James Batchelor – Page 6 – Useful I.T. & VoIP Ramblings

OSMC on Pi with PPTP VPN

The arrival of the Raspberry Pi 2 meant the B+ previously used as a server was now ready for a new purpose. These little machines make great media players and is easy to setup so this would be its new role.

However, this Pi would be in my parents’ home, and miles away from where my videos are stored. I didn’t want to add a hard drive locally as syncing the library would be an issue. But thanks to the fibre internet connection on the server side I could upload at 10Mbps, enough to stream media across the net.

Therefore, the plan is to use an install of OSMC and add a VPN connection to my home server that starts when the Pi starts to make the operation seamless.

Continue reading “OSMC on Pi with PPTP VPN”

Review: Asus X205TA

It’s not often that I post a review about a product on this blog, but on this occasion I want to showcase an item that does not have a lot of exposure on the web, nor the reviews do it justice.

I’m talking about the Asus X205TA, essentially a low cost, low weight, basic Windows laptop that does the basics. At a retail price of £179 (less with the offers it seems to attract) its price point puts it among lower end Android tablets and Chromebooks. But here the big attraction is its ability to run full versions of Windows, making it a contender as an ultra-portable daily driver.

Continue reading “Review: Asus X205TA”

2 Servers, 1 UPS

With the new server up and running it seemed fitting to connect it to my UPS, and thanks to the low power consumption of the HP Microservers I still get around 40 minutes of battery only time with both servers running before the UPS runs out of juice.

Unfortunately, the UPS in use only has one monitoring port which is connected to my original server, meaning during a spell of prolonged power outage, the new server will not know when to shut down safely and will continue to run until the UPS runs out of battery supply, leaving it vulnerable to data corruption that affected the original server prior to battery backup.

But with a simple script and some setup both servers can shut down safely before the batteries run out.

Continue reading “2 Servers, 1 UPS”

Raspberry Pi 2

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has brought a new model of the Pi to the table, so with the same low price it was easy to add to my Pi family.

For those not yet familiar with the RPi 2, it keeps the small and simple form factor of its predecessors, but gives performance upgrades in the form of an 800mhz quad core processor, with overclocking options still available, and combined it with a whole Gigabyte of RAM. These upgrades, on paper at least sound that it could make the Pi into a useable desktop machine, with less freezing during full CPU load that was easy to achieve previously.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi 2”

Trouble Accessing BIOS with Windows 10?

Since installing Windows 10 the option to enter BIOS settings disappeared on my HP Pavillion DV8, with the only way to get it back was to pull the CMOS battery from the laptop and perform a hard reset.

If you’re having the same trouble the solution is easy, instead of clicking shut down to turn off the laptop and switch it on again, click restart instead! Seems simple but I always used shut down to allow the machine to cool off before turning on again.

Continue reading “Trouble Accessing BIOS with Windows 10?”

Finally: Fibre Connection

Fibre broadband has been available in my region for a couple of years now, and while it was tempting it was just too expensive for a fully unlimited package. Therefore I had to make do with ADSL, combined with being a few miles from the exchange it was pretty poor, even when pulling the ring wire.

But at last an offer from Sky for existing customers to get Fibre half price, so I had to jump on this bandwagon immediately. The Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) service is a 40Mbps down and 10Mbps up with no download cap. Compared to before this is a huge improvement.

Continue reading “Finally: Fibre Connection”

New Server

My trusty HP Microserver N36L has been ticking along nicely for years with Windows 2003 at the helm, but with support for 2003 coming to an end an alternative was needed.

Recently I have been using Amazon EC2 cloud services for all my website hosting, new customers to the service get a 12 months free teir1.micro instance with myself opting for Windows Server 2012 R2 as my OS, and I’ve taken up this offer since October last year when an extended spell of server woes left me unable to serve websites.

A caveat with the free EC2 instance is the billing process, while the instance is free you have to pay attention to what is included as part of the offer, network usage, hard drive capacities and security keys are subject to charge over certain thresholds, so be aware.

With the trail due to expire in a few months I preferred to avoid an ongoing monthly cost and bring website hosting back to my own server, but not my current server as I didn’t want a box that served the web as well as store all my personal files. The logical conclusion was to get a new server.

Continue reading “New Server”

Want A Faster Network? Check Your Cables

I have been running Gigabit Ethernet on my network for a few years, the speed from my everyday laptop was good enough at 40MBps but wasn’t running close to capacity when moving large files to the server, I assumed that this was down to the 5400rpm Hard Drives on the laptop not being able to fill the bandwidth on the network.

Recently while shopping for network cables to connect my new server I though it time to get a new line for the laptop since the plug clip on the current one was broken. I decided to go for Cat 6 cables just to keep up to date and nowadays there is not such a price premium over Cat 5e.

The first transfer of data through the new cable and instantly got 70MBps, nearly double the 40MBps I was getting before. Wondering why there was such a difference I looked at the replaced cable:

Continue reading “Want A Faster Network? Check Your Cables”

First Look At Windows 10

I just got my first hands on look at Windows 10, before I even start I must note that this is not going to be an in depth review of the system as I am just hopeless at writing reviews, so instead here are a quick few pointers of what I noticed.

Continue reading “First Look At Windows 10”

Upgrading RAID Disks

The time came when my 1TB drives were full, having a data clearout reclaimed a bit of free space but it was time to upgrade.

The HP Microserver I am running has four HDD bays all populated with 1TB drives in RAID 1 configuration, so to increase capacity I had to replace two of the disks. I went for two Western Digital Green 2TB disks as the 1TB variants I currently had proved reliable.

Moving the data over to a new disk would be tricky, the simplest solution would be to put the old drives into a USB caddy and plug into the server, but I had previously found that USB drives don’t like RAID. But since RAID1 means redundancy, I could tackle this another way…

Continue reading “Upgrading RAID Disks”