PARANOIA

You may be paranoid, but are you paranoid enough?

A tough question, but in the context if IT (that's Information Technology for a change) the answer is usually Probably Not.

Today, because I was let in early and the Netgear router that provides wifi here at Castro Bisztro has been flaky for several days I decided to restore the settings - call it a public service with a hint of self-interest.

I saved the current configuration yesterday, saved another copy today, and read the instructions carefully. I disconnected everything (as instructed) and - just in case - saved the web-pages of the configuration screens in case I had to restore the Factory Defaults and rebuild the configuration.

So... I attempted to restore yesterday's config file. No dice. Odd. Tried today's backup. Ditto: zip, nada, zilch. Took a peek at the files: there's stuff in there that doesn't look as though it should be... they're corrupt all right.

OK then, restore Factory Defaults and rebuild... I reset the system, and one by one loaded the saved web pages to read the data and manually reapply the settings... only to find that there is a bug somewhere that resulted in not being able to view the MAC address that the router presents to the Cable modem.

Oh dear. I've just fucked Castro's entire internet connection.

Fortunately, it turned out that data had been saved, but wasn't where something (Firefox or the Netgear web page) thought it should be and I did find the MAC address, so the interweb sprang back to life.

But what didn't I do? I didn't check that I could read the saved config web pages before I relied on them. If I'd done that I could have written things down and saved myself time and panic.

Remember: Be More Paranoid. Let's see if I remember that when I try to install the replacement DOM module for my Thecus N5200Pro tonight...

By the way, that advice applies to everyone... except those who already know the Government/The Masons/The Aliens are already after them - they should relax: The GovMasAliens know where you are - even I know where you are - if They/I wanted to get you I/They could, so if We haven't, We probably don't want to.

Yet. Don't upset me.

Mind Bending Stuff

Data... Lots and Lots of Lovely Data

Well, it's been bugging me for some time... I had a little Freecom Storage Gateway - only 250 MB - and that just filled up with... stuff. Nice little box but still awaiting a firmware update to make it properly compatible with Vista

It seems we have >50GB of photos (ah, the wonders of digital photography), backups of other hard drives and GB of media generally and it was all here.

I'd been meaning to get some serious storage for a long time and I finally bit the bullet yesterday (ah... that reminds me of a malapropic (?) former boss who, when faced with a particularly difficult decision, said, "we have to bite the bull between the horns")

Anyway, here on Revay u in Budapest we are well placed with local amenities... the opera is a 5min walk away, the wonderful open air and subterranean venue known as Godor (can't reproduce the accents, but its pronounced "girder" and means "hole" because for a long time it was just a big hole in the ground while the city argued about where to put the arts palace - it ended up a way down river), 24 hour shops, the basilika for those last minute imprecations to the almighty...

...and a little computer shop called Modding.hu full of Stuff.

Now despite my predilection for Stuff I had walked by it hundreds of times, but it is a little shop so I never paid it much attention. The one day I walked by and saw this thing called a Thecus N2050, and I was keen on some extra storage and thought "hmmmm...", but I'd never heard of Thecus so I walked on by. Then a short while later PC Pro reviewed the latest Thecus N5200 RAID array...

So, on a whim I Googled PC shops and Thecus etc. in Budapest and where was my closest outlet... no more than 20m from my window (that's 10m down and 10m across and ignoring Pythagoras), so I went in and asked whether, having curtailed my Walpoling activities, they might have be able to help. A quick call to the importer later "Yes sir, one N5200 Pro arrived today..." I asked them to hold it for me while I checked a few things (like what disks I was going to put in it)

The next day at 10:30 I went back with a large pile of cash and ordered one N5200 and 5 Samsung 400GB SpinPoint disks (because PC Pro said they were good - and quiet); picked it up at 17:00.

Last night I got it out of the box, fitted the drives and turned it on... absolute doddle to set up... but it took overnight to build my lovely 1.33TB RAID 5 array (wheeeeeee! I have TERABYTES of storage!)

Today I started copying stuff across, but the rest of the network is only 100Mb/s so it's going to take a while.

Then I thought I'd try and see if I could create a Steganos safe on the array. Answer: not by placing the SLE on a mapped network drive, and not via direct access to the network (they're quite clear that it doesn't do this, but I thought I'd try...!)

However, the N5200 has iSCSI, which makes network devices look like ordinary devices... A bit of fiddling around (Vista has the iSCSI initiator built in but then you need to go to computer management and initialise and format the disk) and voila! the I: drive is mounted AND Steganos Safe happily begins to build a safe... but it was hogging all the bandwidth so I cancelled it - I'll do it later.

My only complaint - about myself for a change - is that in my eagerness to build the RAID array I only left 75GB for iSCSI and as far as I can tell there's no way to shrink an array (expand yes - shrink - no), so I either go back to square one or I leave things as they are... 1.33TB is a lot of data space to rebuild, and I really can't be arsed to start over so I'll live with it.

Next stop, probably Acronis to get some drive imaging software to backup various machines properly.

My only slight concern is that I bought an HiDef camcorder for the wedding and I have a sneaking suspicion that HD files are going to eat a lot of space... still, I can always swap the 400GB drives for 1TB drives later I suppose... but that would only be 4TB and I'm concerned that it won't be long before Petabytes are de rigeur.

My opinion of the Thecus so far (<24hours) - nice, quiet, does what it says on the tin even if the web interface is a bit... primitive.

Masochist or Pragmatist? Only time will tell.