SmashTech

…everything looks like a document. I was surprised, to say the least, to learn that one of the salesmen for Flowerco, after having his computer replaced, wanted access to the legacy document imaging system (which we’ll call FileMania).

It was my assumption that FileMania was only used for some billing and insurance paperwork, not anything that sales would really need. Turns out, he was using the software as a rudimentary CRM, to track customer calls, contact information, and the like. Hardly an ideal solution, but unfortunately, there isn’t much else we currently have available for him.

If users don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs, they will find some way to use the tools they do have to make due.

I finally had it with Vista on my media center PC. Slow startups, it never saved my resolution for the TV correctly, and frequently locked up while loading videos. It’d been a while since I tried Ubuntu (normally I use Fedora), so I decided to load up Jaunty and see how it worked.

First, the bad. It did not load the accelerated drivers for the Intel onboard video. While it sucks for 3D, it was more than enough to run XBMC smoothly under Windows. Under Ubuntu, videos would play fine, the interface was just dog-slow. I could’ve researched and fixed the problem, then I remembered I had an old GeForce 4 that Vista didn’t support. I slapped that in there, loaded up the nVidia drivers, and XBMC ran smooth as butter.

Now, the good. Wireless. Freaking amazing, I did not expect it to work right after an install with a Linksys WUSB54GSC I had, but after logging in, I was presented with a list of wifi networks, and connected to mine with no problems whatsoever.

There was some Samba weirdness. For some reason, it initially only showed my other Windows PCs, and my OpenFiler server didn’t show up in the Network list at all, even though they were all in the same workgroup. Changing my workgroup settings seemed to fix that.

On the whole, I’m very satisfied with how XBMC on Ubuntu turned out to be.

The replacement drive for my 1TB RAID5 finally came in last night. I had never actually had to do a rebuild with the md toolset before (I’ve always had hardware support in the past). I wasn’t able to find any rebuild option in OpenFiler’s web interface, so I ssh’ed in.

First, I looked at the partition structure of one of the remaining working drives with fdisk -l /dev/sdd, then I matched this partition setup on the replacement drive. Then I added the new drive back into the array with mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/sde1, and monitored the rebuild process occasionally by looking at /proc/mdstat.

The total time for the array rebuild was just shy of 4 hours and 30 minutes, on an Atom N270.