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November 15th, 2011

It has finally happened.  My lab has finally gotten the funds to upgrade our aging G5 servers with nice, new, shiny Mac Mini’s and a Promise Pegasus RAID.

Currently, the lab I run has 10 Mac Pro desktop’s all running into a 6 year old G5 Xserve and Apple RAID.  The RAID uses 14 IDE drives that are basically maxed out.  We have about 4TB of storage on 14 drives..this is very sad.  Our G5 servers are not upgradable anymore, and we have limitations on the types of things we can serve on them.  They have lasted us this long, but it’s time to finally phase them out.

In the next 2-3 weeks I’ll be replacing our two G5 servers and our RAID with two Mac Mini servers and the Promise Thunderbolt RAID.  The servers will give us huge boost in performance and the RAID will bump us to 12TB of storage.  This will not be an easy task as our current systems all run 10.5 and the new servers run 10.7.  I will also have to migrate all of the user accounts and data to the new system without losing anything. Instead of removing our old servers I will use them only as basic servers; MySQL, Apache, Xgrid controllers, etc.  I’m also going to use them as tertiary backups for our user accounts and servers (backing up the new machines and user accounts to the RAID once per week).

Over the next few posts I will attempt to document the migration.  I’ll start with initial setup then go to migrating data/accounts then end with the final phase out process.  I hope that the next few entries may help people who get into a similar situation as well as keep a record for myself on any problems I might face.

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Posted in Hardware, Work

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That didn’t last as long as I was expecting…

April 18th, 2011

I decided to upgrade to the Thunderbolt after all.  Main reason: I got $50 off from a web coupon.  I’m going to write a little bit about it after I’ve used it a bit more.

Some first impressions: This thing is super fast, it’s got a nice feeling to it (not as solid as my DROID but still pretty well built), and the screen is really really nice.  The battery life isn’t as bad as everyone says it it…I got a full day out of it with fairly heavy use…we’ll see if that continues though.  I hate SenseUI…so I replaced it with ADW Launcher right away and I’m waiting for CyanogenMod to come out for it (it’s currently being worked on).  So expect some sort of review in the coming days/weeks…

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Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 2: Restoring and Troubleshooting)

April 13th, 2011

In part 1 I described (in little detail) how I rooted my phone and installed CyanogenMod 7 on it to get some more mileage out of it until I upgrade to a newer device this year.  But of course every upgrade and every hack isn’t without it’s issues and every hack isn’t perfect at all.  Cyanogen never claims to be 100% trouble-free, and every users’ experience will vary depending on device and applications installed; after all, it is technically a hack made by third-party developers…and no developer is perfect. The methods for flashing are also different for each user.

I installed CM7 when it was at RC1 for the DROID (still buggy, but still good for everyday use) and I originally flashed my phone by doing a factory reset of the device (removes everything) and then installing the ROM. This gave me an endless boot screen.  What I had to do to fix this was not only do a factory reset, but wipe the cache partition AND the Dalvik cache partition.  This was easy with the ClockworkMod and it was also nearly 100% risk free since I had a complete Nandroid backup.  After wiping the two it booted successfully!

I noticed that in Android 2.3 Google will restore all of your previously purchased and downloaded apps if you want it to automatically on a new device (only the app itself, not the data..like game save data).  This is great, but I already decided to use MyBackup Root for this, mainly because I wanted to have my stuff there with all of the data.  So i just told the phone not to download everything and I’ll just restore everything from my backup.  What this left me with was broken installed apps with no way to update them because the Market links were all hosed.  This sucked, now what was I supposed to do?  I decided to flash again and allow Google to push the apps to my phone.  This process took some time but everything was downloaded for the most part; unfortunately, I didn’t have my app data, so all of my game data and all of my settings were gone…I check MyBackup and sure enough I was able to restore data only!  I did that and bingo, everything worked again with all of my old data!  A few apps needed to be reinstalled or needed their data wiped (Google maps and Facebook I think) but for the most part everything worked just as it was supposed to.

Choose which to restore? Yay!

So now that I had my apps on my phone, I was nearing happiness with my hacked DROID.  I say nearing because I was still having many issues with other things.  I won’t go into every little one but I will talk about the two that almost made me decide to go back to stock.

LED Notifications

The one thing I love about Android phones is the LED notifications.  A simple little LED in the corner of my phone blinks different colors for certain things (texts, emails, etc) so I don’t need to turn the screen on, or unlock my phone to see what I missed or see what that beep was from…I can just look at the color of the LED.  Funny thing happened after installing, it stopped working.  I would look down and nothing would be blinking but when I unlocked my phone I’d notice an e-mail that I missed!  What was going on here?  I looked in the settings and found that CM has basically rewritten the notification system and you can customize colors and blink rate from it if you so desired, but instead it broke the damn thing.  This wouldn’t fly with me, I was about to go back to stock because one of my favorite features was broken…then I found the forums.  I searched the issue on the forums and found a lot of people with the same issue, on different phones even!  Reading through many of the posts they all usually came around to the same solution, un-check everything in the LED settings then check them again then hit “Reset all LED notifications” and reboot. And it worked!  I had my LED back and working and now it was even better because I can change the settings for every program and even change the colors and blink rate for them, pretty neat.

Change color and rate for LED notifications

Missing Messages

Now that my LED notifications worked I was happy that I could look down and see if I missed any emails or (more importantly) text messages…but strangely I felt that I was receiving less messages.  I went an entire day without a text message, which is very odd for me actually.  I looked at my phone, no blinking LED, I unlocked the phone, no notification in the menu, I opened the messaging app and boom, new texts, some as old as a day!  What the hell was going on with this?  I’m missing text messages now?  This used to happen with my EnV Touch, never my DROID!  I tried resetting my notifications for the app, and it would work for a while after I opened the app.  I figured, okay, it’s fixed, but then it would stop later on in the day.  I was getting very frustrated with this now and was again thinking about going back to stock.  I hit the forums again and found one post about the issue with one simple solution:

The solution! Check that box!

Once I checked that, never missed another message.  It locks the message app in the memory so it’s always running.  Sure it uses up memory, but my messages are more important to me than the amount of apps I can run at one time.

Side note: But why does the DROID do this with CM7?  The DROID has 256MB RAM, this was a lot when the phone came out and with 2.1 it was fine.  Once 2.2 was released memory was becoming a problem for the phone.  The phone had trouble even keeping the Home app in memory; if you ran a program that was memory hungry and went back to the home screen you’d have to wait for it to redraw because Android’s memory management would kill it.  So in CM7 you can see the two check boxes for home and messaging, this stoped the redrawing(relaunching) and the missing messages…but it took some memory away of course which means you can only do so much multitasking before apps start getting killed.  Android 2.3.3 uses more memory, and the DROID just doesn’t have that much…so CM7 also allows asset purging to free up RAM as well as compucache (memory compression).  These use a little CPU but allow you to multitask fairly well;  it’s nowhere near as good as other newer phones, but it works.

There were some other small odds and ends that I had fixed by tweaking settings and installing updates but I thought that these two were really the most damming for me.  I managed to fix them with help from other nerds at the CyanogenMod Forums who were running into similar issues and there are some I managed to fix by trial and error.  Now, he ROM still has it’s occasional reboots and hiccups (not very often) and they usually happen with two programs; Google Maps and the Camera app, but these crashes happen less and less with each update.

CM7 is now out of RC and was released as Gold…but not for the DROID yet.  It still is very much a work in progress, but the progress is going very quickly, and I really like the direction it’s heading.  They’ve managed to give DROID users Android 2.3 even after Motorola decided it “wouldn’t work” on the phone.  Well, it is working (for the most part) and I’m fairly happy with it.  It has really allowed me to use my phone a bit longer than I was expecting.  I’m probably going to wait until August to upgrade my phone instead of going for the Thunderbolt, but time may change that.  What I do know is that my phone still works well and I will get more time out of it because of the ROMS.

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Posted in Hardware, Phones, Software

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Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 1:Rooting and CM7)

April 11th, 2011

I love my DROID, I have since I got it over a year ago.  But in a year, a lot can happen with technology of course.  My phone was originally equipped with Android 2.1 (the first phone to have it actually) and had an ARM 600MHz processor (underclocked to 550 for battery life), and 256MB RAM.  It was fast, really fast…and it took a while for phones to be that fast…but it didn’t last long.  Soon after the DROID came out every new phone that came out just got faster and faster very quickly..I mean, that’s what technology does, right?  But the DROID looked slow very quickly.

So when Froyo (Android 2.2) came out the DROID got it down the line and that’s when the DROID started to show it’s age; extremely slow…a big drop in performance.  So I decided to root it to get a little more millage out of it before my upgrade.  Mind you, I was waiting for the Thunderbolt to come out to replace it…but decided against upgrading for the time…another story I suppose.  I decided to use SuperOneClick to root my phone, and damn it was simple.  Literally one click and it was done…but what can I do with this root?  Well, first thing was overclocking to see if I can get some more speed.  I overclocked it to 800MHz and really didn’t notice much of a difference besides the fact that I could now have a wireless hot-spot…oh and I could take screen shots now (why doesn’t Android have this functionality built in? Seriously!).

Android Screen shot

Hey look, I need to ROOT to take a screen shot!

So I decided to take it a step further.  My buddy was telling me about CyanogenMod and how he loved it on his MyTouch and basically brought life back into it.  So I said “Why the hell not?”  Not only does it add a lot of functionality, it will give me Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread)…something the original DROIDs won’t ever see normally.  I backed-up my apps and text messages phone using MyBackup Root then flashed my recovery ROM to ClockworkMod which allows me to install firmware from the SD card and allows me to backup my entire phone to an image just in case anything goes wrong.  After the backup with MyBackup Root I rebooted into recovery mode and backed-up the entire phone using the Nandroid backup (in the recovery) then started to flash CyanogenMod 7 on my phone..this meant I had to do a complete wipe of the phone which is always scary but with the backup I should be cool!

Wiped the phone, flashed the ROM, and booted the phone. It worked! I had the Release Candidate (at the time it was RC1) of CyanogenMod 7 on my phone!

I had some issues with CM7 at first and some issues with getting my apps back (which I’ll talk about in Part 2) but after some initial bumps I was up running as smooth as I could be on a release candidate.  I had some reboots and some programs would crash but reinstalling them from scratch helped for the most part.

After a few updates it became more and more stable.  I am now running RC4 with a new ultra-low voltage kernel (which allows me to overclock to 1GHz and uses less battery power than the stock kernel). which gives me good battery life, pretty good performance, and all around a pretty good experience.

Android 2.3.3 and 1.1GHz!

So if you’re looking to get some more time from your old DROID this seems like a great way to do it.  It’s not up there with the new phones, but it does give your device a nice little jolt until you decide to retire it.

In Part 2 I’ll talk about installing all of the apps from backup and troubleshooting the many issues I had with memory issues and how they were resolved.

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Posted in Hardware, Phones, Software, Uncategorized

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Verizon iPhone: UNICORNS!!!!

January 11th, 2011

Okay, so it’s finally out, Verizon now has the iPhone.  And unicorns are flying around now apparently.  Of course the blogosphere and the media are insane right now but I have also seen my fair share of complaints and I laugh at a good amount of them.  Some of them even make me want to slap someone. Let me go through them.

  • Not GSM, can’t use all over the world:  Okay, were you really expecting this? Verizon is CDMA, their phones work only in the US.  Yes, they offer world phones, but did anyone really believe they’d make a “world iPhone?”
  • Not 4G/LTE: Apple will not update the iPhone in the middle of it’s life cycle to put 4G in the device.  Maybe the next one in July will have it, but expecting a 4G iPhone to come out today was really far-fetched.
  • Can’t use data and voice simultaneously: Let me see. Anyone who would need this should know that CDMA cannot do this, it never has been able to and it never will.  Why the hell would anyone expect the iPhone to suddenly let CDMA do this?  It’s not about the phone people, it’s the network.  In my life, I have probably had the need to do this maybe 4 times, and I’m a tech junkie!  Maybe that’s me, but I still wonder how much people really need/care about this.
  • Verizon might install apps on the phone: I don’t think Apple would allow this. They didn’t allow it on AT&T….why would they allow it for Verizon?  If they do, I’ll eat my shoe.

So those are really the fun ones I’ve heard. I’m sure there is someone out there who always uses data and voice, but then stay with AT&T! If you travel out of the country a lot, chances are you don’t have Verizon anyway. I believe that these complains are from people on AT&T fed up with them and they were hoping Verizon would swoop in and save them from everything bad about AT&T…and are disappointed that they can’t just get everything they want.  So a message; stop crying. You’re never going to get everything you want, face it.

Unicorn Power!

What everyone expected...

What will Happen Next?

How many people are going to jump the AT&T ship to go to Verizon now?  I know of a few off hand that will as soon as they can. Honestly, switching carriers for a phone is just ridiculous.  I always thought this, especially when everyone complained “Oh my god I can’t wait until the iPhone is on Verizon so I can finally dump AT&T!”  My question, why bother have a cell phone on a network that doesn’t make you happy?  Isn’t the point of a cell phone to have cellular service?  If you switch providers simply for a phone, then that’s dumb.  Switch because one has the features you want, or because one’s cheaper, you know..a good reason.  If you’re going to leave AT&T now because you had shitty service and were just waiting for an iPhone to come to a better network, that’s even a good reason..that’s probably why most people will leave, but don’t complain when you can’t use your voice and data at the same time since you switched, that’s your own dumb fault for not knowing you can’t do it.

I also wonder how many Verizon Android users will hop over to the iPhone.  I know this will happen (again, I already know of some people who are thinking of doing this), but I really want to see how many people will end up doing this.  I myself have thought, “Humm, if a Verizon iPhone came around, would I go for it?”  I do like the iPhone hardware and iOS is nice but I’m very happy with Android and I see very good Android devices coming out in the near future.  I’m also used to it’s features and I know I’d miss some of them if I went to the iPhone.  Only time will tell, but come August when I’m up for a new phone I hope to have a choice of some LTE Android phones or even an LTE iPhone.

Wrapping up, what does this change?  Nothing much.  People will still switch companies for a phone, and people will still not be happy with things they’ve wished for.  Not a single person will get everything they want from their phone or network, and that’s the way it will be forever.  I want a device that can work on CDMA and GSM and underground, but guess what? That’s not happening. Am I going to complain and call something I waited for a failure? No, because these are my wants, my needs.  Cell companies and device makers don’t have an obligation to anyone.  This iPhone hype was all created by the media.  All of these wishes were created by the media.  Verizon and Apple didn’t promise anybody anything, they simply said “we have an announcement” and that’s all it took for everyone to go ape shit and expect all of these things from the device, hell people didn’t even know it was actually an iPhone announcement until they said it.  It could have been a Windows Phone 7 announcement!  The fact of the matter is that you can’t always get what you want.  Listen to the Stones, people.

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Posted in Hardware, Phones, Rant

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