At work we have 6 Cisco AP541N wireless access points, these are aimed at the small business and is a dual band access point. The problem we had though was that although the clients could see the wireless, they would never get an IP from the Server and thus not connect. I did some googling around and I struggled to find any reason for this behaviour and when I did find something that pointed back to the Cisco Site – I had to jump through many hoops to even get the that post or information. I did finally get this sorted and this post shall explain what I did and why it was broke.

The Background infomation

We have two floors in the building and on the ground on each corner we have an access point and upstairs we have 2 more, this was to try and give as much spread around the building as possible. Initially the person who had set these up had placed them all on channel 10. The issued that arose were all related to DHCP in that it would not give you an IP at all but I worked out that if you rebooted the access point, you got an IP and as long as you were connected, all was fine but as soon as you dropped, you were back to square one with no connection due to lack of an IP given out.

Information that I found

I read all sorts of things to try and as I am not a Cisco type person (understand what each of the boxes do – such as clustering) I was unsure what to try. My First task was to place them on all different channels, this made no difference as such but it meant it at least stopped the client suddenly searching for another point. I did find another post about DHCP running from Windows 2003 Server (which we are) not working with these boxes due to the way they both work. There was a suggested registry hack but I was not about to start experimenting on a live server. The most annoying part was how many hoops and how much information I had to provide just to create an account on the Cisco website and then look for the relevant information.

Fixing the Issue

Eventually after scouring the Cisco Forums, I found a simple fix that I should have tried – Updating the firmware! I downloaded the latest version (v2.0.0) and overwrote the Current Version (V1.8.0) and tested it over the space of a couple of days and sure enough – all clients got an IP without me having to apply registry fixes to the server or un-plug the access points. My Next task then is to find out any black spots in the wireless range and order more if needed. I did do walk about with my Laptop and work out that two more would be needed anyhow, at £239 each its a good job I am not spending my own money.

Synology have a low end product for sharing USB Hard Drives ( as well as printers) which is called USB Station 2. You can buy this product for £79.99 – I am not sure of USA Pricing at this time. This uses the same OS as the rest of the Synology Range (DSM 3.0) so you can use it as a download station, share printers across the network and even plug in a USB Wireless network card and make this thing wireless. You could spend the same money for a Print sharing device and it may look and act like the PogoPlug (except it is not shocking pink) but is in fact a full blown NAS – just with USB Speeds for the drives.

On the back – Connections

It is quite simple around the back, it features 2 USB Ports, a RJ45 1Gigabit connection and a power socket. If you need more devices, you can just add a USB Hub (Powered if you want to add 2.5″ External Drives) and away you go.

Different from a PogoPlug?

There is a few devices around at the moment that share USB Drive and one of these (which I owned briefly) was the PogoPlug – this shares out the drives two ways, one by means of a program you install which maps the drive letter P: for you and inside this is each USB Drive plugged in. The other way the PogoPlug works is you access the device online and this allows easy sharing of any media across the internet – the goal here is to provide a link via email and that person can get at the pictures, movies or whatever it is you shared out.

This device like any NAS shares using standard SMB (windows) sharing as well as the apple protocol and various others, this makes it super easy to connect to the device without the need to start installing programs. Let us not forget it can share your media as it has an iTunes Server, Media Server (DNLA/uPnP), and other methods of sharing the contents.

Sharing across the internet is were it gets a little tricky for the average non-tech person and this is not a fault of this device but more of the router which will have no idea how to pipe through port 5000 on it’s own. What I can say though is it allows complete control over who gets to do what and when.

Conclusion

Given the choice of this device, the Linksys USB Sharing and the Pogoplug, not only is this cheaper but has a LOT more features included – if it’s USB Device sharing your after for a low price – this is the one you need.

The Synology DS110+ is a One Bay NAS Box aimed at the small to medium business market. It comes supplied with no hard drive (you fit your own capacity), has an eSATA and 3 x USB ports to add additional storage to the device plus it is fitted with a gigabit Ethernet port for high speed data transfer.

Unboxing the device

All synology NAS devices are well packaged with a carrying handle for easy transportation once it arrives or you buy it from the store. Inside you will find the device itself, a power cable, a power supply unit, RJ45 Network cable, a packet of screws to hold the harddrive in, a packet of screws to secure the unit and finally a manual plus CD to install the device.

Putting the device togther

The unit come unscrewed and its a simple case of sliding the top across and you end of with two pieces, one is the top and the other has the electronics stored inside. It is obvious were the drive goes:

With the drive placed in the holder and pushed into place, its is secured and you can refit the top, again there is screws supplied in the box which fit on the back. Once everything is ready – you now need to plug this into the power and into a network point, either on a router or a switch – the faster the network, the better it will perform.

Setting up the device for first time use.

Before you start, it is best to head off to the synology web site and download the latest firmware, make sure you remember to select the correct device from the drop down as it defaults to the DS1010+. Once you have the file saved, extract this to a place you know and now insert the CD that came with the device. This is one product that you actually need the CD that comes in the box as this prepares the harddrive to hold not only the firmware but also formats the drive. Once the process has finished (it will take a while) you can now go into a web page and manage the device from there.

The Basics

You need to create some users so that you can access the shares later, it can tap into Windows Server Active directory if you are a company or simply match the users on the NAS box with your windows login. You need to prepare the drive, I found with this device though it had already set up the drive for me on the first part of the install. You then need to create some shares and give people (users) permission – you can have as many or a few as you require at this stage.

Technical Info

It has a 1.06Ghz CPU with a 64bit DDR533 Memory Bus which supports floating point.

It comes with 512MB Ram, 3 USB Ports, 1 eSATA Port and supports a max of 12 IP Webcams.

Performance

Windows Upload/Download⁽¹⁾ (5GB File)

Netbench⁽²⁾

Encrypted file Upload/Download⁽³⁾ (5GB File)

iSCSI Upload/Download⁽⁴⁾ (5GB File)

Web Server Responsiveness⁽⁵⁾ (1,000x requests)

Photo Converting⁽⁶⁾ (54MB of Photos)

Price of this device

I did some searching around and I found the price on average of £230, I failed to find as USA Prices. You may well ask why a 1 Bay NAS box with no drives costs more then the 2 Bay DS210J (my other device) and the answer is performance, number of IP webcams out of the box supported and a eSATA Port – all pointing to a business use rather than home. The graphs above bear this out and its clear why the price is more.

The different products from Synology

Synology provide a page to compare all the products and the best way to think about this is to ask yourself were is the product going to be used, how many people will access this at one time, how much storage do you need and how much you are will to spend on a NAS Box.

Why Synology?

There is a lot of companies out there who sell a NAS device and while I was looking, I found some lacked in features (as in they had none), some limited the size of the hard drive and some were plain slow. Remember not only are you getting a NAS device which can support the largest drives but they come packed with features such as:

• Photo Station – share your pictures and videos easily.
• Download Station – leave this device to get the files without having to leave computers switched on.
• Webstation – have your own unlimited website which supports PHP and MySQL
• Audio Station – share you music via a web page, itunes and any other music player.

Plus many many more – head HERE to see everything that is on offer…

If you own more than one computer, you may find that some items would just work better if they were held in one central location and each computer could access these files no matter which computer was on – such as your MP3 Collection for example. This can take the form of dedicating one computer as a server if you like and left on 24/7, you could build your own NAS box or buy one of the many off the shelf – all are good but have a downside normally. I plan on jotting down my thoughts to give each idea a good going over and seeing how it look at the end – join me on my journey into NAS.

Server based sharing

When I said server here, I mean a computer with FIle and Print Sharing enabled and various drives shared out, this can be Windows (any), Linux or Mac based OS. What happens here is we take a machine, put as many hard drives as you have around /  can afford and basically use the share option. One the other computers you browse the network and map a network drive which connects on start up and you have access to these files all the time. The good side of this is any computer can be used but for me at least, the bad side is that depending on how quiet the computer is – this can be a noisy solution to the problem and also eating up electricity 24/7 (250+ Watts). It does mean though you can plug in USB Drives (or even eSATA if the machine supports this) and add this to the shares without having to wipe the drives first.

Build your own NAS (Proper hardware)

The first item you are going to need is a nice case that is small, quiet and can hold more than one drive – we could get Fractal Design Array R2 Mini-ITX NAS Case

This bad boy holds SIX Harddrives, you need an Mini ITX Board and maybe even a sata raid card. The cost of this case is about £149 and looks nice and should be a lot quieter than a normal desktop case. next on our list would be of course the Mini ITX Board – Intel D410PT With Integrated Intel Atom Processor D410 and the Intel NM10 Express Chipset M-ITX Motherboard

This motherboard comes with the ATOM CPU which means it does not need a FAN – very quiet indeed then and the price look at that site is about £56. You need to buy some memory, this takes DDR2 and has two slots, for a NAS Box, you do not need a lot – so a single 512MB Stick will do you fine – so we can add another £10 to the price. The last thing you need of course would be some hard drives – after all what use is a NAS without such a thing right? At this point it comes down to cost vs. capacity.

One example here is 1.5TB sata drive this comes in at the bargain price of £57 or you can branch out and buy a 2TB Drive for about £88 but this has a lower spin speed of 5400RPM for example. What it comes down to is this – if you bought three 1.5TB Drives, you will be spending £171 and have 4.5TB of space (formatting means you loose some of that of course) compared to two 2TB Drives setting you back £176 but only giving you 4TB of space. The upshot is the end game, 6×1.5TB is 9TB and 6x2TB of course is 12TB – quite a difference one you fill the drive bays up over time.

Counting up the cost so far then – we would have spent close to £400 on a system that has a potential capacity of 12TB, looks nice and is quiet.

What software to use?

The Software I would suggest would be FeeNAS – this is very flexible and included various add-ons such as BitTorrent Server and an iTunes Server.

The Pre-built *Cheap* Solution

One example here is an Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box, this comes with NO Drives but has all the features such as BitTorrent Server, iTunes server and so forth as well as GigaBit Network port, USB for connecting extra drives and so forth.

The price of this is £99, add to this 2x2TB Drive (£80 each) and we have a 4TB NAS Box for a price of about £260 – this is a lot cheaper then the solution above but you are limited of course to only two drives.

The last option is to buy a single drive NAS Box – in this case a Western Digital My Book 2TB NAS Box. This device is listed as £150, cheaper once again and it has a USB Port so you can stick your existing USB Drive in there and share that out, no metion of iTunes server and such.

Thoughts

How much you spend on a NAS depends on many things such as how much capacity you need, how much redundancy it offers (Such as RAID 0, 1,5), other services it comes with such as Torrent and iTunes for example and finally how quite plus power consumption of the offending device. At the moment my main source of files would be Backdrops (I have a lot), my Tunes and maybe my movies. If I moved to a more central storage arrangements, I could give up the 1TB Drive and the 750GIG drive and replace that with something a lot smaller – remember if all your data is now central, why do you need such a big OS Drive?

My Pick of the day would be the Edimax box – lots of features, cheap and good reviews…

We got in some new servers at work, this been the Dell R900 4U Servers and what peaked my interest was the fact that this servers comes with 2x 6 core Xeon CPU’s – that’s 12 Cores of 2.4Ghz Power. It is easy sometimes to forget what is going on in the server / business world when sitting at home and looking at awe at the 8 Core (2 x 4) Mac Pro or the new 6 Core I7 CPU. This post is just to serve as a means to show you what you can get, this is for a box that might run 12 virtual servers and maybe not quite suited to playing the latest games (the noise would annoy you too much anyhow – its like a jet taking off).

CPU

First this server can take FOUR six-core Xeon processors – running at 2.6Ghz each. What we have here folks is 24 core box that can take out any Mac Pro that may come along – yes that is no doubting some serious number crunching ability.

Memory

It can take up to 128GIG ram – combine this with your 24 Cores and we agree it can run a whole bunch of Virtual machines while taking up only one space in the rack.

Hard Drives

Let us add to this 15K RPM SAS Drives in a RAID configuration – this will stop any bottle neck that might be caused by slow 7200 RPM Drives. The goal of this server is not to serve out 100TB of data. you have other servers for that (NAS etc) but to have pure speed, even so you can stack in some 600GIG Drives x 4 or so and your good to go.

Money

One of these does not come cheap – not by a long stretch – with the money for One fully loaded server you could buy a very good car indeed. The noise of this thing when it spins up can be heard a few streets away and no space for your top end graphics card – this is not a gaming rig.

My Aim here is not to write from scratch what you cannot already find by using Google but rather try and get it all in one place. Half Life 2 Death Match can be gained for Free – so first let us get that:

For ATI/AMD (Radeon) graphic card users: install – storefront

For Nvidia (GeForce) graphic card users: install – storefront

Now let us begin on our quest to get a server up and running on Linux, I am going to assume you have access to a Linux box to complete this part.

Getting the server files

mkdir srcds_l
cd srcds_l
wget http://www.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.bin
chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin
./hldsupdatetool.bin
./steam

When you execute both ./hldsupdatetool.bin & ./steam – this can take some time and look like nothing is happening – this is quite normal.

Now we need to grab the file for the correct game:

./steam -command update -game "hl2mp" -dir .

This will take a while, go grab yourself a drink.

Server.CFG

We need to create a server.cfg file at this point, so fire up your favouite editor, in this case I shall use Joe:

cd hl2mp/cfg

joe server.cfg

Now we need to populate the file with the following:

// Server Name
hostname "Half Life 2 Server"

// Rcon Cvars
rcon_password "password" //Set’s remote control password

// Server Password
sv_password "" // Password protects server

// Server Cvars
mp_disable_autokick 1 //Prevents a userid from being auto-kicked
sv_allow_color_correction 0 //Allow or disallow clients to use color correction on this server.
sv_allow_wait_command 0 //Allow or disallow the wait command on clients connected to this server.
sv_alltalk 0 //Players can hear all other players, no team restrictions
sv_alternateticks 0 //If set, server only simulates entities on even numbered ticks.
sv_cheats 0 //Allow cheats on server
sv_clearhinthistory 0 //Clear memory of server side hints displayed to the player.
sv_consistency 1 //Whether the server enforces file consistency for critical files
sv_contact "************" //Contact email for server sysop
sv_pausable 0 //Is the server pausable.

sv_steamgroup_exclusive 1 // Setting to 0 will not connect to the Match Making Service
sv_steamgroup  // Family Steam Group Number

// Lan or internet play, Server region cvars
sv_lan 0 //Server is a lan server ( no heartbeat, no authentication, no non-class C addresses )
sv_region 3 // Region Codes: 0 – US East coast, 1 – US West coast, 2 – South America, 3 – Europe, 4 – Asia, 5 – Australia, 6 – Middle East, 7 – Africa, 255 – world

// HTTP Redirect
sv_downloadurl "http://yourserver.com"
sv_filetransfercompression 0

// Server Logging
sv_log_onefile 0 //Log server information to only one file.
sv_logbans 0 //Log server bans in the server logs.
sv_logecho 0 //Echo log information to the console.
sv_logfile 1 //Log server information in the log file.
sv_logflush 0 //Flush the log file to disk on each write (slow).
sv_logsdir "logs" //Folder in the game directory where server logs will be stored.

// bandwidth rates/settings
sv_minrate 0
sv_maxrate 25000
sv_minupdaterate 10
sv_maxupdaterate 33
sv_mincmdrate 10
sv_maxcmdrate 33
sv_client_cmdrate_difference 1
sv_client_predict 1
sv_client_interpolate 1
sv_client_min_interp_ratio -1
sv_client_max_interp_ratio -1

sv_rcon_banpenalty 60
sv_rcon_maxfailures 10
sv_rcon_minfailures 5
sv_rcon_minfailuretime 45

sv_allow_lobby_connect_only 0

// Voice Comm
sv_voiceenable "1"
sv_voicecodec vaudio_speex

// Exec Configs
exec banned_user.cfg
mapchangecfgfile server.cfg
mapcyclefile mapcycle.txt

Map File Downloading

A Special mention for the Map file site – sv_downloadurl – This tells the server were to find the files to send to the user. On a dedicated host (web server) – create a folder called HL2DM for example and inside this we need maps, sound, models and so forth (depending on the requirements of the map). You then point the variable to http://www.yourserver.com/HL2DM for example.

Creating the MapCycle File

In the same directory, we need a file called mapcycle.txt, this will list the maps the server will use. You fill it out like this:

dm_intel_inside
dm_balcony_beta2
dm_gulch
dm_killbox_final
dm_killbox_kbh_2
dm_neon

Server run Command

Go back to the srcds_l folder and create a new file called server.sh (joe server.sh)

#!/bin/sh
echo "Starting HL2DM Server"
sleep 1
screen -A -m -d -S hl2dm ./srcds_run -console -game hl2dm +map dm_gulch +maxplayers 16 –autoupdate

Now chmod +x server.sh

Running the server

To run the server, simply type ./server.sh and it will say running the server and come back to the command line, this is now running in the background. To view the server screen, type screen –x hl2dm

To jump between screens you need to Press CTRL+A, N and CTRL+A,C to create a new one etc.