IcePick’s home of R and OWC

I kept having default shares disappearing after a server reboot on volumes hosted on iSCSI connected SANS.
I added the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
\LanmanServer\Parameters\AutoShare DWORD = 1 value.
Turned out to not be the complete answer.
On Server 2008 R2 I found the Volumes and Devices tab in the iSCSI initiator. Auto Configure adds the iSCSI volumes and tries to make sure they are available when start up services need them.

On Server 2003 R2 the tab is: Bound Volumes/Devices

Seems to have fixed my problems.

This problem still exists on Server 2008 R2 with the newest HP drivers.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319127

At least it is an easy fix.

Last year I posted how I had tried moving from Plex .8 to Plex .9 and switched back to .8 the same night. I have now moved to .9 and plan on leaving it installed. The scrapers are better and when they are wrong you can now edit meta data.

One of the biggest things in the new Plex is that they have separated the application into two pieces. A) the Plex Client B) Plex Media Server. The media server runs in the background and does all the work to sort through your libraries and present them to the clients. This allows a single Plex Media Server to service more than one client – the Android and iOS apps for mobile devices allows for remote viewing of your content – each are available in their respective Apps stores for $4.99. There are a few things that .8 did better. The first is that you can no longer edit and fix meta data using the “from 10 feet” interface of the client – instead you must now do all that via the PMS interface which is designed to be used like a regular desktop application. The second is that the media server no longer recognizes multiple episodes from different seasons being part of one file. The naming convention for multiple episodes in one file has also changed to one that in my opinion is less user friendly. There is also an issue where the client is not automatically selecting the highest quality sound track that is compatible with the system the client is installed on. This can be worked around by manually selecting the files once the video starts.

Over all I am happy with Plex Nine and will be sticking with it.

Update: Discovered new feature that helps with the Media Manager having a standard desktop GUI. You can connect to the Plex Web Media Manager.

I wish I would have written this up when I thought about it last week. It would have been cooler then posting it after the problem came up on Slashdot today.

While in the shower last week and not thinking of anything in particular a thought popped into my head regarding use of a non-incumbent DNS server and distributed content services like Akami.

Let me start by loosely explaining the Akami service. Akami makes many of your Internet experiences faster by pushing content that is frequently downloaded closer to the end user. They do this by placing content servers strategically connected the Internet all over the World. Now you might be thinking “that is fine here are these servers filled with data connected directly to my ISP – and just a few hopes away – but how do I talk to them”, and that is where the rub occurs regarding centralized DNS servers.

Akami’s system works by providing a different server IP address for the data you are asking about depending on your perceived location on the Internet. The issue is that you (your computer or router) never actually asked Akami directly for the IP address. You asked the DNS server so Akami gave an answer based on the location of the DNS server and not your computer. When you use your ISP’s default DNS server everything works as it should because you and the DNS server are both on your ISP’s network and thus Akami correctly hands out the IP address of the Akami server connected on or near your ISP’s network. When you use a centralized DNS service (Google DNS or OpenDNS) the DNS server and you are most likely not on the same network and possibly very far way in terms of Internet connectivity. Thus when Akami makes an assumption about your location and decides which content server to send you to they may make a poor choice and your download will be much slower than expected.

Got it? Maybe not, let me try to explain in a non-computer way.

For the sake of this example let’s set out some rules:
1) There a pizza company called Hot Pies that has pizza stores all over the entire country
2) Each Hot Pies store will take an order over the phone and deliver to anywhere in the country – no matter the distance.
3) Every home in this country has a phone and the prefix of the number represents the town the phone is located (think area code and exchange – like our current system before number portability)
3) Hot Pies corporate has an 800 (toll free) line that you call and then are connected to the closest Hot Pies to place your order.
4) The toll free line does not ask you what town you are but instead uses Caller ID to see what number you are calling from and then makes an assumption about your location given your phone number’s prefix.

When you call from your own home phone the 800 number service correctly figures out your location and connects you to the Hot Pies store that can best fill your pizza cravings in a timely manor. Everything works out, the pizza is delivered fresh and hot satiating your appetite for the night.

What happens if you have some forward your call to the 800 service. Let’s say the 8 on your phone is broke, so you call a friend whose phone number contains no 8s and ask him to transfer your call to the 800 number. He says no problem and takes care of it – you are delivered to the Hot Pies location service and forwarded to a store to place your order. Hours go by and your pizza finally arrives cold and rubbery. What could have happened? You ask the driver where he has been and to your surprise he drove from a town 75 miles away. How did this happen? As the driver leaves grumbling about your bad tip you realize the store the pizza came from is pretty close to where your friend that forwarded the call lives. It dawns on you that the Hot Pie corporate line made their decision on which store to send you to based on your friend’s phone number and not yours.

And that is what is happening to some people using streaming services like AppleTV and others while using a centralized DNS server

Firefox use this plug-in from the TOR project and EFF to help secure communication with many popular websites.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Android has certainly beat my expectations. After a slow start and in my opinion starting with the 2.x updates Android became a serious competitor for the best mobile device OS available. I have been using a Nexus one for a while now. I run a community compiled ROM and am very happy with it. I think one of the things holding back Android on other devices and in fact probably a lot of phones and their respective operating systems, is the carriers ham-stringing the phone by loading them full of performance stealing crap, and removing standard apps and features that compete against some offering from the carrier. Why the hell does a carrier need to have their own App store when each OS already has one with pretty large catalogs. The only reason I can see is to restrict customer choice. The carriers need to stop pissing around the “extras” and concentrate on providing the best voice and data service they can provide. I believe the carrier’s meddling is one the things that has allowed Apple’s iOS to be so popular as Apple has really been very good at not allowing the carriers to crap up their devices.

Been thinking of deleting my FB account lately, just getting too annoying and heavy handed.

For now instead of deleting my FB account I decided I would just cull the herd.
I deleted 20 FB friends.

Dear Netflix,
Now that you have put a price on a streaming only plan and decided to raise the price of my plan by more then 10% how about you create a disc only (no streaming) option. I don’t even want the full amount of the streaming only plan refunded, maybe just 4 or 5 bucks.
Why don’t I care about streaming – well because every time I want to watch some movie it is not available for streaming. I do not believe that once in the last year have a I wanted to watch some movie and found it to be available for instant view. What makes this even more nuts is that these are not new films, everyone of them was at least 8 years old – one was from 1990.

In closing – until you can you provide a much more robust streaming library I have no interest in the service and would appreciate not being pushed into lower disc at a time plans by your increased prices.

P.S. -
I think a good definition of a robust streaming library would be to have every movie that was ever in the weekly box office top 10 from 5 years ago and older + every film nominated for any Oscar from 3 years ago and older.

I am getting kind of tired of the way Google’s accidental capture of passwords and other information is being portrayed in the Media. The worst one is that Google went around stealing passwords. Lets first start by explaining what Google meant to be doing.

Street view ventricles drive around capturing images that you can see from Google Maps and Earth. While they are doing that they also do wireless scans to see what wireless networks are in that area, this data is input into a database that allows WiFi only devices like Apple’s iPod Touch a way to find their location based on the WiFi networks in range.

What Happened: The WiFi scanner captured not just information about the wireless networks but also some traffic from open (non-secured) wireless networks, which may have included passwords and other sensitive information.

The take away from this is not that Google did something bad, but should instead be: secure your home wireless network! Anyone could have captured this data, Google admitted to it and is purging the data. Others that might have collected the information may have had more nefarious intentions.

Saying that Google stole passwords is like saying you stole someone’s credit card information after they read their card number into a cell phone loudly while sitting in an airport terminal next to you. It is not your fault you heard the number it is the idiots fault that said it out loud in public.

Netflix website and Instant Streaming have been down all day.
This is one of the reasons I would prefer all my media NOT be stored in the “cloud”.
At least the DVDs that Netflix sent me yesterday still play.