I been a whole year…

Wow – it has been a whole year since I wrote something – that should change in the near future. I have a couple of things planned – so don’t worry

Sonos multi-room sound system

I needed some music in my room. And I had read and heard so much about the Sonos multi-room sound system. So i ended up going to the only supplier in Denmark to buy a Sonos S5, “HiFi klubben”.

What is the Sonos sound system really:
The Sonos sound system consist of one or more of the following devices: S5´s (device with 5 build in speakers), passive/active ZonePlayer (should be connected to active/passive speakers). Along with these there are some additional optional devices – ZoneBridge (create/extend the wireless Sonos network) and iPod dock to name some interesting ones.

All the Sonos devices create a common wireless network, to communicate which each other – used for streaming sound/music. One device has to be attached to your normal network, for internet/network access. The system can stream music from netradio´s a local NAS or line in on the devices. I use all of them. I only bought the S5 – the one with build in speakers. But now i certainly plan to buy more when I get space for them (more rooms).

You can control the system via your PC or iPod Touch/Ipad/iPhone (not sure if more Apple products are supported?). I primarily use my iPad to control the system (secondarily my PC, when it is turned on). I play both netradio (there a tons of build in netradio, from RadioTime) and music from my local NAS). I must say – the Sonos system is super nice.

In the future I plan to buy two more S5´s and maybe a ZoneBridge. Two S5´s can be set up to play stereo – so i might end up having two in the living room. Another one i my office or bedroom. And maybe a ZoneBridge somewhere to connect all of them to my network and the internet.

The only thing I have noticed not working perfectly is the radiotime service. I have only tried using it via my iPad – and 2/3 of the time, it has trouble connection to radio time. BUT! And there really is a but! The iPad has trouble connection to other thing too – but ONLY on the network at home (which currently is not my own network) – so it might be a network problem rather than a Sonos or RadioTime problem.

 

But overall – Sonos is a GREAT sound system. If you want a multi-room sound system – Sonos would be my recommendation

My first iPad impressions – should you buy one ?

First post in 2011 – yeah!

I finally took the plunge and bought an iPad – and I do not regret it! It is my first Apple product – ever, I have never even owned an iPod. The iPad really is a nice piece of hardware. As i live in Denmark, i haven’t had the opportunity to buy one before December 2010, where it was released in Denmark. I bought the smallest edition – 16GB, WiFi only. After having used it for about a month, I’ve only used some where around 2GB. Most of the used space is used be apps, rather than user data – so I wont need the extra space.

The package:
In the package you find:

• The iPad – but i guess you already knew that
• (re)Charger
• USB cable (used for charger AND PC/Mac connection

The first thing to do is to install iTunes on your PC or Mac, as you wont be able to use the iPad before it has been installed via iTunes. My iPad came fully charged. When I turned it on, it simply told me to connect it to iTunes – I did, and the newest software (4.2.1) was installed.

To get the most out of the device – you should create en Apple ID / Apple account or what ever it was called. That will allow you to use the Apple Store, where you can download apps, games, book and more – which really is half the experience.

What do I use the iPad for on a semi-daily basis?
I use it for my mail (IMAP and Exchange), calendar and web surfing the most. For heavy web surfing I still use my laptop – as the iPad isn’t that good at multitasking in several tabs. Switching between the tabs is simply to difficult/slow. But i guess they did it the way they did to safe screen space. But several other browsers are available in the App store. And off cause I spend some time playing some games as well

It is really good if you just need to check something online – it being the TV guide, wikipedia your mail or anything else.

And it is nice to bring the iPad to bed to surf before going to sleep. It is actually a little heavier than I thought. It is not too heavy, but it wouldn’t hurt if they removed a little weight

I love the iPad – and I would probably miss is now, if I didn’t have it

Should you buy an Intel SSD ?

So – i finally decided to buy an Intel SSD (80GB, second generation). Overall, I’m happy with it. Bootup and shutdown is lightning fast. However – I didn’t notice the (hopefully) increased speed when installing applications, so maybe installing applications isn’t as I/O bound, as I thought. But my system is definitely faster than before.

My system:
Intel 6750 CPU (2,66 GHz)
6 GB RAM
ASUS P5KC motherbord
ATI 4770 GFX
Intel SSD (80 GB)

As you can see, the system is 2½-3 years old – which might be why I don’t see the last bit of speed from the SSD – not sure though – further test is needed to make a conslusion on that (which I’m not going to do).

So should you go spend your hard earned money on an Intel SSD ? Well, if you have got the money, I say go for it – it is expensive, but in will surely increase your I/O speed. I surely don’t regret buying mine

Debian – update from stable/Lenny to testing/squeeze

So… Debian 5.1, Squeeze, is some what around the corner. I might be running Debian stable, but I like to be on the edge everywhere else. Testing is close to be releases as stable some time between now and the next 6 month (personal guess – I have no inside knowledge). Before doing this kind of thing: backups, make sure you have enough available space to perform the update, and did I remind you to do a backup ? Great – lets get started

Actually it was very easy. Here are the steps I did:

• Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
• - Change every instance of “lenny” (or stable) to “squeeze” (or testing), depending on how you set up your sources.list and what release what want to follow.
• Run “aptitude update” – this will fetch the new packagelists from your usual repositories
• Update main package tools by running: “aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude”
• Do first part of the upgrade by running: “aptitude safe-upgrade”
• Your might be asked some stuff about upgrading to grub2 – I went ahead and chainloaded grub2 from grub-legacy
• Reboot
• Cross your fingers – and wait for the box to reboot
• Run “aptitude full-upgrade”

This should upgrade your box to Debian Squeeze. However I ran in to a few problems, which I’ll describe here. First – udev-151 refused install, and the error wasn’t exactly easily understood, at first glance. The error in short: make sure to upgrade your kernel before (or at the same time) installing udev-151. Udev refused to install. This can be bypassed by running `touch /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade`. Then run aptitude full-upgrade again – now udev should install.

I had another problem, which was kernel/initrd related. Installing the kernel, failed to create a new initrd-file (which is allways generated at install-time), because an appropriate tool for the job was not found to cut a longer story short – I installed the package “initramfs-tools”, which solved the problem.

The last problem I encounted (at the same time as the above), was that aptitude/apt/dpkg wouldn’t recognize that I had actually installed/upgraded all the needed packages – so it kept reinstalling them. Somehow, this was resolved be solving the two other problems.

So now I’m running Debian Squeeze – wohoooo

On the other hand, I had some bad luck doing the upgrade – it seems my HD (secondary storage in my Soekris 5501-60 server) died. I havn’t investigated yet – but it seems something is wrong with it – if it seems interesting, I’ll write a little about it.

Cya

Solaris 10 no longer free – WHAT !?

So, I found out yesterday (reading Distrowatch.com´s weekly news) that Solaris 10 is no longer free to use. I must admit – I was quite surprised. Solaris 10 have been free for many years now – and now they (Oracle) change it, just to cash in some money? Looking forward to find out whether it is the same for prior installations.

The exact terms onwards in: you can still download Solaris 10 – but you may only use it for 90 days – unless you buy a service contract for the software. So in other word, you can put it like this: it is free to try, but you have to buy it if you want to keep using it.

My personal guess is that fewer people will use Solaris. At the moment, the licence for OpenSolaris is the same as allways – but who knows for how long? So some people may go the OpenSolaris way instead – others may go the Linux or *BSD way.

Systray monitor for Nagios

Why monitor your monitoring system? Well, while it shouldn’t be neccesary, I like to always be able to see how the systems are doing, without having to read through mails or opening a browser and browse to the nagios home page. I found a very nice, little systray app, which constantly (nearly), connects to Nagios (via HTTP or HTTPS) and displays status in the systray. The name is Nagstamon.

First indication is the color of the systra, which can be either: green, orange, yellow, red or black. If the color is anything but green, something is wrong, and you can (left)click the program and have a list of current problems – NICE.

Besides the visual monitoring, nagstamon defaults to play sounds according to what is happening – so you don’t have to babysit the tray icon

I tried 3-4 alternatives, but liked Nagstamon the most – a very nice app