Has Crashplan crashed?
I’m pretty good with making sure I have backups, I have several external drives I use regularly. When I’ve gone away on holiday I usually get a friend to look after some of the external drives. I don’t just want to protect against hard disk break downs, I also want to make sure I can restore all my thousands of photos if the house burns down. But keeping a semi-recent off-site backup copy is not so easy, so when I discovered Crashplan recently, I thought I had found the solution. I would still have local backups, but a second line of defense would be Crashplan. Crashplan offer the first month free of charge, so I started it backing up my photos (40 GB). I also sold my family on the idea of a family subscription as the prices are pretty decent. Well, we shall see if this is indeed woth pursuing. Today the crashplan GUI showed me that the backup has stopped with another 2 days to go. The log file shows odd error messages such as “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is being moved” and “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is not accessible”. Searching the internet showed that some users had similar error messages back in February and apparently crashplan wasn’t terribly proactive. What may be even more scary is that their main website page is now also unavailable. This is a time when a company needs to use its Twitter or Facebook account to tell its customers what is going on, but so far nothing. Crashplans promise to “Get your files securely – anytime, anywhere” would not be of great comfort right now if now was the time I wanted to perform a restore. I’ll look and see though, everyone can have IT challenges. What is important is a combination of speed with which the issues are resolved, and how well you communicate when you have challenges…
Update: Almost 14 hours after the backup stopped, it has recommenced… Others have reported via twitter that the main website pages was unavailable. Crashplan staff have tweeted back replies such as: “We didn’t seem to have any recent issues”, “We did not report any errors overnight” and “No reported issues overnight”. What is worse, Crashplan not telling the truth or plain not knowing that their website was unavailable? I will probably still subscribe to their service once my 1 month trial period expires. I will not be paying Rolls-Royce prices so I don’t expect Rolls-Royce service.
Home server hardware
I’ve had a home server running 24/7 for more than 10 years now. Originally my home servers used old hardware I no longer had any use for, at one stage my server setup consisted of three different computers all to some extent reliant on each other. Eventually I had come to rely on my home server so much that this hodgepodge was taking too much of my time to keep running, so I purchased a proper server, a Dell Poweredge 830 with ECC memory and internal space for up to 4 hard disks. I have been very pleased with it, it has run 24/7 for 6 years.
However, no product is perfect, and the Dell Poweredge server ultimately has had two things going against it:
- It wasn’t particularly silent
- Its Intel Pentium 830D CPU is probably one of the most power hungry CPU’s made by Intel.
The noise was not excessive, and I have a cupboard where my node 0 resides. Only problem with that was that it got a little hot during the summers forcing me to leave the door ajar. Power usage was around 115 watts/hour, so just over 1000 kWh/year. At current prices (around £0.13/kWh) it was costing me about £130 to run a year. Being an environmentally-minded person I really wanted to cut down on that.
I’ve been considering various small servers with Intel Atom CPU’s, but they are not exactly cheap compared to Dells latest entry-level servers. Although I would like to cut down on my energy usage I didn’t want to replace a perfectly working system with something that at the end of the day would cost me more than what I would save.
The Dell Poweredge server has now been switched off. After 6 years of continuous use it was probably just a matter of time before one or more of the harddisks would fail, and I finally ran out of disk space as well. With all my photos, CD’s and DVD’s ripped and available to my xbmc mediacenter (and in fact any other computer at home) over my network, 2TB was not enough in the end, so new disks had to be bought. When I then discovered the HP ProLiant N36L Microserver which, with an HP cashback offer, was available for around £125, I was sold.
The Microserver has room for 4 internal harddisks (like the old Dell server), it is considerably smaller, almost silent, uses about ½ the amount of electricity that the Dell used, and the CPU is, according to benchmarks I’ve seen on the internet, faster than the current Intel Atom CPU’s. At the price mentioned above and the reduced power usage, it will earn itself back in less than two years.
Anybody out there interested in a used Dell Poweredge 830?
Quicken 2001 and Windows 7
Anyway, I tried installing Quicken 2001, and Windows 7 said the install.exe was incompatible even in compatibility mode (worked fine under Ubuntu by the way). So I did the usual, googled for a solution, and I did find a thread with others who had apparently also had this problem. The thread was useful in that some said it worked fine for them, so I perservered.
The solution: Don’t try running the install.exe in the root of the CD, run autorun.exe in the autorun directory instead and the install will work flawlessly.
Yahoo!, Flash and iPad
The other day I attempted to leave some feedback about a Yahoo! app for the Apple iPad. I went to the “Yahoo! for iPad” page. After clicking on the “Send Feedback” link, Yahoo! very kindly told me that “You do not have Flash installed with your browser. The feedback form requires Flash.” Yahoo! suggested that I “Click here to download Flash. After installing Flash, you may return to the page and submit your feedback.”
What! Doesn’t Yahoo! know that iPads don’t support Flash?
I guess Yahoos mobile team can report to their management that everyone seems perfectly happy with our iPad apps as they are as nobody is offering any feedback!
So many jokes can probably be made on the back of this. I’m not even going to try though, I’m just speechless!
- Click the screenshot to see it full-size
Netgear lies! 802.11n will (probably) not give you higher speed and better coverage
When my ADSL modem and Wi-Fi access-point died I decided I might as well buy the latest and greatest even though 802.11n was still a draft standard. So I bought a new 802.11n Wi-Fi access point/router/ADSL modem (Netgear DG834N) and I fitted 802.11n PCI cards (Netgear WN311B) into the various PC’s we have in the house.
802.11n was supposed to give me wider coverage and higher speed. “Supposed to” is the key in the previous sentence. I have absolutely no better coverage than with 802.11g and the real bandwidth is only very marginally better.
I decided to test using ttcp which is a program that only tests the actual network pipe, it is not a fileserver test. In all tests I ran one copy of ttcp on my Linux server and another copy on the workstations. I first ran ttcp on the PCs equipped with 802.11n PCI cards and then I ran, from the exact same location, the same test on my laptop which is equipped only with 802.11g. So when I say there is no real difference in the network performance it is not just a guess or a feeling, it is based on facts.
I just couldn’t understand why I didn’t get any of the supposed benefits of using pure 802.11n equipment, much higher speed and better coverage, so I did a bit of research (otherwise known as Googling), and this is what I learnt.
The 802.11n standard supports data transmission both in the 2.4 and in the 5 GHz frequency bands. The 2.4 GHz frequency band is the same one used by the 802.11b and 802.11g standards. Where I live I can detect 12 other 802.11g-based access-points. My Netgear DG834N device only supports data-transmission in the 2.4 GHz frequency band which it has to share with all the other access-points. My access-point supports something called “channel expansion mode” to achieve the theoretical 270Mbps, and it can’t do that as it has to avoid problems with the transmission from the other non-802.11n access-point. High bandwidth using the 2.4 GHz frequency band is only possible where there are very few or no other access-points using that frequency band. In other words, if you are in the same situation as I am, lots of neighbours with 802.11b or 802.11g-based access-points, either forget about buying 802.11n-based equipment, or ensure the 802.11n equipment you buy supports the 5 GHz frequency band.
I must admit to feeling cheated. On their website Netgear show how 802.11g gives you speed 1x and coverage 1x whereas 802.11n supposedly gives me 15x speed and 10x coverage. Nowhere did they tell me that would only be the case if the airwaves where practically free of data-transmissions from other 802.11g-based access-points. Since I bought the Netgear DG834N access-point, they have released a dual-band access-point. In other words, it supports both the 2.4 and the 5 GHz frequency bands. And guess what, they do actually tell you on the page for that device that “Dual band wireless networks deliver better connections with less interference”. Come clean Netgear (and other Wi-Fi vendors), tell it as it is, 802.11n-based access-points with 802.11n clients that only support the 2.4 GHz frequency band are probably not going to be any faster than are a 802.11g-based access-point.
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