HP MediaSmart Server Project Update – Windows Home Server

As I mentioned about 8 months ago, I purchased an HP MediaSmart Server with the intention of making it the hub of my home network. It’s been a bit of an interesting ride, so I thought I’d bring you up to date on that project.

The box came with 512MB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. I knew 500GB wasn’t going to be enough to backup my existing computers, much less provide any additional storage, so I bought a 1TB internal drive along with the machine and installed that right after the initial setup, giving me a total of 1.5TB of storage.

I moved my music files and some other archives to the home server to free up some space on my main desktop machine, but otherwise, just set up that machine, my laptop, netbook, and my wife’s laptop to be backed up to the home server nightly. I’ve since replaced the desktop machine, but not before copying its data to the home server.

As a storage platform and automatic backup system, the home server works pretty well. I created shares on the server for music, photos, software installs, and user data then mapped drives on each of the machines to those shares. Windows Explorer simply sees them as drives and file transfers are quick and easy via the network.

I’ve learned a few things along the way, some of which were surprising. The big surprise was learning that if you let Windows automatically update on the home server it will spontaneously reboot itself when the update calls for it. I’ve since told it to download the updates and let me know they’re ready. I had hoped to be able to work on documents directly on the server, but this little “feature” makes it necessary to have a copy on the local machine and update the server as changes are made.

The first time I encountered this one I was, of course, in the middle of editing a document that was stored on the server. I was able to recover without a major data loss, but it was not one of the fonder memories I have of the home server! I had thought perhaps setting the Windows updates to notify instead of automatic would eliminate the problem, but no such luck. It still reboots occasionally, although it’s always around midnight so if I’m paying attention I can anticipate it.

Another thing I learned was that the server is a real worry wart! There are three status levels: normal/healthy (green), needs attention (yellow) and “Omigod the sky is falling!” (red). The latter is accompanied by dire messages like “your network health is critical!” Not only that, the normally blue status LED on the front of the box (which stays blue in “condition yellow”, go figure) changes to red, apparently to get your attention.

There are all kinds of things that trigger a yellow alert. If a machine known to the server hasn’t been backed up in 7 days or more, warning messages begin displaying saying “[name of machine] hasn’t been backed up since [date of last backup]. Your network health is at risk!” Since my machines aren’t all turned on and connected to the network 24/7, this happens a lot.

When this situation occurs, I have three choices: ignore the incessant warning messages, connect the designated machine to the network and back it up, or go into the Home Server Console and tell it to ignore the situation. If a machine isn’t likely to be used for a while, I’ll do the latter just to shut the server up and hopefully turn the yellow tray status icon back to green, at least for a while.

It becomes a sort of game to see how long you can keep the status icon green. You have to become resigned to the fact that it will be yellow quite often. There’s almost always something the thing isn’t happy about!

There’s apparently something a little flakey about my 1TB server hard drive. The past couple of months I’ve been getting “File conflicts” messages. These are yellow alerts, too. File conflicts are not a good thing, and in my case have been indicating that there’s an error on the hard drive. Maybe it’s a bad sector, maybe something else, I’m not sure and I haven’t had the time to dig into it and diagnose it properly.

I’ll occasionally get a red alert that the drive is “unhealthy” which tells me to “repair” it. Back to the Windows Home Server Console to run the Repair function on the drive. This is very likely good old CHKDSK, but it does seem to repair the problems which warning about possible data loss. A successful repair will turn the status icon green…until it discovers that the file conflicts are still there.

This last time, it was a set of four files which apparently were listed in the directory but didn’t really exist. I went in to the share on a connected machine and deleted them. That wasn’t good enough, the file conflict messages continue. The drive reports healthy, however, so there’s no option to run Repair again. –sigh–

I’ve mentioned the Windows Home Server Console. This bit of software until recently took performance to a new low. I’ve seen glaciers move faster!

Seriously, the login nearly always failed the first time (“Cannot connect to your server”). Clicking the OK button generally logged in, but it took several minutes for that to happen. Once in, clicking on any of the toolbar buttons required waiting another few minutes (not seconds, mind you, minutes!). Eventually, something would happen as a result of the mouse click, then the cycle would start over again if another mouse click was needed.

In trying to troubleshoot that phenomenon, I learned that you can access the server via Remote Desktop just like a “real” Windows machine! Doing so, however, is less productive than you might think. For one thing, when you log in, Internet Explorer pops up and delivers a dire warning that bypassing the WHS Console can have dire consequences (you could screw something up royally) and you really shouldn’t be doing this. Suffice to say that working directly in the server is not for the faint of heart and you’d better know what you’re doing to avoid catastrophe.

Within the past several weeks, the WHS Console has magically become fairly usable. Gone are the multi-minute reaction times. While performance is nowhere near snappy, it’s at least tolerable. You know that when you click something, you’ll see a response in this lifetime. The login even works the first time…usually. Whoever fixed this has my undying gratitude!

The MediaSmart Server isn’t really designed to be what I had in mind, but I’m adapting to it. If nothing else, the automatic backups are a major plus. Now I just have to implement a plan to backup the server itself!

John The Geek

How I Handle The Chaos of Twitter

Unless you’re living in that cave in which my wife grew up (a little family humor), you’re aware that Twitter is the hottest thing on the planet and therefore the single greatest contributor to global warming at the moment. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have come to a number of conclusions about it.

First, it’s an incredible time sink if you don’t take control of it quickly. Once you’re following a few hundred people, you could literally spend all day reading their tweets and get nothing else done. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, that’s pretty obviously unproductive.

Second, the tweet-o-sphere is chaotic, to say the least. The word “twitter” is much more benign than the visual cacophony of tweets that come flying at you once your follower count starts to grow. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not physically possible to follow a large number of people and A) read all their tweets and/or B) get anything else accomplished.

Third, Twitter is a marvelous source of information, if you can manage to filter out the wheat from the abundance of chaff. I’ve learned some useful things from tweeple and managed to do so without spending more than 20-30 minutes a day on Twitter.

After a fair amount of experimentation, I’ve come up with the following system that works pretty well for me. I use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) as my interface to Twitter. The Twitter website is a terrible user interface unless you sit there staring at it all day dealing with tweets as they come in. Its shortcomings are fertile ground for application developers, however, and there are a number of Twitter applications out there.

Admittedly, I haven’t tried most of them. So far, I’ve used TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I simply don’t have time to use and evaluate the rest.

Seesmic Desktop (http://desktop.seesmic.com) shows promise. What I like about it is that it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously. I have several Twitter accounts for specific purposes and one “main” one, so it’s nice to be able to aggregate all my accounts in one place. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with Seesmic Desktop that are annoying enough that I’ve given up on it for now. It’s still very much beta software, so hopefully, they’ll get it together eventually.

I’m using TweetDeck regularly. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it for the best results. My current configuration is based on this article, so I can’t take credit for coming up with this strategy all on my own.

Here’s what my current TweetDeck configuration looks like:

Note there are four columns. The column on the left is for all tweets from all those I follow. As you can imagine, that column fills up rather quickly!

The second column from the left contains tweets from those I have added to my one group. These are people I want to follow more closely.

The third column is a Search query. This is the key to keeping track of all my accounts. I have written the query to search for my main Twitter username: johnsawyer or any of the other of my accounts. This is accomplished by using the OR keyword. My query reads like this:

johnsawyer OR john_the_geek OR critterreiki OR rootsrocknblues

The results of this query include any tweets containing one or more of those user names. This includes tweets I make, re-tweets of any of my tweets, replies I make to other tweets and replies to my tweets. It would also include any arbitrary references to any of those user names in anyone else’s tweets.

The last column on the right is for Direct Messages to the account with which I’m currently logged in via TweetDeck (usually my main account).

You’re probably wondering why the screen shot shows three of the four columns empty. That is because I keep them empty to reduce the clutter. I leave the search column tweets because those are typically the ones I’m most interested in and may want to refer back to later. The other three columns are disposable.

I know this will likely bruise some egos, but the left column gets skimmed fairly quickly. I’m looking for pictures I haven’t seen before, or for keywords to jump out at me. If I don’t have time to get through the whole column (there are often several hundred tweets), I skim as far down as I can, then clear the entire column and let it start over.

If I find someone tweeting something interesting, I’ll add them to my group so that they show up in the second column. This is a small percentage of all the people I’m following, so I can keep up with them more easily. I can always remove people from the group is need be, and sometimes it needs be! The idea is to keep people in the group whose tweets are interesting and/or useful to me and remove those who aren’t. This column is read and cleared regularly after noting URLs or whatever other info I may find to be of value later on.

Again, the search column is never cleared, but it doesn’t tend to fill up that fast, either. I’m not one who tweets constantly, as many seem to do, so at any given moment there aren’t a zillion tweets out there containing my usernames.

Finally, the DM column is checked when TweetDeck starts up to see if there are any new DMs since the last session. If not, the column is cleared.

One other tool I use is TweetLater (http://tweetlater.com). I discovered TweetLater by way of a tweet that touted it as a way to eliminate many of the automated Direct Messages we get when we follow people. TweetLater can be configured to block any that come from its service (which is most of them, apparently). That alone is worth its weight in gold! I get far fewer DMs now that I’ve turned on that filter.

TweetLater has a number of other great features. The two I use regularly are the keyword reports and the auto-follow feature. The keyword reports are just that: reports of tweets containing specific keywords for the time since the previous report. This is very handy for keeping track of references to your username(s) and for references to topics in which you’re interested. These are automatically emailed to you at specified intervals.

The auto-follow feature saves me having to manually check out and follow (or not) anyone who follows me first. I’m very likely going to follow back most anyone who follows me, so I figure it takes less time for me to unfollow the few I find obnoxious than to manually visit the profiles of those who follow me. I don’t believe I can make an informed decision on whether to follow someone just from their profile, unless they’re obviously a mismatch. So far, few people have been an obvious mismatch.

Between TweetDeck and TweetLater, I find I can accomplish what I need to on Twitter in about 30 minutes a day. I’d be interested in other strategies you’ve used that worked for you. Please leave a comment about your favorite Twitter tool or strategy.

John The Geek

Action Machine + Dashboard = Can’t Miss System

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been using Derek Franklin’s Action Machine software for a while now. The more I use it the more I like it. I keep finding things it does that not only help keep me focused and productive, but enhances other parts of my product creation system, too.

Here’s a good example: I’m in the middle of writing an e-book. The e-book is actually written, it just needs some editing and formatting to make it look nice. There is still a lot to do, however, before it can go live and start making sales. Among other things, I need to create the cover graphic, make two web sites, one for a free e-book that promotes the paid one, and the other for the paid e-book.

The first site needs to interact with AWeber to collect contact info, and the second site needs a sales page, order button, and the back end for payment processing, downloads, customer registration, etc.

Once all that’s done, I need to promote the sites, so there’s a whole list of things to do in that regard, too. The list of to-dos is pretty long and keeping track of what’s done and what needs to be done can be a real challenge without some kind of system.

To help me manage all these tasks, I bought Marlon Sanders’ Promo Dashboard last year. This is a great product that lays out step by step everything that needs to be done from product creation to promotion. Each step is explained and there is a ton of videos and other training tools on the Promo Dashboard site.

Knowing what the tasks are is great, but even better is having a way of staying focused on each task until it’s done. Still further, being able to track how much time you spend on each task is very valuable for future projects. If you know how long it takes to complete a particular step, you can accurately gauge how long it will take to complete a project from start to finish and plan accordingly.

The Action Machine allows you to create your own task lists and groups of timers. It dawned on me that I could simply take the steps in the Promo Dashboard, create a list of them in the Action Machine and set up groups of timers for each phase of the project.

Once I understand the task thoroughly from the training in the Promo Dashboard site, I can set to work on it and the Action Machine keeps me focused on it until it’s completed. Then, I move to the next task and repeat the process.

This is a perfect marriage of two separate, but complementary tools. Each by itself is a terrific tool. Used together they make a killer product creation system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the Action Machine here: http://johnthegeek.com/likes/action

Check out the Promo Dashboard here: http://johnthegeek.com/promodb

John The Geek

The Action Machine – A Great Productivity Tool

I’ve recently been evaluating a new piece of software from Derek Franklin. Derek came up with a really interesting and effective productivity strategy and wrote an application to support it.

In a nutshell, the strategy is very simple: allocate a certain amount of time to a task, set a timer, then focus only on that task until it’s either done or the timer goes off, whichever comes first. This increases your focus because you tend to want to get the thing done before that timer goes off!

It becomes something of a game with yourself to see if you can accurately estimate the amount of time a task will take, and then to see if you can get it done in the time you estimated. You know you can’t be sidetracked by anything else or you probably won’t get it done, so that increases your ability to shut out other distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.

Because it can be a hassle write several to-do lists, then to locate a timer and carry it around with you, Derek had the idea to write a software application to address the problems. What he came up with is called The Action Machine.

I bought The Action Machine v1.0 because I liked Derek’s strategy and the idea of the software. It was good, but had some limitations. Derek asked the users to let him know how the software could be improved and got a ton of great feedback. He’s just released The Action Machine v2.0 incorporating many of the requested features and enhancements.

Here’s what the new version of The Action Machine looks like:

I had to shrink the image so depending on your screen resolution you may not be able to read the text clearly. The lower left pane is the task list. The software comes with a default task list, but you can create your own.

For example, I have a list (shown) of my routine activities, daily, weekly, etc. This is my default task list to which I can add tasks to be done that day, or new daily or weekly or even monthly tasks. I can export the list to save it for future reference, or to copy it to another computer.

I have another list that is specific to the steps involved in a particular product creation and promotion process. When I’m going to be focusing on that process, I load that list to serve as my checklist to determine my progress. More detail on that to come in another post.

On the right, there is a grid of 12 squares each of which may contain a separate timer. In the screenshot above I have five timers loaded. Two of them are set for 30 minutes and the other three are set for 60 minutes. The total time shown at the top is 4 hours, so I know how much time I’ve allocated to the tasks I’ve committed to get done this day.

Timers can be started, paused, reset, cleared, or checked as completed. Completed items can be listed in a report. Lists of timers can be saved under specific names and reloaded at any time. If you know you’re going to work on a certain group of your default tasks regularly, you can simply create timers for each of those tasks, save them as a timer group and reload them when you’re going to work on that task group.

You can see the full demo video at The Action Machine web site. Check it out, I think you’ll like it as much as I do. Highly recommended!

John The Geek

Secunia Personal Security Inspector (PSI) Released

Secunia’s Personal Security Inspector (PSI) is now out of beta. I’ve been using this handy application for quite a while and have found it to be extremely valuable for keeping my applications updated.

Secunia PSI scans the applications installed on your PC and warns you if any are outdated and contain known security flaws. It also flags applications that are no longer being supported by their vendors.

Windows users typically keep their machines updated with Windows Update or Microsoft Update, however, Microsoft Update only scans Windows and Microsoft applications. Secunia PSI scans not only Windows and Microsoft applications, but a long list of other applications from other software vendors such as Apple, Adobe, Sun and many others.

This latest version of Secunia PSI adds a “Simple” mode for non-technical users. The Advanced mode gives the user extensive control over the patching process while Simple mode makes the process, well, simple for the average PC user.

Secunia PSI runs in the background and constantly monitors your PC, scanning periodically to determine if the status of any known applications has changed and warning you if it does. The program is unobtrusive and doesn’t seem to consume noticeable quantities of resources.

This is not an anti-virus scanner. You still need AVG or another good anti-virus application. Secunia PSI compares the versions of known applications on your machine with its list of the latest secure versions. If there’s a mismatch, i.e. you have an older version of an application installed, PSI will warn you and tell you how severe the threat is.

The user interface is clean and straightforward, showing you graphically which programs are insecure or at end-of-life (no longer supported), how severe the threat is, whether there’s a direct download for the update, and very importantly, where the application is located on your machine. The latter information is very helpful when PSI shows that you have two instances of the Java runtime, for example.

I highly recommend installing Secunia PSI on your PC and keeping your applications updated with the latest security fixes. You can download the latest version here:

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

John The Geek

Amazon Kindle – First Impressions

The Amazon Kindle is basically an electronic book. Amazon calls it a “Wireless Reading Device.” The Kindle has been on the market about a year now. I recall looking at it when it was introduced and thinking it was a very cool idea.

Well, now it’s a year later and I own a Kindle. And it’s very cool.

The first thing you notice about a Kindle is the “electronic paper” screen. It’s essentially black-on-white and the detail is very sharp. Text is crisp and very readable even in bright daylight outside. There are a number of screen saver pictures that come with the Kindle and these are very detailed, looking very much like fine etchings.

Operation of the Kindle is straightforward. On the left side are Previous Page and Next Page buttons. On the right, a Next Page button and a small Back button. A small scroll wheel below the bottom right corner of the screen controls the cursor and menu system. Push the wheel to click, roll it to scroll the cursor.

The Kindle has a headphone jack for listening to music or audiobooks, a USB port for transferring content from your PC to the Kindle and vice-versa, and an AC jack to recharge the battery. At the bottom of the screen are indicators for remaining battery charge and wireless connectivity.

Battery life is impressive. I’ve gotten 3-4 days from full charge to half discharged with it on 24/7. I’ve not run the battery all the way down. Amazon warns not to do that, but to keep it topped off. I’m still a Ni-Cad guy so I can’t bring myself to plug it in every night, but when it gets to the halfway mark, I’ll charge it back up.

The Kindle is on the Whispernet wireless network, aka Sprint. I get 4-5 bars of signal strength everywhere I’ve been with it so far. The wireless is fast. A 1.5-2MB Kindle book downloads in a few seconds.

The Kindle has about 180MB of available internal memory, good for a hundred or so books in Kindle format. There is an SD card slot to add more storage. I have a 4GB card in mine which will hold literally thousands of books and documents. The Content Manager allows you to move items from internal memory to the SD card and vice-versa, or delete items altogether.

If you purchase a book from the Kindle Store, it is delivered to your Kindle via the wireless and also stored in your online Media Library at Amazon. This means if you run out of space on your Kindle and have to remove something to make more room, you can redownload it from the Media Library at any time when you have more available space.

In addition to the content you purchase from the Kindle Store, you can convert various files to Kindle format. At the moment, Microsoft Word documents are supported along with MP3s, JPGs and a few others. PDF documents are in the experimental stage. I’ve converted several PDFs and the results have been varied, but this looks very promising. One thing I intend to try soon is to convert a PDF to Word using Adobe Acrobat and then having the Kindle convert the Word doc.

Conversion is simple. Just email the file(s) you wish converted as attachments to the email address given you when you register your Kindle. There are actually two addresses, one of which is free. The difference is that the paid address delivers the converted document directly to the Kindle via the wireless. The free version stores the documents on Amazon’s servers and sends you an email with links to download them to your computer. You then transfer the downloaded files to your Kindle via USB cable.

As of this writing, the paid conversion address has not been charging the 10 cents they say they will charge for the service, but eventually I expect they will. The conversion fee isn’t unreasonable and IMO is easily justified in the time savings avoiding the download/upload cycle.

Not all books are available in Kindle format yet, but they’re certainly working on it. If you find a book on Amazon that isn’t in Kindle format, there’s a link next to it to tell the publisher you’d like them to publish it for the Kindle. I’ve been doing that with computer books as some of my favorite publishers aren’t putting out Kindle editions yet.

Purchasing content from the Kindle store is straightforward. You activate 1-Click ordering on your Amazon account and all your Kindle purchases are processed via 1-Click. There is a Search capability where you can search the Kindle Store from your Kindle by keying in search terms from the keyboard. The Kindle keyboard is a typical QWERTY layout, but the keys are very small buttons. Not all the punctuation marks are present, but when you need one, you press the Sym key which brings up a menu of them.

Thankfully, the period, forward slash and @ symbols are on the keyboard. Web surfing is available albeit in experimental mode and pretty much limited in usefulness to mostly-text web sites.

I leave my Kindle on 24/7 by putting it in sleep mode. If it’s idle with no activity for 10 minutes it will go into sleep mode by itself. There is a two-key combination to put it to sleep or wake it up depending on its current state. I also leave the wireless turned on although this probably consumes a bit more battery power than with it off.

In addition to books, you can purchase newspaper and blog subscriptions for your Kindle. All the major newspapers are available and well over 1,000 blogs as of this writing. I signed up for two sports blogs for 99 cents per month each. Whenever anything new is posted to the blogs, it shows up as a new item on my Kindle home page immediately.

I definitely love my Kindle! It’s allowing me to take reading material with me where it’s too cumbersome to carry a book or two and I can grab 10 or 15 minutes of reading as I get time during the day. If all my computer books were somehow transferable to the Kindle, I’d save a good percentage of the space in my home office! Hey, it’s nice to dream.

John The Geek