Random Synapses

I’ve got a couple of Dell Latitude C610 laptops with sufficient power in the 1 GHz Pentium III Mobile processor for playing a DivX video full screen. What they are particularily great with is power consumption, running easily for 2.5 to 3 hours on a full charge, and they’ve got room for two batteries each! Obviously, this comes at a cost: the weight.

But one thing drives me bonkers: one came with a 24x CDROM drive, and the other with a flimsy 8x CDRW drive. With the omnipresence of DVDs, these are annoyingly limited for reading and writing optical media.

Option 1: Purchase an external drive. A fair option I actually considered, however it would require a fully functional USB2 or FireWire port. The laptop has only one USB 1.1 port, and the extra CardBus USB2 controller is not very reliable for intensive data transfers.

Option 2: Purchase a DVD-RW drive from Dell. Not only these drives are expensive, but also very difficult to find. Over the years, Dell changed the removable tray format, so there’s no way I could find a brand new DVD-RW drive for the ancient Latitude C600-series laptop model.

Option 3: Purchase a standard slim DVD-RW drive and replace the existing drive in the plastic caddy. I managed to find a Pioneer slim DVD-RW drive for a very reasonable price (30€ give or take) which arrived in the mail today.

It was immediately obvious that the new drive won’t fit. Its front bezel is flat and square, unlike the extruded, rounded-corners bezel of the existing drives. It was also slightly wider, only by one or two millimeters, but enough not to fit through the hole in the caddy. The bezels from the old drives didn’t match the button position, nor did the clips securing them to the drive tray.

I decided that, instead of trimming the excess from the new drive’s plastic bezel, I could file off the caddy to make room for the new drive. This was a fairly easy job and didn’t take more than 10 minutes of carefully filing the plastic, beveling the edges and cleaning everything.

So, here’s the story of modding the Dell Latitude C610 CDROM tray to fit a standard slim DVDROM drive, in pictures.

The original drive in its caddy:

Note the rounded corners of the drive bezel:

New drive on top of the old drive, removed from caddy. See how the original bezel is shorter with two millimeters at the right?

After using a file to make room for the new bezel, this is what the modded caddy looks compared to the original:

Detail on the filed corners - not an extremely pleasant result, but it’s functional:

Mounting the original connector to the new drive:

Mounting the new drive into the modded caddy - perfect fit:

Caddy fully assembled, ready to be inserted back into the laptop. Miniature screwdriver on top was a must have tool for working with the tiny screws.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!

Man, what a nightmare this project has turned into!

I have never seen so many unexpected restarts and problems. I have gone through all the distributions — FreeNAS, ClarkConnect, OpenFiler — and ended up pulling hair with despair. Nothing worked, and the symptoms made no sense at all.

So, filled with hope for putting an end to this journey, I went back to installing Windows. It worked just fine before, so I should be thankful for having a solution, right?

Wrong. Windows was acting up just like the Linux and BSD distributions did. It installed and ran flawlessly. But if I dared turning it off during a weekend out of town, it wouldn’t start up again. It would reboot at some point before the GUI was initialized, then go in safe mode which didn’t work either, and so on. Can you imagine the frustration built up in so many hours of trial-and-error debugging, without getting anywhere?

At this point I am convinced it’s some hardware flaw. After all, this old Dell has lived a rich, long life; it’s time something gave in. Could be graphics mode, could be the interrupt table, power lines, fishy drivers, the need for a display or keyboard, another swollen capacitor… Frankly, I don’t care anymore. It’s been fun, but you gotta know when to draw the line.

So I’m again left without a file server. But not for long: one thing led to another and I ended up buying the core components of a new PC — motherboard, processor, cooler and memory. The new configuration was meant to be a testbed for a video surveillance system; video capture card is very picky about the hardware it runs on and must be tested first. The test was postponed, so I am now the proud owner of a top-knotch motherboard and low-power processor with a monster passive cooler. It’s so much more powerful than the old system, more versatile, and dead quiet — joy to my ears. Old hardware? That’ll be my file server, after the winter holidays.

Now, the question is, should I go back to square one and try out all those distributions, or just throw in Windows and enjoy the afternoon with the lads at the pub?

I have a small network set up at home, and a bunch of files I’d like to share easily without the need to keep my computer on all the time. Clearly, a file server is my solution, but there are 1001 ways to make one.

The obvious choice is to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Lots of these are popping all over the market. Some are as simple as a hard drive in an external box with an Ethernet connectors, others can create redundancy over several hard drives and even run applications on their own.

Pros: they’re quiet and don’t eat up a lot of electricity.

Cons: oh boy, what a long list. The cheap ones require all computers to install some software, have limits in number of concurrent accesses and use the unreliable FAT instead of NTFS or some other file system. The more expensive ones have a severe problem with performance; RAID is incredibly slow, defining access restrictions is quirky at best, and I could go on for days.

If you want to go in detail about what’s available on the market, SmallNetBuilder.com site has an entire section dedicated to NAS.

So, about a year ago I rescued an old computer from a second hand shop. It’s a pretty decent Dell desktop, with enough juice to run a dedicated file server software, and then some. I maxed out the memory installed on it and added a fat hard drive with plenty of space. Then, I began looking around for software options. I crossed out Windows in a second, as it’s a resource hog and requires constant maintenance. I could install some decent Linux, but I dreaded customizing it for the role I had in mind. And finally, there are some specialized Linux/BSD distributions for file servers that caught my eye, all oriented towards simplicity of use and complete remote management through a friendly browser interface.

First to look at was OpenFiler, considering the reviews. All seemed nice, except it would play really well in a network with Active Directory or LDAP for managing accounts, and I really didn’t feel like tinkering with it to make it run one.

Next was FreeNAS, a BSD spin-off, which survived on this box for a few weeks. It’s weird at configuring drives and shares, and the account authentication is still problematic. Plus, I’m reading lots of posts about people losing data in the event of an upgrade. Not fun.

Now I’m downloading the recently released new version of ClarkConnect. It’s more than what I need, but I can “opt-out” on extra features. But even before I install it, the information available on it warn me that the particular Dell hardware I have may not be supported and may not work. Tut tut.

Worst case scenario, I’ll just get Ubuntu Linux (possibly Server) installed and running for what I need. At least with that one I know that I’ll have open possibilities and loads of help. But, for the sake of keeping resources low, I’ll end up fiddling with this as much as if I kept running Windows, if not more.

Looks like I’m going in circles. What solution would/did make you happy?

The first e-mail I have sent was sometimes in 1994, so I’ve been very much alive and active online for a whopping 13 years. I’ve got a fleet of e-mail addresses, a long list of forum accounts, and many logins for various online services. 9 years ago I was launching my own tentative of a site, on Tripod. Remember Tripod, Hotbot, Lycos, Netscape and all those buzzwords back then? Gosh I’m old.

One would think it had to happen sooner. Having an account hacked into, I mean. Nope. I think I defy statistics. This must be some sort of a record, to be so prolific online and only have the first intrusion today. And it wasn’t even something important — it was my 10 year old eBay account, which only saw around a dozen transactions over the years. How pathetic is that? Not even my Yahoo! account.

So here I am, talking with eBay customer support about unlocking my account, and unsure whether I should worry or laugh. I have no idea how it happened, since those principles that kept me safe so far have not been crossed. I’m thinking of an exploit on eBay’s site used to spam sellers with ads through the “Ask seller a question” option. This would make more sense than breaking my random consonnants and digits password, always changed less than a month ago. I mean, you’d probably screw up the login even if I spelled out the password to you, twice.

For the peace of mind, I just took a tour on my major accounts and gave them fresh, random passwords. The eBay account lock-out has been addressed within 3 hours. Now I think I’ll celebrate this glitch in a perfect score, the reminder that even with the best protective measures in place, mistakes do happen. It’s only natural, and it had to happen. Issue contained, damage insignificant, moving on.

Have you been hacked? How did you deal with it?

Some time ago I started this blog mostly to have my own corner on the Internet where I could unrestrictedly publish whatever was on my mind for whoever may ever find it useful. Part of this was acknowledging that I’ve killed the narcissistic side many years ago and I simply loathe the idea of spilling my beans every half an hour on a public diary. I could just not go with “me me me me me me” all day long, as if I was some sort of superstar of the world searching for my spotlight. Obviously, I didn’t make a splash into the blogosphere either; I skim through some blogs of interest once every few weeks, rarely comment and almost never link back.

Not only does it make me an oddity among bloggers, but also reveals that social networking is definitely not one of my finest traits.

This stood out even more clearly when I joined LinkedIn and Facebook a couple of weeks back. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with those accounts, no interest in updating my status every 20 minutes on Facebook and definitely not going to spend my time searching for everybody I know to add them there.

I basically ditched LinkedIn a few hours after signing up. I’m still tolerating Facebook for the single reason that I can scratch the surface on a bit more personal level with some people in the Company. They interest me, and if I want to work better with them then I should start knowing better the person behind the professional.

So here I am, hating every word of a post that goes on and on about me, writing something that will probably not be read, and wondering if I will ever understand what’s so hot about being on hi5, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo! 360 and so on.

Stripping away all the personal issues above, the bare question is revealed: if social networking does not appeal to everybody, how could one still benefit from it in other ways than the obvious?

[edit] Lewis Green at Marketing Profs Daily Fix hinted a week ago what’s better than virtual relationships. Check out the comments too — looks like I’m not alone!