Network Boot Menu setup with iPXE

My iPXE setup is coming along just lovely, and it is working out just fine. My goal is to avoid scurrying around like a headless chicken looking for USB flash drives and optical media whenever I have to work on someone’s system. This part usually takes the most out of me when I am fixing a system as I can never seem to find install media, usb drives and my tools. I sure wish I could network boot my tools! I’m trying to become more organized in that regard :-). ...

August 24, 2013 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

GNTP: Growl Alerts from my NAS

I have been using Growl for Windows for a few months and I think it is a very cool application. I use it mostly at home with Sickbeard and Couchpotato. In Sickbeard, when a show is snatched, that is the show has been submitted to your download manager (Transmission in my case) a notification will be sent to growl. When the the download has been completed, a notification will be sent to growl. This is especially useful when I am waiting a particular show to finish downloading. ...

February 5, 2013 · 3 min · Shane Greaves

SIL3114 SATA card BIOS update

I grabbed this card from my local computer shop without doing any research. I was very excited and eager to get my home NAS up and running. I was soon disappointed after installing and configuring one hard drive. I was using freeNas then and the write speeds where terribly slow. This was one of the main reasons why I started looking for another NAS solution other than freeNAS. When I migrated to OpenMediaVault this card seemed to have much better Linux support. The I/O speeds were very decent and in spite of this this card always seemed unstable and even though I kept having unstable behavior with hard drives I never made the connection that this card was the root cause. If I had any clue that this was the case I perhaps would not have been so eager with my move to RAID and would have delayed my migration until after I had found a reliable replacement. Alas, you lose data to learn and I lost over 500GB worth of movies and tv shows. ...

December 18, 2012 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

Oracle: My little media server

I wanted a reliable home media server and so far the process to get this up and running has been very fun and rewarding. This is where I store my movies, tv shows and music. I’m a big fan of XBMC and I wanted to set up sharing the xbmc database through mysql to all my clients. I also wanted to be able to stream my music to multiple clients. Initially I used daap but I have since moved on to SubSonic. ...

November 20, 2012 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

Install: utorrent on OMV

My quick and dirty walk through of how to get utorrent installed and configured on Openmediavault, a Debian based network attached storage solution (NAS). I used this package. wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24928836/utserver/deb/utorrent-server_3.0-25053_i386.deb dpkg -i utorrent*.deb point your browser to: http://omv-ip:8080/gui The default is: 8080 The user name is admin with no password. Additionally you will have to add utserver to the machice startup: update-rc.d utserver defaults Reference utorrent.com forums

November 19, 2012 · 1 min · Shane Greaves