paste everything you see there, and dump it here. Exact same thing. Sounds familiar to this guy here, or to quite a few reports here, and not to mention just about everyone who owns a Mac Pro with a 2600XT in this thread, here. Wow. That’s a lot of screen freezing and graphic corruption going on. Of course, the internet is a great thing for blowing a small, isolated issue out of proportion, but the sheer number of reports detailing the exact same issue I was having made me think “Gee, there’s a pattern emerging here. Surely Apple would notice this as well, right?”

Anyways, before calling, I decide to do what any good tech does, and do a bit of self diagnosis. I try a number of different methods, seeing if I can cause the issue to reproduce at will, testing to see what the screen freeze does, and does not effect, and eventually determine one of two possibilities: It’s either the graphics driver, or the video card. Running Windows Vista under Boot Camp, and hitting the dreaded “Your video card driver crashed and needed to be restarted” issue that one gets when one has a dud video card (or driver) pretty much hit the nail on the head for me. It’s the video card. It’s gotta be. My Aluminum iMac has essentially the same type of video chipset, and has never suffered from this, and a clever bit of hacking to get my iMac’s standard 10.5.1 Radeon kexts running on the Mac Pro further confirmed it to be a hardware issue. I do the usual PRAM zap, and SMC reset, and then phone Apple with the results of my labour (leaving the bit about the kexts and crap out, because I know the level 1 phone goons wouldn’t understand, and would actually freak the hell out). I explain my background, my previous experience with PC hardware fault and diagnosis, and the various other facts such as console logs and that the issue occurs even under Windows Vista. I lie and say I changed the display as well, because level 1 phone goons are a predictable bunch, and fail to realise that the display you use has bugger all to do with graphical corruption issues like these.

Their response is to first run the Apple Hardware Test in a loop for a few hours. I bite my tongue, knowing that most software based diagnostics are generally only good at reporting when you, say, have a burning hole in one of your ram sticks, but I do it anyway. It reports nothing. The next phone dude I get, tells me to flatten and reinstall. I believe he even went so far as to suggest that I do a complete zero-ing out of the hard drive first, in the event that some naughty bits escape a standard format, and play havoc with my graphics card again. He tells me that once this is done, and I can’t get any further luck with it, I’ll have to send the sucker back and get it replaced.

This immediately strikes a nerve with me. I know it’s the video card. I’m also selfish in the fact that I bought this thing for my 30th birthday, making it not just another computer for me - but a significant entry in my personal history of computing. I’ve been immersed with computers ever since I learnt how to speak. The fact that me, a guy who works in IT in a highly technical role, who has always built his own machines, has now decided to go with a pre-built box of such magnitude is a pretty big deal. Despite the gremlins, I’ve grown rather fond of my 8-core monstrosity, and have some very specific ideas on how I plan to use her - not just for my personal home use, but for advancing my career as well. I’ve even named the damn thing. I don’t want her replaced - especially when according to reports that a replacement may not even resolve the issue - I want to keep the same machine, and I want her fixed.

Okay, so maybe I’m at best - a little touched in the head, or at worst - downright creepy, for having this sort of an attachment to a machine, but goddamnit, it’s how I roll. While wishing no offence to the man, I would assume that with a guy like Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, a user could be forgiven for their eccentricities.

So, I throw the Apple support thing to the side for the time being. I first buy a second hand GeForce 7300GT from the original Mac Pro, only to find that the EFI32/EFI64 shenanigans that cause the 8800GT not to work in older models now goes both ways as well. I decide to go a little ahead of myself, and pre-order the 8800GT (which I planned to do anyway, but not until I first loaded her up with stack of RAM and HD space). Only now, I have to wait over a month before I get a working machine. In the meantime, the new 10.5.2 and Leopard Graphic Update makes the video card run a whole lot faster, but at the same time makes the thing a whole lot more unstable. Out of desperation, I decide to purchase AppleCare a little earlier than planned - in the hope that perhaps support won’t suck so bad, and that, as they promised, they’ll send a tech out onsite, and maybe, being a fellow tech, I can talk the guy into trying to swap out the video card instead of taking my precious away, and dooming her to become just another refurb.

I’m on the phone again to Apple. I get through, explain the issue, the guy says “Yep, we can get a tech out onsite” and proceeds to put me through to a product specialist. Awesome. Exactly the sort of guy I want to speak to. I get put on hold. A few minutes later, the guy I originally spoke to comes back and says he’s having trouble getting through and it may take 5 minutes longer. I accept, and sure enough, I’m on hold again for 5 minutes more. Guy then comes back, and says there’s a hell of a long time to wait, and I’d be better off calling some other time.

Awesome.

So that’s pretty much where I’m at with that. Over $800AUD later to try get around the inefficiencies of Apple’s phone support, and I’m back where I started. I plan to give them another call at work tomorrow, and maybe when their product specialists have some free time, they can help solve this outstanding issue I’ve been having without needing to take the lazy route and replace the whole damn machine. The biggest issue I have with all of this, is that if I was born in the United States of America, I wouldn’t have to go to all these lengths for Apple to replace my damn video card, because I could have just walked straight into any one of the roughly 200-odd retail stores, explain my problem to an Apple store “Genius”, and if my American friends are to be believed, have them magically wave their fingers and fix or replace whatever’s at fault, and be merrily on my way. But, because I apparently live in the barren, filth-infested wastelands of a third world country like Australia, such support is clearly too good for one so unfitting such as I.

Okay, so the hyperbole is a tad over the top, and you can’t blame Apple for not having any retail stores in Australia if you think about it properly. My problem isn’t that I don’t have a physical store or location to take my issues to - it’s just that a company that stresses quality above everything else, should have the support channels to back that statement up - and if you’re in a country where the only option is phone support, then it’d better be really great fucking phone support. When you’re dealing with a company that seems to strive for perfection, then you shouldn’t feel compelled to try spend over $800 to fix something yourself, just because you apparently know more than the guy you’re on the phone with. In the case for Apple, when they make the software AND the hardware, that prospect becomes even more worrying.

While we’re on the topic of lack of support options, here’s another interesting scenario I ran into just recently. Picture this - you bought an iPod touch the second they came out, from the Apple online store. You’ve even gone out and gotten a case to hold it in, and have never treated it badly, or dropped it, or anything. A few months later, the sleep/wake button appears to have gotten stuck. This causes the thing to constantly turn on when it’s off, or when it goes off, it goes into a cycle of starting up and shutting down, and makes it nearly impossible to get the thing to work. Even worse, when it does work, the constant sleeping/waking it does sucks the life out of the battery, and instead of the week or more it usually lasts, you find the thing doesn’t even last a single day. Kinda shitty, when you have a 2-hour commute each morning to work, and each afternoon back home, and you haven’t much else to do on the train and bus ride.

So.. off to apple.com/au/support to get the sucker fixed. You know it’s a hardware fault, and it’s not something you knowingly caused. Only now, you’re stuck. When you enter the serial number in their little “check warranty” box, it tells you the hardware is still under warranty, but your 90-day phone support is gone, and what’s worse - under service options, it gives you only two options: Jack and Shit - and Jack left town.

A bit more investigative work, and searching for “Apple Service Providers” gives you plenty of places who service iPods, like Harvey Normans, or Myer, or Dick Jones… oh wait, they also sell iPods, don’t they? That’s right. They’ll only deal with you in the case you bought your iPod from them. But you didn’t - you got it straight from Apple, and that’s who they’ll tell you that you need to speak to. Apple. So you dig out Apple’s phone number from their support page somehow, and phone fruit. But wait - right after you give them the serial, they ain’t gonna do shit until you fork over your credit card information and then they arbitrarily decide that whether your report of a hardware fault constitutes a support incident or not, and charge you for it if they consider it to be. So - depending on who you get on the phone, you may or may not have to pay money to report a hardware fault, and get your iPod serviced under warranty. Apple’s support pages tells you you’re fucked. Shops like Myer, etc, tell you to go to Apple, and Apple’s wonderful phone support won’t do shit unless you cough up your credit card, or some other way for them to get money. What do you do?

The correct answer, of course, is to go to this site, and log the fault yourself. From here, you put in your serial number, date of purchase, and explain the fault. You then enter shipping information, and other such stuff, and Apple then e-mail you with a URL to a shipping label. You then print out the label, and take it - and your iPod (not boxed, or with any of its accessories, like headphones or USB cables - just as it is) and hand them over to your local Australia Post office. No shipping fees, you don’t need to package the thing, they’ll take care of it. With any luck, a week or so later, you should receive either your old iPod fixed, or a brand new one to take its place. Easy, right?

Problem is.. how did I know to go to that site? I didn’t. I stumbled across it by accident, trying different URLs in the hope that I’d get a page like that. I’m not sure if the US site has it linked somewhere, but go and visit apple.com/au/support, and just tell me exactly where to find a link to the self service site. Go on. Try. I can assure you that if it’s there, it’s certainly very fucking hard to find, because I couldn’t see it anywhere.

So again, we’re back to the lack of support options. I was impressed how easy it was to go through the self service process, how easy it was to get the thing sent to Apple, and the speed of which it was diagnosed, fixed/replaced, and promptly sent back to me. What I wasn’t impressed with, is the fact that I merely stumbled across that site by accident, and in desperation - because the Apple support page would have me believe that I’m entirely fucked in regards to getting a faulty device replaced whilst still under warranty. Again, if I had lived in the US, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.

When you take into account the length of time it took for the iTunes music store to come here, the fact that the iTunes TV and movie store hasn’t (and most likely won’t for quite some time), the high likelihood that the iPhone probably won’t be here in an official sense for another year at the least (pure speculation on my part - I don’t have a shred of proof to back that statement up, but it’s something I can clearly see happening), and with the whole support issue seeming like they only sell shit here as an international courtesy, considering we’re a country primarily full of white people after all… well.

Now I get into the final paragraph where I need to wrap this shit up, because it’s already three pages long, and half of you assholes have lost your attention span, and meandered off elsewhere. So… yeah. I live in Australia, and Apple’s support options here seem to make me feel they couldn’t give a flying fuck about their customers who’re living on the Southern Hemisphere. Maybe this isn’t the case. Maybe I have bad karma or something. Having a website devoted to a fictional 10 year old girl would certainly do that. Regardless of that, I’ve found Apple’s support to be downright fucking woeful in both times I’ve had to deal with them, purely because of the initial hassles on getting the actual goddamn ball rolling, and having someone to try resolve my issues. Seriously, is wanting decent support too much to ask?

My take? I think Chris’s article is awfully shady. I mean, I like the man. I used to subscribe to Lockergnome’s mailing list back in the mid to late 90’s. The whole product placement thing, and the fact that the site is littered with ads instantly makes me distrustful of anything stated on his site, but I gotta admit - I agree with most of his good points about OS X in comparison to XP/Vista. On the flipside, I don’t pay any attention to Neowin’s “writers” in the off chance they actually produce original content, and the site’s legion of fanboys rank even lower on my couldn’t-give-a-fuck-about scale - mostly because I recall the days when Neowin first came about, said fanboys were busy hacking away at Windows XP’s skinning feature to make it look more like OS X. iRony++;

Now, I don’t give a fuck what you use, and I certainly don’t expect my preferences, needs, experiences or whatever to translate in any shape, form, or whatever to you, the reader. Furthermore, this is my blog. Because it’s my blog, I write whatever the hell I want on here, and it’s your choice as to whether you’re going to read it or not. You may also notice that because it’s my blog, there’s no advertising on here. I don’t advertise, I don’t use referrals. For example, my web host apis networks has a referral system. However, when people ask me what host I use, and if they’re any good or not, I send them a URL to apis’s front page and let them decide. I’ll be happy to say what I think is cool about them, but overall, it’s up to them to decide. The same goes for what platform you choose. It’s pointless for me to be an evangelist when I’m pretty much an antisocial prick, anyways. So I’ll just sprout my opinion, and if it falls in line with what you think - cool. If not, go somewhere else.

As you all know, I participated in the beta of this thing, and wrote a couple of articles here and there about the behemoth of a fileserver I built for the thing. For those too lazy to click this link, I essentially built an Allendale based 1.6GHz system with 1GB of RAM, a single 500GB SATA300 hard drive, and nine 400GB SATA300 hard drives for an aggregate of 3.73TB of total storage capacity. She currently has about 1.6TB of data duplicated, taking up most of the space on the thing, the left over space being used for backups, downloaded files, my Technet library files (ISO’s, etc), software and driver library, and so forth. She has a big-ass case to handle it, and a hell of a lot of drives to boot.

However, such a setup wasn’t quite as ideal as I had first planned. With a rather unique case of having 10 drives, and 1.5TB of data spread across them, I’d hit quite a few snags. The first being performance, and the second being file permission stuff-ups. Furthermore, when the SYS volume started to die recently, it caused a bit of a dilemma due to the fact I had an additional RAID card in the thing, which would make reinstalling it successfully a bit of a bitch. In regards to that, I’ve managed to recover everything off onto two 1TB drives, and I’m going to have another crack at it again later on, using the same PC, housing, etc.. but this time, with a few minor changes.

So, that’s enough veering from the original purpose of this posting, which was to give a few recommendations on how build a good, reliable DIY Home Server setup. Before you start, however… there’s four very important pointers you should be aware of:

• Buy the biggest drive you can afford for your SYS volume
  Basically, the way Home Server works is this: It takes your first drive, slaps a 20GB SYS volume on the beginning of the drive, and the rest of the drive becomes your initial DATA volume. From then on, any further DATA volumes basically “link” to the initial DATA volume, which gives you two side effects - free space as reported from anywhere else but the Home Server console is actually free space of the first DATA volume, and you can only copy files smaller than the available free space on the initial DATA volume at any given time. Furthermore, all your system backups are going to be put on the initial DATA volume first, so it’s within your interests to get the biggest drive you possibly can for your first DATA volume. If you have more than one volume, don’t worry about the first one filling up all the time - the Drive Migrator starts moving stuff off the first DATA volume, once it’s copied across (and we’ll discuss more about that service further down)
• Keep your total amount of volumes low
  I know it’s tempting to go crazy and slap drives in left right and center, now that even 1TB drives are easily affordable. Or even to go the route of buying more smaller drives to obtain the same space cheaper, but if you go crazy like I did and have 10 or more drives in this thing, you’ll find performance is going to crawl. With more physical drives in the thing, you’re giving Drive Migrator a hell of a lot more work to do, and you’ll forever see the “Balancing Storage” status in the Home Server console. The other issue is that if the drives are forever active, then they’re more likely to burn out and die quicker - just like what happened to my SYS volume in Konata. Try keep it to a maximum of 4 to 6 volumes.
• Use the onboard SATA, and don’t bother with any RAID setups
  Any IT professional worth their salt will tell you that RAID is not a backup solution. If you’re this conscientious about keeping your data secure, then you’ll go out and buy a little NAS box for syncing stuff on the Home Server shares that equates to the same storage capacity of the Home Server itself. My recommendation goes towards something like the N5200. Either that, or buy a Blu-ray burner or something. Home Server is usually resilient enough that even if your SYS volume goes down, you may lose your local computer backups, but as long as your data is duplicated across other volumes, it’ll be okay - and even some data that isn’t duplicated usually comes out alright as well. In my experience, having to use specialized drivers for SATA drives tends to make this kind of recovery much more difficult. Hence, if you’re choosing a motherboard - an Intel one with 4 to 8 SATA ports is generally recommended, because even without the Intel chipset drivers installed, it can still see all the drives attached perfectly fine. Don’t bother using the onboard RAID functions of said Intel chipsets - it’ll only make data recovery much more difficult in future.
• When removing a drive, wait a day or two before removing any more
  Not sure if this was resolved in the final release, but in the release candidates, I took it upon myself to test removing two drives from the storage array and immediately replacing them with two larger drives. I removed one drive first, ensured that all my data was still there (it was), then added the first of the two new drives. When I removed the second drive straight after this, it told me again that no data would be lost, but straight after doing so, found it took a sizeable chunk of data with it upon removal - despite having plenty of space across all drives to migrate the data across. Thankfully, I had backups to restore from. So, ever since then, my personal rule has been to wait a day or two before removing any other drive after I’ve removed one already. If it doesn’t say “Storage Balanced” in Home Server, I wait some more.

So, those are essentially my own personal findings after having used the thing for a good year or so. Aside from the fourth rule, it’s mostly all related to DIY setups - as Home Server OEMs tend to keep things fairly simple. So… what should a DIY Home Server look like in terms of hardware? Despite what some people say, it’s best to not go with a second hand PC, or some old server bits off eBay if you intend to rely on this thing, and have it on all night long. For something reliable and sturdy, you’re going to want new parts under warranty, and ideally all from the same shop, to make RMA processes easier, in the event that you get a bad component. No manufacturer has a perfect track record on having a faulty unit slip past QA, and into the hands of the consumer.

So.. we’re buying new bits. What do we want first? Well, you’ll need to look at where you’re packing all of this stuff into, and where it’s going to go. You’ve also got to take into account that WHS gives you the ability to add and remove drives fairly easily over the course of your Home Server’s life, so some form of external drive caddy system is preferred. For me, I have three particular cases with their own specific benefits that make them ideal for Home Server solutions.

For the most practical case, you can’t go wrong with a Coolermaster iTower 930. It already has a 4 SATA drive enclosure built into the case, allowing you quick and easy access to the drives. If you go by my above rules, and just get 4 enormous drives, as opposed to a stack of smaller but cheaper drives, then this case is a fantastic choice for your DIY Home Server.

For something a little cooler and sleeker, the Coolermaster Cosmos 1010 isn’t too bad, either. It’s got more expandability in terms of hard drive bays - 6, instead of 4, but you lose the easy access to them that the iTower 930 provides - unless you go with an internal drive bay in the 5.25 bays.

Finally, if you’re crazy like I am, you’ll go with a Stacker solution like the CM Stacker 831 that I have - well, not like I have, because I have the normal one, and this appears to be an SE edition or something. Regardless of which, if you slap three SATA backplanes into this like my personal favourite - the SNT 3141, which occupies three 5.25 bays to give you 4 SATA drives per enclosure, you can load your Home Server up with up to 12 drives that are very easy to get to. I can’t recommend a big solution like this if you’re using WHS, however.. as Drive Migrator appears to be rather unforgiving with performance and reliability when it’s given so many damn volumes to look after. Once I sort out all my crap, the next Home Server will be 4 to 6 drives only.

While it wasn’t my intention to make this article a two-parter, I think this is getting a tad too long for keeping people’s attentions, so stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll discuss more about what sort of architecture to go for, what makes a good Home Server motherboard and CPU, and how to go beyond a simple backup and file dump, and do some cooler things - like automated torrent downloads (without data corruption), DHCP serving, and so forth.

Just so people don’t go accusing me of being the next Walt Mossberg or David Pogue, I thought I’d write a few things about how Apple’s doing so far, this year.

So… first off the bat, we have the Mac Pro refresh and boy, what a refresh! We’ve got Quad cores in every model, except for the single processor version (and hey, there’s a single processor version!). We’ve also got a brand new chipset, bus speed, and updated RAM speeds which will stop all those PC folk laughing at the “low” speed of the memory in a machine that costs 4 grand.

To top it off, we also have an awesome array (well, 3) of PCI Express video cards that will again, stop PC folk laughing at the 2 year old graphic card options in a “state of the art” machine. What’s even better, is that they sell the video cards as separate components, so people who own the previous Mac Pro models can now upgr-oh wait :v:

That’s actually a lie, because as many older Mac Pro owners will tell you, the nVIDIA 8800 GT - pretty much the only card worth buying for the Mac Pro at this point - only works with the just released Mac Pro. The technical reasons as to why differ, depending on which rumour site to believe, but the common theory at this stage, is because the original Mac Pros had a 32-bit EFI firmware, whereas the barely-a-week-old Mac Pro uses a brand new 64-bit EFI firmware implementation.

In Apple’s defense, it appears to have been an oversight between nVIDIA and Apple somewhere, and the incompatibility with the GeForce 8800 GT and the earlier Mac Pro models was purely to do with differing EFI versions and stuff. Furthermore, Apple and nVIDIA seem to be on the case in regards to fixing this up. Truthfully, this doesn’t directly effect me, but I do have a couple of friends who are sighing a sigh of relief that they won’t have to go out and spend around $4,300 just to get a slightly better video card.

What would be nicer, is if Apple dropped the price of their X1900XT to something more in line with, say, PC video card prices (a PC X1950 Pro with 512MB is generally half Apple’s goddamn price, for fuck’s sake) to make up for the firmware bungling on the 8800GT. Then maybe they can start a cold storage business for Eskimos.

Then there’s the MacBook Air. A 13″ widescreen notebook with a choice between a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz processor, a choice between an 80GB hard drive of slow and fail, or a speedy yet small 64GB SSD, and 2GB of RAM, with the same graphics and chipset as the standard MacBook, minus the optical drive, and possessing only a single USB port, micro-DVI port, and audio-out port. While this would normally sound like a budget notebook on specs alone (at least, the first configuration would), the thing costs $2,499. What’s more, the higher end model (1.8GHz, SSD) costs $4,338. Jesus Tittyfucking Christ, I hear you exclaim. Well, its gimmick is that it’s absurdly fucking thin, as in you can slide one into those internal mail envelopes you see in offices everywhere. It’s barely thicker than your index finger, and weighs only 1.5kg - which is pretty cool, if you think about it. In terms of the subnotebook market, this thing kicks the shit out of all the other subnotebook attempts out there.

However, it still doesn’t address the fact that you’re paying a whole lot more for something a whole lot less in comparison to the Macbook, when ultimately you wind up with half the weight. I only know of one or two people offhand, who could be in the market for a subnotebook, and said people are:

1. Rich, and
2. Complete fucking imbeciles

I think the MacBook Air is an amazing feat of engineering, but Apple couldn’t have missed the mark more if they were pointing in the opposite direction, and the mark was in an entirely different country. Sure, the world’s thinnest notebook is cool and all that, but when the MacBook Air weighs 1.5kg, while the MacBook weighs in at 3kg and is in every way superior in terms of performance and featureset, one has to ask precisely what kind of problem does the MacBook Air really solve? If anything, the MacBook Air seems to only produce more problems, with its inherent lack of an optical drive or ethernet port, and the fact that the battery in the thing isn’t user replaceable.

That last bit is a particular stickler for me, because unlike folks in the good ol’ US of A, we don’t have Apple stores on every corner - in fact, we don’t have Apple Retail in this country at all. The only option for Australians to get the battery swapped out, is to send the sucker off to Apple, and wait a week or so for it to come back. Not to mention if you’re travelling long distances with the thing, and want to keep a spare battery in order to keep you running if the time between power points is longer than the aforementioned 5 hours you’re going to get out of this thing.

I’d like to be able to say “Well, hey.. that’s kinda cool. Bit pricey, but I’m not really the market that Apple are aiming for with this”, but I honestly can’t think of any real market for the thing, outside of rich people or complete pussies. If any of my friends expressed an interest in this thing, I’d strongly advise that they harden the fuck up, and get themselves a MacBook or MacBook Pro, instead.

Last but not least, we have Time Capsule, which surprisingly enough hasn’t had much mention in the press, lately. If you haven’t heard, it’s a combination of a wireless-N base station, complete with 4 gigabit ports that can also act like a router only with the addition of a 500GB or 1TB hard drive in it that works seamlessly - and wirelessly - as a Time Machine repository, that wonderful, wonderful backup solution of Leopard’s. There’s just one problem. I already bought an AirPort Extreme to do this, in combination with the 400GB (for now, a larger one was planned) drive I have in a USB enclosure. In fact, I was kind of hoping that I’d be able to use my Windows Home Server for this exact purpose - but I can understand the need for a HFS+ volume to do it with.

That said, Time Capsule is pretty damn good. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of Windows Home Server, albeit not with quite the same level of expandability, but then again Time Capsule is a hell of a lot cheaper at the equivalent storage levels. It’s a hell of a lot more simple, meaning that real people (not geeks like you and I) will actually buy this thing, and be capable of setting it up themselves, as opposed to Home Server. The problem for me is that as of right now, Time Machine doesn’t play nicely at all with the AirPort Extreme - and that’s effectively all that Time Capsule is - an AirPort Extreme with a hard drive slapped inside. If the release of Time Capsule doesn’t coincide with either a fix for Time Machine, or a fix for the AirPort Extreme, then we’re going to end up assuming that Apple just made me their bitch.

Even so, I probably will end up buying this thing, simply because I’m in need of a NAS solution for backing up my Macs, and the Home Server just can’t do that, with or without Time Machine. WHS has this wonderful bug with corrupting data stored on shares, and basically stems from trying to modify the data directly on the server, as opposed to keeping a local copy and just copying over the updated version. I’m willing to bet that a backup solution (ie, Super Duper) would end up writing gibberish onto the Home Server, instead of backing up correctly. That, and the Home Server’s almost full, requiring me to look into alternative storage methods anyways.

So there you have it. Yes, even I can poo-poo Apple, once in a while. All in all, Macworld ‘08 was kind of pretty much disappointing, but the update of the Mac Pro a week before it was all I was personally hanging out for, anyways. I’d also hoped to hear mention of when/if the iPhone was coming to these shores, but I think I’ve got enough to spend money on for the time being.

Well.. something has kinda come up in the meantime, and I’m going to be a bit distracted by it, so you’ll need to wait a little longer. What came up, you ask? Well.. it’s this.

Go check out the hardware page for more details. :fappery: