Richard Ive - Rants Raves and Tech. - Linux, Windows, OS X, Programming and More!

Last week I purchased a NAS box, and a 500gb hard disk to go with it. I’ve wanted one for a while now and decided it’s a good time to get one. After a lot of browsing round online computers shops such as www.overclockers.co.uk and www.novatech.co.uk I decided on the Icy Box 2001 series from novatech.co.uk. It seemed like it was perfect for what I need, and it is. It’s fantastic! I’ll list the servers it has on it:

• Samba (Windows file sharing)
• FTP
• NFS
• DHCP
• Print Server
• iTunes Media

Currently i’m using Samba within my parents house, and FTP from Uni. I’ve set up a nice cronjob on my iMac to FTP all my uni work to it in a tar file once a night. It works really well for my parents too. They have a mapped network drive, so it looks like any other windows drive on their Microsoft Vista machine. To which they keep backups of their photos and emails. The iTunes server is really good too. It transmits all your music to a shared folder in your iTunes without you having to do anything, all you need to do is search for the song you want and double click it to play.

Once issue I have had with it is the online admin page crashing and not responding until the server is hard rebooted. However, to overcome this issue I found a nice hack to enable telnet, and the program that fires the http daemon off. For anyone who has the IB-NAS1000/NAS2000/NAS2001 Icy Box here is a little tutorial for you:

1. In your web browser go to: http://<ip_of_your_nas>/cgi/telnet/telnet.cgi. Here is a hidden admin page for telnet. Tick the check box and then the submit button.
2. Open up a telnet client, or Windows Command Prompt and type telnet <ip_of_your_nas>
3. Login with user name: root and password: raidsonic. (These logins should work! If not try a google search)
4. In the command line type /etc/rc.d/S97thttpd.sh start (This will start you thttpd server! (Obviously))

And that’s how you enable telnet and restart your httpd daemon. If you’re confident with cronjobs, add the command to a 15min cron and you’ll never need to send the command again!

So over all I’m very happy with my NAS. I’m lucky I know something about Linux and the way samba works, other wise I probably wouldn’t have been able to fix the issues, however over all it’s a very good piece of kit.

Before I start; Here’s a famous quote of Mr. William Gates: “1994 - I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.” - Four years later the giant we know today as Google Inc. was founded. Two years after that Google were crowed the Worlds largest Search Engine.

The trend of Microsoft ignoring the importance of the Internet has been around for a lot longer than most people can remember. And for this exact reason my motivation for learning ASP.NET is minimal. Don’t get me wrong - I understand the importance of learning a Microsoft language. I understand that employers are looking for people who know the new .NET framework, I also know that Microsoft are, obviously, the dominant suppler of software in the market. However, I personally believe that for such a large company, their naivety is enough to put you off learning their web language.

I am also a strong believer of Open Source. When i started College at the age of 16 I made the decision to learn a programming language. I started off learning Visual Basic 6, but decided that the importance of the Internet was too much to miss on (even a 16 year old boy can see it), so I decided to learn PHP. PHP is an Open Source language developed to run on multi-platforms making it very versatile and develop-able. Because PHP is Open Source there is a large “fan base” and support community to go with it. Along with PHP I also enjoy playing with Linux, which is also open source. Which is another reason I want to stay away from ASP.NET, and ASP in general. I realise that Microsoft can only advertise their own products, it wouldn’t make sense if they allowed everyone and anyone to make their own languages. What they haven’t done is make ASP for an other Operating Systems such as Linux. This may be impossible to do, I don’t know, but it would be nice to see them attempt it.

To summarise. I don’t believe Microsoft are leaders in the Internet market and will never be. Their current roll of the most dominant company in the software and SDK / IDE market will, I feel, be stolen by someone like Google, or even perhaps Apple. Open Source / Linux is become more and more popular with the every day user. Take Dell for example, they give you the chance to buy personal computers and servers with Red Hat pre-installed. Dell have been associated with Microsoft for many years, and are probably Microsoft’s largest retailer, now they’re supplying an alternative.

I’d like to think I’m not someone who gets bored often, however that isn’t the case. I have one of those minds that wanders all over the place thinking about numerous things unrelated to the task at hand. Or I will contradict decisions I make due to the mind-wandering. For example: While I have been sat here writing this post, I have had a discussion in my head whether creating a blog is a good idea, or not, due to my crazy indecisive mind. As a result, I can never decide what to do and get bored.

This indecisiveness carries its self across to work. Here I am, trying to work out what is more important: Configuring an IBM database, which I may add, is close to impossible due to the pathetic documentation provided by IBM; Start developing the new back-end for a web portal I previously programed; Or start helping other people with their work. All of which are legitimate tasks that require my attention at one point in the near future. Now, I could just get down them one by one and slowly get them out of my in-tray, however the though of thinking how to fix and tackle each problem is what’s putting me off . Problems result in mind wandering which results in indecisiveness… get where i’m going here?