The new box is here and ready
I ordered bits from everywhere in the world to get a new, quiet and fresh box. This idea is to replace the “old” Dell XPS M1330 with something better suited to virtualization. And here are the specs :
- H3.S Fanless Chassis, with 80W Open Frame Fanless PSU
- Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi (Z68ITX-A-E)
- Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 2500T 2.5GHz 6MB 45W 32nm Quad Core
- G.Skill Kit Extreme3 2 x 8 Go PC12800 Ripjaws X CAS10
- Samsung SSD (MMDOE28G5MPP)
- M4-CT064M4SSD2Crucial m4 2.5-inch (M4-CT064M4SSD2)
- WD Scorpio Blue (WDC WD2500BEVT-7)
And here’s the baby pic:
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Transfer OpenBSD from one disk to another
For some reason, I need to switch my main (and only) disk running OpenBSD. As it is a production machine, I want to do it fast and painless.
The system will go from the internal SSD disk to an external USB FlashVoyagerGT stick. Yeah, quite weird, but this is temporary 
Anyway, here are the directions.
Quick speed test on ICYBOX IB-RD2262 USEb
As you may have noticed, I have installed a ICYBOX IB-RD2262 USEb on my MacBook Pro. It contains two 500GB SATA disks. You can either use the “RAID Master” provided tools to create the RAID system or use the Mac OS X native RAID system. The main difference is that, using RAID Master, you’ll only see the rendered RAID disk in “Disk Util” ; whereas you will see both disks and the RAID system if you use the standard OS X configuration.
I wanted to check if there were any performance difference between native OS X configuration and RAID0/SPAN using RAID Master. Maybe using RAID Master, you benefit some hardware RAID system…
Use an HSDPA 3G USB adapter with the Asus Transformer TF101
My Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is quite nice to take on a ride. The only issue is that when there’s no WiFi around, there’s no Internet at all. I used to have a Novatel MiFi 2352 3G hotspot but it died. All I have left is a data-only SIM card and an Huawei E220 USB modem.
By default, even with the dock keyboard, plugin the HSDPA USB adapter into the Transformer won’t lead far. But since I can root the Pad and install an alternate ROM, there are every likelihood that I can manage to access Internet via the 3G modem.
Improve Synology DS409slim shell using ipkg
I own a Synology DS409slim on which I have enabled SSH. The primary idea was just to have a look behind the hoods. This is quite simple: browse to the configuration panel, select the terminal services section and active the SSH daemon.
But once there, you’re stuck with a basic shell and a few commands. No `less`, no `grep`, no `bzip2`, no `perl`… Synology provides an official packages repository that provides a few extra features ; like VPN, LDAP and such ; but not so much to get a “complete” UNIX environment. The savior here is called “ipkg”. Quoting Wikipedia: “(…) the Itsy Package Management System (ipkg), is a lightweight package management system designed for embedded devices that resembled Debian’s dpkg. (…)”. It provides a bunch a GNU-like tools and it runs on the Synology!