Hurry up and wait

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must begin to consider his tech nerd options. Sure, USB hard drives are convenient, somewhat reliable, and portable, but in a household with two laptops, a wireless connection, and no desktop computer, the vision and dream of a home server starts to take hold. Imagine…near-unlimited storage options, no need to plug in external drives for backup. Properly done, it’s a dream come true.

Secret, stealthy, and secure. It’s as if a ninja would be taking care of all our files.

Earlier this month, I decided that now is the time for our home server. Let’s step back and take a look into my vision for the Ninja server.

1. Ninja should back up our two laptops over our wireless-G LAN at home.
2. Ninja should store all our music and photos, eliminating the need to keep those files on our space-starved MacBook hard drives.
3. Ninja should be accessible through VNC from other home computers and our iPhones.
4. Ninja should have 1TB or more of hard drive space.
5. Ninja needs to be USB 2.0 capable.
6. Ninja should be cheap and not have high initial costs; i.e., what can be offset by selling some of our external hard drives.

Given that we are a Mac household, it would be much easier to run a Mac as our home server. Which model fits the bill? I wasn’t looking to spend more than $100 on the computer itself; as a quaint file server, any of the Macs produced in the last five years would be overkill, both in processing power and on my wallet.

I began perusing the Lancaster Craigslist computer parts board, which has experienced a welcome spike in traffic in the last 6-12 months. After some time and consideration, I decided that I was looking for any model of the Power Mac G4. Most G4 towers are relatively speedy computers, even to this day, and while their power consumption isn’t optimal, the G4 offers amazing expandability options, and with a minor hack, can run the latest Mac OS.

I found a cryptic listing where a fellow was trying to unload his G4 tower and a flatscreen monitor for $300. I have no use for the monitor, since my vision is that Ninja will sit happily in a corner, maybe with the cable modem on top, stealthily serving our files. I bargained down to $75 for just the tower, and picked up the computer that night. While his listing showed a Yikes/Digital Audio-era G4, what I actually bought was an anomaly: a 733mhz “Quicksilver 2002” G4 model. This omission on his part was welcome; the newer computer, the better, and I think I got a very good deal for only $75.

One of the limitations of installing Mac OS 10.5 is that the installer will refuse to run if it senses that the computer is slower than a 867mhz G4. I wanted some of the extra functionality that 10.5 offers, so I attempted a workaround (described here) to install it on Ninja. The workaround involves entering code in Open Firmware to trick the system into believing it’s faster than it really is. I did have an issue with this: my G4 did not want to boot into Open Firmware using the traditional Cmd-Opt-O-F key combo on boot. I’m certain that this problem was due to my Logitech keyboard, whose keymap drivers probably don’t load until later in the boot process. I did some digging and found that holding the programmer’s key during boot (the tiny pinhole button below the power button on the front of the Mac) would allow me to boot straight into Open Firmware.

The main hardware issue with these G4 towers is that their hard drive bus is IDE, and won’t accept drives larger than 128GB or so. Since I want to serve large media files, I purchased a Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card, which was a bit pricey, but comes with a guarantee of plug-n-play Mac compatibility. With it, I purchased a 1TB Western Digital Green SATA hard drive as the main drive for the server. (The stock hard drive with the computer is 80GB, which I’ll keep as the boot volume, and possibly a Time Machine backup for my wife’s laptop.) I also acquired a IOGear USB 2.0 PCI card to connect our external hard drives, since this era of G4 only has USB 1.1. Both the SATA and USB cards plugged and played last night without driver installs or other issues, which was an excellent experience.

Some toys I’ve installed on Ninja so far: iStat Server, which allows me to monitor Ninja’s stats from my iPhone, and a VNC client to login to Ninja for minor maintenance tasks.

What’s left to do? Quite a bit, actually. I need to bring Ninja to its final destination near our cable modem and router, set it up as a shared volume accessible at login on our laptops, map the Pictures and Music folders to Ninja, finalize the Time Machine setup so that backups occur seamlessly over the network, and install Mozy Unlimited to give Ninja an external offsite backup.

Having a Ninja take care of our files…that will be a welcome addition to the family.

Mitch Uncategorized

I appreciate great customer service. Bad customer service means no return visit, and price is usually not a factor in this decision.

Take the Wal-Mart Supercenter in East Lancaster, for example. Cheapest food in town. But many a Lancastrian associates that Wal-Mart with bad customer service, and for good reason. Everyone has their own horror story. Most of the time, if Hayley and I absolutely must shop at Wal-Mart, we choose the more civil location on Fruitville Pike. This is a shame, because the Supercenter location was just renovated and is now one of the nicer Wal-Marts I’ve seen, but the experience there is just as awful as ever.

Now, with car dealers, choices are fewer. I own a Nissan Altima, and within a 10-mile radius of our house, there is only one Nissan dealer that could service my car: Lancaster Nissan, which, surprise, doesn’t have a great customer service reputation in the community, either. Choice is limited. Unlike the more popular car brands, Lancaster Nissan is the only choice here. My brother, who works at a nearby dealer and does a fantastic job of keeping my car in tip-top shape, can only do so much. His shop does not have the right tools to diagnose and fix my Nissan. If the Altima needs more intricate service, there really is no choice other than Lancaster Nissan; driving 30-45 minutes to York or Harrisburg isn’t really an option.

I’ve experienced my own problems with the Lancaster Nissan service department before, “but never quite like this.”

I made an appointment for 7am at the dealer so I could get in and out of there before work. Nick, the desk jockey on my “service team,” quoted a price of $150 for the key and the service. I asked him to break that out, and roughly $95 of the fee was for the key alone! So, cheapskate that I am, of course I brought along my own blank transponder key, which I bought on eBay for $15. Right away, I got a pushback from Nick, “I’m not sure if we can cut that or not, we’ll have to check.”

Turns out the key was approved by the mystery key checker dude in the back, and I sat down and waited to get my key cut. I watched my car go in the garage right away. At 7:50am, 50 minutes after I arrived, Nick strolls out from the desk and informs me that they were not able to cut my key because they did not have the “key code” for my car, and wouldn’t be able to get that until 9am, and could I wait around for that. He also informed me that I had some gasket leaking that would be $65 to fix.

Translation: these people spent 45 or more minutes looking over my car, not even attempting to cut my key, to try to upsell me on a bogus service. Later, I called Nick and related that I was disappointed in the quality of their service. I asked him why he couldn’t have informed me that they couldn’t cut my key within the first few minutes I was there, or, better yet, if they knew that they couldn’t get a key code before 9am, why they didn’t call to preemptively gather the code after I made the appointment the previous day. I was completely calm and collected on this call, but Nick seemed to take extreme offense, and actually said:

“If you are not happy with my customer service, then I don’t want to see you or your car in here again.”

I thought that’s a fairly extraordinary thing to say. Later, I spoke with Keith The Service Manager over the phone, who was just as much of a character as Nick. Keith offered no apologies and had the same d-bag attitude as Nick, which wasn’t a surprise, because I imagine that Keith would be doing the customer service training around there. Envisioning their service department sabotaging my car in future appointments, I chose to take my business elsewhere.

I eventually took my car to Wizard Lock & Safe on Prince Street, and had a wonderful experience. I bought one of their keys and they programmed and cut the key I brought, so we have two keys now. (Who knew they would program and cut car keys like that?) The cost was a little less than the dealer and there was no drama, plus, their store is actually really neat and fun to look around. I’ll go back there if I ever need another key made, or find myself needing a safe or lockbox.

Hayley and I will probably be in the market for some sort of car in the next year or so, and this experience has left a bad taste about the Nissan brand in general. Since there’s no great service option for the brand around here, we’ll probably go Toyota or Honda, because I can’t imagine taking my business to Lancaster Nissan ever again.

Mitch Uncategorized customer service, lancaster nissan

There’s a fantastic discussion thread at Macworld.com where folks are writing about the favorite Mac they’ve ever owned. I had a good time writing my Mac history and thought it might make a good first post to the new blog.

First Mac was in 1992, when the folks bought a LC II and 13″ color monitor from an educational teacher discount program. Mom opted for the somewhat expensive Apple //e card and 5.25″ floppy, but we never really used the //e stuff that much. 4MB RAM, 80MB hard drive. Got RAM Doubler and I had at least two rows of extensions installed on that thing. Slow as molasses. I remember getting a SCSI Zip drive for it. Gasp! One Zip disk holds my entire hard drive! Never tried to connect it to the Internet, and it sits in my basement on a shelf.

Next Mac was a Power Mac 6500/250 with 15″ monitor. What a terrible, awful machine. We had nothing but problems with it, although it did have a TV input card, which was neat.

I got a toilet-seat iBook SE 366mhz for college, and in those days of Napster, my hard drive filled quickly. I remember buying an external Iomega CD burner, running over USB 1.0, that had a burn success rate of about 5%. It did not have Firewire. I paid a local idiot-run Mac store to have that upgraded to a 40GB hard drive.
Now, the answer to the question. The best computer Apple has ever made, and my favorite, is the 12-inch PowerBook G4. I would still have that computer if it had any make of Intel processor. It was the perfect computer for me as a Communications student…wireless Internet built-in, DVD reader to watch movies, Firewire for video editing in iMovie. Didn’t weigh me down, and the battery lasted forever. My laptop was better than everyone else’s at school. I think it’s just about the best computer Apple ever made.
Also had a Mac mini, and then a close second for my favorite computer is my white MacBook C2D, which does everything.

Mitch Uncategorized