Usually when I’m traveling I try to get a car service done or anything that would take some time to get done. I had this arranged with Toyota to get my 10K service and a little paint job done for the Landcruiser. It took a total of two and a half days to get it all done, when my friend went to pick it up the Body Shop Manager told him that the iPod from my car was missing and they can’t find it, it was listed in the original paper when the car was submitted and they can’t find it. Now my friend went a little ballistic on them before I even knew, but they offered right away to purchase a new one for me. So he called up Alghanim Electronics and they are sold out and waiting for the new iPod Classics which were announced. The body shop work cost 95 KD and the 10 KD service was 25 KD, and the cost of the iPod Classic 120 GB was 85 KD. But it wasn’t available so I ordered it from Amazon and emailed my friend the emailed invoice, he sent it to them and they were reluctant to pay since it was an emailed invoice but after my friend spoke to the Body Shop Manager again, they paid the 80 KD, but that doesn’t include Aramex shipping but I didn’t mind. I usually take out all the items from my car but I wasn’t there this time around, but I have to say I was surprised this happened at Toyota, at BMW I would expect it in Kuwait but not Toyota. They were gracious enough to offer to pay right away, even if it took a little arguing.
Unboxing the PS3 was a simple process, but wiring it up and powering it up was going to be a headache so I decided to do that at a later point. So I went to Ace Hardware to pick up a voltage regulator to handle 2x110V connections and 2x220V connections smoothly since I also had the XBox 360 running on 110V. I wired up the PS3 Slim to the Home Theater A/V (Onkyo 875) using the HDMI cable of the Onkyo DVD player since it didn’t come with one as a temporary solution, then I connected to the network and switched on the power regulator to switch on the PS3. While I was there I sorted out the network cable connections and power cable connections, my cable management skills are close to zero, I like seeing clean jobs but I just can’t seem to do clean wiring myself but overall it wasn’t too bad.
Switched it on and I started roaming about the Operating System not sure where to go, but just poking around. I wanted to create user profile and thought to make PSN user profile so I can use it for online game but it seems that I had to update to the 3.0 software which took me over 10 minutes to find where to update it. Sony’s way of doing things seems interesting and I remember it from the PSP but this time around its alot more options and menus. After updating the system, creating my user profile, I opened up Kill Zone 2 and decided to play the famous FPS game of the PS3. I was having fun, and I have to say the graphics are amazing, loaded up the game and went to shooting and I am enjoying it but its far from Halo.
I bought a couple of other games for the PS3 and XBox 360 while I was there:
- Kill Zone 2 – PS3
- Batman – Arkham Asylum – PS3
- Need for Speed – Under Cover – PS3
- Section 8 – XBox 360
- Red Faction – Guerrilla – XBox 360
I was contacted by Zain to try out their new 21.6 Mbps E-Go and put it through the loop and see what its all about. The packaging seems to be nice and small, got a post-paid chip to try it out, took it out of the box getting it ready to plug into my HP Mini 5101. Just to keep in mind the 7.2 Mbps connection of Zain would get around 200 ~ 300 Kbps, so I kept this in mind when I was testing it out.
Its the usual plug and play scenario that everyone is used to, and piece of equipment is even a little better with the new setup. Its a sliding USB connection so its nice and compact, this is the Huawei HPSA+ Slider Model, fits nicely in any bag or pocket even. When you plug it in the USB emulates a CD so your software is installed and launched right away. I went into the technical details of it and trying to mess around it a bit, I had a few places in mind to test it out. When I first heard 21.6 Mbps I took it with a bit of skepticism and thought why not try it out and see what results I get.
Plug it in, configured the connection for the 3.5 G connection and went to my FTP Server which is co-hosted in Europe(Secret Location) to see what I could download a few large files and see what I would get in relation to numbers. I picked a 2.4 GB file to download and it started off at 450 Kbps which is faster then a 4MB land connection, I was impressed right away, its faster then the old 7.2 MBps E-Go right away. As I gave it time the speed fluctuated between 480 Kbps to 960 Kbps, and then I took it a step further, I got into my car and start stopping in different locations to test it out from the 6th ring road to Bida’a to Salmiya and back. I was impressed, there is a fluctuation in speed but it held solid between a 4MB to 9MB connection at 4:00 pm on Friday which is peak pressure time on the network, and so I’m assuming that late night surfing or downloading is going to be even faster then that.
This isn’t a long term test, so I’m going to try it a little bit longer to see what else I can get out of it. Now Zain has an excellent product on their hands with the possibility of great service, they will be giving Internet Service Providers a run for their money but they have to do two things, price it at an acceptable price and keep the service level at a high level. (Click on some of the images to get larger version of the graphs)
After Mark‘s visit of the place I had to go check it out, I had the urge to take a look at some RC cars before futoor and luckily they are open from 10 am to 1pm and 5 pm to 12 am. They are odd hours but work out nicely, and its just as Mark described it, the place is huge, its an RC Car enthusiast’s dream come true. They moved it up to the 1st floor right next to Rouche Boubios, not exactly sure of that spelling though.
They have all forms of cars which are ready to race or the buildable ones. The ready to race cars range from 70KD up to 180KD depending which model you take, size and speed have a matter as well, and that doesn’t include that you can get accessories for them and improve them. I was tempted to get a small one which looked really cool and is meant for drifting but I thought I would think about it for now. And then there were the models which had to be built and you can get those in gas or electric and those range from 250 KD up to 600 KD plus with lots of different configurations and types, and some of these machines can go faster then most consumer cars.
There were so many spare parts available for all kinds of vehicles, and you can customize them in many ways. As Mark stated you can have a building area as well as a paint booth and a photography booth. Then they are building a track on the roof right next to them which is going to be huge and perfect for those drifting cars, they can even make some interesting jumps for those off-road machines, I’m curious how they are gonna design the track. This is all located in Tilal Center in Shuweikh right after City Center on Pepsi Street and opposite Home Center.
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The order was placed the day of the announcement of the PS3 slim with one day delivery from Amazon, luckily it was delivered a few days earlier then the suggested September 1st release date, so I received on September 1st. The packaging was very compact and simple, I didn’t expect it to be this small in comparison the normal PS3. Now I have the PS3 even though all my games are in XBox I do have a few games in mind that I want to play with PS3, so I will pick and choose from that selection when I have a chance to head over to rehab, I will buy two games which are easy to play and not too involving so I won’t get too caught up with it.
Now I just have to get a suitable HDMI cable and plug it in to try it out, I haven’t really had the chance yet to play around with it but I’m hoping for sometime over the week to check it out, and I will update it to the latest software edition to get used to that from the start.
Apple will be making an announcement about their iPods on 9th of September. Now we will see if they will be making the 64 GB rumored iPod Touch and whats going to happen to the classic. Apple always have to leave something up their sleeve with their product line, they never like being out of the lime light or out of the rumor mill for too long.
It just takes one thing for a domino effect to take place when it comes to hardware, I had a failure with one of the tower raids so only half of it was working. So four drives were missing from the WHS and it was issuing warnings left right and center to my computers. I wasn’t sure what was going on but luckily I was able to isolate the location of the drives because that’s another issue and I transferred them to the new TowerRaid, but only three out of the four available were working so one drive was still out. Luckily I had duplication running and everything was safe and dandy in the WHS, at least I didn’t lose any data with a port multiplier failure resulting in four hard drives going missing. That took a little time but I managed to unravel the issue but coming to a full solution is a little bit a head when I butcher the Bunker Server, and that deadline is coming closer and closer.
After that I went ahead and trying to configure my APC 5000 XLI UPS with a network address but turns out it was having issues. But luckily at the end I managed to configure it correctly and access the wed control panel to see what makes it tick, and it has so many features to mess around with but I will make full use of that when I install the servers over the next two weeks.
- Mounting, wiring, and configuring 5KVa APC UPS
- Cleaning out the rack and rearranging the hardware and wiring
- Preparing for server install
That simply put doesn’t really cover all that we did, that UPS weighed over 60 KGs which is a hell of a lot when your trying to mount it inside a rack so we took out the batteries first and proceeded to install the mounting kit. After cleaning out the last 8 months of dust inside that cabinet we proceeded to rewire the network cables and power cables to be a little bit more organized. This major UPS will be supporting three to four servers easily with a few other items, it has a nice feature being manageable through the network and doesn’t have to be connected to a specific machine. The next step over this coming week will be to install and configure the first rack server which will be a testing bed and ftp control server, meaning I will dump all my downloads into that for organization purposes. Then the WHS server will be coming along the week after that, and that will be a hell of an install with so many things at stake with this crazy install. The best part is when you complete an install, and everything goes smoothly which is very rare, now just a few more steps to complete the setup.
On another note Seagate just released their new 2TB drive which seems to be faster then WD, but I think I will stick with WD for now.
Netgear announced the addition of a new, high-density network storage system to its award-winning family of ReadyNAS products for SMBs.Netgear 24TB network storage system for SMBs with the ReadyNAS 3200 is a 2U 12-bay unified storage platform that provides up to 24 terabytes in a single system.
I have always been a fan of the ReadyNAS product line and that was even before Netgear purchased the company, and luckily Netgear has only improved on the product but I still think there is some room for improvement. They mention that this is a new 24 TB 2U 12-bay storage platform, meaning that they are using 2TB Hard Drives to reach this amount but on their Hard Drive support page they do not support the 2TB drives, and when you look to purchase it, it isn’t available yet but the other units are but I’m looking forward to their solution because it will apply to all their product lines. Now for this machine, I think that it is one amazing product and looking forward to seeing some of the reviews, but you don’t get all this techi goodness without a nice juicy starting price of $4000 and thats for the 6 TB unit. As you know you can buy the low end one and buy the hard drives separately and perform the upgrade as you know can be a lot cheaper. As I said before, you can never have too much storage space.
Due to the urgency of my hardware capacity expansion I needed increase the amount of space available on my WHS Server. The steps were simple, I ordered the Sans Digital 8 Disk TowerRaid for the fast expansion and I already had a eSata controller in my Hazmat server which had two spare ports, so that worked out perfectly. It just took 10 days to get all the hardware I needed, at first I only ordered two 2TB drives, but then I ordered two more and the replacement to the damage one came as well.
I took some snaps of the Sans Digital TowerRaid which looks great and ready to go, I plugged it in without any hard drives and started it up. No problems with the hardware, everything was working as it should. I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to installs such as these, I take things step by step and install one item at a time and I perform a restart every time to make sure nothing goes wrong and if it does I know where the problem originated from, finding the problem is half the issue.
I installed the first 2 TB, and added it to the WHS server storage pool which bumped it another 2 TB, then I added another one. Later on in the evening I got a message saying that the Hazmat server is suffering from a Hard Drive failure and that led me to order a replacement hard drive from Amazon. I took it out, and since I got three more hard drives, one of which was the warrantied drive, which I added to the pool it was working perfectly and I went through the same process of adding one by one. This time I waited about three hours before moving any files and this time it seems to have stabilized.
