A Weblog…Again

A NAS + a DAC = bye bye CDs

It has been a busy summer, but I finally got some time over the past few weeks to work on making the most of the NAS that I had built a few months ago.  There were 2 reasons why I built the NAS:  1) to have lots of local storage, which I accomplished since it is 2 TB; 2) have some redundancy, since it is in a RAID 5 configuration; and 3) migrate my CD collection to it.  So the NAS has been running rock-solid for the past few months, therefore I felt pretty comfortable in taking it to the next step.

Since my end goal was to be able to listen to all of my music through my 2-channel, Naim system, I needed to insure that the quality of the source material was lossless.  Obviously, this meant that I had to choose from one of many lossless formats.  After doing some research, I decided to go with FLAC, since it is non-proprietary and widely supported.  I then used the Mac based ripper called Max, which allows you to rip to both FLAC and MP3 formats at the same time.  I needed to rip to MP3 in addition to FLAC, because iPods and iPhones do not understand FLAC.

Once I had all of my CDs ripped, I then needed to consider how to convert the digital content to an audio input for my amplifier.  This is the purpose of a DAC (digital to audio converter).  Every soundcard has a DAC, albeit lousy, built into it, which is why you can hear music via the headphone jack.  But in order to extract as much detail and musicality from the source material, you really need a dedicated, high-quality DAC.  Since this was my first foray into the world of DACs, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a DAC, but I also wanted to ensure that the DAC was on par with or better than the sound of the Naim system.  After a bit of research and based on the recommendations in the Head-Fi forums, I decided to order the VALAB DAC for $200.  It is a non-oversampling DAC that has a very vinyl sound to it.  It also has the benefit of being amenable to significant modding, which is why I also purchased a soldering iron.

The next thing I needed to consider was the software that I would use to play the music and what type of user interface would I use.  I was loathe to use a laptop for this, because I really wanted the ability to have a remote in hand and browse the catalog and change music.  A Mac Mini was overkill and too expensive.  The solution to this came in the form of the Music Player Daemon (MPD), which is a client server based music player.  Basically, the server contains the player and will play whatever it is told to by the client.  The client can be another computer or any IP based networked device, for example, an iPhone.  In order to get this solution to work, I needed to have a small computer that was fanless, silent, consumed very little energy and was of a small form factor.  I discovered this blog post called the Cheap Silent USB Linux Server that matched my needs exactly.  I followed the directions to a tee and am very pleased.  I had to order a Alix 2D2 motherboard and case for about $140.  I then threw in a 1 GB compact flash card into and installed Voyage Linux as the OS.  With this setup, I can view and play my complete music collection from my iPhone using MPoD and it will automagically start playing out of the Naim system.

How does it sound, you may ask?  I am simply astonished!  There is so much more detail revealed and the soundstaging is expansive and this is all attributable to the DAC.  This setup has truly re-invigorated my ear for music and I’m listening to music from my collection as if it is brand new and completely different than what I had listened to before.  This was a real shocker to me, since my CD player, the Naim CD 3.5, was purchased for $2000 about 10 years ago.  I need to spend many more hours listening to music to get a better sense of what other improvements and tweaks I can make.  I know for a fact that I need to either make or purchase some acoustic treatments, since the room is very bright.

So, to summarize, this is what I ended up with:

• Music is stored on the NAS in FLAC format
• It is streamed over ethernet to a small, AMD Geode based device, which is running MPD
• The music is outputted in FLAC format over the USB port to the VALAB DAC
• The DAC converts the digital input to analog output and sends it out over RCA connectors
• The RCA cable then connects to my Naim amplifier
• I control what is being played from my iPhone using MPoD

This is a networked diagram of the final result.

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Wireless – 0; Wired – 1

This afternoon I worked on one of the projects that I had earlier mentioned.  I decided to abandon trying to get WDS (Wireless Distribution System) working between my office on the 2nd floor and the home theatre in the basement.  Instead, I bought a 100 ft of Cat 5e cable and just ran the wiring from the outside of the house.  In my office and in the basement I have Netgear GS105 gigabit switches, so the connectivity blows away any wireless network that I could’ve set up.  It took about 3 hours or so to run the wire, tack it down, cut drywall, punch the wiring into the adapters, but I think I would have spent a lot longer trying to get WDS working correctly.  So, what’s the net result of this wiring job?  Well, now we can finally watch movies from our Instant Queue on Netflix via the XBox 360 on the plasma TV downstairs.  Oh, that is, of course if I actually had time to watch TV.

Unified Computing System

Well, the cat is out of the bag and now "California", now called the Unified Computing System, is public knowledge.  I recently joined the professional services team that will be supporting UCS.  Services will be a key aspect of the success of UCS, so it will be pretty exciting and telling in the coming months.  More to come later.

Here is the announcement.

Developers Replacing Network Admins with Cloud Computing

Very interesting article, Why virtualization is shaking up IT data center, that begins to hint at how data centers will change as virtualization and more importantly unified computing gain predominance.  In particular, I was struck by one passage:

Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.

By moving data and applications to the cloud, an organization will not need to maintain network admin skillsets, rather what will be more in demand will be the ability to interact with and extract data from the cloud using programmatic interfaces.  Increasingly, the choice of the interface is REST based as is witnessed by Amazon Web Services.  So the question arises, if an organization is 100% cloud-based for all of its IT services, is their a role for a network admin?  Increasingly, the answer appears to be "no".

NAS & CD Collection

I successfully finished ripping my complete CD collection, which is probably only about 400 CDs.  Now, I can stream it using DAAP and have any iTunes client pick it up.  (Too bad that Songbird does not have solid, built-in support for DAAP.  I had only mild success with the DAAP plugin.)  What is really cool is that my complete CD collection only took up 1% on my NAS:

Cloud Computing in Plain English Video

An exceptionally well done video that effectively and concisely explains "cloud computing", its origins, the value proposition, etc.  Highly recommend to watch it a couple of times!!

Link

Update:

Another good video about cloud computing.

Link

Wifi Extender, Xbox360 and Netflix

My current home network setup had a Linksys WRT54G as the primary wifi access point.  It was running DD-WRT.  I increased the transmission signal to 100 and I get wifi coverage throughout all 3 floors of the house even though the wifi access point is in my office, which is upstairs.  Recently, Netflix announced that it is possible to watch the Instant Play movies using an Xbox 360 that has internet access.  I didn’t want to run an ethernet cable from my office to the basement where the XBox and TV are located.  Also, I didn’t want to shell out the money to buy the wireless adapter for the XBox 360.  Instead, I bought a second Linksys WRT54GL and installed DD-WRT.  I then used the built-in capability for WDS (Wirelss Distribution System) so that wifi in the basement is just a bridge.  Initially, I had read that a lot of other people were having trouble getting the wifi configured with WPA and had to use WEP.  This is wholly inadequate.  After a couple of hours of experimenting, I got WPA2 working on it without a hitch.  It has been running stably runnig for the last 2 days.  I signed up for a trial XBox Live account and now I can watch all fo the Netflix Instant Play movies, which is pretty amazing.  Pretty soon, Netflix will offer their whole catalog over the internet.

Now that the network connectivity is set up in the basement, I need to build my NAS server in my office so that I can stream all media from my office to the basement TV.

Here is what the network looks like now:

Multiple Channel Bonding on Linux 2.4

Apparently, the bonding driver needs to be loaded multiple times if you want to bond more than one pair of interfaces.  For example, eth0 and eth1 would be bonded to bond0 and eth2 and eth3 would be bonded to bond1.  This is the line that needs to be added to /etc/modules.conf:

options bond1 -o bonding1 miimon=100

Useful article can be found here: