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!