My walkman

January 9th, 2010

Some of its features:

  • Unlimited songs!
  • No DRMs! Listen and record to whatever you want, legal or not! Just play it. Or record it!
  • Social features: Share your music! Plug two headphone sets, enjoy your favorite tunes with a friend, in stereo! Or switch tapes with your mates. No complicated wireless setup, no waiting for files to be transfered, no internet access required. The best social experience ever!
  • Built-in stereo microphone and line in. Records full quality sounds for as long as you want (with short breaks every 45 minutes)
  • Advanced space duplication algorithm: when you think the media is full, just warp it around and you have 100% more space!
  • No desktop, laptop, tablet, super-computer or any other damn thing with transistors in it required. No software. No platforms. No broadband internet connection. Nothing. It just works.
  • Strong, hard, heavy-duty case. Won’t break, period.
  • Very reliable, can work for decades, even under rough usage (trust me).
  • Replaceable built-in batteries. Can also be powered by external batteries or power supply.

Some photos:

(Unfortunately, I forgot to remove the batteries about 15 years ago… there’s a huge mess inside the battery compartment)

Posted in Generic, Hardware | 1 Comment »

WebObjects, PostgreSQL and DB growing, and growing, and growing…

July 12th, 2009

One of the databases that support our application has some tables where data is updated very frequently. In PostgreSQL world, this means the table must be vacuumed very frequently to remove the old versions of the updated rows, clearing up space for new rows or new versions of existing rows. On very frequently updated tables, where insertions occur occasionally, but updates very often (several per second), recent versions of PostgreSQL should trigger their auto-vacuum daemon at a very high rate, like every 2 or 3 minutes, for those tables.

Despite this, our database kept growing like crazy, with no apparent reason. I decided to investigate what was going on.

The vacuum verbose is a neat command you can use in the PostgreSQL console to check what’s going on with the built-in cleaning service. This will run a vacuum on every table, giving you extensive report on how many used and unused rows exist in each table, and how many of the unused were deleted and their space reclaimed by PostgsreSQL.

The most interesting output of this command are the lines (one per table) like: DETAIL: 2942 dead row versions cannot be removed yet.. This means you have, in this example, 2942 rows on that table that are not used any more, but for some reason, vacuum was not able to delete them.

Browsing the web, I found out the most probable cause of this issue is the existence of a transaction that started a long time ago, and never finished. PostgreSQL will only delete rows older than the start timestamp of the oldest transaction still running. Newer versions might be needed by those transactions, so they are kept in place, even if their death sentence is already declared.

So, I started looking at what was going on inside the database engine, searching for those pending transactions. A lot of useful information about the current status of a PostgreSQL database can be found in many tables that exist in memory during PostgreSQL execution, that can be queried as any regular table. The one that was important for me was pg_stat_activity, which contains a list of all the current transactions.

By running the select * from pg_stat_activity; SQL command, I saw that each instance of my application had create two database connections, and for each instance, one of the connections had a transaction that started at the time the application instance was launched, but never committed or rolled back.

After some time of poking around, reading code, and talking to the right people, the problem was revealed. By default, WebObjects applications will open two connections to each database they talk to. One for the actual data queries, and the other to ask the database, at startup time, for what’s called the jdcb2info. This is a bunch of information needed to map between PostgreSQL and Java data types. And, due to one of those very old bugs that strangely nobody fixed yet that make WO fun, the transaction where that information is requested is never committed. So, the transaction will remain open, and PostgreSQL won’t vacuum a thing until you quit your application.

Although there’s not yet a solution for the problem itself (hopefully there will be, as I filled a bug in Radar), you can avoid it, by using the jdcb2info bundled in the PostgreSQL plugin instead of requesting it from the DB. To do this, simply append ?useBundledJdbcInfo=true to your DB connection URL, like jdbc:postgresql://localhost/dbname?useBundledJdbcInfo=true. This way, the second connection is not created at all, and no pending transaction will occur.

And of course, after doing this, the DB happily vacuumed hundreds of thousands of dead rows and stopped growing like crazy. Also, a tip: if you really need to vacuum the database right now, but you can’t stop your apps and interrupt service, simply obtain the pids of the PostgreSQL processes that are maintaing the offending connections from the pg_stat_activity table, and kill them, using the unix command kill <pid> command. The connections will die, but your apps will not.

Posted in PostgreSQL, WebObjects | 1 Comment »

WWDC 2009

June 18th, 2009

Contrarily to WOWODC, I didn’t like WWDC at all this year. Some reasons for that were:

  • The IT track (the one that is of most interest for me) was very poor on this WWDC edition. There were a few talks about OS X Server and some of it’s new technologies, and that was it.
  • There was one (yes, one) talk about Java. This is ridiculous, specially if you consider that, a few years ago, Apple was selling the Mac as the best platform for developing and deploying Java applications. The first time I was at WWDC, 2006, there were a few Java sessions with interesting content. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cocoa, but some people need decent Java support to work.
  • No WebObjects content at all. The only official note about WebObjects was an announcement of an announcement that should happen within weeks. I don’t have any more details (and if I had, they would be under NDA, of course). This is sort of understandable, as they focused their attention on WOWODC, but it makes WWDC kind of pointless for people working on WebObjects projects in full time.
  • They somehow managed to serve even worse food than last year. Those guys must have some special talent, I thought it could not get worse than last years, buy they crossed that barrier at full speed. Also, there was no food on monday of tuesday evening, making it a little hard to eat and get back to watch the Apple Design Awards ceremony on time.
  • There were attendees distributing flyers and merchandising material inside the Moscone, despite the fact that doing that is clearly against the conference rules. Many people that attend WWDC work for some company, but a large part of the attendees own their own business, and everyone would love to promote it. But this is not a consumer exhibition, it’s a developer conference, with well defined rules, and people must respect them. What pissed me even more was the fact that the same flyers were distributed every day, by the same people, and no one from security kicked those guys out. It kinda looked like Portugal, where people break the laws with no apparent consequences.
  • Moscone center was at the limit of it’s capacity, and that showed. Although they could arrange the room sizes and session schedule way better than last year (I could attend all the sessions I wanted, which didn’t happen last year due to some of the rooms being full), there were not enough seats (either on the round tables, or the sofas) on the halls. On the first days it was really hard to find a place to rest for a while, or to write some lines of code.

I think Apple should seriously consider moving to a larger space, or breaking the WWDC in two separate conferences. Maybe one for newbies and another one for advanced users, or one for iPhone OS and another one for Mac and IT. I believe the WWDC is becoming less interesting every year, and the numbers back me up.

Apple claims that 60% of the attendees at WWDC 09 were first timers. Given that they sold out in 2008 and 09, and the Moscone capacity was the same on both events (around 5200 attendees), clearly a lot of people that came to 08 didn’t find it very interesting to come back this year. The fact that they sold out is based on the iPhone SDK hype, but people seem to be not coming back on the next year. I know I won’t, unless something deeply changes about WWDC.

I could not finish, of course, without congratulating João Pavão and the Sofa team for their well-deserved Apple Design Award on Versions, their SVN client. Really good job, guys! :)

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Posted in Generic | 2 Comments »

WWDC 2009 (Keynote)

June 17th, 2009

I found most of the keynote announcements interesting.

The hardware upgrades on the MacBook Pros were cool. First, Apple seemed to acknowledge that the difference between the unibody MacBook and the MacBook Pro was not strong enough, so the MacBook is dead, long live MacBook Pro. This means the 13 inch laptop has now some of the Pro features, namely Firewire was brought back, in it’s 800 Mbps version. Other nice stuff, like the non-removable high capacity battery and the back-lighted keyboard made their way to the MacBook Pro 13”. The usual CPU speed bumps were there, of course. The only decision that left people a bit confused was the introduction of the SD-card reader. Not only it seems useless (because you may plug any SD-card enabled device to your Mac using USB) but because it kicked out some old features on the Macs that got it. The Express card slot went away on the MacBook 15”, and the Audio in port on the MacBook (now Pro) 13” was replaced by an Audio in/out jack found on the iPhones. Although you can buy an Apple headset to plug there, there’s an obvious question not yet answered, how to record audio from the line in?

The MacBook Air also got some CPU upgrades, and very interesting price cuts. Finally they are not ridiculously overcharging (at least, not as much as they did) the MacBook Air form factor, despite the fact that the machine specs were disappointing. I think they should ship them with 4 GB of RAM instead of 2 (specially because it’s not upgradable), but despite that it’s becoming a really interesting machine to buy if you travel a lot. The only feature I miss (and I was hoping to find it on this new machines) is a 3G modem, which would avoid carrying one more USB dongle. But they may be because of…

… the iPhone. Apple surprised me with the new iPhone 3GS and the 3.0 version of the OS. Despite the ugly name, the 3GS is a really nice improvement to the old model, and the differences are in the details. Among all, we have:

  • (3GS only) Hardware encryption of all your data. That’s really cool on a device that can easily be lost or stolen. This helps keeping your data private, but it’s not all.
  • Find my iPhone. Every mobile phone user went trough this at least once. You look for your iPhone, but it seems to be nowhere. If it’s somewhere around your house, you just grab the landline phone, call it, and follow the ringtone. But sometimes, no ringtone will sound, and that’s the time you start panicking. Did you left it in the car? Or maybe in a restaurant? Or, worse, someone stole it without you even noticing? Now, if you subscribe MobileMe, you can simply access the service, and ask for the current localization of the phone. If it’s turned on, the iPhone will report it’s current position (based on the usual localization facilites, like GPS or WiFi triangulation) that will be presented on a map. But there’s more: you may ask the phone to make some noise, and display a message with your landline phone number and address, and with luck, someone will pick it up and return it to you, or deliver it to a local police station. There’s the nice detail that the phone will make noise even if it’s set to silent. But, even better, if your phone is lost forever, you can still keep your data private. Just beam it an order to wipe all the data on it, and the phone will start erasing your stuff. If it’s encrypted, the wipe is immediate. Later, if you get back your iphone, just plug it to your Mac, and the content will be restored from your backups (which can also be encrypted, for extra protection).
  • Tethering. This one is big, at least for me. iPhone will share it’s 3G connection either trough the USB cable or Bluetooth. This is awesome, allowing you to pay only one 3G subscription instead of two (one for the phone, and one for the laptop). Also, no more crappy 3G modems with questionable quality drivers.

There are also some nice details, like the faster CPU on the 3GS, MMS support, better camera, etc. The iPhone is becoming more and more interesting, and I may find myself finally getting one, if the portuguese operators manage to sell them for decent (or not very indecent) prices.

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Posted in Generic | No Comments »

WOWODC 2009

June 16th, 2009

So, it’s time to wrap up the annual crazy week in San Francisco. This year, we had a two days conference entirely dedicated to WebObjects (WOWODC 2009) on the weekend right before the week-long WWDC. As I had about 12 hours with nothing to do inside two US Airways planes, I wrote quite a bit of text, that I’ll split into 3 different posts. Here’s the first one, about WOWODC.

WOWODC

WOWODC 2009 was, by far, the best WOWODC ever. Last year’s WOWODC was good, but a large part of the content, although interesting, was stuff not used for the majority of WebObjects developers. This year, the organizers and speakers have decided to talk about stuff used daily by most of the WO developers to get their work done, covering from some nice EOF details to the WO 5.4 templating system, and of course, new Wonder stuff.

But that was not everything. Apple was there too. 16 of the slightly over 100 attendees were Apple employees. One talk (the WO 5.4 templating system) was given by Drew Davidson, from Apple. But, there’s even more: Mike presented Gianduia, a stunning technological preview of a new framework the Apple guys are working on, with an amazing approach to handling Ajax and client-side programming in a logical and powerful way. This is the framework already being used internally by Apple on the One to One application (for those who don’t know, the One to One is a service provided by Apple on it’s stores, with the purpose of assisting users with their computer usage).

Watching Apple employees attending and presenting on non-Apple events is rare, and public previews of what they are working on is almost unimaginable. Yet, it did happen, and it shows how committed Apple is to WebObjects and it’s community.

One interesting detail was the fact that Mike, due to medical reasons, could not be there, so he did his presentations (three of them) using iChat audio conference and screen sharing. It was amazing how well it did go (specially with the crappy network the hotel provided us). Mike did an amazing job on this, and it really seemed like he was there with us.

Above all, I want to thank all speakers, all the Apple people who went there (including Pierre who is making an important effort inside Apple to push WebObjects forward), and above all, Pascal Robert, and he’s incredible personal (and financial) effort that, once again, made WOWODC happen, and in style.

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Posted in Apple, WebObjects | No Comments »

FireFox 3: the evaluation order bug is back

April 19th, 2009

A few months ago, I wrote about a Javascript evaluation order bug I hit on Firefox 3. I managed to create a workaround and everything was going fine. I assumed the bug had been fixed on the subsequent minor releases of Firefox.

Some time ago, that same page started to be the target of some bug reports stating that users would occasionally get a blank page when accessing it, and the only way to get the page back was to hit reload. This was happening on Firefox 3.0.7 and newer.

As I wrote on the previous post, our page does an RPC call while loading the header scripts, like this:

<script src="/some/path/prototype.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/effects.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/wonder.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/english.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/combo.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/feedback.js"></script>
<script src="/some/path/jsonrpc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var jason = new JSONRpcClient("proxyUrl");
</script>
<script src="/some/path/comboboxes.js"></script>
...

After poking around with Firebug, I discovered that all the code below the call was being ignored by the Firefox parser. That would naturally result in an empty body, which lead to a blank page.

I started googling around, and I found two interesting Firefox bug reports, 444322 and 478277.

The first of those bugs mentions the original Javascript evaluating order issue I wrote about before (which was not, in fact, a JavaScript evaluating order, but an issue where the parser would not wait for the result of the RPC call to continue parsing). They also mention the Firefox team released a “fix” for it in 3.0.6, but people kept reporting the issue was not yet fixed (some claimed it in fact got worse), which lead to opening the second bug report. Also, an important fact about this bug is that it seems to happen only when all the page resources are already cached locally by the browser. This includes all the resources loaded in the page header (usually, JavaScript and CSS files).

A few interesting comments (#30 and #34) clarify what’s causing this, and mentions this is a piece of “fragile code”. I don’t know enough about the Firefox code base (which is a nice way to say I know nothing at all) to be sure about this, but I believe the “fix” caused an even bigger problem, where, in some conditions, the parser will enter a state where it will simply eat all the input without parsing it. This leads to the blank page problem.

Well, this is all very interesting, but I had a problem that needed to be solved. So, I hacked. On of the things that avoid this bug to be triggered is at least one of the page resources to not exist on the local cache when the page is loaded. So, I forced this situation to happen. I picked up a small JS file that is loaded before the Ajax call, and configured Apache to add all the necessary headers for browsers to not cache it. This is done with something like this:

<Files "somefile.js">
	Header set Cache-Control: "private, pre-check=0,
post-check=0, max-age=0"
	Header set Expires: 0
	Header set Pragma: no-cache
</Files>

This will prevent browsers from caching the file. Remember to to this on a small file, or you’ll be wasting bandwidth and causing the page load time to increase.

Now if only someone would really fix that bug… :)

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Posted in AJAX and Javascript | No Comments »

Apple: be decent

March 27th, 2009

Dear Apple:

When you acquired NeXT, you gained access to two powerful and sibling technologies: Cocoa and WebObjects. Both are built upon stunning and advanced architectural principles, and share many concepts.

A few years later, when you introduced OS X, you promoted Cocoa as the way to build software for Mac. That’s great, because it in fact was a breakthrough compared to what we had to do before (I still remember WaitNextEvent()… ).

Probably because the web was not then what it is now, you decided to not publicly advertise and promote WebObjects, although you saw enough potential on the technology to make it the technical base for all your business. From numerous internal applications to popular industry leading services like Apple Store or iTunes Store, every dollar than gets in or out your company goes trough, at least, one WebObjects app.

This lead to a situation where you made WebObjects evolve according to your needs, barely maintaining a public functional version of the framework. Although the framework by itself is still the one with the most advanced and powerful concepts one can find, the feature gap started to show. This lead to an incredible, amazing, dedicated community to grab the task for themselves and make the work Apple should be doing, adding features, some of them essential for the success of the framework, like XHTML support or Ajax.

So, you’ve just announced WWDC 2009 today. I’m not asking for 18 WebObjects-related sessions like you had in WWDC 2000, because I know that’s unimaginable, given the importance (or lack of it) you attribute to promoting WebObjects. I know there will be one, maybe two, and if we are really lucky, three WebObjects sessions on WWDC 2009. It’s the same every year since I attend WWDC.

But, Apple, you have to tell me… how hard is to respect an entire community, of highly competent and dedicated professionals, who use your technology for years, who kept it alive, who built extensions and IDEs that yourselves are using internally, and adding at least one fucking little reference to WebObjects on the WWDC 2009 IT page? Is it really that hard to do, specially considering you mention other web technologies that are not even made by you?

Or it’s just the iPhone that matters now?

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Posted in Apple, WebObjects | 3 Comments »

WebObjects, SSL, Apache 2.2, FreeBSD problems

February 15th, 2009

I still didn’t have time to investigate this deeply, but here goes anyway, as I didn’t find the answer to this anywhere.

I had the problem described in the Apache 2.2 adaptor: SSL fails on FreeBSD amd64 thread in the WebObjects-Deploy mailing list. As the thread suggests, the problem is not related to 64 bits at all, but with a problem related to the SSL client certificate becoming corrupted somewhere between an SSL request entering apache and leaving to the selected WebObjects application instance.

The thread suggests a little hack in the Wonder’s Adaptor code to ignore the SSL client certificate stuff, but I found that to be a little too dirty. So I dug this as much as time allowed.

I found the adaptor will forward all the SSL http headers it has to the application. This allows the application to analyse the SSL information (like the certificates themselves, the certificate information, etc) if, for some reason, that’s needed. However, the SSL client certificate information is becoming corrupted, and screws up the request, making it invalid. As the application will not reply to what it believes to be an invalid http request, the adaptor thinks the application is non-responsive, and considers it invalid for some minutes. That’s why the user starts to get the infamous “No instance available” message.

I still don’t know if this is an Apache, mod_ssl, WO Adaptor or whatever bug. But I know how to work around it, avoiding this error. As the problem is related to providing the SSL information to the adaptor, I chose to simply block it. This can be done in the Apache configuration. Just add this to the right context (usually the SSL virtual host configuration block):


SSLOptions -FakeBasicAuth -ExportCertData -StrictRequire -StdEnvVars

This will hide all the SSL information from the adaptor, avoiding the error. I’ll try to dig this a little more if I have some free time and update this post.

Posted in FreeBSD, WebObjects | 1 Comment »

Apple 2009 wish list

January 2nd, 2009

It’s a brand new year. So here’s my wish list for Apple:

  • Please fix the wireless driver that causes my Mac to crash about 10% of the times I turn Airport off.
  • Please fix the trackpad driver, or whatever is causing the trackpad to behave strongly erratic during about 30 seconds after waking the Mac up.
  • Please fix the damn copy/paste bug that makes the paste command paste the previously copied object and not the most recent one. This is specially irritating when you cut a piece of text, paste and you realize you are pasting something else, and that your supposedly cut piece of text is lost forever, unless you can undo and get it back.
  • Please fix the irritating bug that causes an iChat window to keep being the active one even after I click Safari, making its window go in front of iChat’s. That’s specially annoying when I type apple-W to close the Safari window, and the ichat one goes away.
  • Please provide replacement keyboards for people who has pre-unibody MacBook Pros that, you know, actually sense a keystroke every time the key goes all the way down, without the need to almost punch the key.
  • Please fix whatever is causing my father’s MacBook Pro to keep waking up and going back to sleep when the lid is closed and the charger on, despite I had already turned off every god damn thing that could wake it up, including the lid open event.
  • Speaking about the charger, please provide chargers where the charge light doesn’t go off for some unknown reason. It still works, but it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in it ans it’s safety.
  • Please provide granular updates to Mac OS X Server. Please please please pretty please.
  • Please care a little more about the entreprise and IT markets, namely your own web application technology (WebObjects, of course).

Thank you, guys! You must hate me but you’re nice people anyway. Sometimes.

Posted in Apple, Generic, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, WebObjects | 1 Comment »

Stardom SOHORAID review

December 13th, 2008

Backups are vital for keeping your data safe, but keeping them in the same physical place as the backed up data has some drawbacks. If your house or office catches fire, or some natural disaster occur, you loose all your data anyway. If the place is robbed, there’s a high probability that the burglars take all the hardware they can find, backup disks included (and it happens to many people, unfortunately, including some indie mac developers).

Facing that, and having the possibility of easily keeping a backup media offsite, I started looking for a solution. My requirements were simple: it had to be fully automatic and give me zero work, besides the obviously needed physical transportation. As I already had a backup system in place (using Retrospect and a backup disk) it was easy to conclude that a nice solution would be a RAID system with swappable drives. This way I could have two mirrored drives online, and a third one offsite. Every time I switch drives, it’s just a matter of taking out one of the drives and later inserting the one that was kept away. The RAID system will rebuild the mirror and, most important, I would have to do nothing!

After searching for a while, I was recommended the Startdom SOHORAID line of products. Don’t be fooled by the crappy site, because, as we are about to see, the product actually surprised me for it’s quality.

There are two models, the SR3610 and the SR3620. The SR3610 is actually the best one, including an LCD display for easy configuration and system monitoring. The SR3620 only has one option, USB2 + external SATA interface, while the SR3610 comes in two options, USB2 + external SATA or USB2 + Firewire 800

As the machine that is driving the system is a PowerMac G5, my first idea was to buy the firewire 800 model. But I ended up getting the USB + eSATA SR3610 option due to a mix of reasons. The first one, the price. The Firewire 800 model was much more expensive (about 70 euros). Also, facing the fact that Apple is moving away from Firewire and that the reliability of firewire controllers is not that great, I ended up opting for the USB + eSATA model. This model has an additional fan to help keeping the system cooler.

I decided that, as the RAID would be only used for backups, USB would be enough. But the Stardom came with an eSATA to SATA bracket that allowed me to turn an internal SATA port in an external one. As I would not need the internal backup disk any more, I got a free SATA port on the G5 and used this bracket to plug the RAID directly to the SATA interface. It was a nice way of adding an eSATA port to the Mac without having to buy a PCI eSATA card.

Stardom sells their RAIDs under OEM to many manufactures, including WiebeTech. As there’s already an extensive and incisive review of a WiebeTech SilverSATA II Dual Bay SATA Enclosure online (which is exactly the same product as Stardom’s) I won’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, I’ll add some points to Arthur’s great work:

Power supply

One thing that surprised me in the Stardom system was the quality of the power supply. As you can see in this Arthur’s photo, the power supply is not an external made-in-china low quality brick, but it’s built in the case itself. And those big capacitors are actually making great work there. Remember on the old Macs where you would turn off their switch, and they would take about half a second to actually power down? Well, here is the same thing. After cutting off the power, the system will still work for about the same time. This is great to avoid quick power cuts, and shows the power supply appears to be relatively immune to bad quality mains power.

Interface

The LCD panel + control buttons were actually a deception (the only one). First, the menu system is complicated and non-intuitive to use. A good example is the RAID mode, that can be switched between 0 and 1. When you get to the RAID mode menu, it will display one of the modes… that is actually the mode the system is not in. The idea is that, if you want the RAID mode to be that one, you press the ENT button. Well…

But there’s worse. The LCD display, during normal operation, displays the status of both drives. If you try to do anything else, including monitoring the system temperature of fan speed, the RAID operation will stop. The LCD will display a warning about this, and if you confirm, no disk activity will occur while you are on the menu system. This is pretty bad, because you won’t be able to constantly monitor the system health during operation.

Also, I have noticed that, sometimes during the internal controller initialization, after powering on or resetting, the LCD panel will display random characters. Despite being scary, it has no apparent side effects related to the data consistency and disk operation.

Finally, I also don’t get what the drive leds are supposed to mean. Each drive has an operation led on it. When writing data, the leds on both drives will light up. When reading, sometimes only the upper drive led lights up, and sometimes no led lights up at all. At first I thought the system was only reading from one drive, but according to the speed tests I made, both drives must be in usage, as a single disk cannot sustain the +70 MB/s I got (you can see more speed tests in Arthur’s review). So I suppose this is just a controller bug, again, without any visible harmfull effect on the data reliability or normal RAID operation.

Bottom line, this is something that Stardom needs to improve.

RAID reliability

As I intend to keep removing and inserting drives in this thing, I wanted to be sure how reliable the RAID system was. To test that, I created a RAID mirror using two disks, and copied some big video files to it. To test the consistency during the tests I describe next, I used the command line md5 tool to create a hash of the original file (on the G5’s internal drive) and the files in the RAID. As long as both hashes are the same, the files are not corrupt.

First, I did the obvious: removed a drive. A very loud “beep” started sounding from inside the box, and the status led turned yellow. I pressed the mute button to bring back the peace, and tested consistency. Everything OK. Then I inserted the drive I had just removed. The system started rebuilding the RAID. I did consistency checks during and after the RAID rebuilding process, and everything was OK.

But this is lame. The system did what is supposed to do. Big deal. Next test was a little more agressive. I removed a drive again, and reinserted it. The rebuilding operation started as expected. Then, at about 2% of the rebuilding process, I turned the system off, to simulate a power failure. As this is not exactly a high-end expensive RAID system, I expected a disaster. Well, much to my surprise, not only the system started rebuilding the RAID mirror immediately after being powered on again, as it actually knew where it was before being turned off, and resumed the process from there! Again, consistency checks were done during and after the process, and everything was fine. Thumbs up for the Stardom people!

Noise

This thing has two hard drives, a RAID controller and a power supply inside it, so it really needs to cool itself down. Cooling down means generally fans, and fans mean noise. On of the great things I felt when I upgraded from a PowerMac G4 to a G5 was how silent my office become. The PowerMac G5 has very high-quality fans that turn only as fast as needed, which means they turn very slowly and quietly most of the time. I was afraid the Stardom enclosure would bring the noise back.

To my surprise, it’s much more silent than I expected. Arthur told that in his review, and I do the same: you’ll hear mostly the air flow through the enclosure and not the fans themselves. Of course, it makes noise, and it’s clearly louder than the G5, but it’s not that bad. To get an idea of it, if you play some game on a MacBook Pro and bring its fans up to full speed, the MacBook Pro becomes much more noisier than the Stardom RAID.

Conclusion

The Stardom SOHORAID seems to be a great system, specially being cheaper than most concurrent products. It’s very reliable, and seems to be made out of quality components. It’s also fast (if used through the eSATA interface) and quiet. The only bad thing about it is the user interface, specially the fact that using it will halt the normal RAID operation.

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Posted in Hardware | 13 Comments »

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