Dinner Saved by a Surge Protector

The Surge Protector that Gave Up It's Life in the Name of Supper!

Last night were we were cooking supper using the microwave at home and it just decided to take a break. Then we tried to switch it on again, and it didn't budge. I then decided to plug the microwave into another power outlet to see if maybe the power outlet is a problem. The microwave still kept quite. The I noticed that the leds on the power surge protector plug were off. This meant that surge protector was dead. The power protector had died saving the microwave and our dinner. I thanked myself for putting the power surge protectors, as seen in figure 1, on each appliance in the house.

Figure 1: Model of the power surge protector that was used

Giga What? Giga This, Giga That, Gigabit Networks

Gigabit Network

Recently I bought a ZTE MF253 LTE Modem Router.

 



ZTE MF253 LTE Modem Router

This made me realise that my current home network which is using the Netgear MBRN300 modem router is not fast enough for connecting my other network devices anymore. This means I had a challenge of introducing the new LTE modem router into the network and upgrade the network at the same time. After some research I ended buying the Netgear GS608 8 port Gigabit switch. This switch is capable of transmitting data between network devices at 1000Mb/s!

Netgear GS608 8 Port Gigabit Switch

The switch will allow me to watch high resolution movies on my home network without having to worry about bandwidth and I can take advantage of the LTE modem's high speed Internet connection. On the MBRN3000 modem router using an HSDPA USB modem I used to get a peak download speed of 2.2MB/s on the Vodacom network. I did a speed test recently with LTE modem  and I can do 8Mb/s on the Vodacom network. Happy networking!

As a bonus, the ZTE MF253 can also work as network media server. Yes, you guessed it, the router is compatible with your other DLNA certified devices. All you have to is attach a usb hard drive to the modem router and all your media can played on compatible devices on the network.

QNAP HS-210 - The NAS For Your Living Room

QNAP has a launched a fanless dual bay NAS device. The device does not only look great but it is fanless! Through some clever engineering they have created a big heat sink on the top of the device that eliminates the need for a fan.

QNAP HS-210 Dual Bay NAS

Checkout a review of the device by audiostream magazine here

Netgear Stora Recovery - Firmware Reinstall

Unbrick My Stora

Steps for installing Netgear Stora Firmware are:

Note: Your NAS needs to be attached to router with an internet connections

• To put the device into recovery mode, power on the device, wait 15 seconds (exactly), then hold the reset button while bootup continues. The bootup process will take approximately 30 seconds and the blue LED will be blinking during that period.
• As soon as the recovery mechanism kicks in, the blue light turns off and HDDLED1 will turn orange. The reset button can be released at this point. Your NAS drive will go through the following actions:
1. Then the device will request a DHCP lease and try to get an IP,
2. If an IP is obtained, HDDLED2 will also turn orange for 1 second. 
3. If no IP is assigned the following pattern will be shown on the leds and the recovery mechanism will stop: Power LED Off -> HDDLED1 and HDDLED2 will blink 3 times together -> All LEDs off
4. Once network is up, the download and burn process will begin. During the download procedure the LED behaviour is: Power LED Off -> HDDLED1 and HDDLED2 will turn on and off in turns. Below is a video of the flash pattern

• The download and burn will take around 4-5 mins with a fast connection speed.
• Once the download and burn is done: 
1. If the burn is successful, all LEDs will turn on for 5 seconds and then the device will reboot normally
2. If the burn fails the LED behaviour will stay as follows and the recovery mechanism will stop : Power LED On -> HDDLED1 and HDDLED2 will blink together

Rotel Went DAC

Rotel has launched it's first DAC. I really like Rotel products as they have remained "pure" throughout the years - they only make sound electronics, no speakers, no tvs. I bought myself a Onkyo iPod transport a few years back and have not found a good DAC to pair it with.



Onkyo ND-S1 iPod Transport

Now I have the Rotel DAC in my sights, must start saving, this thing is a beauty!

 

Rotel RDD-1580 DAC Back

Rotel RDD-1580 DAC Front

I will get it in Silver as I think audio components in silver never look out of age

 

Rotel RDD-1580 DAC in Silver at the Top of The Rack

Netgear Stora 3TB or 4TB drives

I am reapeating this post from the Netgear Stora forums as a backup, the post is copied from http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=72007&page=3 anf here it is:

Since i'm not getting posts from the forum and netgear isn't going to upgrade to support 3tb drives, i'm just going to post it here:

First, you need SSH access to your stora:

SSH Access to a Stora

First you need to get your Stora’s product key, it’s located behind the Stora, close to the ethernet port or may be on the bottom of the device, it’s in the form “XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX”.

Then you just need to SSH to your Stora with a particular user which is just one of the users created through the web interface (the user needs to have the administrator flag selected) concatenated by the string “_hipserv2_netgear_XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX” (where XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX is your product key, ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!), this time you’ll get a password prompt instead of the “connection to x:22 exited: remote closed the connection”, just enter the user password, which is the one you use to access your Stora through the web interface and you’ll get user access. Now to get root access you just need to write “sudo -s” and enter again the user password, every ADMINISTRATOR user is allowed to use the sudo command. You’ll probably get a: “audit_log_user_command(): Connection refused” but it doesn’t matter, you’ll get the root prompt!

Example: if you created a user named “stora”, flagging the “user is administrator” during the Stora setup or through the web interface and your Stora’s product key is “1234-5678-9999-9999? you just need to ssh to your Stora and use “stora_hipserv2_netgear_1234-5678-9999-9999? as user, either using Putty or your favorite SSH client and enter that user’s password, then “sudo -E -s” and you’ll get root access, that’s it!

There’s another way to login concatenating the username with the string “_axsync_” but it allows you to issue only “mkdir” and “rsync” commands.

Explanation:

Basically Netgear, or more probably Axentra, ships his software with a modified version of SSHD that disallows regular user access, except for “root” and “apache” users, what it does is basically changing the logging username by substituting the first character with a “0? so it doesn’t match with the list of allowed users inside the /etc/passwd.

The SSH Deamon leaves a “backdoor” open, which basically is: if your username is appended with the above string, this substitution doesn’t take place, and you can login normally.

p.s. the “hipserv2_netgear” part may be different for some users, although I suppose is the same for everybody, if you already hacked your Stora using other ways I’d ask you to check the “/etc/oe-release” and post here the DistName line and we’ll try to figure it out.

Now to setup your stora to support 3tb drives:

Requirements:

- Any SSH client
- Two 3TB or bigger drives
- Any USB stick inserted in the front of the stora

Log into your device via SSH

Copy every line step by step:

---Get root

sudo -E -s

---Navigate to sbin directory

cd /sbin

---Partition the first drive with GNU parted (to make a GPT file format so that 3TB+ drives work)

./parted /dev/sda
mklabel gpt
yes
[Press Enter]
unit TB
mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB (4.00TB for 4tb but I haven't tried it).
print
quit

---Partition the second drive with GNU parted

./parted /dev/sdb
mklabel gpt
yes
[Press Enter]
unit TB
mkpart primary 0.00TB 3.00TB
print
quit

---Make the raid0 array with a blocksize of 128 (the blocksize is defaulted to 64, but 128 might be more desireable)

./mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --chunk=128 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

y

or

---Make the raid1 array

./mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --chunk=128 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

y

--- Wait for sync (also shows in web interface)

watch cat /proc/mdstat

*** Takes Long Time *** Mine took 4 1/2 hours.

---Make the USB Stick a swap partition and mount it as swap drive

./mkswap /dev/sdc
./swapon /dev/sdc

---Then we partition the drives to XFS filesystem

./mkfs.xfs /dev/md0

---Then we are going to text edit the fstab system (this system mounts the drive at startup)

vi /etc/fstab

Remove the # in front of

/dev/md0 /home xfs defaults,bsdgroups,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

Then as a finishing very important touch we make sure that the raid0 array is remembered at startup

./mdadm -Q --detail --brief /dev/md0 > /etc/mdadm.conf

Then reboot the device

./reboot

Wait a few minutes, you should see the device boot. The HDD leds will go from green to orange for a few seconds, don't worry they will become green again and you should hear the HDD's working. This is probably the stora finalizing the partition so that it's ready for use.

The Machines Will Rise - The Smartphone is Our Demise

They're Getting Smarter

MediaTek has unveiled the world's first true octa-core mobile chip recently. According to media reports and the company's figures, the MT6592 chip manages to beat what appears to be the quad-core Snapdragon 800 in benchmarks, power consumption (as low as 40 percent) and temperature.
This means the chip is doing more with less resources. Just what any cyborg (cybernetic organism) will appreciate. This means we can developer smarter and efficient cyborgs thanks to our pursuit of ever powerful and efficient mobile devices.

All over the world the development of these technologies, like the the LG G Flex self healing phone can be combined to create some advanced machinery. Watching this space.