Lime-Technology has released 4.3 Beta 2 as of yesterday.

“Changes from 4.3-beta1 to 4.3-beta2
———————————–

Bug fix: Restore missing ‘installpkg’ script.

Bug fix: Fixed possible user share crash if top-level disk directories contain ordinary files.

Bug fix: Fixed warning message generated by ‘find’ when searching user shares.

Bug fix: Fixed problem reporting correct hostname to DHCP server.”

You can download it from here.

MyMovies has also released PR5, which resolves a few more issues (thank god I can access my box sets again).   You can get it from here.

I’m currently upgrading MyMovies, but will not be applying the unRAID upgrade until I get home this time :)

Last week’s failure to boot was a fluke as it just hung loading the bzimage.  A hard reset brought everything up just fine.

That’s right…grab it while it’s hot. unRAID Server 4.3 Beta1 is available and, although it is a beta, contains some features that I know I have been anxiously awaiting.

From the unRAID site,

“The first main change in the 4.3 release is an upgrade to the linux 2.6.24.3 kernel. This kernel includes numerous driver updates and bug fixes. Hopefully the Realtec driver issues are behind us now. Another notable feature of this kernel is SATA Port Multipler support. This works with SIL313x host cards talking to SIL-based port multipliers. Finally, unRAID OS now supports up to 4GB main system RAM (though still only single-core).

The next main change in the 4.3 release is an almost total re-write of the User Share pseudo-file system [this is what delayed this release by a few days]. It is now possible to create objects (files & directories) directly on disk shares and have them immediately show up in the corresponding user share. The new user share file system is now much more memory efficient, and it should be possible to use very high ’split-level’s if that’s what you want to do.

We also added the vsftpd FTP server. In this release, there are no user controls for this yet – it’s just pre-configured to allow any defined user to log in & that user will have full access to all shares, both disk shares and user shares. Configuration controls in the System Management Utility will be added in a subsequent beta release.“

I’m especially excited about the fix for the User Shares as I experience the ‘update’ problem. I’m also thrilled that port multiplier support has been added. I was basing my entire build on support for this since I intend on going with a RocketRAID 2314 when it’s time to expand beyond the four onboard SATA ports. The RocketRAID 2314 has four eSATA ports, each supporting port multipliers. The external drive enclosure I bought also comes in a port multiplier version. I’m all set.

The increase to 4GB of memory also affects me as I future-proofed and went with 2GB (previous maximum was 1GB). The FTP server may come in handy at some point.

I did attempt an upgrade from work to the new 4.3b1 and it seems as though my server has failed to boot. I’m not sure of the cause as of yet though. It’s either waiting for user input, which isn’t going to happen since no one is home, or it really failed to boot – which would suck. I’ll be sure to post about my experiences one way or the other.

You can get the new, or older versions, here.

I’ve included a link to my online MyMovies Collection. I’m currently in the process of getting it all synced up, so only about 5% of my collection is actually up there. I had always imported info from IMDB and added my own custom movie info, but never realized that this affected the functionality of the online collection feature. Now that MyMovies has removed IMDB importation, I’m going through and using the web service to update my titles. I’ve been able to contribute some in the meantime (370+ points in the past couple of days).

Considering I don’t have a very high contribution total, the cover images will be of low quality. Also, I want to add a disclaimer for myself. Some titles may show up that aren’t even on DVD yet. These are just on my “Wish List”, of sorts. There is such an option in MyMovies, but if I use it, I’ll forget to bring the movie online. So, hold your horses before screaming, “Arrrrrr…Pirate!”

Link to the collection is under Projects.  For the exceptionally lazy, this is a direct link to it.

Gamacky (from the Mymovies forum) has created a hack for MyMovies 2.43PR4 that allows for 6 thumbnails per row instead of the typical 4 on a 16:9 display. You can follow the progress in this thread.

This is a great little hack. For those of us who have hundreds (I have over a thousand) movies in their database, it can take 30 minutes to scroll through them all when looking for something to watch. This puts more on the screen at once and should really help.

If you do this hack, make sure you backup all the .htm files that it replaces first. I’ve tried it on one of mine and it works, but it is a hack, afterall…

Update

Apparently, the thread has been yanked. I’m going to assume the developer for MyMovies pulled the thread. I don’t blame him for not wanting hacks posted on his own forum…they can lead to dirty support issues. If there is continued interest, I can provide the files necessary. Just register with a valid email and leave a comment requesting it.

Thought I’d share this since I’ve spent the better part of the evening trying to figure this out. Last night MyMovies started becoming unresponsive and browsing the movies share in Video Library was next to impossible. I have no idea what brought this on as this system has proven to be very reliable over the past few months of nearly 24/7 operation. The server wasn’t rebuilt until this morning, so it counted that out. The only real change has been the addition of the Intel Pro1000 NIC that was added. I’m not convinced by that theory, however.

The system could access all other shares (from other systems) with no problem at all, including the new unRAID server. Despite this, I figured I would do a complete reinstall. A week ago I had replaced the motherboard in this system without doing a reinstall afterwards. They were so comparable, I didn’t see the point (P5L-MX to a P5B-MX). Irregardless, they had the same Attansic/Atheros L1 PCIe adapter onboard.

Long story short, the reinstall did not help matters. I ended up disabling a pesky little Vista network “feature” called Receive Window Auto-tuning to get things working again. I’m not going to get into what this is because that’s not the point (if you really want to know, here’s a good article on it). The point is to make it go away.

First, I disable UAC on my HTPCs. If you haven’t, do it. If you don’t know how or don’t want to, then use RunAs to open a command prompt with an administrator account. If you don’t know how to do that, then you need to spend some time on Google and come back :)

At the command prompt, you want to type in this:

c:\>netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Be sure to reboot afterwards for it to take effect (I never saw mention that a reboot was required, but things did not get better or me until I did).

If you want to turn it back on, just redo the command but change the disabled to normal. There is also a restricted level that may work well without outright disabling it, but I wasn’t interested in that since this is a dedicated HTPC.

Hope this helps! Leave any comments or suggestions you may have.

The media server that I’m phasing out of primary file serving duties was based on the craptacular VIA PT890 chipset. Single-channel memory and no features worth mentioning. I had a spare Asus P5L-MX sitting around that was replaced by a P5B-MX for my bedroom HTPC client (I blew some CPU pins doing a BSEL mod to the E2140). I thought the board was a bit iffy, but after replacement, I found that the same standby issues were still there. I’m assuming Vista just doesn’t like these boards (I later found that there are S3 issues with the P5L). So, even though the board has some blown out pins, they must be null and not important.

The P5L is based on Intel’s ICH7, so it has dual-channel memory suuport. It also has onboard video and GbE LAN. I disabled the LAN in favor of the Intel PRO1000 I have, but I’ll have the option of dual-homing later, if I find a need to. I’m not sure the Attansic LAN is compatible anyway…I tried it once before and could only get 10Mbps out of it (could have been an incorrect driver).

I also added a 36GB Raptor for the OS. The OS was previously installed on a 20GB partition of the 320GB drive that’s in it. That should also add to the responsiveness of the system. I’m hoping for a little better performance on the MyMovies end since this is the server for it. Sharing the covers is fine since I modified the registry to allow the covers and actor photos to be loaded on a 256MB RAMDrive. MSSEE must be installed on C:\, however, so the Raptor should help on the database side. Being able to run SQL in memory space over supported dual-channel should really improve things too.

I’ll find out later how everything turned out. SP2 is installing now and all that will be left is to load up MyMovies and make the adjustments for it. I really wish PR4 was out…that would make this upgrade almost perfect.

OK, I’ve seen this on countless forums, blogs, and other home theater/network sites and I wanted to get this out to all of you who have not yet experienced the inconvenience of disabled null sessions on Windows 2003 Server when trying to connect to a share with your HTPC.

For those that don’t know what I mean by “null session”, I mean connecting to a share when your system has a blank password. 2003 Server does not like this and screams, “Halt! Who goes there?” You must then enter a username/password that it recognizes. By design, this is desirable. 2003 Server was not created to give the home theater crowd warm fuzzies. It was created with security in mind. So how do we connect to our shares with a blank password? I’m going to tell you.

The most common information available is to start hacking away at the Group Policy Management entries under Network Access, some things about SMB signing, selling your unborn son, and sacrificing a chicken at the next equinox. I don’t know what an equinox is and chickens scare me, so I decided to come up with an answer that works. Windows system administration is what I do, so you can risk taking my advice or not. Either way, I’m enjoying password-free file sharing on Win2K3 Server.

We are going to need to change a (yes, one) Group Policy setting, so go to Start -> Run -> and type gpedit.msc and hit Enter. Expand Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> Accounts:Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only. Set this from the default Enabled to Disabled. Exit and reboot the system. That’s really all there is to it. You do have to have an account created on the server for any users attempting to access shares, however. So, make sure you do that. Also, make sure your shares are set up correctly. If this does not work for you, then something else is wrong in your setup (whether it be a user account or share permission/security issue).

Hope this helps. Please leave any comments or suggestions you may have!

Last night I put on The Condemned as I had not seen it and was in the mood for some action. Once it started, I noticed that there was something odd about the way it was displayed on the screen. I knew it was a 16:9 movie and I have a 37″ Hannspree XV37 widescreen LCD in my bedroom, but it was displayed more like a 4:3 movie with no black bars. Something was wrong.

I have this movie in Blu-Ray, so I checked it out. Sure enough, it’s in 1.78:1 widescreen. I then used MediaInfo to check the details of the mp4 I had encoded. I reduce the resolution to an acceptable one for most all my HD movies. It saves on space and still provides an excellent picture. For this one, I used a resolution of 800×448. However, for some odd reason, it had a PAR (picture aspect ratio) of 1.5:1. Crap.

Well, I’m pretty picky about things like this and I refused to watch the movie. But I’m also too stubborn to submit myself to ripping and encoding this thing all over again. What ever will I do?

After some Internet scrounging, I found out that MP4Box can alter the PAR. I already had YAMB installed, so I just took the MP4Box executable out of there and dropped it in my C:\Windows directory. I coped The Condemned to a local directory from my server and renamed it to take out the space, then ended up using this command:

C:\>mp4box -par 1=1:1 x:\archange\condemned.mp4

After it completed the ISO writing, I opened it up in MediaInfo and voila! 800×448 (16/9) love! I renamed it, copied it back over to my server, and went back to bed to watch Band of Brothers instead.

So, if by mistake, you or your encoding software incorrectly sets your PAR to something other than the intended one for your mp4 files, this is a good way to change it. Keep in mind that it may not always be 1=1:1, however. I ended up having to change a couple of others using 1=8:9 (which is 4:3 fullscreen) and 1=32:27 (which is 16:9 widescreen). These were encoded in true DVD resolutions of 720×480, but were showing a 1:1, which made them display at 1.5:1. For fullscreen material, this looks very close. It’s not acceptable for widescreen, however.

I could get into PAR, SAR (sample aspect ratio), and/or DAR (display aspect ratio), but I’m afraid I’d just confuse my point here. I’d probably confuse myself as it can be harder to preach than practice.

Hope this helps someone out. Let me know what you think (comment/register). Happy encoding!

I’m going to have to backtrack a few days now that the server has been up-and-running since Wednesday. I had planned a very thorough setup, but I’m not going to go through with that anymore. The Project Gallery entry gives enough background so that I don’t have to do that. Plus, I followed the unRAID installation instructions to the letter, so I don’t see any point in repeating them. I will, however, explain a few of the “gotchas” I encountered on the way.

The first problem I encountered happened to be with only one of three drives being detected within the BIOS. I knew the enclosure was not the issue as the populated bays were all orange when powering it on for the first time. That left the connection from the rear of the enclosure to the SATA ports on the motherboard. After closer inspection, I found the culprit. The eSATA cables I bought were not capable of being plugged all the way into the ports on the back of the external enclosure. As you can see, the ports are located very closely to the edge of the cutout in the back of the enclosure.

The eSATA cables were not really at fault since they’re all pretty much made the same way. The molded shroud was hitting the back of the case and not allowing it to be inserted all the way. The two top ports were fine, but it was the two bottom ones that I was having difficulty with. Therefore, only SATA01 showed up. I used a utility knife to cut back about 1/10″ off of the offending part of the shroud. After plugging it back in and entering the BIOS, it was a success. I then continued on to configure the remaining pages of the BIOS, which is where I encountered my second, and more frustrating, issue.

After setting the BIOS according to the recommended settings by the unRAID installation manual (as well as using some technical common sense), I was ready to save and exit. This is where I would begin the immediate reboot and loading of the unRAID OS…except all I received was “BOOT ERROR”. I knew that I had prepared the flash drive correctly. In fact, I initially used the same flash install that was working at work with my VMWare setup. I took the flash back upstairs to my office, reformatted it, used syslinux to set the boot record, and copied the unRAID OS to it once more anyway…just to cover the bases. It was futile. I received three different types of error messages – all indicating no boot device or invalid boot ID. I must have changed settings in the BIOS 30-40 times over the next couple of hours with no love. Even though I was sure that I had set it once before (I don’t know how it would be possible for me to miss after all the combinations of settings made), I enabled a setting that forced all removable devices to appear as fixed disks. I saved and exited and was finally met with the unRAID OS/MEMTEST x86 screen! Success!

After finally making it to the login prompt and connecting to the web administration for the first time, I continued to set up my new unRAID server. I assigned two drives to the data slots, then mounted and formatted them. I did not initally setup theparity drive though. After weeks of reading in the unRAID forum, I came across a tip that saved me several hours of data transfer time. By not enabling the parity drive prior to data migration, transfer rates can be at a maximum since the parity calculation is not taking place concurrently. Since there is the original storage target, there is no need to have the redundancy feature enabled on the unRAID server yet. This definitely helped as I found a transfer with the parity enabled only went about 100Mbps (it would hit 400Mbps+, but fluctuate to nearly a halt while the parity was being computed), whereas without it I average nearly 400MBps over 1TB of data.

After several hours of transferring the data to the drives, it was complete and I could enable the parity. That took about another 5 hours (I’m not real sure as I just let it run, but unRAID estimated 5 hours).

At the moment, I have not assigned my HTPCs to use the unRAID server. I’m just letting it run through a “break-in” period. I’ll probably switch a single system to it first just to see how it’s going to handle the disk spin-down feature. I’m curious as to how long the delay will be for that. I really love the idea since this is an “always on” system and the disks can spin down overnight, when not in use. I have it set to a 2 hour period of inactivity now, but that will be moved up to 1 hour if the delay does not cause issues.

Well, that’s it for my unRAID server build. Please feel free to leave comments, questions, or words of advice.

It’s a slow process starting a blog that’s destined to be more than what you can sign up for at MySpace or the like. I didn’t realize it until now. However, I’m slowly making headway towards getting the information on here, and in the way I want it. There has been a Project Galleries link added to the top menu. Aside from my blog entries, there will be a condensed ‘gallerized’ version of my projects placed there. I have completed the unRAID Server gallery and posted it. The second part is still in the works.