Article that I’ve written over the years to resolve specific technology issues that I’ve run across in my day to day life.
How To: VPN to your Home Mac
Lifehacker posted a great article on how to essentially VPN back to your home Mac (as long as it’s running Leopard,) with built in tools.
I knew this was possible, but hadn’t investigated it not needing it. But now… there is no need to justify keeping the machine on at home “as a server,” just in case I need to access something on it.
How To: Budget Network Attached Raid 5 Fileserver, Part 2
In Part One I talked about selecting the hardware and my thoughts behind the choices I made. It’s all been put together and the next step is to install an OS. For various reasons I decided to install FreeNAS which is based off of FreeBSD. It can be grabbed from here.
After a few minutes of looking at FreeNAS I was really quite impressed with it. They’ve taken a quite hard and convoluted process, added menus and made quite easy to setup. Like FreeBSD in general it can feel picky about hardware. If you’re using some off the shelf no-name SATA RAID controller, the odds are it’s not going be supported. But a lot of the more popular and better quality models are supported. The FreeNAS website (and also the FreeBSD website,) are both a tiny bit hard to find information and support when first using it. Counter intuitively you need to click on the Wiki link first, then knowledge base, not the Support link to find Installation and Configuration documentation. Luckily the menus within FreeNAS are fairly self explanatory.
The first step is of course to download the image. In my case I grabbed the live CD so that I could simple have the machine boot off of it and was good to go. Another option is to use a USB thumb drive to boot off of. I’m personally disinclined to use one as they stick out and get broken easily.A UNIX installer screen will come up and start probing and self configuring hardware in the machine. A FreeNAS graphic screen may come up, and eventually it’ll beep when ready. Hit the escape key and choose option 2 to get an IP address via DHCP. Make sure to hit “Yes” when it wants to choose a IPv6 address. That step messed me up the first time I saw it, but it’ll simply fail as most likely there is not an IPv6 server around. Most home routers have a DHCP server built in, but there may be some configuration needed so check the router’s documentation.
Once the IP address has been discovered, type the address it gives you into a web browser to open up the FreeNAS configuration page. The default user name and password is admin:freenas, it’s highly suggest you change the password ASAP. Once everything is fully configured we’ll go ahead and change this. At this point the instructions proved useful.
Step One is to add the physical disks. Under Disks Click on Management, then the + sign. This brings up the disk management screen:
As can be seen the available disks are at the top. In this case ad0 is the 40gb IDE drive I’m going to eventually use as a boot disk. Per the instructions change the “Preformatted file system” option to “Software raid” (the other options in that article may not be available). In this case I have four SATA drives so each needs to be added individually. Hit the apply button and each drive is added.
The next step is to create the raid partition. Go to Disks, Software RAID, then choose RAID5. Choose a RAID name it doesn’t matter what. For simplicity I used “server” put a check next to all the disks that are going to be part of the RAID then another on the “Format and Initialize” box. Hit OK, then once again “Apply”. Now sit back and wait. On this screen very little is going on. But on the RAID server itself messages will start popping up. Even better, they’re helpful!GEOM_RAD5: server: all(-1): re-sync in progress: 0.01% p:x ETA:232min (cause: store verify progess). After 232 minutes of waiting we then got this screen:
As can be seen my four 250gb SATA drives have been built into a 715gb RAID5 Partition. It now needs to be formatted which is done in Disk, Format. Choose the RAID array, give it a name again, no hurt in using the same name again. We’ll format it out to UFS+ with GPT and Softupdates as the as the filesystem. The other options may work, but are not recommended by the FreeNAS team. Hit the format button and thirty seconds later the drive is ready to mount.
The mounting screen is sort of confusing at this point. After all we’ve already created and formatted the RAID drive so it should be ready. But this physically mounts it so that it can actually be accessed.
Under Disks, click on Mount Point. Pick the disk. Then choose “EFI GPT” under the partition menu. This menu was a bit confusing for me at first, and once again FreeNAS’s documentation left this step out. Reading it at first it seems option 1 was wanted as we’d setup UFS before. The filesystem stays UFS though, and the name can be what ever. I choose the simple “raid” moniker for simplicity. The last option could be a real life saver if the power ever goes out. “Enable foreground/background file system consistency check during boot process,” would run fsck and other filesystem utilities when the machine was powered back on. It might take longer to get the RAID back up, but could save problems in the long run.At this point we’re ready to start mounting the RAID and writing data to it. I’ll talk about doing that in the next article in this series, including troubleshooting and setting up Time Machine to back up to the RAID automatically.
I recently came to the conclusion that I need three things.
There are multiple solutions to these three problems. Each can easily be tackled separately and there are a ton of good products that do each quite well. But I wanted something that provides all three. With the announcement of Apple’s Time Capsule a NAS or “Network Attached Storage” system suddenly sounded like a great idea. Unluckily Time Capsule does not have a firm ship date, and I’m not sure I wanted to invest in a new Airport Base Station too.
Turning to Google provided hundreds of links to products that were limited to only two hard drives, USB 2.0 only, or didn’t support RAID 5 or higher. Or worse of all did what I wanted but cost way too much. So eying the spare hardware pile, I decided to save some money and build my own NAS server with Raid 5 and Gigabyte network. I figured I’d save several hundred dollars and have a system that was more upgradeable and more reliable.
Tom’s Hardware Guide built one in August 2006. Looking over the list of parts used I wasn’t happy with purchasing a separate SATA RAID card as that would quickly add to the price. It would also significantly add to the complexity of the entire system, and reduce recoverability if the system went down and I had to put the hard drives into another system to recover their data. So a new requirement, Software Raid became quickly apparent.
My Hardware Requirements were pretty basic:
Between various upgrades I was able to scrape together a decent older PC case the boot drive and two of the four drives for the Raid array.
I’m a big fan of the LX-104 case. These were made by a no-name Chinese company for OEM builders. Despite that they were very good construction, thick steel, a working and easy to use snap together design, rounded corners and an attractive $75 retail price. Since their main competitor at the time was first generation Enlight cases this was all pretty attractive. Plus it has two hard drive slots and two 3 1/2 inch bays so that I could install 4 hard drives there.
The original motherboard an Intel PII-233 capable Asus board would have worked well, but then I would have had to go back to a SATA Raid card of some sort. I decided to pick up the Asus M2A-VM board. Not only does it have four on board SATA slots, it had onboard Video and Gigabyte. All of which use fairly common chip sets and are thus supported by Linux and FreeBSD. It also has hardware RAID, but I didn’t want to use that for the reasons outlined above.
I also needed to pick up a new power supply. I’m not an Antec fanatic like a lot of people, but I decided that quite was a definite plus. This machine would be effectively replacing an Apple G5 system which is dead quite. The Antec TP Trio 430w supply looked like it’d do what I need.
Add in two more Western Digital 250gb hard drives, a single chip of DDR2 512mb memory, and a retail Athlon68 3800 cpu at 2.4ghz and I was under $400 total. If I didn’t have some of the other parts on hand the price would have been a lot more making something likeLacie’s Ethernet Disk Raid much more attractive.
Of course, this would also be a great use for that previous generation PC sitting in the closet. With the addition of a couple of extra hard drives it’d be easy to build a budget NAS for under $200.
The boot drive (a 40gb IDE Maxtor) went into a 5 1/4 inch to 3 1/2 inch bay adapter so that it could be master to the boot CD drive. The four SATA drives installed easily, and the entire machine booted perfectly fine.
Next Step: Install Software and Configure
How To: Reset Admin/Root Password
Anyone who has been in the IT business for any length of time knows literally hundreds of passwords. As we get older though it becomes harder and harder to remember each password and continue with safe security practices. Many companies have gone to centralized password systems. But such software is not always compatible with every OS there is. In such cases as the four year old FreeBSD server sitting in the corner that serves one application. So, here is a large list on ways to reset the root password or administrative user on many operating systems. Keep in mind that these instructions all assume you have physical access to the server in question.
FreeBSD (all versions)
Linux (Lilo Loader)
Linux (GRUB loader)
mount -t proc proc /procmount -o remount,rw /OS X (All Versions) OS X has two ways to reset the Administrator Password.
Option 1:
Option 2:
Solaris (On Sun Hardware)
You must have the Solaris CDRom to do this. If you do not have physical media, get it here. Note that this download is for Ver10, so may not work on older versions.
Note that many Solaris systems may have mirrored volumes, a volume manager or other method of copying the full filesystem. If this is the case these instructions will need to be followed for both volumes, otherwise corruption can easily occur.
Solaris (i386/Intel Hardware)
Again you should have the CDRomto boot off of.
General Windows
Amazingly Windows Server does not have an easy way to recover the password. Microsoft would call this security, but do provide a package of recovery software that does the job. But it costs $199. Tech Trax has an article on reseting the password on XP system via the XP install disc. Or you can download an emergency boot cd from here, here, or buy a password cracker from here. Be extremely careful with downloading Windows password crackers from the Internet. Yes they may work, but it’s more likely they are actually a Virus or a Trojan and could cause more problems then you have already.
*edit* Hiren’s BootCD has several utilities that will allow the reseting of Windows passwords.
Windows 7
This does not reset the password, but allows you to make a new Administrative user who can then change the password in the control panel for the other user.
Windows 8
User the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Tools (download here) to reset the password.
How To: Fix Desktop Switching
One of the bugs introduced in Leopard is pretty small, but significant to those of us who highly enjoy our Apple Experience. If Aperture is installed, users are no longer able to change which folder pictures are pulled out of for Desktop Switching. Adding a new folder will show a second, inaccessible “Aperture” folder.
Various troubleshooting steps included removing Aperture, and removing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist which is the file that controls the desktop settings. Neither of these worked though.
The fix is pretty simple and amazing really. Open iPhoto. Create a new, blank library. Close iPhoto. Go into Desktop Settings and feel free to add as many folders and you wish. In fact it may already be there if you had dual Aperture folders before.
After that, simply sit back and enjoy your auto-rotating desktop picture again.