captaingeek.net

Custom IDN’s and TLD’s Using Punycode and BIND

admin — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:10:19 +0000

I’ve been playing around with some IDN’s and TLD’s and DNS etc…. i’ve realised you can create IDN (punycode) subdomains to any existing domain, in addition, i’ve created my own TLD, and setup a DNS server that works for this purpose. If anyone would like an IDN or a custom TLD, get in touch!

From anywhere in the WWW:
http://армсторнг.el.cx

Set your DNS to: 77.79.11.26 in order to take advantage of the new ком TLD. (note: this is just a bit of fun, and is not official).
http://армсторнг.ком

Google Translate BeatBox’s for everyone!

Michael — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:40:48 +0000

Who knew translating from German > German would be so fun!?

I recently reminded myself of a great “google hack” during a lecture today on International Computing. (hello to anyone from there who is reading this!) In honour of internationalisation Google seem to have taken it upon themselves to make the CPU voices beatbox for us all! Just follow this link and click on listen to see what i’m talking about!

Also anyone noticed how google defaults translations to masculine and the voices to feminine… *TBC

Zotac HD-ID11 to MacMini via OSX86

Michael — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:18:41 +0000

Following on from my popular Asus S101 mod, Look what I just got my hands on: ION2 Powered Dual Core Atom Net-top all I can say is… preliminary results look very good, with very nice performance. Expect a full review and tutorial soon. =)

NexentaStor ZFS Bonnie++ Benchmarks

Michael — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:04:24 +0000

Following on from my previous post regarding AFP and iSCSI benchmarks i’ve decided (after many requests) to post a few raw benchmarks of the system gathered by bonnie++, the environment is as follows:

CPU: Athlon 64 3700+
RAM: 2gb DDR400
Controllers: 2x SATA-II and 1x SATA-I
Hard Drives: 7x Samsung 2tb Spinpoint F3 5600 RPM
OS: NexentaStor 3
ZFS Config: Standard raidz1 with dedup=off and compression=off

So I gathered a few results… after some annoying results I found a bottleneck in my system on 1 of the drives that seemed to bring the benchmark result down greatly, however once this was worked out I acheived the following:

So overall a result that i’m quite impressed with, one that for most things out-performs the connectivity (1000BaseT) I use to retrieve VMDK’s etc from my SAN. Feel free to comment with any suggestions / requests.

NexentaStor AFP & iSCSI Xbench Benchmarks

Michael — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:58:27 +0000

UPDATED WITH BOTH iSCSI & AFP RESULTS

I’ve recently setup a ZFS raidz with 7 disks using NexentaStor, natively this doesn’t come with AFP, but I managed to get a package and get this all working (which i’ll demo in an upcoming tutorial), one thing i noticed however is that I could never find any benchmarks that tested the general use of a NAS… i.e. using CIFS or AFP over a network to another machine and testing performance. There are literally 0 AFP benchmarks for NexentaStor due to its non-native support. So here it is

Test Environment:

NAS: 7 SAMSUNG Spinspoint F3 2tb Hard drives connected via SATA & SATA-II, in a ZFS raidz running on NexentaStor 3
Network: 1000BaseT Gigabit LAN
Test Machine: MacMini with 1gb memory (disk tests are cached in memory for speed) running XBench to benchmark
…

So the results are decent (90MB/s) however on the box itself I can reach speeds of around 170MB/s (today after some tweaking i got it up to 310MB/s )… perhaps 90MB/s is reaching the limit for Gbit LAN, if I have time at any point i’ll try using link aggregation for a 2gbit test (which i hear works well over AFP)

Since the AFP test i’ve also setup iSCSI and achieved the following results with the same hardware setup and using COMSTAR iSCSI built into ZFS:

Samsung F4 EcoGreen F4EG Firmware Bug Patch

Michael — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:17:16 +0000

Many people already know that the Samsung green drives have a bug in the firmware that may cause data loss, Samsung have created a patch that you need to create a bootable floppy disk along and drag in their file, if like me you don’t have a floppy disk drive & don’t want to mess around with USB booting and creation of a drive or just cannot boot from USB then you’ll need another solution, i’ve put together a quick bootable CDROM ISO that contains freedos and the patch, simply boot and type F4EG and hit enter, the patch will automatically detect your drives and update them. I hope this helps people out as it did me. As quoted from the original site:

“If identify commmand is issued from host during NCQ write command in the condition of PC ,
write condition is unstable.
So It can make the loss of written data.”
(Model : F4EG HD204UI, HD204UI/Z4, HD204UI/UZ4, HD155UI, HD155UI/Z4, HD155UI/UZ4)

Samsung Article regarding firmware and affected drives

CaptainGeek Bootable ISO: DOWNLOAD

Bye Bye FreeNAS hello NexentaStor

Michael — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:43:43 +0000

Well, i’ve used FreeNAS for around 2 years+ now, and all has been good, however, in that time demand for large quantities of storage has now been joined by demand for high speed storage; Once I had replaced all of my drives with 2tb 7200rpm drives I realised that FreeNAS wasn’t giving me the performance on each drive that i’d like.

Welcome NexentaStor… a storage appliance natively supporting ZFS as its based on OpenSolaris! NexentaStor offers many of the same features of FreeNAS, however at a greater level of performance. This comes at a cost though, the free Community edition is limited to a some what large 18tb, whereas the paid version will cost you.

Also NexentaStor is a pure storage appliance, although it supports CIFS/iSCSI/NFS and the likes, it does not have all the bells and whistles of FreeNAS… but for me, there is no use having all these features if I can’t have the speed.

I’m installing NexentaStor now as we speak, after which I’ll be posting a review / tutorial on NexentaStor after i’ve got it up and running and configured to my liking I hope you enjoy it!

Amazon Support Store

Michael — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:49:53 +0000

Hi everyone! I keep getting lots of emails from people asking where they can buy xyz to complete the tutorials and try out some of the things listed on CaptainGeek, well after I kept emailing people the same links i had a thought, why not setup an amazon affiliate store. Basically, i’ve setup a small amazon site with a small selection of products (only those used for the tutorials on this site + related ones), purchases and payments are handled by amazon, however a small percentage of the sale goes to helping fund the server this website is hosted on AT NO EXTRA COST TO YOU so its a win win situation, please use the links whenever you can.

Our Amazon Store

iPad Ripper 0.1 Convert Anything to H264 for FREE

Michael — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:33:46 +0000

Well, i know i’ve been slacking lately on this blog, but heres a lil treat, I recently got an iPad and iPhone and bla bla, and soon got very tired of converting all of my mkv and avi content over to the iPad, so I made a little tool to simplify the process, it supports as input formats pretty much everything that VLC does, including: xvid / flv / mkv / mpg etc, and outputs all files into .mp4 H264

Its free to use and released under a beer-ware license… i.e. if you like it, donate me some £ for some beer there is a giant button in the app, you can’t miss it =). Here it is anyway: iPad Ripper

Requires: Intel Based Apple Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.

Convert anything to iPad for Free

Soon it will begin again…

Michael — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:21:22 +0000

My one year of absence is almost up… Soon I’ll be back with more geek-fu than you could ever imagine! Stay tuned…

Comment on what you’d Like to see most