Author Archives: Daz

MediaPortal – Codecs

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SAF seems to be one of the best option out there, the author has a nice post here : http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/codecs-external-players-55/saf-v4-00rc1-standalone-filters-dxva-ready-mpeg2-h-264-vc-1-a-44614/

I was previously using the mega codec pack, but found lately there was some issues with it jerk zooming? – in dark scenes it was jumping in and out. I’ve gone through all the filter settings and ensured everything was disabled, but still the problem comes up. Installing SAF has removed these problems.

There is another codec pack to grab if your decoding HD tv – google – HD Pack 2.2

Updated : 26/11/2009

I’ve started to use windows 7 since it has some really good builtin drivers for my tv card. Media center seems to be alot more responsive than mediaportal has ever been. Also more stable. Hopefully things change as it matures.

Opensolaris – Samba and Network browsing

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If you’ve setup samba (rather than the builtin cifs/smb) chances are that you can only browse to your samba shares directly on IP only.

If you want your box “network browseable” you’ll need to load nmbd.

You can find a really good write up on modifiying the SMF for samba to autostart the required service here : http://wikis.sun.com/display/BigAdmin/Enabling+Browsing+with+Samba+in+Solaris+10+Update+4

import this file samba.xml

run these commands;

# svcadm disable samba
# svccfg import samba.xml
# svccfg delete svc:/network/samba:default
# svcadm refresh samba:smbd
# svcadm refresh samba:nmbd
# svcadm enable samba:smbd
# svcadm enable samba:nmbd

VirtualBox – crashing / freezing

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I’ve had some problems since my upgrade to virtualbox 2.2.0 on OpenSolaris. After some time all of my linux boxes seem to just die. The virtual machine just stops responding. Strangely there was no problem with my windows vms after the update.

From what i can tell it looks like the upgrade turned off “IO APIC” – this is the bit that seemed to cause the problem. Re-enabling this on all of my linux boxes seems to have fixed the problem. I’ll continue testing for another week and update this post if any problems re-occur.

Updated : 01/09/2009

Here is a bit more on IO APIC from the virtualbox wiki…  (from a windows perspective)
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

The hardware dependent portion of the Windows kernel is dubbed “Hardware Abstraction Layer” (HAL). While hardware vendor specific HALs have become very rare, there are still a number of HALs shipped by Microsoft. Here are the most common HALs (for more information, refer to this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309283):

Hal.dll (Standard PC)
Halacpi.dll (ACPI HAL)
Halaacpi.dll (ACPI HAL with IO APIC)

If you perform a Windows installation with default settings in VirtualBox, Halacpi.dll will be chosen as VirtualBox enables ACPI by default but disables the IO APIC by default. A standard installation on a modern physical PC or VMware will usually result in Halaacpi.dll being chosen as most systems nowadays have an IO APIC and VMware chose to virtualize it by default (VirtualBox disables the IO APIC because it is more expensive to virtualize than a standard PIC). So as a first step, you either have to enable IO APIC support in VirtualBox or replace the HAL. Replacing the HAL can be done by booting the VM from the Windows CD and performing a repair installation.

Updated : 5/09/2009

I’ve had even more problems with opensolaris crashing completely after upgrading to the newer versions of virtualbox (3.0.4), and have since reverted back to 2.2.0 which has fixed alot of the hanging issues i have encountered

opensolaris – zfs PCI-e sata controller

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Time for me to add some more sata ports to my opensolaris build. I’ve been using the SI 3114 PCI cards  (4x sata) up until now without any issue, but they are limited by the bandwidth on the PCI slot. Time to upgrade and boost my performance.

At the moment i’m looking at grabbing one of these UIO cards;

AOC-USAS-L8i

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm

From what iv’e been reading these cards will work fine in a PCI-e slot (8x / 16x) after a bit of modding and display the drives straight to opensolaris without any additional drivers etc. (same chipset used in various sun servers)

The backplate on a UIO card is essentially on backwards, when you remove the backplate and put the card into the PCI-e slot all the components will appear on the other side to normal. It is possible if you have a spare PCI-e backplate to attach to this card (just unscrew the current backplate and replace).

And the required mini SAS to SATA cables from extreme deal;

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18023

Done.

Updated : 02/09/2009

Put this card in and bingo no problems. Had to export and re-import the zpool as it had problems with the drives being on a different controller? (hadn’t seen that before), but after that everything was working very well as expected. Cool!

PC Build – May be time to upgrade my rig soon

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This is my current gaming machine which i built earlier this year – i decided to have had a play with water cooling before i put anything too expensive into the case. :)

Its a Intel E8400 running at 4.14Ghz, i’ve only got 2Gb of ram and 2 x 120Gb HDD’s in raid 0

I’ll keep the case and water cooling setup when i move to i7. Probably just grab a 1366 mount kit for my fusion v2 waterblock.

Since these pics I’ve put anti-cink slinkys on all of the tubes (when the water was getting warm the tube was kinking).

I’ll probably drop the chipset cooling with i7 as well – keeping the cooling specifically for the CPU.