Silke and I tried to disassemble my keyboard, a Logitech diNovo Mac Edition Keyboard, but failed to open the case. Silke managed to remove the key caps of both shift keys but we couldn’t spot any defects. We finally had to give up and declare the keyboard a loss. This is quite disappointing considering that I bought that keyboard less than two years ago.

As Logitech are not selling any Mac keyboards at the moment and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted another one anyway I decided to buy an original Apple keyboard. I use the same keyboard at work and  get along with it quite well. Fortunately you can just order keyboard in US layout (and not only in International English) in Apple’s UK online store these days.

I was quite pleased when the Apple Store promised to deliver the keyboard within two days using the standard delivery method. I was even more pleased when the keyboard really turned up today. I really wish that Amazon UK’s delivery service was anyway near as quick as that.

Anyway, I’m happily typing along on the keyboard and now all is good.

That reminded me how happy I am that I don’t own a Gaming PC anymore. It was just a waste of money and time and on top of that frequently very frustrating: the noise, driver problems, hardware incompatibilities, and so on and so forth.

The quality of the graphics produced by the PlayStation 3 might not be state of the art anymore. But they look good enough for me. And I can actually focus on playing games instead of faffing around with the system.

Luckily I ordered the two new hard disks via Amazon who offer an excellent return service. They already sent me a replacement hard disk before I even shipped the broken one. Let’s hope this one works better.

A few afterthoughts on the whole affair:

1. It is very disappointing that one of my server grade Seagate Barracuda ES.2 hard disks died within little over two years.
2. The good news is that Seagate offer a five year warrantee on this model. I am therefore entitled to a replacement which I have requested via their website.
3. Before you return a faulty hard disk to Seagate they however ask you to run SeaTools to get an error code. The quality of this tool is really impressive. You can download a bootable ISO image with a DOS version that doesn’t seem to work. I tried it to boot on both my HP Proliant ML110 G4 and on an old Pentium 4 PC but it hung after loading the main program. As a result I had to use the Windows version. This version of SeaTools has a charming Windows for Workgroups style user interface. But to be fair it got the job done in the end and confirmed that one my Barracuda hard disks was indeed broken.
4. Seagate’s warranty serviced turned out to be very good. I shipped the broken hard disk, received the receipt acknowledgement on Tuesday and the new hard disk on Friday. The replacement hard disk is only a year old and looks brand new.
5. Considering that only one of the disks was really broken I’m still a bit puzzled why the second hard disks initially showed problems as well. In a system using SATA with its point-to-point connections you would hope that disks don’t interfere with each other. But somehow they seem to do nevertheless which is not what you would hope for.

Anyway, I’m decided to give the two Seagate hard disks a try and installed them as the second RAID 1 in my server.

Last night both of the hard disks in the primary RAID 1 volume of my server started to report bad blocks. As a result one of the hard disks got removed from the volume. Two attempts to add it back have failed because parts of the other hard disk cannot be read as well. My attempt to create a backup of the file system containing the bad block revealed more bad blocks and locked up the remaining disk. I will have to restore the data from last Saturday’s full backup.

I just hope the partially working hard disk will keep running until the two replacements arrive.

The Intel PRO/1000 PT is supported by NetBSD 4.0 and newer and works like a charm for me. According to TTCP its Intel i82572EI chip provides a 13% higher transmit rate than the Broadcom chip. It also supports hardware-assisted checksums and TCP segmentation for both IPv4 and IPv6. Above all the card performed flawlessly in my server for over a week now with all the hardware features enabled.

So if you are looking for a fast and reliable Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express card the Intel PRO/1000 PT is a good option.

1. Decent analog video (preferably via a SCART connector) and digitial audio output.
2. An HDMI connector for future use.
3. Support for popular video file formats like DivX and MP4.
4. Doesn’t require a proprietary server software.
5. A good WAF.

But I was wrong. I couldn’t find any streaming video client that met these demands in over a year. When I recently learned that Sony’s Playstation 3 (PS3) supports DivX in newer versions of its firmware my interest was sparked. After a bit of research I found a number of facts in favour of the PS3:

1. The PS3 supports UPnP AV and works fine with MediaTomb, an open source UPnP MediaServer.
2. The PS3 has all the video and audio connectors that I wanted.
3. As the PS3 can also play DVDs it could replace my DVD player. That would not only avoid an increase in the number of devices in the sitting room but also prevent a shortage of SCART ports on the TV.
4. The case of the PS3 is well designed and shiny.
5. In addition to all that the PS3 is also a powerful game console and a Blu-ray Disc player. And I was keen to play Assassin’s Creed anyway.

Based on the above evaluation I came up with a profound business case which was approved by the secretary of domestic affairs straight away (the WAF was even better than anticipated). I bought a Playstation 3 online the next day.

Luckily for us our good friend Achim is currently visiting us with his family. And because Achim isn’t afraid of anything and has healing hands when it comes to repairing computer hardware he retransformed our paper shredder into a printer today.

The only drawback is that I no longer have an excuse to buy a new colour laser printer.

1. The master telephone socket is in the hall downstairs. The study with all the computers is upstairs.
2. The interior phone cables are not really inspiring confidence.
3. There is no phone socket in the study anyway.

The initial solution for this dilemma was creative use of long ethernet cables and a lot of adhesive tape.

After careful consideration I ruled out WLAN because of its reliability problems and lack of speed (ADSL2+ will max out 802.11g). Don’t get me wrong, WLAN is very nice to have. Silke and I use it for our laptop and Nintendo Wii. I just don’t want to depend on it for the Internet connection of my server.

I decided to give PLC a try. After browsing the offerings at the local PC World store I decided to buy the devolo dLAN 200 AV Starter Kit. My wife prefered the Netgear kit because of the nicer design of the included adapters. But it required Windows XP for configuration and didn’t specify the supported encryption algorithm. The devolo kit on the other hand promised full Mac OS X (and Linux) support and AES 128bit encryption.

Back at home I tried the dLAN adapters out. I plugged in one downstairs in the hall and one upstairs in the study. Within seconds they established a connection (indicated by a light on the unit). After that I removed the direct ethernet connection, connected the adapter upstairs to the switch in the study and the one downstairs to the router. A quick test confirmed that my computers could still access the Internet. It took only two minutes to get PLC working and I was very pleased.

Configuring the encryption took a bit longer. devolo had indeed included an easy to use configuration tool for Mac OS X. It did however not work for me at first: it asked for my password twice and didn’t find any dLAN adaptors afterwards. Finally I tried to run it using a local administrator account instead of my LDAP account. And that fixed the problem. The software found the adapter on the ethernet upstairs, allowed me to enter the security id of the adapter downstairs and configured encryption using a password I supplied.

The PLC setup is working without any problems since then. The round trip times (4.5ms on average) are not as good as hoped for. But throughput (5.5MByte/s) and reliability are very satisfactory.

The harddisk arrived yesterday and I tried it out on the same day. The case looks nice enough and appears to be robust. It starts glowing when you power up the disk and connect it to a computer. The light effect results in a high WAF according to my wife. I would personally have prefered a full size USB socket on the case but its micro USB socket works fine so far. And last but not least: the harddisk works fine with my server.

After partitioning and formatting the drive (newfs -i 1048576 saves a lot of time when you create a 698GB filesystem under NetBSD) I started my backup script. Three hours and over 150GB later I had a complete backup. Copying the most important filesystems (about 25GB) to the DAT streamer would have taken twice as long. And there is still free space for three more backups on the external harddisk.

Overall I’m happy with FreeAgent Pro. It works fine, offers a lot of diskpace and isn’t noisy.