August 8, 2009: The Living Room is Wired

I accidentally slept in way too late this morning.  There is a ton of work to be done and I had only meant to sleep for a little while.  When I woke up even Oreo had decided that it was time to have gotten up and have left the bedroom to go down to the living room seeking out his morning sun spot on the brown chair by the windows.

I found out last night that my boss is traveling to Los Angeles today.  So I am covering a little more than I had been planning on this morning.  He is working from there so I am only covering extra while he is traveling, but it is a very busy morning.

I did everything that I could this morning to streamline the system upgrade process.  It is a rather manual process with a lot of steps, a lot of checks and a lot that can go wrong coupled with several reboots which, of course, cause the process to take forever as you wait for the machines to cycle through over and over again.

Dominica spent the morning cleaning after Liesl went down for a nap around a quarter after ten.  She got a ton of cleaning done in the upstairs.  The basement really cannot be helped much, though.

Susan arrived at half past noon.  She had been in the complex for a while but had a really hard time finding our house as the street is mismarked and the three people in the complex to whom she spoke had never heard of our road.  So she just drove around for a while looking for us.

We visited for a little while and she got to meet Liesl who was just waking up from a nice, long nap.  Then the five of us drove out to Grandma’s on Crompond for lunch.  I am still getting the bagel and lox platter almost every time that we go there.  I love it.  And, of course, we all got pie for dessert.  You are not allowed to eat at Grandma’s without getting pie.

Susan left Peekskill shortly after we returned from lunch.  Surprisingly it was around four thirty already by that point.  My how the day flew by!

I watched Liesl and Oreo while dad and Dominica went out to Home Depot to do shopping for the stuff that we need to do the painting tomorrow.  They picked up paint and paint supplies and a new, high-velocity fan to use in the living room.  Our living room gets almost no airflow and it gets very warm in there even when the house is below seventy degrees.  It is a real problem that the few areas of the house that we constantly use – the master bedroom and the living room – are always very, very warm and the parts that we seldom use – bathrooms, the kitchen, etc. – are really cold.  So the air conditioning works really hard just to keep the house livable even when it should not have to do so at all.

This evening we worked on running the CAT6 cabling from the wiring closet, which is located under our stairs, into the living room so that we can hook up our entertainment systems, the Sony PS3 and XBOX 360, directly to Gigabit Ethernet rather than having the PS3 connect over very slow 802.11b wireless and the XBOX be left with no connection at all as it is wired only.  Our original plan was to run this cable through the basement and drill through the floor to run it upstairs but after some research that dad did on the position of the walls we decided that it was far simpler and better, and required no modifications, to snake it directly from the cabling closet through existing holes in the floor and come out at the top of the stairs.  Doing it this way also cuts about eighteen feet of cable length off of the run making it more reliable and less costly as CAT6 cable is definitely not cheap.

Our original plan, back in April, was to run four or five long CAT6 runs up to the living room, but after much thought and discussion we realized how much better it would be to move the Apple AirPort Extreme wireless access point from the basement to the living room giving us better WiFi on the upper levels and out on the deck as well as providing three GigE ports in the living room directly next to the PS3 and XBOX 360.  It gives us one or two fewer physical connections that we would have had with the original plan but it saves money and a lot of effort and provides us with greatly improved wireless coverage.  It also moves more equipment out of the wiring closet which has no ventilation.  Right now the closet door is left open to allow it to cool but that is far from ideal.  Once the wireless is out, which generates more than its fair share of heat, the next big item to leave is the Netgear SC101 SAN device that we plan to have ready for dad to take with him this weekend.  That will leave nothing but the cable modem (bridge), firewall and switch in the wiring closet along with the associated battery unit – none of which generate very much heat at all.  So once we are down to just those we should be able to close the door there making the whole situation far less intrusive.

Running the cable proved to be really easy.  The hard part, that I was really dreading, was finishing the cable by putting the RJ45 ends onto it as we are building our own cables so that we can control the length and run them through the walls.  Dominica has always been good at building cables and got right to work on this.  She managed to get the cable right the first time.  We plugged it in and it just worked!  Awesome.

We moved the Apple AirPort Extreme up to the living room and plugged it in.  We got a GigE connection straight away.  Now the real tests – to see what will happen when we plug in the PS3 and the XBOX 360.

First we tried the PS3.  It connected and got its GigE connection via the wired interface.  We connected to MediaTomb and tried watching some movies.  It was awesome.  Our UPnP connected movies started instantly – none of the wait time that we had when using the wireless.  No buffering needed. Even really high bitrate media started instantly and played perfectly.  Movies looked awesome.  The movie list loaded instantly.  This is going to be awesome.  We will be watching everything this way for sure from now on.  People are going to love this.

We tried watching some PlayOn media from NetFlix and it did appear to work just slightly better than before but still has the same problems that it always did.  We are pretty sure that those problems are actually with the PS3 itself and not with PlayOn or NetFlix but it has been hard to tell.

After verifying that the PS3 would work wonderfully with the new setup we switched to the XBOX 360.  I ran the system updates as the box has not been turned on in quite some time.  We tested the PlayOn connection, which worked instantly, and discovered that almost all of the problems that we have been having with watching things on the PS3 were the PS3 and not the fault of PlayOn or NetFlix.  Suddenly everything just works!  We are very excited.  The unfortunate thing is that our MediaTomb server does not support the proprietary format of the XBOX 360 for streaming so we cannot use it for that yet.  So the PS3 will continue to handle our “in house” media and the XBOX 360 will handle the PlayOn stuff from NetFlix, Hulu, CBS and Amazon VOD.

We watched several episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place because Dominica and I have had to have been skipping episodes all over the place when they fail to play on the PS3.  Dad went to bed around ten.  Dominica stayed up until just before midnight.  I stayed up later and watched the first episode of Sonny with a Chance which Dominica has seen along with most of the first season watching it without me.  Now that it works on the 360 I can watch it comfortably on the big screen.

I took the time to download the latest expansion pack to Fable II while I was up and using the 360.  Now that is ready for me to play the moment that I have some spare time.  It is a short expansion, I am told.  I am still very excited to get back into the world of Fable II – that is still one of my favourite games ever.

I did some hunting around and discovered that The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition was not available for download to the XBOX 360.  Secret is the original title in the Monkey Island series that released from Lucas Arts in 1990.  It is almost twenty years old this year and Lucas Arts just made a complete remake of the game as a downloadable title for the 360.  What is really cool is that they completely updated the game including new music and voice acting using the same cast that they used for the fourth title in the series, Escape from Monkey Island, which we have for Windows as well as for the PlayStation 2.  Included with the remake is a faithful port of the original as well and by hitting the select button you can switch back and forth between the original and the remake. Very cool idea indeed.  So I downloaded Secret and played a few minutes of it to check it out.  I am quite excited to get to go back and play the original now.  It has been a very long time since I have seen it.

Earlier today while I had some time I also downloaded some titles for the Wii.  There was a big Wii update since the last time that we had it turned on and now you can run games directly from the SD card which is a big improvement and a rather obvious one that I cannot believe that they did not figure out before.  Nintendo has released The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Wii retro console which was a really good idea, I think.  I never played the original on the N64 even though I had bought it when it released and was interested in playing it now so was glad to see if on the Wii.  Many serious players claim that Majora’s Mask is the best title, although least appreciated, in the Zelda series so I need to try it out.

I also downloaded Tales of Monkey Island: Episode One which just released for the Wii.  Tales is the fifth installment in the Monkey Island series and the first to release in a very, very long time.  Very exciting indeed.  Tales is also the first completely three dimensional title in the series.  The others were pre-rendered two dimensional with a three dimensional perspective to make it feel 3D.  Tales is an original for the WiiWare platform.  I hope to get to play it very soon.  Dominica will be really excited about this one as well.

Having the living room hard wired to the basement is really going to change the way that we use our house.  This is a major breakthrough for us.  It will affect our television viewing, video game playing, music listening, etc.  This is a change that will impact our lives on a daily basis.  Now what we can see that we want is to get wires run to the upstairs bedrooms.  That, of course, will not be nearly as easy as wiring the living room.  I have no idea how we will manage to pull that off if we even can.  It would be great to get a wire up to our bedroom so that, eventually, we could have a television up there with a PS3 or something to watch the UPnP content on the network.  That would make the media server that much more valuable.

August 7, 2009: Liesl’s Big Fall

I awake this morning to the distant sound of a giant gasp and Dominica’s “oh my gosh” screams that had that ring of a mother’s panic.  I was out of bed and downstairs in a wink – no glasses on even.  When I got down Dominica had just reached the top of the basement stairs carrying a very unhappy Liesl.

Liesl had crawled to the top of the basement stairs and, we are assuming, crawled partway down them and then had fallen into the basement.  The stairs are carpeted and she didn’t make enough noise as she fell for Dominica to have heard her from the kitchen so we are assuming that she did not fall the entire way, but we have no way of really knowing either way.  It is a long stairway, fourteen steps, to have fallen down.  Luckily they are soft.

Liesl was very upset and cried for a while had no visible bumps or bruises.  It seems as though she just really scared herself.  Not nearly as much as she scared her parents, though!

We called the doctor’s office and they said that it sounded like everything was fine.  We just need to keep an eye on Liesl today and make sure that no signs of trauma appear.  They did not feel that there was any cause for concern or any need for us to bring her in unless some symptoms arose during the day.

So that got our morning off to quite the start.  Dad emailed to say that he was on the road around a quarter till nine this morning.  He was heading down to Dansville to get breakfast at the McDonald’s there.  If he makes good time that should put him in Peekskill around two this afternoon.

Dominica spent the day cleaning around the house.  We have both dad and Susan visiting this weekend so we really want it to be clean.  Although dad is going to be painting the living room and dining room this weekend so it only makes so much sense to do so much cleaning.  It is going to be a real mess all weekend.

Dad arrived in Peekskill at just before three thirty.  We visited for about half an hour but I really do not have any spare time on a Friday, especially a busy Friday like today with a large number of system upgrades to be done.

Dad was able to bring one of his largest car loads ever of stuff for our house.  This time a bit of furniture made the trip in addition to the boxes and bins.  Two more desks for the basement, one for Dominica and one for me.  That is going to really change the look of the basement office area for sure.  It has been so big and empty thus far.  Now I am going to have some serious desktop space to work on keeping clean – which will never happen.  It is going to be piled high with DVDs and books in no time.

Dad brought enough books with him that we now have nowhere to put them.  We have been putting off buying our next several bookshelves for a while and we really cannot avoid it any longer.  We are going to have to make a run to Ikea sooner than later to get more book storage space.

The painting crew came just after five to work on the house again.  The neighbour’s cat, Belle, was hanging out on our deck as usual when they arrived and we figured that since they were going to be staining the deck that it might be best if the cat was not out there because she would get in the stain and probably make herself sick and track the strain into the neighbour’s house.  She has been busy on our deck all day stalking Oreo.  She scared him good today and sent him running through the house to find me to take him out for a walk to get him away from her.  She even made Dominica jump with that particular attack.

So Dominica walked over to tell the neighbours that they should probably lock the cat up so that she doesn’t get into the stain.  We tried to convince the cat to go back home on her own but that didn’t work.  She let me pick her up without a problem so we discussed tossing her over but that seemed dangerous and scary (for the cat.)  She was all friendly while I held her.  We decided that I could just carry her through the house and around the front.  That seemed simple.  So into the house we went.

We made it halfway out of the front door when the cat completely panicked and tore the crap out of my arm as she dug her way up my left arm and chest over my shoulder and escaped into the house.  Poor Oreo went into a panic.  He is terrified of cats under the best of conditions and this was his tormentor loose in his own house!

Dad managed to somehow convince Belle to run out the back door where she attempted to hide in a corner until I went back out there.  Once I was out she decided that I was dangerous and she lept back to her own deck and was let in.  She had more of an adventure than she had been planning to have this evening.

The painting and staining crew arrived just after five and worked until eight this evening.  They did a lot of work.  They painted all of the trim around our house and stained the deck.  It looks pretty good today.  Hard to really tell until everything has dried but it will definitely look much, much better than it did up until today.  The deck was definitely not looking its best.  The previous owners of this house really let just everything go so that we would have to deal with all of it.

We ordered in dinner from Forno’s.  We didn’t feel like doing anything hard for dinner and I couldn’t really go out anywhere will all of the work that I need to be doing for the office tonight.

While eating dinner we watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua which Dominica had gotten from Netflix on BluRay.  Not exactly one of my top choices for movies to watch but it was cute I guess.  Definitely for kids without much to entertain adults.  Pretty cheesy and a little sad as they talk about the dog fights in Mexico city and shows dogs being kidnapped to be killed there.

We paid close attention to Liesl all day and she has had no signs of anything being wrong after her fall down the basement stairs.  She does have one small bruise under her left eye but that might be nothing more than rug burn.

After that we watched two episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place with dad as he was curious as to what this new show was that we have been watching.  Funny enough the show started and recognized Selena Gomez as the star of Another Cinderella Story.  So he is more up to date on the tween pop star scene than you would think.  Now if we just catch him listening to Demi Lovato music…

I worked from the laptop until midnight.  There is a ton of work to do today and tomorrow and Susan is coming around noon to go to brunch with us and to meet Liesl so I am trying my best to get everything done by then.  It is going to be a busy morning tomorrow.

August 6, 2009: Liesl’s First Word

Today was a very important day in the life of Liesl.  Today was her first word.  While Dominica was feeding Liesl some ice cream this afternoon Liesl said “more” to get Dominica to give her some more ice cream!  Very exciting.

Today was another day without rain in the Hudson Valley as well as another really slow day for me at the office.

I managed to figure out why my MediaTomb installation is crashing once per day.  I am not sure of a long term fix yet but now that I have identified the issue it should not be that hard to come up with something that works well.

I got a chance to do a lot of work on the VoIP system today.  Last night I got it working to the point that I was able to leave a voicemail message in a single mailbox which is a major breakthrough but only a start in the big scheme of things.  Today I managed to get the ability to have a “receptionist” answer the phone and allow people to select the extension that they wish to reach.

We made plans for Susan to come visit on Saturday.  We have not seen her since living in Newark which was almost a year ago.  This will, obviously, be her first time meeting Liesl!

After work this evening we ran out to Stop and Shop to do some quick grocery shopping.  It was a fast trip and probably took no more than an hour.  Dominica and I were both in the mood for some cake and we wanted to have some supplies for while dad is here this weekend so we thought that we would take the opportunity to stock up.

While we were out shopping we discovered a DVD of three horrible Elvis movies for cheap so we picked that up so that we would have something to watch as Netflix was not working well tonight.  We tried hard to watch a little Wizards of Waverly Place but the amount of time and effort that it takes to get to watch a single episode makes it a bit exhausting.

We watched Harum Scarum with Elvis Presley.  This is one seriously bad movie. The plot makes no sense, the acting is bad and the music is horrific.  Surprisingly bad even for an Elvis movie.

I found a national news story from Yahoo tonight about the massive increase in drunk female drivers in the US that talked about the horrible crash that we just recently had here in Westchester this past week – the worst crash in Westchester in seventy-five years.  It is sad that I looked us this same information in the local newspaper online only to find that the online article was gibberish – not once mentioning who had been in the crash, if anyone had died, where the crash was or anything of consequence.  It was just a jumble of disconnected sentences like it was written by a gaggle of schoolchildren.  I had gathered enough from the front page blurb that there had been a mother and a crash but the article itself was such a mess that I could not determine at all what it was about.  Sad that this was the extent of what our local paper calls “journalism.”

August 5, 2009: Very Slow Day

It is a super slow day today in the Hudson Valley.  The slowest work day that I can remember, in fact.  It was great.

Amazon delivered some cool stuff today.  We got the BluRay of Another Cinderella Story with Selena Gomez.  I also got the third book in the series on digital photography techniques called “The Digital Photography Book, Volume 3” by Scott Kelby.  I finished reading the first volume over the weekend and have almost finished the second volume.  I will probably finish it today or tomorrow.  And I received my Nikon NL-L3 wireless remote control for my D50 camera.  It is just like a traditional remote trigger except it is wireless causing even less camera shake and is far more convenient.  It is so cheap that I am not sure why everyone doesn’t have one.  I’ve been wanting this for a while and have no idea why I have held off on getting it.

We were going to have painting of the house and staining of the deck done today but there was some rain so the painting crew rescheduled for Friday instead.

I decided to leave work “early” today (read: normal time for normal people) and hang out with Dominica and Liesl.  We ordered a pizza and a pasta bread bowl from Domino’s for a change of pace and popped in our new Selena Gomez movie.

Another Cinderella Story was pretty decent.  Over the top, of course, like the first one but Selena is always entertaining.  After the movie we stuck with Selena in The Wizards of Waverly Place.  Our NetFlix/PlayOn/PS3 combination has a horrible time playing those shows so we spend more time trying to get an episode to play than we do actually watching the episode.

We managed to get two episodes in before Netflix just stopped playing.  So we watched Road to Morocco from our new MediaTomb server.  I love these old Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies.  Especially these earlier ones.  The old monochrome movies really compress well with the h.264 when I put them onto the media server.

Oreo spent the evening snuggling with me on the recliner.  This is his new thing.  Every evening he climbs up here and snuggles as close as he can and pretty much stays for the entire evening.

After the movie was over I was not all that sleepy so I decided to go down to the basement and get some work done.  I ended up working until almost three in the morning but was very productive with my time.  I got a lot of work done and am glad that I stayed up.

Tomorrow we have cleaning and prep to do as dad is coming on Friday to visit us.

Installing MediaTomb on OpenFiler

If you have researched both FreeNAS and OpenFiler then you will be aware that a key difference between the two is the inclusion of a UPNP media server in FreeNAS.  This is lacking in OpenFiler and is a major piece of functionality that I with to have in my own installation.  I specifically would like a UPNP / DLNA server that will work easily with a number of devices such as the Sony PlayStation 3 and the XBOX 360.  After much work I decided that the best product would be MediaTomb to add this functionality to OpenFiler.

I originally started this article with the intent of installing ps3mediaserver onto my OpenFiler installation but, due to a ridiculous lack of support for dependencies, ps3mediaserver is not a reasonable possibility for this platform.  As it turns out, though, MediaTomb is actually a better, lower resource usage, simpler option that does exactly what I want and does not require careful tuning to force to behave logically.

Installing MediaTomb onto a working OpenFiler system is actually extremely easy as MediaTomb is packaged with all dependencies included in the option binary package for Linux 32bit.  Simply download the i386 static binarys from the MediaTomb Static Binaries Download page.

You can then just unpack the download tarball to the /opt directory using “tar -xzvf” and you have a working system already!  It is actually that simple.  One of the great things about MediaTomb is that it does not attempt to transcode your media files lowering the quality and eating CPU cycles.  It is simply a UPNP / DLNA server.  If you are like me all of your media has been carefully transcoded ahead of time for maximum quality versus storage.  I certainly don’t want low quality, real-time transcoding degrading my video experience.  Many people do but if you are running a full storage server like OpenFiler you probably do not want it busy transcoding media files every time that they are served out.

You can start MediaTomb from the command line simply using the command:

nohup /opt/mediatomb/mediatomb.sh &

And away you go.  In my case I renamed the MediaTomb directory to /opt/mediatomb to make it easier to use.  When you fire it up you will get an on-screen message telling you where the web management interface to the software will be.  You can simply go to the web page to add your media directories to MediaTomb so that it can scan them and make them available via UPNP.

Caveat: I have noticed that MediaTomb tends to crash for me about once every twenty-four hours.  Not a major issue, restarting is quick and easy.  I am still investigating this and hope to have an answer soon but it is not a major issue.

Why not ps3mediaserver?

In order to make ps3mediaserver work you need to manual fulfill a large number of dependencies.  Ps3mediaserver comes as a tarball, not as a system package like RPM, DEB, Conary, etc. and so all dependencies are yours to discover and fulfill.  On Red Hat, Ubuntu or Suse systems these dependencies are often fulfilled by default and can be ignored.  On rPath, however, which is a dedicated appliance, server OS not only are they not filled by default but the necessary packages are not even available for the platform!

You will need to install Java for starters.  This will allow ps3mediaserver to run and serve out audio files.  If this is all you want then you can go down this route.  But once you start ps3mediaserver you will discover that it has no normal administrative interface and is designed to only work with an X GUI.  Of course, no one has X installed by default on rPath Linux – this is a server not a desktop.  This is an extremely silly requirement for ps3mediaserver and really shows that they do not intend this to be used in a serious installation like what we are doing here.  This is a desktop solution like iTunes.  Fine for most people but we are on a different scale here.

So to configure your new ps3mediaserver you will need to install Xterm and get remote X to your server.  If you are working from Windows then you will need an X server like Mocha to handle this.  You can install all of the necessary packages for this using “conary update xterm” but this is just the beginning of your problems.

You can set ps3mediaserver to not transcode but on Linux, without the transcoding libraries installed, it won’t work.  It will attempt to transcode regardless of the settings.  You can verify this by checking the media type from your PS3 or other video player.  For me my pristine, low bandwidth h.264 MP4 files were being displayed as being MPEG2.  This does not happen with ps3mediaserver on Windows with the statically compiled binaries.  Rather inconsiderate for the ps3mediaserver project to compile such for other platforms but to cripple the Linux version without so much as a list of dependencies that we need to fulfill.

You will need ffmpeg and mencode for starters.  Good luck.  Neither are available for the rPath platform and they do not compile using the included compilation environment.  You will, of course, need to install an entire compilation environment just to get started with these.  More software not exactly appropriate on a server.  You can remove it once you are done but then how do you update your system?

The bottom line is that you should avoid ps3mediaserver on the rPath platform and stick with MediaTomb.  The ps3mediaserver project just is not ready for prime time from what I have seen.  They are okay on carefully controlled environments but they are not yet prepared to really run on a “production” media server.  They have some great potential to be sure.  I’ve run their project on Windows and it is very nice.  Over the top complicated but nice.  However getting it to run for the highest possible quality, like MediaTomb does as its only real feature, requires a lot of work and a lot of extra libraries and bloat for a relatively simple system.