Vista auto-login

This one is easy to find in a Google search but will put here cause I found it useful.

1.  Start > Run > 'netplwiz' (ie Advanced User Accounts Menu)

2.  Uncheck 'User must enter a username and password to use this computer'

3.  Click OK/Apply to complete.

Scanning: HP PSC1315 scan straight to file

I have two printers connected to the NAS/Media Center box now.  The Canon iP4500 is the primary printer.  The HP PSC1315 is an older all-in-one printer/scanner that I've still got lying around; the printer part is pretty much stuffed but I still want to be able to use the scanner.

The scanner is just in the right spot to walk up and scan anything.  For documenting and record keeping and scanning like product receipts or bills, I'd like to be able to walk up to the HP, press the scan button and know that anything scanned will be saved to a file.  As the NAS/Media Center box is connected to the TV, I don't want to have to change the AV/Input to PC and click 'OK' to confirm my scan.

I have now set this up.  It wasn't too hard but some tricks were:

1.  Download the latest Vista drivers for the HP PSC1315.

2.  Install the "Everything" option and follow the instruction as prompted by the installer.  (I had to completely uninstall the HP software and reinstall in order to be able to make this work.)

3.  After all the rebooting required for a full install, open HP Solution Center and goto

• Settings> Scan Settings> Button Settings> and then disable "Show Preview when scanning from the Scan button" and "Prompt for these settings at the time of the scan"
• Set the default image options under Button Settings including the "Save to file Save Options...": disable the "Prompt for these Save Options at time of scan"
• Settings> Scan Settings> Scan Preferences> and then disable "Prompt for additional scans from the glass/TMA"

4.  Now when you press the scan button on the printer, it will scan straight to a file without prompting.

Network printing: Mac OS 10.5 to Canon iP4500 on Vista SP1

Out of the box, Mac OS 10.5.4 could not print successfully to a Canon iP4500 shared out from a Windows Vista SP1 machine.

On the Macbook, when you goto add the printer and select a driver iP4500 was listed using the "Canon PIXMA iP4500 - CUPS + Gutenprint v5.1.3" driver.  All the setup of the printer goes fine until you print a page only to find it comes out blank!

This issue was described on forums such as http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6339055

This issue has been resolved in newer versions of the Gutenprint drivers: 5.2.0-beta3 fixed the issue for me.  To fix:

1.  Download latest .dmg file from gimp-print.sourceforge.net

2.  Install the drivers

3.  Install the printer and ensure that the latest Gutenprint driver is installed.

CrashPlan and Mapped Network Drives as SYSTEM User

The original thoughts behind the NAS system was to backup at all the important documents automatically offsite. I stumbled across a neat program called CrashPlan that allows you to automatically backup offsite to somebody you know for practically nothing.....very cool. (http://www.crashplan.com).

Anyway, got the demo installed and got my Dad to install it on his PC. I setup CrashPlan on my Vista machine to allow him to backup to my internal RAID5 array, easy. He was trying to setup CrashPlan on his WinXP machine to allow me to backup to his external Maxtor Shared Storage NAS drive (which he had mapped as a Z: or something)....Problem was that CrashPlan couldn't see the drive!

After a few emails to tech support, I found out that CrashPlan runs as the SYSTEM user and can't see Mapped Network Drives created by users.

To get around this, I had to figure out how to map a drive as the SYSTEM user. With the help of my friend the Internet, I was able to cobble the following together:

1. Run the following to schedule a command prompt session as the SYSTEM user at HH:mm
C:\> AT /interactive cmd.exe
(found here: http://shijaz.com/windows/Using_SYSTEM_user_context.htm)

2. Map the network drive using the 'net use' command.
C:\> net use Z: \\192.168.x.x\folder /PERSISTENT:YES
(more details here: http://www.cezeo.com/tips-and-tricks/net-use-command/)

UPDATED: This works well until the first reboot when the 'PERSISTENT' didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Looks like this is on hold till I can find a way to run a batch file as the SYSTEM user on startup.

UPDATED2: He gave up on the network drive idea and he's just going to use an external HDD to store my backups.

Free EPG stops working in Vista Media Center

Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't supply an electronic programming guide for Australia. There are work arounds; namely IceTV http://www.icetv.com.au/ and Free EPG http://www.epgstream.net/

I decided to go with Free EPG. The installer is very simple to use and the community support by the likes of http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/ is fantastic. Which is what made finding out why my Free EPG installation just stopped working a day after I got it working much much easier.

Turns out that a Microsoft schedules a task to blow away any custom EPG services in Vista Media Center. The Free EPG install instructions say to make sure that the following MS KB hack is installed.... I've requested the fix from MS thru a web form but they still haven't got back to me....
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935685

So did a bit more digging (specifically here: http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/vista-media-center-software/14063-vista-rewrites-discsvc-registry-key.html ) and found that the "discSvc" was being reset to the Microsoft default at regular intervals. I'd 'repair' the Free EPG install and watch it change to something similar to below, and then minutes later it would change back to the Microsoft default.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\EPG]
"discSvc"=http://free-epg.epgstream.net/mce/mcediscovery.aspx?epguser=xxxxxxxxxxx

Following the lead of one of the posters in the linked forum, I've done the following:
1. Run 'regedit' and find the 'discSvc' registry key as per above.
2. Click 'File' > 'Export' to export the correct settings JUST after a Free EPG repair
3. Open Task Scheduler and create scheduled task to run the following command every 10 minutes.
"C:\Windows\regedit.exe \s C:\folder\exported_settings.reg"

SLEEP and WAKE Windows Vista at Scheduled Times

While the purpose of a NAS box is primarily to be always on, in these days of climate change, leaving a computer on 24/7 doesn't seem like the right thing to do. So I'm going to limit the on time for the NAS to be only during my waking hours but depending on my usage habbits, I'll probably make it even less than that.

Vista seems pretty content entering S3 sleep state so I looked for a way to schedule Vista to goto sleep at a certain time and wake up at a certain time. Shouldn't be too hard no? Well I couldn't find any step by step instructions for how to do this so here we go....


UPDATED: All the tools you need are here. Don't waste time with anything else! TOff to schedule SLEEP, and WakeupOnStanday for the obvious. http://www.dennisbabkin.com/php/m_download.php

My Home NAS Box (Revision 2)

My NAS dreams are still there but my direction has slightly changed since last time I wrote here.

In the end decided to buy another 2x Samsung 500GB hard drives so that all the hard drive trays with rubber grommets were full. This was then going to form the basis of a 4x 500GB software RAID5 array with a usable capacity close to 1.5TB under OpenSUSE 10.3.

I did get this going. It was looking good. Had Samba server running with local authenication, SSH daemon running securely on a non-standard port and limited users, NoMachine (www.nomachine.com) FreeNX configured so that I could connect with a GUI from the internet....But there were a few things that I wanted to do that were annoying me:
* I couldn't get my 22" Asus widescreen monitor to display correctly. No matter how hard I tried, I kept getting a large black band down the left had side of the screen.
* Samba sharing to my Mac OS 10.5 laptops was very very slow. Tried changing the settings on Samba to no avail.
* I had a FusionHDTV / Dvico Dual 4 TV tuner card lying around that I was interested in getting up and running. I did find some links to maybe get it working (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DViCO_Dual_Digital_4) but a new large screen TV purchase meant that I wanted something a bit prettier and that 'just worked'.

So....rightly or wrongly, decided to ditch OpenSUSE and bite the bullet on Windows Vista Home Premium. I do love the look of Vista Media Center (included in Home Premium) and thats all I thought I would need. Should have looked into the differences between versions a bit more; Ultimate would have been more my cup of tea with the ability to Remote Desktop to the machine and CompletePC backup things that would have come in really useful. Anyway, the graphics card working at 1680x1050 straight out of the box, TV tuner works with the drivers (with a bit of stuffing around) and now I'm using the onboard ICH9 software RAID to RAID5 three of the four 500GB disks.... I don't feel as hard-core but at least it all works.

The current is as follows:
* HDD1 - 25GB Windows/Main, the rest for Temp TV tuner recordings
* RAID array - 1TB usable with a public (RO everyone), private (RW only me), uploads (RW everyone) directories shared via SMB.

We'll see how we go second time round!

My Home NAS box

I've wanted to have a home network attached storage (NAS) box for a while now. The idea of having a few hard drives in RAID configuration to protect against data loss through faulty hardware really appealed to me. So after considering the few NAS options that are out there such as the Synology CS-406e and the QNAP TS-409, I thought it would be more cost effective and flexible to build my own from scratch.

After a lot of deliberation I finally settled on the following components (at time of writing these made sense):

• Antec Sonata III case
• Large enough for 4x 3.25" HDD trays with rubber grommets, 2x 3.5" HDD bays, and 3x 5.25" drive bays; future expandability. It also has been reported on the Net as being pretty quiet and good value.
• Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R motherboard
• Full sized ATX motherboard that will fit in the Antec case. Has 8x SATAII connectors for future expandability. Onboard video solution to minimise power draw from unnecessary components. Gigabit ethernet for maximum file transfer speed.
  
• Intel Dual Core E2160 processor
• Not much difference in cost and power consumption between this and E1200 ie Celeron. Performance shown to be much better.
• 2x 1GB Kingston PC6400 DDR2 RAM
• Because 2 is better than 1GB ;-)
  
• 2x 500GB WD HDD
• Web reviews state they are very quiet. Less expensive than Seagate.

I plan to install openSUSE 10.3 on this home server, RAID1 the hard drives initially and then migrate to RAID5 at later date to increase capacity. Will advise how things go...

UPDATED: Added 2x more 500GB Samsung HDD

Welcome

Welcome to my blog! Don't know what's going to go in here but I thought I could use this as a place to store any text or info I don't want to lose. I could just open up Notepad but some thing might come in useful to the peoples on the Net.