Archive for January, 2008

FreeNAS for File Storage

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

I do all of my design and development on a 17" PowerBook G4.  Using a notebook for my development is great because I can haul it with me wherever I go, but one big downside is the size of the hard drive.  I only have 100 GB to work with and I have a lot of software and a lot of files that I work with on a regular basis.  I'm always looking for files I can delete because I'm always filling up the last 6 GB of space I have available.  I can offload some of these files to external disks, but then I'm concerned about a hard drive failing and then losing some of my data that I need access to.  Of course, you can almost always recover data in the event of a hard drive crash, but it can take a long time to get the data back.  Case in point, my father-in-law recently had a 500 GB external drive fail on him.  I was able to recover all of his files but it literally took a week to scan each sector of the hard drive to extract the data.  I can't wait that long to get access to my data.  Thus, I was casting about for a solution that would hopefully not be too expensive.

I'd love to drop an XRAID into my office (like we have at the colocation facility) but I don't have an extra $10,000 just sitting around.  I contemplated getting a DROBO, but that would cost me about $800 in total by the time I bought hard drives to go with it. In looking for a solution, I came across a mention of FreeNAS, which has turned out to be the perfect solution.  I have an old Dell Dimension XPS D266 that's been sitting in my closet for the past 2 years doing nothing (used to run a small Call of Duty server for my friends on it).  FreeNAS allows you to run a network storage device and includes a software RAID option if you don't have the hardware (I don't) to run a hardware RAID configuration. I didn't have the 500 GB hard drives sitting around but before I bought them, I wanted to make sure I could get it working on my old Dell.  I downloaded the ISO file from the site and burned it to a CD. Since I do a lot of hardware fixes and upgrades for friends and family, I had a couple of extra 40 GB hard drives sitting around.  I slapped those into the computer and started the install.  I followed the documentation (very simple and straight forward) which walks you through step by step of how to configure the server.  Within an hour of digging my computer out of the back of the closet, I had a fully functioning RAID configured network storage server.  Now, I'm going to buy the 500 GB hard drives and toss those in and be in business.  This should allow me to recover around 50 GB of my laptop hard drive back. Total cost for the two 500 GB hard drives and a new network card from Tiger Direct: $250.  

[UPDATE]

I received my hard drives from Tiger Direct and did a new installation of FreeNAS on that Dell.  The second time around was even faster: 25 minutes for hard drive installation and installing FreeNAS and setting it up as a RAID drive.  I set it up with SFTP access so while I was in Rhode Island on a recent trip I still had access to all of my files.  And I now have a whole lot of free space on my hard drive.

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Some Handy Programs for Mac

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

It's been a while since we've posted anything new up here on the blog.  I have a whole list of topics to write about but I thought I might condense a couple of them down into one post.  I've recently come across a slew of software that has made my life a lot easier or better. So, without further ado…the list:

Remote Desktop Management

If you're one of the poor souls who doesn't have a new Intel Mac (like me) and you still need to check out site's you're developing on a PC to see how badly Internet Explorer is breaking your HTML/CSS and find yourself jumping back and forth between your computers so you can reload IE over and over to see if your changes are having any effect, this little program will make you're life a lot easier:  Remote Desktop Connection (by Microsoft).  It allows you to connect to a PC on your local network and control it from your Mac and it's free! 

Likewise, if you have another Mac sitting around in your office that it would be handy to be able to work on without having to get up from your desk, try Desktop Transporter. My printer is not network friendly so this allows me to drop a file on my Mac that's connected to the printer and print from my main working computer.  Desktop Transporter gives you complete control over the other computer.
 

Deleting Applications Without Hassles 

I recently purchased the MacHeist software bundle which had a number of programs I've been interested in using.  AppZapper was a big bonus that I hadn't really paid attention to when I purchased the bundle.  I had a demo version of Illustrator CS3 that I hadn't been able to get rid of because it would delete some of my CS2 files along with the CS3 files.  It had been sitting on my hard drive taking up space for probably six months (I don't have time to mess with a reinstall of Illustrator).  I installed AppZapper and the first thing I did was delete Illustrator CS3.  AppZapper gave me a list of files that it would delete on the uninstall and I was able to uncheck the CS2 files from the list. Presto! CS3 was gone and CS2 still worked great.
 

Screen Flicker After Upgrading to OS X Leopard Fix

After I upgraded my PowerBook G4 to Leopard, I kept getting a strange green flicker on my 30 inch Cinema Display when I maximized or minimized windows or closed programs.  I spent some time trying to find some answers on the Mac forums and finally found a post about the problem but no real solutions. In the meantime, the new Leopard Dock was annoying me so I was looking for a way to modify it.  I came across DockDoctor and installed it so I could customize my Dock.  I was messing around with the settings and discovered that changing the dock from 3d to 2d fixed the screen flicker issue (and gave me an easier to use dock).
 

Help for Teaching Clients How To Use a CMS

One struggle that I inevitably run into as a web developer is teaching clients how to use the systems I've created.  Even though we mainly use WordPress as our CMS of choice, we still run into folks who have some problems remembering how to work their sites even after a couple of training sessions.  My new solution to this problem is Snapz Pro X.  It allows me to make videos of the steps necessary for a client to post new content to their website so the client can always refer to the video if they can't remember how to do something. I can easily do a video and a voice recording walking them through everything step by step.  I had been using the demo version of Snapz Pro X for about a week when I came across the MacHeist software bundle.  The minute I saw that Snapz Pro X and CSSEdit were a part of the bundle, I bought it right away.

Other Programs 

Here are a couple of other programs I'm looking into:
DDWRT – a better firmware for wireless routers. 
OpenVPN – so I can access my files from anywhere
Lighthouse – dynamic port forwarding
MAMP – Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Macs. I'm using this currently since the PHP that comes with OS X Leopard is missing some libraries that I need. Easy set up and install for local development.

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Finally… an easy way to write pdf files for free

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

CutePDF Writer is a great free software released under the GNU General Public License. However, it takes two files. First you need a converter (download and install here ), then you need the PDF writer (download and install here ).

I've been using it for a couple weeks and couldn't be happier. I use the Open Office PDF writer all the time, but now I have a way to print to PDF from other programs (Quickbooks) without the need for Adobe Acrobat.  

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