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Here is a copy/paste of a post I did on a forum. It describes in very light detail how to add iSCSI based storage to a Mac. With the new Macbook lacking firewire, this might actually become a more popular method.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with a few different bits of technology, one of them being iSCSI. iSCSI is a relatively cheap and efficient method of adding storage to a computer that uses your existing network infrastructure. If you have a gigabit network and a Linux server (I haven’t tested other solutions) you can add as much storage to your Mac as you can fit in your Linux system.

You might be thinking, “I have a 2TB USB/FW drive why would I want iSCSI?” USB and FireWire drives are a fine thing but lets look at some of their disadvantages.

* USB2 is actually slower than many FW400 devices
* If you have a mac with just one FW port and your external drive doesn’t include a FW port, you can’t attach anything else to that FW port AND use your drive
* External drives add noise
* External drives must be located close to the computer, not ideal in a HTPC setup

Here a really quick overview of how it is done, I can certainly provide more detailed information however. Here is a list of what you need to get the job done.

1. Linux server with gigabit ethernet
2. A hard drive or RAID set that you want to share to your Mac
3. gigabit switch
4. Mac with gigabit, the more recent the better
5. GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator for Mac
6. iSCSI Enterprise Target for Linux

Setup your Linux system and install IET. If you’re using Ubuntu, IET might be available in apt. I use Fedora so I compiled IET from source. Edit the /etc/ietd.conf file to point to your disk or RAID set (or even a file that was made using dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1024 count=1 seek=n where n is the size of file you want in bytes). Start the ietd service, /etc/init.d/iscsi-target under Fedora.

Install the GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator on your Mac. Enter System Preferences and click the new GlobalSAN button. Add your Linux server’s IP address to the Discovery screen. Click on the target tab and your disk should be shown, click it and logon to it without a username or password UNLESS you configured one in IET. Be sure to check the persistent tab if you want this drive to appear each time you boot your Mac.

Open Disk Utility and format the iSCSI disk. Your Mac will format the new drive and it’ll soon appear on your desktop. You can use it like any other disk you’ve ever used. You can partition it, copy/delete files, whatever. As far as the Mac is concerned it is a normal hard drive.

In my setup I have an Intel Mac mini, 1.83Ghz C2D and a Linux server built in late January, 2.2Ghz C2D. The disk being shared to my mini is a single 120GB PATA drive. I am able to copy files to the drive with a top speed of 44MB/s. Reading is actually slow but I attribute that to a limitation with the mini’s internal drive. I haven’t been able to test using OpenSolaris as the iSCSI target though OpenSolaris would be a fantastic choice as a storage server.

To be fair, there are some negatives to this setup. The biggest one being you can’t have multiple Macs using the same disk at the same time. You can unmount the disk on one mac and mount it with another one, but having two macs connected at the same time risks your data.

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Ugg, where to start. Apple released yesterday an entirely new Macbook and Macbook Pro. The primary chassis of the laptops, the upper part that holds the keyboard, palm rests and touch pad, are now made from a solid piece of aluminum. This is great because it improves structural rigidity and the laptop can be made from fewer parts. The Macbook also gets to take advantage of some new nvidia chipset/video card which improves performance greatly over the old intel option.

Now for the bad part. There is no eff’n firewire port. None, just two USB ports. WTF? Why would Apple ditch a port they created on a consumer level laptop that costs $1300? “Hey, look at this laptop, it comes with iMovie so you can edit all those family vacation movies that you CAN’T GET OFF OF YOUR CAMCORDER.” Want to edit video with a firewire camcorder, pony up $2000 and get a Pro model! Got firewire external drives or peripherals…get a Pro model!

I’ve always recognized and understood why some people are so anti-Apple. They hate that lack of choice in hardware, among other things, but it has never bothered me. Apple hardware has always been pretty good and looked ok. Looks are subjective but I’ve always found Apple’s products agreeable. But when a company decides to strong arm you into buying their more expensive product by cutting out a key part…it’s ridiculous.

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I’ve been battling with a video tearing issue on my Linux HTPC for the past few weeks. This morning I finally found an answer that works.

Yeah, its a problem with the intel driver… a workaround for mplayer is:

Run xvinfo to find the overlay port, mine looks like this:

Code:

Adaptor #1: “Intel(R) Video Overlay”
number of ports: 1
port base: 79

Then:
Code:

mplayer -vo xv:port=[portnumber goes here]

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Sometimes it just seems that everything is out to get a guy, nothing goes right. This seems to be the case today when it comes to performing an upgrade on my Fedora Linux based file, web, email, XBMC and whatever else server. After burning three copies of the install media none of them work, despite correct SHA1 verification and burning with different drives. What’s a geek to do?

Do a network install!

I downloaded the full DVD hoping to do a local install from it so I could avoid the long downtime of doing an over the internet based network install. The problem however is that I either have two bad DVD burn drives or there is something goofy with the image I downloaded. Everything about the DVD iso checks out, the SHA1 is fine and I can loop back mount it without issue. Rather than give up I decided to do a network install by mounting the iso on my Mac mini and sharing the contents via web sharing. As it turns out, this is very easy to do.

This little mini howto assumes you have already downloaded the DVD install media for Fedora. If you haven’t, I suggest you do that first.

Enter System Preferences and choose sharing. Click on Web Sharing to enable your Mac’s web server. Be sure to note the IP address. Next, double click on the Fedora DVD install iso. OS X will mount it and make it available to you. Next, start terminal and type ‘cd /Library/WebServer/Documents’ without quotes and press enter. Type ‘ln -s /Volumes/Fed* fedora’ (*type Fed and then press tab to autocomplete) and press enter. On my system the complete command looks like ‘ln -s /Volumes/Fedora\ 9\ i386\ DV/ fedora’

Open finder and browse into your mounted DVD media. Look for a folder called images and copy out the boot.iso file. Burn this file to CD using OS X’s Disk Utility. Next, take that disk to your Linux machine and boot from it. Choose install or upgrade and then when asked where the install media is located choose URL. Enter http:///fedora where is the IP address from your Mac. That’s it, the install will then continue as if you were using a local CD/DVD.

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I was reading slashdot the other day and someone had asked about how to provide email for their children while keeping them safe. One of the answers mentioned that they didn’t really have a solution for them regarding email but if they needed a way to help protect them while browsing the web they should look into OpenDNS. Turns out OpenDNS now offers a type of web filtering that you can control and best of all it is free. I have a new button on the side of my site that will take you to their site if you’re interested in such a service.

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After a week with the iPod touch here is what I have learned. Keep in mind I have a first gen model with the 2.1 upgrade. This stuff is probably documented somewhere but I generraly skip the dogs.

While using mail, if you swipe left on a message in the message list you are given the option to delete it.

While in any app you can double tap the home button to get a volume control and ability to pause/play or skip tracks.

The keyboard will auto correct a lot of things yet it can’t spell check.

I think that is it for now. If there is something you know about that I didn’t list here leave iron the comments area.

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I thought I’d take a break from my usual topics and hit on something I haven’t talked about for awhile, gaming.

If you played Nintendo growing up and you are my age you probably played at least one Mega Man game. Mega Man 2 is the I played a lot of growing up and while it was really hard I still had a good time.

In today’s gaming world that kind of difficulty just wouldn’t fly. Games are much longer afairs today and require more time to complete. If a game like Metroid Prime was as brutally difficult there is no way I’d ever finish it. I’d be so frustrated that I had just lost an hour’s worth of play time I’d soon quit playing.

So when I heard Capcom was going to be creating a new Mega Man AND was going to be doing it the same 8 bit style Mega Man 2 was done in I was pretty excited. When I downloaded the game off of the Wii shop channel and started it up I couldn’t believe how well Capcom captured the feel of the original games. The sound effects, music and animations were all just right.

Then I realized that after no less than six attempts I hadn’t even made it past the first checkpoint in the Concrete Man stage. After twenty minutes I had just made it to the end, to Concrete Man himself, only to die immediately.

But I loved every minute of it. I haven’t had as much time as I would like playing the game but the $10 price is well worth it. If you liked any of the original 8 bit versions of the game you owe it to yourself to play this game.

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Although I’ve had the hardware and software for a little while the setup had never been put to too much of test until tonight. Tonight was the start of the new season of Heroes but it also overlapped with an episode of Sarah Conner Chronicles. I am quite pleased to report that EyeTV handled the whole process very well. It managed to record both shows and deal the overlapping shows (it is configured to record 2 minutes before and after the show) by swapping which tuner it was recording from.

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Everyone once in a while my hot corners will stop working. After a bit of trial and error I found that it is the Dock process that controls hot corners. Opening terminal and typing killall Dock will get your hot corners working again.