By Rein Taul -
Most of the people here are experienced IT professionals who no
doubt have some good war stories, scars and favourite "what idiot
thought of that" examples. Me, I'm just a little guy, but I sell a
lot of this stuff, so when I see first hand the havoc it creates,
it's cathartic to share my experiences. Besides, you may all get a
laugh.
My story begins many years ago. I bought a bunch of Slimedevices Squeezebox players. Awesome audio playback clients, well thought out and most importantly, SIMPLE. These were definitely not designed by software engineers distracted by the latest Star Trek movie, but by real oxygen breathing humans who understand industrial design and their users. Interestingly though, they still attracted a huge hacker community and open source add-ons are everywhere. But I digress...
So armed with these clients, I needed a server to host the content. My PC needed an upgrade, so it was a good time to pull the boot drive, XP OS and all, attach it to a cheap old low power AMD motherboard and done! All this had to do was run a little application and serve music files. Over time it grew into a printer server and a backup location. Still basic stuff.
A couple years later, the old motherboard dies. Oh well, these things happen. I go out and get a basic Atom board from Intel - perfect for the occasion, low power, basic.Soon that dies (yes it had good cooling and was on the right end of a decent UPS). Perhaps 7/24 of waiting around for me to play some music or print a file was too much. Not being the brightest little home IT specialist, I replace it with another Atom board.
Then the hard drive goes. Well, it was pretty old, I tell myself. I find a good deal on a low power Western Digital 'green' drive. Basically one used in the cheapest consumer PCs.
A year or so passes. One day, server no boot. From what I can tell, the drive should be o.k., but I don't know. I pull the drive and connect it to my desktop and get an error message to the tune of "security lockout". Forgive me, that was many months ago, so I don't recall the exact message. What I did learn after creating 1400 user accounts on forums where all the little coder mushrooms in the know hang out, is that there is some sort of feature on this drive to stop it from being accessed unless it is still attached to the original host. FEATURE! What happened to SIMPLE. Not to mention this was supposedly a consumer drive, not an enterprise one that might possibly benefit from such a thing. FEATURE, huh! My new term for this crap is FUCKTURE!
So, I could reformat and lose my data. Luckily I had another copy. I try the reformat and get constant boot record problems. Cut my losses, I say. For the purpose of this project, a shiny new SSD would be perfect. Low power, no motor. I get one of those (insert product placement here: A cool long endurance Prevail SSD from PNY).
Off to the races, except, well, XP won't install. My CD is a service pack behind. Microsoft has understandably given up on XP, so I search the web for ways to do it. After several failed attempts to build an ISO that works, I bail on that approach. Linux, methinks!
Well, unlike most of you, I don't have so much experience with Linux, but Ubuntu looks promising to a greenhorn. Download and build my USB installer. A few hours of waiting for various services to install on the pokey little Atom, and I should be good to go. Let's see, what the Linux experience will be like...
Well, it IS high security, I get what the sysadmins are attracted to, but can I turn off all the paranoia? After all, I'm not even connecting this to the outside world at this point and there's not much some socially retarded Russian hacker would want from me anyway. Well I guess not. Move the mouse; enter user name and password. Turn up brightness on my monitor; enter user name and password. Scratch myself; enter user name and password...etc, etc. With that cadence, I spend an hour or two getting Samba to let me see files and I hand code a driver hack for my printer. Painful, but you gets what you pay for.
The Slimserver app, (now Logitech Media Server) loads like a charm though, despite Logitech buying, shutting down Slim Devices and doing it's best to piss off the user base.
However, I have a huge library encoded in WME Pro lossless. Alas, there is no native CODEC support in Linux and I have to either run a pretty unstable playtime transcoder or convert all the files. I go the convert route. FLAC it is. Except now all the meta data is a mess. Big project. Besides, Samba only appears to work on odd calendar days; every 14th, 16th etc. Other days I need to log on as an administrator (did I mention how much I love collecting logins and passwords? It's like the finest form of masturbation - constant) and reset the shares.
So now, I decide I should just throw more money at the problem. Wouldn't Windows Home Server 2011, be a perfect solution? A little Google abuse reveals that Logitech Media Server does not run on it, but the older Slimserver version is supposedly fine. What the hell, order a license.
First impressions. Installer claims to be mostly unattended and should only take 30 minutes or so. Reality; it still has the stupid, stop and wait for redundant input like, "what's your favourite colour" and "what planet are you on?". Can't they just get you to fill all this crap in once and then go off and do the install? So between the system waiting for me to return from my productive life to hit OK and the long load times, five hours passed. Looks like it's working now, hmmm.
Oh, and I thought Linux was a pin when it came to protecting me from spooks in the crowd. Talk about a password pissoff!
So, let's connect it to the other systems in my home Homegroup does that right. Open Dashboard, connect to Homegroup, enter stupid password, hit continue. Wait. Wait. Get error, "Unexpected Error" none-the-less! Try again. Same. start the Google support engine up, no wait, let's try Bing. It might know about a Microsoft related question. Nope, neither does. Go on MS FAQ page for home server. Nope, no record of the issue. Start joining 1400 forums with the related logins and passwords? Geez, can't a guy just ask a question without having to join a cult each time?
I can appreciate Ubuntu sucked (though not as bad as expected, but still ridiculously geeky), it was free after all. I paid for my MS license and I have nothing against paying for software, somebody's labour went into it, but at least don't make me go through this much crap to get a simple question answered!
So,
Lessons learned and why I posted this.
- Some of us are just cursed. ;-)
- Technology does not reward simplicity. If was building some crazy overclocked gaming system, it would probably be just fine, but I was not ambitious enough.
- Even though I had a modest home server requirement, using consumer components still bit me in the ass. There is a reason why enterprise gear exists!
- As a former industrial designer, I have a big hate-on for bad design. Wasteful useless crap, poorly thought out processes, misrepresentation, or silly styling masquerading as design. It all pisses me off. Software is one of the worst. We all know it. You guys have to deal with it on a much larger scale than I do and with greater economic consequences. That's why I posted this, I hope it will cheer you up! Happy Holidays!
--
My story begins many years ago. I bought a bunch of Slimedevices Squeezebox players. Awesome audio playback clients, well thought out and most importantly, SIMPLE. These were definitely not designed by software engineers distracted by the latest Star Trek movie, but by real oxygen breathing humans who understand industrial design and their users. Interestingly though, they still attracted a huge hacker community and open source add-ons are everywhere. But I digress...
So armed with these clients, I needed a server to host the content. My PC needed an upgrade, so it was a good time to pull the boot drive, XP OS and all, attach it to a cheap old low power AMD motherboard and done! All this had to do was run a little application and serve music files. Over time it grew into a printer server and a backup location. Still basic stuff.
A couple years later, the old motherboard dies. Oh well, these things happen. I go out and get a basic Atom board from Intel - perfect for the occasion, low power, basic.Soon that dies (yes it had good cooling and was on the right end of a decent UPS). Perhaps 7/24 of waiting around for me to play some music or print a file was too much. Not being the brightest little home IT specialist, I replace it with another Atom board.
Then the hard drive goes. Well, it was pretty old, I tell myself. I find a good deal on a low power Western Digital 'green' drive. Basically one used in the cheapest consumer PCs.
A year or so passes. One day, server no boot. From what I can tell, the drive should be o.k., but I don't know. I pull the drive and connect it to my desktop and get an error message to the tune of "security lockout". Forgive me, that was many months ago, so I don't recall the exact message. What I did learn after creating 1400 user accounts on forums where all the little coder mushrooms in the know hang out, is that there is some sort of feature on this drive to stop it from being accessed unless it is still attached to the original host. FEATURE! What happened to SIMPLE. Not to mention this was supposedly a consumer drive, not an enterprise one that might possibly benefit from such a thing. FEATURE, huh! My new term for this crap is FUCKTURE!
So, I could reformat and lose my data. Luckily I had another copy. I try the reformat and get constant boot record problems. Cut my losses, I say. For the purpose of this project, a shiny new SSD would be perfect. Low power, no motor. I get one of those (insert product placement here: A cool long endurance Prevail SSD from PNY).
Off to the races, except, well, XP won't install. My CD is a service pack behind. Microsoft has understandably given up on XP, so I search the web for ways to do it. After several failed attempts to build an ISO that works, I bail on that approach. Linux, methinks!
Well, unlike most of you, I don't have so much experience with Linux, but Ubuntu looks promising to a greenhorn. Download and build my USB installer. A few hours of waiting for various services to install on the pokey little Atom, and I should be good to go. Let's see, what the Linux experience will be like...
Well, it IS high security, I get what the sysadmins are attracted to, but can I turn off all the paranoia? After all, I'm not even connecting this to the outside world at this point and there's not much some socially retarded Russian hacker would want from me anyway. Well I guess not. Move the mouse; enter user name and password. Turn up brightness on my monitor; enter user name and password. Scratch myself; enter user name and password...etc, etc. With that cadence, I spend an hour or two getting Samba to let me see files and I hand code a driver hack for my printer. Painful, but you gets what you pay for.
The Slimserver app, (now Logitech Media Server) loads like a charm though, despite Logitech buying, shutting down Slim Devices and doing it's best to piss off the user base.
However, I have a huge library encoded in WME Pro lossless. Alas, there is no native CODEC support in Linux and I have to either run a pretty unstable playtime transcoder or convert all the files. I go the convert route. FLAC it is. Except now all the meta data is a mess. Big project. Besides, Samba only appears to work on odd calendar days; every 14th, 16th etc. Other days I need to log on as an administrator (did I mention how much I love collecting logins and passwords? It's like the finest form of masturbation - constant) and reset the shares.
So now, I decide I should just throw more money at the problem. Wouldn't Windows Home Server 2011, be a perfect solution? A little Google abuse reveals that Logitech Media Server does not run on it, but the older Slimserver version is supposedly fine. What the hell, order a license.
First impressions. Installer claims to be mostly unattended and should only take 30 minutes or so. Reality; it still has the stupid, stop and wait for redundant input like, "what's your favourite colour" and "what planet are you on?". Can't they just get you to fill all this crap in once and then go off and do the install? So between the system waiting for me to return from my productive life to hit OK and the long load times, five hours passed. Looks like it's working now, hmmm.
Oh, and I thought Linux was a pin when it came to protecting me from spooks in the crowd. Talk about a password pissoff!
So, let's connect it to the other systems in my home Homegroup does that right. Open Dashboard, connect to Homegroup, enter stupid password, hit continue. Wait. Wait. Get error, "Unexpected Error" none-the-less! Try again. Same. start the Google support engine up, no wait, let's try Bing. It might know about a Microsoft related question. Nope, neither does. Go on MS FAQ page for home server. Nope, no record of the issue. Start joining 1400 forums with the related logins and passwords? Geez, can't a guy just ask a question without having to join a cult each time?
I can appreciate Ubuntu sucked (though not as bad as expected, but still ridiculously geeky), it was free after all. I paid for my MS license and I have nothing against paying for software, somebody's labour went into it, but at least don't make me go through this much crap to get a simple question answered!
So,
Lessons learned and why I posted this.
- Some of us are just cursed. ;-)
- Technology does not reward simplicity. If was building some crazy overclocked gaming system, it would probably be just fine, but I was not ambitious enough.
- Even though I had a modest home server requirement, using consumer components still bit me in the ass. There is a reason why enterprise gear exists!
- As a former industrial designer, I have a big hate-on for bad design. Wasteful useless crap, poorly thought out processes, misrepresentation, or silly styling masquerading as design. It all pisses me off. Software is one of the worst. We all know it. You guys have to deal with it on a much larger scale than I do and with greater economic consequences. That's why I posted this, I hope it will cheer you up! Happy Holidays!
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