theHTPC.net

Not a whole lot has been going on lately with me on the HTPC/HT front.  I did get to install Windows 2008 Server on my NETSVR yesterday though.  I had been wanting to try it out, along with an x64 version, for a while now.  The install was painless and I’m really liking it so far.  Everything that I typically use (application-wise) installed without issue and it’s 100% as functional as it was running x86 2003 Server.  It’s a keeper for sure.

I also finally got tapes for my new (used) DAT drive.  Amazon had incorrectly listed their 5-pack and kept sending me a single tape for a 5-pack price, so I canceled and went with SuperMediaStore.  I got it cheaper there anyway.  I’m currently running a backup of all my photos, my wife’s work folder and our home videos using NovaBackup Professional.  I had first tried the built-in Windows backup with supported hardware compression, but it didn’t actually compress anything and was going to use up the full 31GB I needed to back up (40GB with compression is supported by this drive).  So, I figured I would try my copy of NovaBackup to see if its software compression would be any better.  If it is, I’ll stick with it since its more flexible than the built-in backup anyway.

I also had to redeploy my old Gateway Pentium III 933MHz box since 2008 Server does not support the old Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI card I’m running my DAT from.  It will be used strictly for tape backups, so I’m going to look for a way to set it up for WOL since it only needs to run when I’m doing a differential.  It already had 2003 Server on it from when I was using it as my VPN server, so that made things much easier for me.

Other than that, the only other thing I did was add the replaced Seagate 500GB drive to my unRAID server and I bumped the memory up to 3GB - adding a couple of 512MB modules I had laying around (I had 4, but only two slots left).  I’d like to get it to 4GB, but it can wait.

Thanks ComcastCares1 for the offer, but I shouldn’t have to climb a ladder to get basic help.  My TV subscription has been canceled and everything, including installation, is to be credited to my account.  My cable didn’t even work at all the past two days - not even a crappy signal…no signal at all.  They are coming to get their equipment today.  The Digital Voice is next to go -  $10/month > $45/month in favor of T-Mobile@Home.  If someone else would move in the area, my Internet service would be next.  DSL doesn’t do it for me, so I’ll just have to wait.  250GB/month is a lot of bandwidth, but I’d rather not be limited, regardless of my usage.  I pay for service - not a bandwidth allotment.  I’ve never had much of an issue with Comcast until moving to Lawrenceville.  I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that they’re the only service provider in my area.  If we’re fed crap, they expect us to eat it or starve.

Dish Network came out yesterday and after about 3.5 hours, finished my install.  I now have America’s Top 200+locals and the SilverHD package with a DVR in the bedroom and receiver in the TV room.  The poor guy had to reinstall one dish twice to clear my trees and he did this 30ft in the air on the edge of my roof.  I got  VIP-612 DVR and VIP-211 receiver for the equipment.  So far, the signal is very good and the picture looks terrific.  The only issue I’ve encountered thus far is with the Harmony 670 remote and the VIP-612 DVR - I couldn’t get it to work at all.  I’m pretty sure, after some Googling, that it’s just set to URF remote mode and I need to change it to IR and set it to 01 for the address…or something like that.

I received my Digital Starter package from Comcast on Saturday.  I received a single DVR when I ordered two standard digital receivers.  They said it was no extra charge, so OK - I take it.

I moved the DVR to my bedroom yesterday and everything worked fine for about an hour.  Since then, I’ve lost VOD and my reception is pure crap.  The first time I called they said they would send a signal and I should be fine in 15-20 minutes.  It wasn’t fine.  After 2 hours I call back - now they want me to wait two days to see if it clears up.  Now listen to that…”wait two days”.  No thanks.

This morning I scheduled Dish Network to come on Saturday.  If the trees I have don’t pose a problem, I’ll also be cancelling Comcast that day as well.  Their phone service is soon to be replaced by T-Mobile@Home also.  If TWC, Charter or anyone else would come through here (except for DSL - it’s an option, but not one I want) I could ditch them altogether.

My tape drive came.  Yes, it was a PowerVault 100T.  No, it was not the DAT72 - it was the DAT40.  My 36/72GB tapes are worthless and I had to get a 5-pack of Quantum 20/40GB tapes for $32 and change off of Amazon.  The drive does work (it took my cleaning tape, at least), was only a bit dusty and is in pretty good shape otherwise.  I saw refurb units just like this going for $300 on some sites.  I got it for about $35.  Now all I need to do is wait for my tapes to arrive.  I’ll probably see if we have any old ones at work, just to make sure the thing does work.

I got a request to put up my instructions for getting the guide listings working with the HDHomeRun.  They’re on the SiliconDust site, but they’re a little vague.  If I get time at work tomorrow, I’ll put up something a little easier to follow.  Stay tuned.

Well, on a whim, I decided to give this a try on my desktop system that runs Vista Ultimate.  Since I don’t use Media Center except for testing on there, I didn’t figure it would hurt much.  By now, most everyone that is interested knows what it does and adds, so there’s not much more I can say.  I will say that if you have an HDHomeRun, it is a complete pain in the ass to get the TV portion set back up if you normally pull a good number of unencrypted channels via cable.  I typically get around 30 and after going through the scan only three were found.  I had to manually rename and edit the listing on all the others.  In a way, it was a good thing because there were always a couple of stations that didn’t match any listing and I was able to figure out what broadcast they really were, but I don’t really want to have to go through that again.  Comcast comes Saturday morning (8-10am) and when they activate my cable for the digital starter package, I’m going to be getting a lot more than what I’m getting now, so I’m trying to solidify a way to copy the EPG settings from one TV Pack-enabled box to another.  I’m still researching what plugins it breaks before I install it on anything else though.  I think MediaControl is the only one that I’ve found so far, but it may have an updated version…I don’t know yet.  If anyone needs instructions on how to manually set up HDHomeRun channel listings with TV Pack, comment on it and I’ll post what I did.  I’d do it now, but I don’t feel like it :)

My tape drive was supposed to arrive yesterday, but it didn’t.  After looking, I realized it’s coming from Texas, so I can see why it was delayed (hurricane).  It is supposed to arrive today though.  I really hope it works (as-is purchase off e-Bay).  The guy has fantastic feedback, so I’m thinking it will.  Tape drives are pretty durable (even though Dell tape drives typically suck).

The pool guy came yesterday too.  It went well and the estimates looked pretty good and were within what we expected.  There are some things that we didn’t expect, but no deal-breakers.  I just hope we can get it in for next summer.

To the best of my knowledge, everything was recovered.  The last drive was missing one file and some metadata, but I was able to replace that rather easily.  Last night, I swapped out the drive with a bad block and completed my first parity rebuild.  It all went very smoothly and was over in less than 4 hours for the entire 500GB drive (and it was full).

This whole ordeal made me think, despite how great I still think unRAID is, that it really is NOT a true means of data protection.  I still need a way to reliably back up the things I really need.  So today, I went on eBay and found a used Dell PowerVault 100T DAT72 tape drive.  They’re not the best in the world, but I got it for a super cheap $35 shipped, plus it comes with the cable.  I already have an Adaptec 39160 Ultra160 SCSI card, so I’m all set.  I’ll just toss this into one of my Win2k3 servers and get a good tape backup regime going.

The second drive just finished its rebuild and it appears to be completely intact.  There’s really no way for me to know unless I go and start checking each movie, but I figure I’ll just find out as I go.  The folder structure was completely intact and all that was in lost+found were noname files that I found mostly consisted of XML and JPG files that had been deleted in the past.  Everything in there would be 100% replaceable.  

I just started the rebuild on the last drive, which should complete in roughly 5 hours.  I’d like to get it up and running tonight, but I also want to copy all the contents of the drive with bad blocks to one of my standby spares.  I suppose I could have the array active while doing that.  It all depends when it finishes, I guess.  At this point, I’m not a big fan of doing anything that I’m not 100% sure about.

I’ll update tomorrow on how everything went.  By then I should have everything back to about how they were.

Well, the port multiplier replacement came in and all installed just fine.  Good news is that it was the PMP that had failed.  Bad news is that when I got everything configured as it was before the failure, unRAID decided that those three drives were all new and started clearing them!

I hit the reset button on the unRAID box after only a few seconds…it never budged past 0%, but damage was done.  All drives subsequently showed back up as unformatted when unRAID resumed operation.  I had lost roughly 750GB of TV episodes and my entire NAS drive.

Fortunately, I started a recovery process that, so far, appears to be promising.  I performed it first on the NAS drive.  It involves using reiserfsck commands that are not for the faint-hearted.  However, considering my predicament, I had no choice.

I started out with the following commands that basically just rebuilds the resierfs directory structure.  That’s probably dumbing it down a lot since I’m about the farthest thing from a linux guru.  

root@MEDIASVR:/# /root/samba stop

root@MEDIASVR:/# reiserfsck –scan-whole-partition –rebuild-tree /dev/md4

unRAID has to have the array started, but samba sharing has to be stopped in order for it to begin the rebuild.  After about 5 hours, I had a single lost+found folder that contained many more folders named with seemingly random numbers and over 100 randomly numbered files with no file extension.  After perusing a few of those folders, it appeared as all of my old directories were in them.  I have no idea what the no-extension files are, however.  I’m hoping they’re just old deleted files that were recovered after the fact.

I was a bit more at ease until trying the next drive.  This was the one that contained the bulk of my TV episodes and after starting the rebuild, it ended shortly after upon hitting a bad block.  I now had to do a 

root@MEDIASVR:/# /sbin/badblocks -b 4096 -o badblocks.lst /dev/sde

to generate a list of all the bad blocks that the drive could discover.  This lasted about 5 hours - the same length as a recover.   Once finished, I had to make reiserfsck aware of this list and modify my rebuild command like so,

root@MEDIASVR:/# reiserfsck –scan-whole-partition –rebuild-tree -B badblocks.lst /dev/md5

This allows the bad blocks to be skipped or reallocated - I’m not really sure…I just know that reiserfsck knows when and what to do at bad block.  As I write this I have about 35 minutes to go on the rebuild before I’ll see what the damage is.  Considering my TV show folders begin at three levels deep, I think I should be in pretty good shape at retaining the directory structure I had.  I’ll be doing an RMA on this drive once I get everything moved.  Seagates have 5-year warranties and this one is not even two yet.

After spending a few minutes checking that drive when it’s done, I’ll immediately begin with the third drive.  It was, at most, about 2/3 capacity remaining and was a spillover for the other TV episode drive.  I can only hope for no more bad blocks there so I can get this done tonight and spend tomorrow getting it all back in order to use, while finding out what I’m missing.  I’ll be sure to update tomorrow.

In other news, I received a P3 Kill-A-WATT P4400 device that I had ordered yesterday.  The Kill-A-WATT plugs into a standard 3-prong electrical outlet and allows you to monitor all the characteristics of what is coming out of that outlet to the device that plugs into the Kill-A-WATT.  I can get KWh, line condition, voltage, etc.  I plan on using this on the most used electrical devices in the house to see where we can cut some corners.  Computers, applicances, stereo equipment, etc. will eventually all be tested.  I may start a small index so that others can compare to it and see what their devices are drawing while on.  More on that later.

Some of you may have been using Sam Saffron’s ruby script to scrape TheTVDB for TV show metadata, just to find out that it stopped working a few days ago.  TheTVDB has completely moved to a new API and the old ruby script no longer works.

If you’re in need of a new scraper, Bill Daugherty II has started developing a new application that is working pretty well in its early stages.  You can get the new TV Metadata Finder at his website.  It’s currently only in it the second release, but has been working well enough for me so far.  I expect it to be one of the primary scrapers available over the next few days or weeks.

You can also try TVScout.  It does the same thing, is simple to use and just works.  I still expect to be using Bill’s offering as it appears to eventually offer a little more while not becoming too convoluted.

My port multiplier replacement is also on track to arrive today.  Not a moment too soon.  I was really missing watching my TV shows.  Netflix WatchNow has filled in nicely, but it’s still not a replacement.  I just hope I don’t run into any issues putting in that replacement.  I’ll be sure to post how it all went tomorrow.