Synology DS1515+

Recently, we got a Synology DS1515+. For those that don’t know, this is a network-attached storage device (NAS). There are lots of competing products with all sorts of options for number of disks it can hold, what type of RAID it supports, how many network ports, etc. Ultimately, this is really just a computer with specialized software to hold the disks and to present the disks in a lot of different formats and interfaces. If you wanted, you can use an old computer and run something like FreeNAS on it to make it do something very similar. Like most things, you can either build everything yourself with all the customizations you want. Or you can also just buy something like this DS1515+ and get things going in a short amount of time. The choice is yours.

As I grow older, with more responsibilities, and a larger family, I find myself with less and less time to tinker with things. I just want things to work. For that reason, I chose the Synology. It is absolutely amazing how much of my life is digitized. I also want more of my life digitized. There’s too much paper already. It’s getting close to tax season and all I see around me is paper. I don’t mind it when Richard draws on the papers and gives us another absolutely amazing expression. But when it is just forms and boilerplate templates, it drives me crazy.

So I’m at least trying to do my part by putting everything into Synology. I’ve setup Crashplan to back up the stuff and it looks like it will take around 31 days to back up 2TB. I wish I had my work’s ISP where we have 1Gbps bandwidth. I’ll see what will happen first, will Crashplan finish backing up my stuff or will my son be born?

Winding Down 2015

Hard to believe that another year has gone by. A lot of good things have happened. Much to be thankful for:

• Richard going to school and liking it!
• Li’s pregnant.
• Richard went to China, learned more Mandarin and missing China. He comes back saying, “我不喜欢美国” (I don’t like America).
• Celebrated 5 years of marriage.
• Li’s parents turned 71 years old. Grandma turned 96. Mom turned 76.
• Li’s nephew came to America.
• Went to Lake Tahoe, China, Las Vegas, Disneyland.
• Richard got to go on a real train in Felton, CA.
• Richard went to Las Vegas, stayed at the Bellagio and loved the watershow. He now always talks about wanting to see watershows. He can rattle off the times of when the watershow starts.
• Automating our home. Apple-izing our lifestyle (Apple TV, Mac mini, HomeKit, Watch). LTE 4G on all our devices.
• Added a new server, running Ubuntu.
• Read a few books.
• Watched a few movies and TV shows via Plex.

A New Server

This past Saturday, I got a new machine from Craigslist:

Intel Core i7 Six Core Processor i7-4930K 3.4GHz 12MB CPU
Samsung 32GB DDR3-1600 Memory
2TB Hard Disk Space (Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM))
ASUS P9X79 PRO Intel X79 XTX Motherboard
4x USB3 , 6x USB2 , eSATA Ports
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS
6x PCI Express Slots, 8x DIMM Sockets
Integrated High Definition Audio
Integrated SATA II & III controllers
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD6670 1GB VGA/DVI/ HDMI PCI-e Video Card
LG 24X DVD+RW/-RW internal drive
Integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet
SONATA Piano Black Mini Tower and 500W Power Supply
No operating system, keyboard, mouse or monitor included

All for $700. Of course I had the machine tested before purchasing it. Since there’s no operating system, I couldn’t really check the 2TB drive, which when I got home, I found it was dead. No biggie. As this machine was going to replace my old dual xeon box, I basically took the drives from there and played the swapping game. My “server” upstairs had 3 2TB drives in a raid 5 which I took out and put into this 6-core box. I took the 4 1TB drives from the dual xeon box and moved it to my server upstairs.

I also had a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD which I then used as the boot drive for this computer. This box screams and is whisper quiet. It boots from bios screen to login in about 5 seconds. As this will be the a Linux server, I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. This is a first for me to have a Linux server. All previous boxes were Windows. But since all my work is on Linux now, I figured it was time to do things in Linux. To run my virtual machines, I’ve purchases a license of VMWare Workstation for Linux. This will ensure that my existing VMs just have to be moved to this box and voila, they can boot!

After playing with this box, I knew I had to max it out, so I ordered 32GB of ram (4x8GB) and another 2TB drive. When they arrived, I played some shell game again. This time, 4x4GB ram came out of the 6-core box and moved to the server upstairs. The ram it had was moved down to the 6-core box. So now the 6-core box has 8x8GB RAM. I then added the 2TB drive to the RAID 5. And started the rebuilding of the RAID 5 from 3 drives to 4 drives. I can see that the reshaping will take some time. The best thing about it is that the existing partition is still available! Currently, while the raid is still rebuilding, I’m copying over about 250GB of VMs over the 1gb network to the partition. And my Plex media server is also usable! It is kind of addicting to see such high availability and performance.

Apple Watch

I now have my Watch for almost 3 weeks. I have the sport version with the gold color. I didn’t want to pay extra for just the stainless steel look. A couple of first impressions. First, I don’t like the rubber watch bands. They’re not comfortable and the holes are too far apart for the fit to be that comfortable. So instead, I got the endless loop in blue to match the other gear.

Second, I didn’t realize how quickly I would find the watch indispensable for alerts. It is really easy to check on any alerts and see if it is important enough to take out either the phone or iPad or computer to respond. In my field, alerts are my lifelines. I need to get them as soon as possible, but I’m not always at a place where I can take out my phone disrupt the flow. But looking at a watch is much more socially acceptable.

Third, paying by watch is SO convenient. Paying by phone is cool, but not having to take out the phone to pay is even better.

There are some additional health benefits as it stopped my wife from telling me to get up and walk around. It keeps track of my heart rate. It controls my music. I have yet to take it on a run, although that’s planned. Stay tuned… More coming.

Mechanical Keyboards

As a programmer, my main interface with the computer is through the keyboard. I’ve used many different types of keyboards over the years. My favorite from the old days have been the IBM mechanical keyboards. They were heavy, loud, and required a hard stroke to type a letter. But I loved it probably because I learned how to type on the IBM typewriters. There’s a certain satisfying click to the keys when you hit it. You can tell by the feel of the keys whether you hit it or not and makes typing faster easier.

Although over the years, as we moved different technologies such as PS/2 and to the current USB keyboards, I’ve lost my IBM mechnical keyboards. One of the reasons has been ergnomic keyboards. Finding a good quiet ergonomic keyboard was easier finding an equivalent mechnical keyboard. I remember when I had the IBM keyboards, my roommate could hear me from another room even though the doors were closed and there was quite a bit of space between the rooms. Luckily, I was able to find a good keyboard that had most of the features I wanted and is pretty quiet, the CODE keyboard from WASD. I have the full-size keyboard and I love everything about it. There are only two additional wish lists I have: bluetooth wireless and ergonomic design.

There’s one other thing I really love about mechnical keyboards: the keys are replaceable. Literally, you can take a key off and replace it with another key as long as the keycaps are designed for the type of mechnical striking mechanism for your keyboard. I have the Cherry MX clear keyboard which are the quietest versions. There’s still a bit of a click to the keys, but I’ve trained myself to hit them only as hard as necessary to recognize the keys without hitting the keys all the way down to the bottom.

And lately, we’ve been on a navy blue phase. My iPhone case is the midnight blue case. As are our iPad cases. So I ordered a set of navy blue keycaps for the keyboard. What I’ve learned is that replacing most keys is not hard at all. There are some that are wider/longer such as the backspace, shifts, spacebar and the longer keys on the numpad have a stability bar on them so that when you hit off center, the key does not come flying off. Replacing these keys are a pain and requires a labor of love. It took me about 2 hours to replace 32 keys out of 104 on my keyboard. Most of that time was spent on the longer keys because the stability bar makes these keys so hard to replace. But I love the look and now that I know what it takes, it probably won’t take me nearly as long to do it again. Since I really love the look, it was well worth the time.