Microsoft SyncToy v2.0

Posted on October 29th, 2008 webmaster No comments          Print

I needed something simple to backup some files at work to an external drive.  At first, I thought about writing a simple script to do it.  Then I saw a short article about SyncToy from an old issue of Windows IT Pro magazine so I decided to give it a try and I’m glad I did!

SyncToy v2.0 is a free software from Microsoft that lets you “copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily.”  You can also schedule it to run using the Windows Task Scheduler.

I’ve only been using it for a few days and so far it’s working great!

You can download it directly from Microsoft’s website: SyncToy v2.0

FreeNAS

Posted on October 27th, 2008 webmaster 1 comment          Print

Here’s a pretty cool open source software that you can install on an old machine to use as a network-attached storage (NAS).  It runs on FreeBSD and you can even install it on flash drives (installation including the FreeBSD OS is less than 64MB).

It supports popular services such as CIFS/SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iTunes/DAAP, and UPnP.  It even has a BitTorrent client!  All of these can be managed from a web interface.

I haven’t tried all the services but those that I have seem to work pretty well (CIFS, FTP, SSH, UPnP, and BitTorrent).  There is also an option for Active Directory authentication but after I enabled it, it seems to give access to the shares to everyone when using CIFS/SMB, including computers not in the domain I specified (I’m using version 0.69b4).  So I ended up just using Local User Authentication instead.  I created an account with the same username and password as my domain account so I don’t get prompted for credentials when I try to access it.

The UPnP service also worked great with my PS3 and very simple to set up.  Just enable it, add the content you wish to share, select one of the preconfigured profiles or choose custom, enable transcoding and select the temporary directory for transcoded files and that’s pretty much it.

I also really like the BitTorrent client.  Very nice and simple web interface.

I’m running it as a virtual machine on my home network using VMware ESXi.  Installation is pretty straightforward: create a new virtual machine, create a virtual disk for the OS and the FreeNAS software (I allocated 100MB which is more than enough), create an additional virtual disk to store your files, map the FreeNAS ISO image to your virtual CD-ROM drive (connect at power on) and power on the the virtual machine.  Once the ISO image is loaded, choose the option to install FreeNAS to disk.  After that, choose the option to set the LAN IP address and once that’s set just open your browser, point it to that IP address and you can manage everything from here.

Default login is admin/freenas.

Website:  http://www.freenas.org

Dell PowerEdge SC440

Posted on October 26th, 2008 webmaster No comments          Print

I got my Dell PowerEdge SC440 on Tuesday and I’ve been busy all week installing software on it and redoing my entire home network.

The hardware itself looks very well built, it weighs about 40 lbs.  The inside looks very neat.  There are 4 SATA ports but there are only 2 hard drive trays so if you need to use more than 2 hard drives you’ll need to use the CD-ROM trays.  I ordered mine with just 1 hard drive and I bought an additional 1TB SATA drive from newegg.com (around $120).  Installing the hard drive was pretty straightforward, just make sure you get a 36 in. (3 ft.) SATA cable if you want to run the cable the proper way.  This server is also very quiet.

The first thing I did with it was install VMware ESXi (VMware ESX Server 3i, 3.5.0, 110271).  It installed with no problems, it found my onboard NIC and onboard SATA controller.

I’m currently running 4 virtual machines on it (2 Windows 2003 Server, 1 Fedora Core 9, and 1 FreeBSD) and it’s running great with plenty of resources left for more VMs .

More pics: