Back to the Old Nas-T
 This, the Nas-Tinspector Mk.I, is back.AS you might remember, the only reason I switched to Nas-T Mk.II was due to the heartless predations of a firmware upgrade that disabled my hard-won and technically unsupported Linux hacks. Nas-T 1, a Japanese designed Buffalo Linkstation XHL, runs a 1.2Ghz Marvell ARM9 processor, a Linux kernel 2.6 Busybox operating system but only 256MB of RAM. So Nas-T Mk.II, the Korean designed LG N1T1 NAS, seemed like a good bet. It ran a slightly slower, 800Mhz version of the same processor that the Nas-T Mk.I boasted and 4X the ram. I had bet that the increased memory would more than make up for the processor speed. Making it even more tempting was the fact that it required no additional hacking to host SafeTinspector blog; indeed, only a few clicks were necessary to fire up Apache, MySQL and PHP.  In order to get SafeTInspector moved over to the MkII, however, it was necessary to somehow pry the MySQL database off of its 2TB hard drive, a task made more difficult by the fact that the very reason for the replacement, a firmware upgrade I’d recently applied, had also blocked access to phpMyAdmin and even the admin user had insufficient permissions to access the database file directly. I settled down to work and, after poking at the silly old Buffalo for several hours, I actually figured a way to reinstate my broken hacks and found myself with a fully functional Mk.I again, making the Mk.II seem a waste of a hundred bucks. No matter, I consoled myself with the fact that future firmware upgrades were unlikely to break SafeTinspector blog again now that it was housed on a device that natively supported my configuration. And beyond that, LG N1T1 NAS also boasts a built-in DVD burner. But I very shortly noticed that Nas-Tinspector Mk.II was deficient in the performance department. Page loads were atrocious, access to the WordPress Dashboard was depressingly slow and turning off all non-essential services on the N1T1 failed to yield any performance benefits. Without shell access I wasn’t really able to attempt any additional tweaks and couldn’t even begin to diagnose what was holding up the show. I speculate that LG cobbled MySQL with a low RAM limit, but without access to the config files I can’t be sure and couldn’t do anything about it even if I knew. Lastly, the LG N1T1 was bigger and noisier than the whisper-silent Buffalo LS-XHL, and was given to beeping little tone patterns occasionally to draw attention to status changes. With a certain amount of chagrin I put the Nas-Tinspector Mk.I back in service. The Mk.II is in its box and will go to my office with me tomorrow to begin life as… I dunno, either a butler or a place to store backups of my laptop. Here you are, then, person; this page has been brought to you by the Nas-Tinspector Mk1, productively reporting to you from the top shelf of my entertainment center, only a scant few feet from the completely unproductive XBox360. |
Posted in internet culture, linux, open source, wordpress by SafeTinspector on February 5th, 2012 |
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Click here to see a bizarre 
The following is an actual email conversation which took place following a system upgrade at one of my client sites between a user and the on-site IT staff.
Curiouser and curiouser. Why would a bug want to copy a legitimate Microsoft OS DLL into the root directory of a computer and then rename it to a random string with an EXE extension?
Anyway, upon landing at the promised 
For a final test I figured I’d look for some violent candy, the sadistic consumption of which is another of my hobbies. Instead of a sloppy doodle, however, I selected a photograph I took several years ago of a Gummi bear impaled with a piece of broken drinking glass**. After uploading it TinEye did NOT give me the list of violent comestibles I was looking for. Instead, it showed me the same picture twice. And there must’ve been some malfunction, because while this is my private photo which I took myself on my kitchen counter none of the referenced web sites belonged to me!
