Hey guys,

I was a bit surprised on Friday morning to find the little Snow Leopard package in my (snail) mailbox. Of course, I’ve installed it directly on my MacBook. Here are two screenshots from the Upgrade (yeah, I set up soo much machines in the last times, that I really don’t want to configure the system AGAIN, so I went through the Upgrade process with kinda good results ).

Installation under OS X 10.5.8

After round about 1h, the MacBook was restarted twice and Snow Leopard was ready to go. The upgrade worked very good – nothing is lost

Now the painpoints

I’ve recognized, that 4 of my tools/addons no more work in Snow Leopard:
- Saft (AddOn for Safari)
- AdBlock for Safari
- CoverSutra
- iStat Menues

There are meanwhile solutions for the first three affected issues.

Sophie has just released a Beta of CoverSutra, which is fully compatible with Snow Leopard.

Getting AdBlock to work needs minor more work. You will need to run Safari in 32bit mode. I would recommend to get the latest version, quit Safari and install it. When you’re done with the installation, go to your Applications folder, click once on the Safari icon and press Apple (Command)+i. Select the “Run in 32bit mode”.

To get Saft to work, you’ll need to “hack” a info.plist file. Hacking is a bit overdriven here. See the instructions from the ApfelTalk forum. They are in German, but there are plenty of screenshots to guide you through the process. Simply download the linked PrefSetter first, then find the Saft icon in your applications folder and do a right-click on this, show package content and navigate through as shown. You also need to do a right-click onto the bundle which is one of the last screenshots. When you’re done with the edit (simply change the number 5 to 6), save it an restart Safari.

For me – it works!

iStat menues are not yet ready for Snow Leopard, but there’s a beta out for a small circle of users, so I’m really looking forward to get this tool to work soon. I love it so much

Ciao
Dennis

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With moving to the new CMS, I’ve put all 5 posts into one long.

Hi guys,

a week later as projected, but here are the final pics of our Home Office 5.0 overhaul project.

After several weeks of fighting with my retail version and after giving up one time, I was able to manage the proper installation of OSX on this PC. No more mouse jumps, drops & movement issues. Both graphic cards are working seamless with each other, displaying the desktop over up to 3 screens. The huge screen above the 3 22″ displays is a 42″ plasma screen which will be rarely used, but it’s there in case that I need to keep an eye on some console things. The low resolution of 852×480 makes it as nice player for YouTube videos as well

Before I was successfull with OSX, I really wanted to use Win 7 for – well – some minutes…

Talking about internals, this is the Dockmaster Workstation after sorting the cables for more than 1 hour yesterday and using a lot of Velcro and hot glue. It’s a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU (4 cores with 12MB L2 Cache), 8GB RAM and 2x GeForce 8600GTS SLI bidged passive cards.

This SLI thing does not really work on Macs, but if I want to play a game (which could happen 1 or 2 times per year) I can put in another HDD with Vista or 7 and have fun playing with the SLI performance. Of course I use both cards to display all the stuff over the 4 screens.

Two HDDs are currently connected. A nice noiseless 200GB Samsung SATA-II for the system and a 1TB Seagate for the Time Machine which I use as additional protection, even if I have a huge 6TB RAID5 in the basement’s server (Hadron). There’s plenty of space to add up to 4 additional drives in that case and also on the board, there are 4 free SATA-II slots.

Not much additional cards for Dockmaster

What a beauty. I still like the design of the Chieftec MESH series, even if I have in mind to do some case modding to this. Maybe I’ve read to much along Hardwareluxx.de

The workstation placed where it should be. Under my desk. You can see the nice Velcro-based cabeling and the funny 90° rotated network socket as well as my “life saver” (aka APC UPS-800).

The other desk if for my long days working each day – the ThinkPad I got from Cisco with a 19″ BenQ display. I hate to work on notebooks only, so I’d better go with external devices connected. Oh! By the way – funny story, but the Cisco IP Phone there is a private one and does NOT (at the moment) connect to the Cisco SIP network. I will use my “new” IPCop for this…

Guarana – that’s the name of the “new” IPCop. Why? I had no idea how to call it, and there was a can energy drink on my desk with the huge font “Guarana” – I thought it’s a nice name . I wrote it in quotes, because I use our old AMD64EE for this as it should not consumt to much power. For the same reason, I use a CF Card as main device. Most of the HDD activity stuff is moved to the 2GB RAM which is build in. It’s not YET installed in the rack and configured, but the IPCop already is basically installed.

I love this slot based CF Card to IDE adapter I just got last week from eBay.

Of course, also my wife has her desk in our new home office. Even if she will use it much less time than I do, she has her stuff already placed and is using it finally longer than I use mine (sure – she don’t understand why I HAVE TO use OSX on this PC – and so I was working for the last week (well some hours) on different installations and ideas while she’s happy surfing with her Win 7 RC installation (we’ve already pre-ordered the Win 7 Home Premium for her)).

For the free time, like the big break or after work, I wanted to have this fancy couch in this room to… well – chill out

Hope you enjoyed those final pics. I will put them into the Home Office page as well and add some more photos from the little bit rebuild basement servers later today.

Ciao
Dennis

—

Hey guys,

we’ve finished the Home Office 5.0 today

Here are some first impressions from the done work. What I’ll have to do (tomorrow) is to take some better shots with my DSLR.

The first image shows the nearly completely used HP Switch.

For security reasons, we’ve mounted a smoke detector under the ceiling.

I’ve put a cable from my desks over the door frame to my wifes desk, so that she can also benefit from the fast HADRON fileserver Hot glue was again very helpfull

After sorting the cables for about 2h’s, the cables are arranged very nice now. They are seperated into 3 categories: UPS, peripherials and display connectors.

All cables are layed out flexible, so I hope I will not run into any trouble because of shortend lengths

Ciao
Dennis

—

Hi guys,

a bit late, but here are the photos from day 3. Today (Thursday) we took a rest and went to the Burgers Zoo in Arnhem , so no pictures for this day. Here are the pictures from day 3 (Wednesday).

Testseating the 3x 22″ displays under the plasma screen

Mounted power outlet strip for the main desk…

…and for the working desk.

More boxes from the attic with cables, cables and.. you get the idea: cables!

Will be rarely used in future, but I’ve attached a DVB-T receiver to the plasma screen for emergencies when I think watching a news stream is important or so.

Harman/Kardon HiFi receiver & the cheap DVB-T receiver

Seems like I forget to add the Expedit width to the calculation when we hung up the plasma Oops! Ok – so the Expedit is now on the left side instead of the right side as planned. Fits also very nice. Also the Workstation & Server are now stored under the desks, the cable length were just too short and I don’t wanted to spend a few hundred Euros on getting so much new cables.

Also my wifes desk is placed and meanwhile equipped with her stuff

First shot of the running DOCKMASTER (Workstation) systems on all 4 screens. Of course – not nearly ready I just say “cables”.

Testdriving the AKAMAI NOCC video on the screen using QuickTime in Fullscreen on the plasma – I’m loving it

Ciao
Dennis

—

Hi guys,

today, we continued working on the Home Office overhaul. It takes much longer than expected and fact, that my network cable that I had prepared for the Home Office usage was too short has not helped. No – not really – it took me 3h’s just to get a new cable, lay it through the house and patch it to the network wall outlet and to the patchpanel in the rack in the basement. Well, those things happen . We will continue tomorrow with the last things like moving the rest of the furnitures to the new room and connecting the PCs. I will also wallmount our Brennstuhl multi-outlet power strips. By the way: the idea to use a towel rail as rail to hang the cables below it is from Stefan, first I wanted to follow my colleagues idea to simply drill hooks into the desk from the bottom, but this idea has much more charme.

Shopping tour #1: Towel rails, 18 angle brackets and 20m of Velcro

Enough small-talk, here are the pictures from today. First I would like to show you the process of the outlets in the room:

Wondering why it was first a coax cable and then a network wall outlet? Easy answered. The empty conduit is much too small to put 2 cables through it. So I had to decide: Sat TV or GBit ethernet over WiFi. No question what I’ve choosen, ha?

The next funny thing is the 90° rotated network wall outlet. This is also quickly explained. Those noobs from the electric company who have done the cabling initially have built in the inner of the outlet 90° rotated. I want that it’s stable, so I’ve mounted it that way. No problem for the functionality, but looks funny – I know

The two audio/speaker cables are ending in the ceil of the bathroom. When this will be done, we will be able to listen to our MP3s while having a bath

Mounted 42″ Plasma screen
The Mirra chair with the new rolls – and the Plasma TV mounted 11cm above the old position and 30cm more right, so it will sit in the middle above the 3x 22″ screens tomorrow

As mentioned earlier: The towel rail under desk #1

All my work stuff is on this pic – the ThinkPad T61, mouse, Cisco webcam, cables, power supply and the 19″ display as well as the keyboard

Last, but not least: the first desktop takes place at the purposed new position

Ciao
Dennis

—

Hi guys,

this is just a short update with pictures about our 1st day working on the Home Office 5.0 project. This day’s job was to work on the new bedroom at the front side of the house. We had to remove a lot stuff and paint the walls. We just came home from a trip over the weekend at midnight, so we started “a bit” later as planned. After buying the color and a few other handy things like paint rollers and buckets we were ready to start.

The previously guest room looked like this when we started:

While I was doing the electrics…

my wife was busy painting the new color onto the walls.

In the end, we’ve moved the bed in and were done with the painting The room is ready to sleep in tonight – and believe us – we’re really tired!

A view of the previous bedroom, the new Home Office will move into this room tomorrow

By the way – because of the movement, I will have a laminate floor under my feet, instead of a carpet which I had in my current office, so I had to order 5 new rolls for my Mirra chair :/ 60 Euros… but I don’t want to ruin the laminate.

Time to get some sleep!

Ciao
Dennis

—

Hey guys,

I haven’t really finished the Home Office 4.0 overhaul (painting the home office walls at the attic in a new grey/warm brown color) – and the next update is still a few days ago. A version jump from 4.0 to 5.0 – Why? Changing the rooms is a good reason . The reason why I will do update and move into a new room is quiet simple.

Our bedroom is oriented to the garden, which is nice in the spring, when you wake up and open the roller blinds, you will see a lot of green. A real pro for every bedroom. The opposite of this pro is, that the terrace under is directly under the bedroom’s windows and also the neighbours one. So it can become a bit critical if you want to sleep at an earlier time than regular if you need to stand up very early the next day and it’s a warm day and you want to keep your windows open to get cooler air inside. If my neighbours read this: It’s our fault to plan the bedroom oriented to the garden! Don’t take it personal! Sure – the neighbours tend to stay more on their terrace than we do (I don’t know why honestly, we should really enjoy the outside and the garden much more). Anyway – so if you try to sleep earlier and you can listen to your neighbours sitting on their terrace it’s on one site rude to listen to them, on the other hand it’s a bit annoying for you if you try to sleep. Another thing is that if someone on the other terrace smokes, and you left your windows wide open because it was a very hot day and came back late from the office room and join a room which is full of cold cigarette smoke – uh! That’s ugly :S

So for those reasons, we decided to move our bedroom to the front side of the house which is also a bit cooler place to stay, since the sun just shines inside early in the morning. The bedroom is free then, and it’s a nice large size room to put in all our stuff and also a couch which is in my mind the perfect match for a home office – to breath through and calm down in the breaks.

Of course, both rooms will get new wall colors. My wife would like to paint the new bedroom in a light violet/lilac color and for the Home Office in the new room – well – I think I will stick with the color we’ve used at the attic a few weeks ago as we still have some of it and it should be enough to paint the walls there.

We’ve worked on the rooms in Visio and I like to show you how the Home Office 5.0 will possibly look.

(click on the graphic to download the PDF version)

Let’s start with the floor plan:

The next slide is a front view of the desktop (left: private work, right: notebook/VPN work)

I’ll try to answer some questions that WILL come up:

What is this huge screen above the screens?

Well, this is our old 42″ plasma with a very scary low resolution. Unfortunately (;)) it does not fit into the new bedroom, so I have to “stick” with it. Using Windows, it will become a cool 4th screen and I plan to put status informations on it by using Samurize. Not sure what I will do with it, if I go on and use OSX or Linux on the workstation.

What is this for a phone?

It’s cool to work for Cisco, because I got it free It’s a Cisco 7960 IP Phone. My plan is to use it as intercom phone and also a ISDN based phone. As it’s SIP based (with a special firmware from Cisco and a TFTP-server), it’s not able to directly use ISDN. I will set up (and always have started working on that project) an Asterisk server in the rack in the basement to handle the calls for me. My issue with the new room is, that I can only put 1 cable through the ductwork – and so I can choose between a DVB-S, an ISDN or a Cat7 network cable. Guess what I will choose – of course I’ll go for the network cable. TV is very minor interesting meanwhile as the German stations broadcast more and more crap from year to year. I’ve a DVB-T USB Box for the PC and a DVB-T receiver I could connect to the plasma screen if I really want to see some news or listen to music TV. I prefer to watch DVDs or internetstreams meanwhile honestly.

Why to have the HADRON server in the home office instead of in the basement? Is it not noisy?

Yeah – you got me . I’ve moved the hardware from HADRON into a new shiny Chieftec MESH case (the hugest one you can get) to be prepared for the next HDD upgrades. My old case was this nice black 19″ 4U case. It was pretty cool to have it all in the basement, but if I wanted to exchange a simply part like a card, attach more RAM or install a new HDD, I had to remove the whole case from the rack, because those rails are incredible expensive. A new rail system costs the same than the new case (or maybe a bit more). This new case can pick up to 8x 3.5″ HDDs inside the case plus I can add up to 10 3.5″ HDDs by adding 2 of those ‘5x vertical mounted 3.5″ HDDs in on a 3x 5.25″ height’ backplanes. So talking about the current HDD sizes, I will add at least 2x 1TB HDDs to the current RAIDset to push it to 8TB RAID5 = around about 6.4TB usable storage. Adding 10x 2TB HDDs to the bays would end up in having 18TB RAID5 storage additional to the current 4.4 or 6.4TB (of course this would mean to get an additional RAID card and a new mainboard with more than the 1 PCIx x16 slot that the Core 2 Duo (GA-P35-DS3) board has, that’s currently built in. Not sure if I would ever go this way as me and my wife are more than happy with the 4.4TB usable storage at the moment.

Do you run Windows on all those machines?

Good question for me – the “OS bitch” as a friend has called me several years ago. The server runs Debian Lenny at the moment. I’m more or less happy with it, I hate to fight with user rights – that drives me crazy (the server is HADRON). I’ve a Windows Server 2008 licence laying around here, but whenever I install this and try it – it’s cool in the beginning, but those DNS errors and AD-stuff drives me crazy. Yeah I know, maybe I should not use AD for a 2-user household and live with it What I must say: my external 1TB Seagate backup HDD is much faster on Windows Server 2008 than on Linux (Win: 33MB/s / Linux: 15MB/s).

DOCKMASTER (my workstation) is a different story. At the moment, I’ve been running different systems here. Windows Vista Business 64bit on a 200GB HDD and OS X (yes Hackintosh :S) on the 250GB HDD. I’ve just popped in another 250GB HDD to run Debian or Ubuntu on it – so I can select the OS I like to boot and maybe I will stop doing things like installing systems on my hardware This would be a big approach. It takes so much time and it’s no more so much fun than in the beginning.

Why is the chair on the right side lime-green?

That’s the color of my Herman Miller Mirra chair

Having some more questions? Fire a comment below or send me an eMail if you want to know much more detailed things about the “Klein2-network” here

Have a great day!

PS. Have I mentioned that this is my last day before I go on “PTO” (haha Cisco acronym – they are nuts with them – it mean “Paid time off” – so VACATION!) for 11 days (this Friday + the 2 weeks after)? No? Well – I do!

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