Tag Archives: Virtualbox

Had Ditched Spotify, Was With Xbox Music, Now I’m Back With Spotify Again But Still Using And Loving Windows 8 Ecosystem

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Posted by on in Microsoft and Windows, Software
Spotifys huvudkontor på Humlegårdsgatan

Spotifys huvudkontor på Humlegårdsgatan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A month after I quitted Spotify, now I’m back with it for my music listening pleasure.  A month ago, I ditched Spotify for Microsoft’s Xbox Music as I bought into the idea of a more coherent Windows 8 platform ecosystem.  Unfortunately, Xbox Music was a frustrated experience.  Fortunately, I like the Windows 8 ecosystem still, but my love affair with Windows 8 ecosystem just have to do without the Xbox Music experience.

Xbox Music experience was bad for me, because it was hard to have the playlist on my HTC 8X Windows 8 phone to sync correctly with the one on Windows 8 PC and creating playlist was a pain through Xbox Music app.  Furthermore, Xbox Music suddenly refused to play any music in my playlists even though I had one more day of free trial subscription before the whole free trial subscription period would end accordingly.  I would have stuck with Xbox Music by subscribing to its monthly fee payment structure, but the last straw was about how Microsoft did not train their customer support departments well on how to deal with Xbox Music errors, whether the Xbox Music errors found on the smartphone or the Windows 8 PC.  I experienced this first hand as customer supports would transfer me back and forth between the Windows 8 and Xbox customer support departments, but in the end my question and problem would not be resolved.

I thought I would have gone for weeks on end without being able to listen to awesome music on my smartphone since now I’m no longer using iPhone 5.  Instead of iPhone 5, I’m using HTC 8X Windows 8 phone.  I like HTC 8X Windows 8 phone a lot, because it got Windows 8 operating system.  I think Windows 8 operating system is way cooler than the stuffs that make up Android and iPhone operating systems.  Nonetheless, without great music experience, it was painful for me.  Luckily, Spotify came to the rescue.  Spotify app, a beta version nonetheless, is now available in Windows 8 phone app store.  Like a thirsty person that was in a desert, I was too eager to download Spotify app on HTC 8X and paid up roughly around $10 per month for premium plan with Spotify.

The great feeling of being able to listen to whatever music I want and not having to be frustrated by the creation and syncing of playlists is a wonderful thing.  Now, I’m listening to Spotify again whenever I’m in my car, at home, and elsewhere.

I think Microsoft needs to have dedicated teams within their Xbox Music department to make sure Xbox Music does well.  If I’m Microsoft, I would want to imagine that Xbox Music — a core service among core services within Microsoft complex — is a company of itself, just like Spotify, and so the teams that build Xbox Music can be dedicated enough to see things from the ground up, to make sure that Xbox Music will be just as easy and a pleasure to use as Spotify.  After all, Xbox Music does carry the substantial amount of music that form the core of the whole Xbox Music service.  Unfortunately, content fulfilling isn’t enough for some people like me, because a clunky Xbox Music user interface in terms of creating and syncing playlists and weird Xbox Music errors do push people like me away from the service.  Furthermore, bad customer supports on Xbox Music do not help to alleviate but only enhance the Xbox Music problems.

In conclusion, I think Xbox Music needs to be better, and I think Microsoft has the resource to dedicate such a task.  Windows 8 ecosystem is great, but I think people will appreciate more if Xbox Music is a part of Windows 8 ecosystem greatness.  Thanks to Spotify, I like to stick to HTC 8X smartphone a lot longer.  There is one downside with Spotify at the moment is that it doesn’t work well with Windows 8 PC.  Why?  I experience that Spotify refuse to quit or to have its process to be terminated once you launch it on Windows 8 PC.  Furthermore, Spotify tends to crash too frequently on Windows 8 PC.  Perhaps, some people have better luck with Spotify on Windows 8 PC, but I don’t.  Some people’s answer to Spotify problematic issues on Windows 8 PC by launching Spotify on a Windows 7 virtual machine (i.e., installing Windows 7 on a virtual machine that runs on Windows 8 PC).

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Gigabit LAN Empowers Productivity Such As Running Virtual Machines On A Network Attached Storage’s iSCSI

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Posted by on in Networking
English: Intel Pro/1000 GT Gigabit Ethernet PC...

English: Intel Pro/1000 GT Gigabit Ethernet PCI Network card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’re on a Gigabit LAN (Local Area Network), then you can do so many things that sometimes the extra efforts seem to be so redundant, but that is the whole idea!!!  For an instance, on my Gigabit LAN, I had installed Fedora 16 virtual machine (VirtualBox type) onto FreeNAS box (my home Network Attached Storage server), but accessing this virtual machine from my other home computers.  This way, I can centralize whatever virtual machines I have had in one location, and yet I’m able to access these virtual machines anywhere (i.e., any local computer which has VirtualBox installed).  To run a virtual machine on FreeNAS box, I set up iSCSI and installed a virtual machine (using VirtualBox) on iSCSI drive (iSCSI ZFS dataset volume).

I wonder… what happen if two local computers access the same virtual machine at the same time?  Probably something bad might happen.  I don’t think there will be a problem for two local computers access the same virtual machine at different time.  Nonetheless, why don’t you try this out and let me know, OK?

Other examples of how I have used a Gigabit LAN are doing backups for Windows 7, Macs, and other computers to FreeNAS box (e.g., CIFS, AFP).  Without a Gigabit LAN, doing the many things I had mentioned previously would be tedious and slow.  A Gigabit LAN pushes data ten to 40 times faster (at least that is how I feel) than slower types of LAN.

Getting Gigabit LAN going for your home isn’t hard at all!  The requirements are, CAT6 cable, a Gigabit NIC (Network Interface Card), and a Gigabit router.  That’s all you really need for having a Gigabit LAN going.  I wish I can say more as if I’m very sophisticated, but there isn’t much more to say of how getting a Gigabit LAN going.

Nowadays, CAT6 cable isn’t expensive anymore.  For an example, I looked on Amazon and saw a 50 feet CAT6 cable costed only $3.45.  The same inexpensive story goes for Gigabit NIC.  I saw a PCI-E Gigabit NIC priced around $32 on Amazon.  Gigabit router is probably the most expensive item you have to get before you can have a Gigabit LAN going.  I saw a Gigabit wireless router priced around $72 on Amazon, but few reviewers said this router had overheating problem.  You definitely need to get a good Gigabit router which has few problems or else you might not get even close to the advertised Gigabit speed.

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Sometimes, Glossing Over The Simplest Things Would Prevent One From Fixing The Problems

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Posted by on in Anything Goes, Networking

I had built an awesome FreeNAS 8.04 box, but little I knew that this was the beginning of all the problems, and these problems had bugged me for two days straight.  Noticing how I had not updated my blog in two days?  Anyway, it all started with I bought three 3 TB 72000 RPM non-spin down Seagate hard drives, and I installed these three hard drives into an HP Pavilion desktop computer which I had not touched for at least two years.  The HP Pavilion desktop computer has had the spec for making a fine FreeNAS box.  It got 6 GB of DDR2 SDRAM 800 MHz, a quad core, and everything else wasn’t that important in building a FreeNAS box besides the three 3 TB Seagate hard drives I bought for the sole purpose of starting the building of a FreeNAS box.  Before, I had only experienced FreeNAS through virtualization technology (e.g., VirtualBox, VMware, Parallels), and so I had always been eager to start a real FreeNAS box.  It was about time, I guess.  So, it was a breeze for me to install three 3 TB Seagate hard drives into the HP Pavilion desktop computer, and the installation of FreeNAS 8.04 onto a USB flash drive was also just as easy.

With everything was in place before my FreeNAS set sail, I thought man I got this!  Sure, I had it but… Here is the but…  I had forgotten that there was a reason for me not to have played with the HP Pavilion desktop computer all along until now.  Since the day I had this computer off of Windows 7 addiction and I was too lazy to put Windows 7 back on so I could flash the updated BIOS for it, but without a newer BIOS this computer would freeze on reboot or fresh boot — the BIOS could not even get the chance to boot up and the whole computer would freeze at a black screen.  This problem was obviously given me a hard time in putting Windows back on, because 9 out of 10 times, the computer would freeze before the BIOS could even boot, therefore I would not even have the chance to let the computer read the Windows 7 installation disk or USB flash drive.  Luckily, I was persistent and finally got the computer to start the BIOS.  I quickly installed Windows 7 and crossed my fingers that it would allow me to boot into Windows 7 so I could update the BIOS.  This too was a lucky shot, and eventually I had the BIOS updated.

After the BIOS mess was over, I thought now I could use my awesome FreeNAS box with joy.  Such joy was never to last, because I kept on asking myself why on earth it took the Macbook Pro over eight or nine hours just to backup around 10 GB worth of data to FreeNAS AFP ZFS share volume.  This second incident had me pulled my hair and cursed foully.  I should have known better to do the right things first by making sure the basic elements of the problems weren’t the root of the problems.  Instead of such I went on impatiently, fixating on that it had to be FreeNAS problem from the start.  It took so much of my precious time to diagnose FreeNAS box and so on just to find out my last ditch effort was what I should have done from the very beginning.  It was the router’s configuration that had my MacBook Pro sent 1MB worth of data per second.  Considering I’m on a Gigabit network, 1 MB per second worth of data transfer had to be one of the lamest things I had ever seen.  After readjusted the router’s configuration, I was glad to see that even through WiFi, my MacBook Pro was able to send 14 or 15 times faster (i.e., ethernet connection would be much much faster).

The moral of this story is that you have to think it through before you actually embark on fixing things.  Things could be a lot simpler in regarding to fixing computing and networking related matter, but sometimes you might gloss over simple elements and miss the whole show.  I had done just that and it was exhausting.  To end this blog post of mine, I like to end it with a tip in regarding to how one would go about knowing the data transfer speed between one’s computer and a FreeNAS box.  The idea is to use an FTP program like FileZilla and monitoring the upload data rate/speed of a very large file (preferable in Gigabytes) that got transferred from a computer to the FreeNAS FTP volume (i.e., FTP ZFS dataset).

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Let Download An Entire Website Locally For Viewing A Website Offline

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Posted by on in Internet, Software
A download symbol.

A download symbol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I should have known how to save a website for offline viewing long long ago, but the truth was that I did not know an elegant way of doing it until now!  For the longest time, I have used wget for downloading open source software over the Internet, but I had no idea that I could also use wget to download an entire website for offline viewing.  Now I know, but how do I use wget to download an entire website on a Mac?

Before I continue on with the main point, you might wonder what is the point of downloading an entire website, but the point is simply that some people might experience Internet Interruption Syndrome and by downloading a website for offline viewing they can basically somewhat anticipate this very syndrome.  You know, it can happen to you too!  Like, whenever you on a road trip to somewhere you have been fantasized about, but your so called 21st century car doesn’t have 21st century wireless technology and you don’t have other 21st century always on wireless technology with you (e.g., a portable hotspot, a good enough smart phone data plan which allows you to have a smart phone behaves as a portable hotspot, etc…) — you are in a bind as to not to be able to connect to the Internet while inside a rather modern moving car and this makes you want to scream “Oh my God, I want a cure for my Internet Interruption Syndrome!”  Don’t scream too loudly, because you might make your driver dangerously swivels in and out of that highway lane.  The driver might blame you for experiencing a “Sudden Oh my God syndrome,” but the blame has to be after the fact that the car and its passengers are still whole.

With the why for using wget to download an entire website out of the way, let us move on with the how to acquire wget so we can use it to download an entire website, OK?  Unfortunately, wget isn’t coming with Mac by default, but you can always get it onto Mac by following the Makeuseof.com’s How To Get Wget For Your Mac tutorial.  If for some reasons you don’t like to follow the tutorial I just mentioned to get wget onto your Mac, you can always install a virtual machine (e.g., VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels) that runs Linux (e.g., Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Mint, etc…) and through this way you can automatically acquire wget as Linux will install wget by default (i.e., so far Linux has always include wget).  Just remember though, you need to enable a share folder between Linux virtual machine and your host machine (e.g., Mac, Windows) so you can share whatever wget had downloaded between the virtual machine and the host machine — this way you don’t have to download the content from a virtual machine onto a USB flash drive and then share whatever content on a USB flash drive with the host machine (e.g., Mac, Windows).

OK, with the how to acquire wget is out of the way, let us move on with how to use wget to download an entire website, OK?  I follow LinuxJournal.com’s Downloading an Entire Web Site with wget tutorial for using wget to download an entire website.  In case you don’t want to check out that tutorial, you can read on as I will repeat the how to use wget to download an entire website within this blog post of mine.  To use wget to download an entire website, what you need to do is to open up a terminal in Linux (or a terminal on Mac if you have wget installed successfully on Mac) and type in the commands below:

  1. cd ~/Documents/
  2. mkdir wget-Downloads
  3. cd ~/Documents/wget-Downloads
  4. wget –recursive –no-clobber –page-requisites –html-extension –convert-links –restrict-file-names=windows –domains example.com example.com/whatever/

After using the commands above, you should now have a directory wget-Downloads created inside your Documents directory (e.g. Linux – /home/[user-name-here]/Documents/wget-Downloads, Mac – /Users/[user-name-here]/Documents/wget-Downloads) and a website which you had downloaded to this directory.  Of course, remember to replace example.com with an actual website, OK?  Also, if you compare the tutorial from LinuxJournal against mine, you will notice I had not used the –no-parent parameter for the wget command.  When using –no-parent parameter with wget command, it will limit you from downloading an entire website, therefore you might have broken links when viewing the website offline.  Still, if you are sure about the usage of –no-parent wget parameter, then you should use it.  Also, you should know that using wget to download an entire website might be the worst thing you can do sometimes, because you might have to fiddle your fingers for the longest time if not forever when a website you try to download is way way too big.  Luckily, you can always use Ctrl+C key combination on Linux (might be the same for Mac) to actually stop wget from continuing the download of an entire website.

As how LinuxJournal.com had explained,

  • –recursive wget parameter is for telling wget to download an entire website
  • –domains example.com wget parameter is for telling wget to download the contents within a specific website and not to download the contents of other websites as wget can actually follow the links that point to other websites and scrape the contents of those websites too
  • –no-parent wget parameter for telling wget to not follow links outside of a directory within a website, therefore stopping wget from downloading whatever contents that are locating outside of a specific directory
  • –page-requisites parameter for wget is for telling wget to download all the extra contents besides just text (e.g., CSS, images, etc…), and this way an offline website will appear pretty much the same as if it’s being viewed online
  • –html-extension wget parameter is for telling wget to save files of the offline website in .html extension, keeping the website structure as if it’s being served online (this is useful for website owner to backup a website locally)
  • –convert-links wget parameter is for telling wget to convert links locally so when a website is viewing offline, the offline website’s web links will link to each other properly (locally)
  • –restrict-file-names=windows wget parameter is for telling wget to convert file names in a way that when using the files that are downloaded with wget will be displayed correctly on Windows as well (i.e., Windows will be able to serve offline website’s files correctly in whatever browsers that are installed on Windows)
  • –no-clobber wget parameter is for telling wget to don’t overwrite any existing file so you can save some bandwidth and storage space, but sometimes it’s best to not use this parameter so you can actually update the entire website offline (i.e., sometimes a website updates its webpages with newer contents)

In summary, I had tried many other methods of saving a website offline for later viewing, but none is so elegant and simple as using wget.  How come?  For an example, when I used a browser to save a website (i.e., File > Save Page As), I had to do this more than once so I could actually save the portions of website correctly.  Furthermore, I had to reorganize the saving portions of the website locally or else the saving portions of the website appear unorganized within a local directory.

Sources:

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I Don’t Need A World Backup Day To Remind Me To Do Backups, Because I Rely On Automation!

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Posted by on in Anything Goes, Hardware, Networking, Software

Time Machine's retrieval interface. Image from Wikipedia.

Slashdot’s Ask Slashdot: It’s World Backup Day; How Do You Back Up? post reminds us to not forget to do backups for our data even though the post somehow either sarcastically or just idiotically suggests that April Fool day might be even worse than the data corruption event itself.  Anyhow, my very own answer to world backup day is that I have been setting up my own backup solutions that rely on automation.  Nonetheless, these backup solutions as a whole — not as elegant as I would have like!  I will tell you why in just a moment, for now let us take a glimpse into how I keep my data safe so far.

I’ve couple laptops.  Nonetheless, none of them is as important as my work laptop which is the MacBook Pro.  So, I want to make sure the data in the MacBook Pro is safe.  But how?  Time Machine of course!  With Time Machine, you can do backup for Mac data as long you have formated an external hard drive or a partition or (creating) a network share partition that is compatible to Apple’s journaled HFS+ file system.  Obviously you can also use one Mac to be the receiver of the backup data of another Mac, because Mac is Mac and all Mac supports the same file system type and network protocols such as AFP (Apple Filing Protocol).  In my case, I only have one Mac (i.e., MacBook Pro laptop), therefore I had formated my external hard drive with journaled HFS+ file system so I could infrequently do backups of  the MacBook Pro.  Why I infrequent do backups of MacBook Pro onto the external hard drive?  Well, I hate how I have to physically connect an external hard drive to a MacBook Pro laptop, because it makes the laptop feels stationary.  I needed a solution for doing frequent backups of the MacBook Pro, but how?  I solved this problem by virtualizing FreeNAS on a desktop machine of mine.  As FreeNAS (which is free to install and use) supports AFP sharing, I can now just connect the MacBook Pro to FreeNAS AFP sharing volume once, choosing the volume as the Time Machine, and the MacBook Pro will automatically do frequent backups on an interval basis (incremental backup on automation).  With FreeNAS being virtualized as a VirtualBox virtual machine, as long FreeNAS is running when the MacBook Pro is on, I don’t really have to physically have the MacBook Pro connect to an external hard drive for doing a backup, because the backup will be done through a local network on an interval basis (i.e., automation) — consequently allowing me to move about with the MacBook Pro at all times.  Isn’t that how MacBook Pro was designed for?

I’ve a desktop which runs Windows 7, and I use this desktop a lot!  Mostly, I use this desktop for gaming and doing stuffs that Windows does best, but I do not keep anything important on this desktop.  Why?  Windows is well known for being susceptible to vulnerabilities in regarding to computer security problems.  This is why I prefer to work on the MacBook Pro.  Nonetheless, the desktop is more powerful than the MacBook Pro, therefore I have to use the desktop for encoding videos (the videos I make for uploading to YouTube) and what not.  Anyhow, since I do not ever want to have to reinstall Windows if it can be helped, because reinstate Windows to the condition as how it was before can be quite gruesome in my opinion.  I’ve to have a backup solution for my Windows machine.  How is reinstalling Windows can be gruesome?  I’m security paranoid, and so it’s not so surprise to see me to go through the process of reapplying all the Windows updates before I even dare to use the Windows machine, and this whole process takes awfully long and boring.  Additionally, I still have to reinstall all of the software onto the reinstated Windows machine.  So, what is the backup solution I use to keep the data on Windows machine safe?  Simple, really!  I use CrashPlan!  How come?  CrashPlan is a super sophisticated backup solution which is quite fitting for enterprise backup purpose, but amazingly CrashPlan puts this sophisticated backup technology in the hands of the regular users.  It’s also simple to use, and it also has free backup plan which requires no fee or whatsoever.  Nonetheless, I use the paid CrashPlan plan and allow CrashPlan to locally and remotely do incremental backups for the Windows machine on an interval basis (i.e., automation).  Since CrashPlan is so intuitive and easy to use, I don’t really have any complain — setting it up once and the data on the Windows machine suddenly become more resilient.  For your information though, CrashPlan also supports Mac and Linux.

So, as you can see I do have backup solutions on automation, but why I still feel like I’m missing something here.  Well, it’s because I’ve more than one backup solutions for all of my data, including Mac, Windows, and Linux machines.  When my data are residing in different physical media locally, it just makes the whole shebang seems somewhat inelegant.  Part of the blame to this problem has to be me!   I trust the backups of a Mac with Time Machine more than anything else, therefore I have not used CrashPlan to do the backups for my MacBook Pro laptop.  I think I will eventually arrive at a better answer for all of my backup problems.  This will have to do with the combination of using CrashPlan and a physical NAS box which will utilize FreeNAS.  I plan to create a network attached box with enough storage space to hold all of my data locally; this NAS box will use FreeNAS as its OS.  FreeNAS talks to all major operating systems, therefore I should not have a problem of setting FreeNAS up to accept backups from Mac, Linux, and Windows.  So, locally, when NAS box is in play, doing backups locally seems much more elegant.  Keeping the local data even more safe (hopefully also secure), I have to have a plan for storing the local data in a remote location.  This is where CrashPlan comes into play!  I’ll use CrashPlan to slowly upload my local data to CrashPlan network (i.e., remote location).  One problem though, CrashPlan cannot be installed on the top of FreeNAS.  Solving this problem is easy enough!  I’ve to rely on VirtualBox and Linux!  So basically, Linux will be the host OS for the NAS box, and VirtualBox will run a virtual machine for FreeNAS.  I can configure Linux to run RAID 5 to prevent data failure on the NAS box itself .  FreeNAS will then be configured to just host as a storage attached network with software or without software RAID (i.e., depending on how much fun I want to have).  FreeNAS will see Linux’s RAID volume which consists of at least 3 hard drives (i.e., each hard drive has data capacity of 2 terabytes) as one single large volume.  Since I can install CrashPlan onto Linux OS, therefore I can use CrashPlan to do backups for my FreeNAS (VirtualBox) virtual machine.  This allows all the local data within the NAS box to be uploaded to CrashPlan’s network (i.e., keep data in remote location for data redundancy purpose).  Since CrashPlan encrypts all data, therefore I don’t have to worry about my data being easily access by uninvited guests.

In summary, in a way, you can say I don’t need a world backup day to remind me to do backups, because I rely on automation.  Automation?  Yes, because as you can see I don’t have to remember when my MacBook Pro laptop will use Time Machine to do a backup, because I had set the MacBook Pro to automatically allow Time Machine to upload the backups to the virtualized FreeNAS (VirtualBox) virtual machine.  Also, I don’t have to remember when I have to do a backup for my Windows machine, because CrashPlan is also doing this automatically for me on an interval basis.  My backups essentially run on automation.  Nonetheless, I prefer to have a physical NAS box so I can centralize my data locally (i.e., more elegant this way).

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Setting Up iSCSI With FreeNAS So Any Computer Can Have Additional Virtual Internal Hard Drives

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Posted by on in Networking, Open Source, Software
Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing...

Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing platters and heads; 8, 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, 1.8 and 1 inch disk diameters are represented. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Did you know you can use FreeNAS to host iSCSI service?  OK, what is this service anyway?  To tell the truth, I’m so new to this that I’m scared to talk of it, because I don’t want to have this wrong and steer you wrong.  Anyhow, I think I know how this service works inside FreeNAS.  Let me sum this up, it’s like using FreeNAS’s storage volumes to act as hard drives on different computers.  So, to make this clearer, let say you have a FreeNAS server with plenty of ZFS disk space and you had already created the necessary ZFS Datasets to act as if these ZFS Datasets are different partitions (i.e., ZFS volumes or hard disks); you can basically set up iSCSI service through FreeNAS to make these ZFS Datasets to act as if they are internal hard drives of any other computer you have access.  Once you set a computer to connect to iSCSI service’s volumes (i.e., extents) and with appropriate permissions, the users who log onto this specific computer will be able to use FreeNAS’s ZFS Datasets (i.e., ZFS volumes) as if there are additional internal hard drives on the computer.  How neat, right?  Unfortunately, I think the setup for iSCSI is rather confusing, and you have to really understand iSCSI to not make mistakes when setting up iSCSI service in FreeNAS.  I’m myself not exactly sure of how setting up iSCSI, therefore I can’t really make a video about iSCSI.  Luckily, I’ve found an instructive video of teaching you how to setup iSCSI in FreeNAS.  Please enjoy the video out right after the break!

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