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I just bought myself a QNAP TS-409 Pro from Skycomp. Very happy with both the device and Skycomp so far.

However, the initial setup was a struggle.

The device has a very limited openwrt-style firmware. Very, very limited: it contains the bare minimum functionality to be able to bootstrap the device with a more capable OS once you have disks installed.

The documented way of doing this is via a “QuickInstall Wizard”, that comes on a provided CD in Mac and Windows flavors. I only have Macs on my home network, so the windows flavor wasn’t useable for me. The Mac flavor is… interesting. I ran into the problem described here: In short, the full firmware isn’t pushed until after the drives are initiated; but the Wizard gets stuck at the “Initializing drives” stage, so the full firmware is never pushed.

I got around it using these instructions – they’re described as being “For linux”, but as it just uses basic tools like telnet and ftpd, it will work on any *nix.

Some notes:

• Obviously, had to enable file sharing via FTP on my mac first. Did this under “Sharing” prefpane, “File Sharing”, “Share files and folders using FTP”. As the warning states, this involves transmitting your username and password in cleartext: only enable this if you’re confident you’ll only be transmitting them across a safe network. Better, use a username/password you created just for this purpose; which has no special privileges, and which will be turned off as soon as you’re done.
• Out of the box, the device listens for telnet connections on port 13131. Username and password are “admin”.
• Once you’ve successfully updated the firmare and rebooted, you won’t find a telnetd on 13131 any more. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR, DON’T PANIC. Instead, you’ll find an sshd listening on port 22.
• You’ll also find a web interface listening on port 8080. If you visit that, you can start the process of setting up the device.
• It may be helpful to have let the wizard run at least to the “Initializing drives” stage at least once. After I thought I knew what I was doing I switched to a new set of disks and tried again; and this time the hard drives weren’t mounted at all, so I couldn’t go through the documented process.

It’s not clear from the documentation, but the device creates a RAID-1 segment 500Mb in size on each disk you insert (/dev/md9 in my case), and mounts this on /mnt/HDA_ROOT. This is where configs for the device, packages you install, and so on are stored.

The device can handle multiple raidsets – although with only 4 disks to play with, you’re not likely to end up with >2 sets. In my cause I currently have 3 1Tb drives in a RAID-5 set, and a single 500Gb disk sitting on its own.

Same view, 1920.

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That’s the Powerhouse Museum, located between Pyrmont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a helicopter, the view would look something like this:

Imagine if you could magically click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from sometime between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older picture, look beyond the chimneystack, and just to the left. Immediately beyond the chimney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle corner. The road then continues up the picture – but it’s not quite straight, it bends a little to the right. If you look at the modern picture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle corner and the same not-quite-straight road – although now the Western Distributor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large building inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That building is Global Switch Sydney – built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s starting to reach full capacity.

The railway line visible in the earlier picture was the Darling Harbour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Metropolitan Goods Railway Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.

Talking to a workmate who has a sick cat led to looking at Medibank Private’s pet cover.

This led to the source of (apparently) all pet insurance in Australia; which then led to comparison shopping between the various resellers.

The differences are amusing, but annoying. One provides 15k total cover; but only $500 for tick paralysis. Another only offers 9k total cover; but removes the restrictions on what percentage of that can be used for drugs/medication vs how much is for dental care. None of them cover treatment for leukemia in cats; but some add an additional clause declining to cover any condition for which there is a vaccine.

I’d like to go with the RSPCA - if someone has to make a profit, they seem like a better choice than some of the for-profit companies. But the limits are half that provided by Medibank, while the premiums are double. Sure you can skim profit off the top, but that doesn’t mean I want you to gouge me for every cent I own.

Gah. Choices, that aren’t really choices. Just what I wanted.

I was in the supermarket getting some laundry powder last night and noticed something really strange: every single brand of concentrated laundry powder was advertising on their packaging the fact that they’re about to be relaunched in a new version. The new powders are all going to be 2x as concentrated, and most brands made a big deal out of the fact that the new packaging will therefore be half the size.

Golly. Every brand? All at once? All deciding to redo their formulation, redo their packaging, and retool their manufacturing plants, all with identical changes to formulation and packaging, all at the same time? Unpossible!

You’d almost think that every brand of powder was actually exactly the same, made at the same plant, and just packaged slightly differently. But that would surely never happen!

Lindsay did an excellent blog post yesterday titled “Everything old is new again“, about the re-emergence of multi-dimensioned databases.

Great title, but just to prove his point, it applies even better to a post he shared on Google Reader a few days ago, written by Kurt Schrader and titled “Living in a Post Rails World“. To quote that post:

I think that the Ruby world is eventually going to end up in a model like this, writing small simple apps that all talk to each other, and can be replaced or upgraded at any time.

<snip two paragraphs>

All of my hard/long running logic is well tested, encapsulated, and most likely running in little agents on the wire.

Sound familiar? It should. Kurt has re-discovered the same principles that the Holy Fathers of Unix discovered, over a quarter of a century ago. Doug McIlroy, circa 1978:

(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

Later, he simplified it:

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Of course, Henry Spencer said it the best:

Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Some hints about using the Google Sync for iPhone. These will probably also apply to the Windows Mobile sync – but I’ve not used that, so I’m not sure. I’m going to say “iPhone” consistently – but the same will apply to an iPod touch as well (modulo the things that involve a 3G connection, of course).

• BACK UP YOUR DATA. Really can’t stress this enough. The process of setting up the sync WILL WIPE ALL YOUR CONTACTS AND CALENDARS. Back up first.
• You can choose up to 5 calendars (not including your primary calendar) to sync.
  • If you have a gmail/googlemail account, visit m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, follow the prompts, and you’ll be able to choose up to 5 additional calendars to sync.
  • If you have a Google Apps account, visit http://google.com/m/a/<<domain.com>>, then click “More” and then “Sync”. For this to work, your domain administrator will have to have enabled Google Sync for your domain first.
  • [update]It’s been pointed out to me that Apps users can actually access the sync settings from m.google.com/sync. Click on “Google Mobile” on the bottom left-hand corner of the page, and you’ll be taken to a page  with lots of icons for different Google services. Scroll down and make sure there’s a link that says “Not in United States?”. If it lists another country, click it and change your contry to the United States – this won’t work in any other country. Once you’ve changed that and you’re back at the page with service icons, find the “Google Apps user?” button, and enter your domain into the popup. You’ll now have icons for your Apps domain – including a Sync icon. Click it, and once again just follow the directions from there.[/update].
• I have one Google Apps account for work and one personal Google Apps account. However, the iPhone only allows me to set up one Exchange account, so I have to pick which of the two I’m going to sync, right? Wrong! I’ve shared my personal calendar with my work account, giving it “Make changes to events” permissions. I’ve then set up my work account to sync with my iPhone, and chosen my personal calendar as one of the additional calendars to sync.
• If you go with the default setup, it will sync both Calendars and Contacts. This is almost certainly not what you want. It does have the benefit of pushing changes to contacts straight into the cloud – but it also has the effect of breaking the sync between your Google contacts and your Address Book. That is – assuming you used to sync the two – which a lot of people did not, due to Google’s contacts manager being rather broken. However, it’s easy enough to set the sync to Calendar only. If you look at step 13 of the official instructions, you’ll see both Calendar and Contacts selected. If you choose to sync only Calendar, Contacts will still be synced with Address Book by iTunes whenever you sync your iPhone. If you’ve chosen to sync Address Book with Google Contacts as well, that will still happen too.
• You can sync calendars with both an Exchange and MobileMe cloud at the same time; but as soon as you enable one of them, you can’t sync calendars with iTunes any more. You can only have one MobleMe account and one Exchange account.

I used to have a messy messy setup involving Spanning Sync pulling all my Google Calendars into iCal; then using Mobile Me to push them into the cloud; then using the iPhone’s Mobile Me sync to pull them onto the phone. Many moving parts, 3 different sync stages for something to go wrong. Only works if you have a permanently online machine that can be doing the translation between the Google cloud and the Apple cloud. I’m much happier with this direct sync.

[update]About the contact sync thing. See, you only get the option to sync your Address Book and your Google Contacts visible in iTunes if you’re syncing contacts with your iPhone. If you’re syncing contacts with the cloud, you’re not syncing with your iPhone, so you don’t get the option. If you do use Google Contacts, that means that the cloud and your iPhone are both up-to-date – but your desktop is not.

If you really want instant syncing between your phone and your desktop, turn on cloud-syncing of your contacts. If you’d prefer to keep your phone, desktop, and the cloud all in sync, turn off cloud-syncing, and let iTunes handle the sync instead. [/update]

[update 2009-09-09] As of Snow Leopard, it’s no longer necessary to have an iPhone/iPod in order to get Address Book <-> Gmail Contacts syncing. So, it’s now perfectly possible to have your iPhone cloud-syncing your contacts AND have your Mac also cloud-syncing. To turn it on on your Mac, just go into the Address Book’s preferences and look under the Accounts tab.[/update]

[update]Facebook Events? Magically pushed into your iPhone calendar? Easy!

Go to your Facebook Events page. On the top left (below the blue Facebook bar; above the big word “Events”) you’ll see “Export Events”. Click on that link, and you’ll get a popup with a long URL. Copy this URL.

Next, go to your Google Calendar. Click “Settings”, “Calendars”, “Import Calendar”, “Add By URL”, and paste that URL into the box.

Now visit the Sync Settings page, and choose your new Facebook calendar as one of the 5 to import. Now if you RSVP to any events in Facebook, that event will appear in your Google Calendar and your iPhone.[/update]

At first glance, I assumed that this was related to the horrible fires in Victoria. Nope, just advertising. Well done SMH!

Stilgherrian takes weekly nominations for “Cnut of the Week“. Traditionally the gong goes to Stephen Conroy, for his increasingly futile attempts to hold back the (largely imaginary) tide of paedophiles sweeping over the internet.

Unfortunately I believe this week’s spot has already been claimed. However, I’d like to make an early nomination for next week.

Steve Turner, assistant secretary of the Public Service Association of NSW, said … the blame did not lie solely with the Government as “any computer system can be hacked … even American defence force computers”.

[update 12/2/2009] Nope, there hadn’t been a Stilgherrian Live for a while. There is now though, so consider this a nomination[/update]

Reading the draft Executive Order ordering Guantánamo Bay detention facilities to be closed, one minor paragraph jumped out at me:

(c) The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of

the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of

habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention.

If that was the entirety of the order, it would be a huge step forward for people still imprisoned there – they’ll be able to force the government to justify their imprisonment, a right that was consistently denied to David Hicks and the other detainees.

You can read the whole order from a link at the bottom of the ACLU’s press release.