Ram's Technology Notes
I have been trying unsuccessfully to setup automatic wireless sync of photos and videos from our iPhones to my home server running Ubuntu. After failures with Plex camera roll upload which does not seem to work consistently, I have finally found a good alternative. The method is inefficient but has been reliable for the last…
After a long period of contemplation and indecision, I upgraded the hardware on my Ubuntu Home Server last weekend. I’ll write a separate post about my adventures there (mostly self-inflicted). As part of the upgrade, I also clean installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. I picked up mhddfs by doing sudo apt-get install mhddfs to continue…
About 3 weeks ago, I got an email notification from smartd that the regular SMART short check on one of the drives in my home server failed. The specific failure was a failure to read one of the sectors in the disk (current pending sector count went to 1 from 0). Now, it is hard…
One of the key goals for my Ubuntu NAS was to have the ability to create a single storage pool out of all the disks in the NAS (OS is running off a USB thumb drive) and also provide some fault tolerance such that if a single disk failed, data wasn’t lost entirely. Even though…
As part of the reorganization of my home server, I am consolidating all my music files into the home server. I quickly realized that in a misguided fit of irrationality, I had gone through a phase in the past where most of my library was in the WMA format. The problem with WMA format is…
In my home setup, we have a mix of devices (Windows 8.x, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Linux, Android and iOS). As part of my home server setup, I’ve setup Samba to share folders with the other devices – there are a few subtleties with setting up the Samba shares so you can access them with…
I was looking at my logs and noticed that smbd had crashed a few times since install. Searched the samba bug database and found this bug which was reporting the same issue. I have applied the patch supplied and updated the package – here’s how I patched and updated: In your samba source folder, run…
As part of my home server setup, one of the things I am setting up is an automated alert system that would send emails when events happen (for e.g. hard disk SMART errors, CPU temperature violation, hard disk out of space etc.). I was looking around to find the best way to send automated mail…
I am in the process of rebuilding my home server which will run Ubuntu Server – I will be putting up a series of detailed posts on my philosophy and experiences through this process. In the meantime, here’s the scoop on setting up the latest version of Samba on Ubuntu 12.04. This post provides a…
Recently, I got a new SSD (Sandisk 256 GB in case you’re wondering) and as part of setting it up, I decided to clean install Windows 8 instead of moving my existing Windows 7 setup over. One of the things I wanted to try out was the integrated Hyper-V support in Windows 8 to host…