As part of the laptop to desktop transition, I wanted more storage for the Mac Mini, but I wanted some redundancy, so I picked up a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II. It came in yesterday after a bobble with FedEx on Friday. Seriously, FedEx, if the package is shipped to a residential address and requires a signature, 10:30 AM on a work day pretty much guarantees that you’re going to be coming back out. That being said, I am very impressed with the fit and finish of the actual device. It looks good, is very quiet, and was easy to set up.

And that’s where the wheels came off. I couldn’t keep the finder stable with the raid manager running, so I uninstalled it. It then started playing nice, or at least I thought so. Until I checked the overnight SuperDuper! backup. It failed because the MyBook nuked the entire FireWire bus. So at that point I yanked it, installed it on the HTPC via eSATA, changed it to RAID 0, and started a backup of my DVD library (all 4 terabytes of it). It did all of that without a hitch, so it’s going to stay attached there so that I’ve got a backup copy of months of DVD and BluRay ripping.

Oh, and I’ve got a Newer Tech Guardian Maximus on order for more storage for the Mini. It should be in on Wednesday.

I put my MacBook Pro up for sale and got a taker pretty quickly, so I ordered a new MacBook Air. It’s the 11″, 4 gig RAM, 128 gig SSD model. I decided on the Air, even though it’s a little lower powered compared to the Pros, because it’s small enough to travel with on the motorcycle. My current travel computer has been a Acer Aspire One netbook, and while it’s been ok in that role, having a full featured Mac would be a lot better.

It came in this evening, and once I finished my homework I got started unboxing it and getting it set up. It really is small, but it feels a lot more solid than the netbook. I got the basics done this evening, OS configured, browser and mail clients set up, and MS Office installed. One thing I can say is that even though it’s got relatively low clock speed processor, it does not feel sluggish. I’m attributing a lot of that to the SSD, but even at that low of a clock rate the Core i5 processor is still plenty powerful enough for everything I’ve thrown at it so far.

After having to troubleshoot an outage while in Iowa I started looking around for a good dedicated hosting provider. Thanks to some great recommendations from friends I’ve got a dedicated server at Sprocket Networks up and running. DNS has been moved, databases synced, all web content transferred, etc. It’s alive and kicking. All I’ve got left are a couple scripts, one to keep my mail safe via off-site backups, and some additional security measures. But at least now everything’s on real server hardware in a real datacenter.

So China got caught (again) doing what every country on the planet with more than a 56K dialup connection to the Internet does and now there’s a big stink about espionage and all the hacking attempts coming from there.

Duh!

There’s an easy solution to this issue.  Snag my script and start blocking China (or any other country) in and out of any in/out point of any of your networks that might have things you don’t want shared with Beijing.

What’s that?  You do business or need to be contacted by folks over there?  Great!  Snag my script, protect your real networks, and put a completely isolated web site, mail server, whatever else you need out there in a datacenter that has no connections to your main networks so that even if it gets compromised, who cares.

If you’re not a small fry, you can still use the data provided by the nice folks over at IPDeny to build a rule set for your hardware firewall or other device.

Really people, this isn’t that hard.

I’ve been hacking around with this for a while now and have it in a workable state.  It’s a script that grabs the latest netblocks for the configured countries from IPDeny.com and loads them in to IPTables rules.  It’s perl and depends on you having the IPTables::IPv4 module installed, but it’s fast and just blocking China and Korea has cut way down on my spam and intrusion attempts.

I went down to the Apple Store today and picked up a new MacBook Pro thanks to my student discount.  It’s a 13″ model and is definitely a lot more portable than the 17″ I’m replacing.  I also brought home one of the 24″ cinema displays and I’m really impressed with it.  I’m no tech reviewer so I’ll save that for people who make a living at it, but the laptop’s faster and cooler (no more cooked lap!) and the monitor is big and bright.  I’ve got to get the 17″ sold and I’m still waiting for the larger drive I ordered to arrive.  Right now I’ve got about 6 gigs of space free on the current, stock drive.

I just got back from the Apple store with a new battery after my original one gave up the ghost. 11 charge cycles (yeah, I know, but I run it on AC power most of the time) and it was showing 169 mAh total capacity. They agreed and replaced it with a new one, which is currently charging. It didn’t quite pay for itself, but the plan came close.