samba

Samba Android

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So whenever I get a new phone, it seems the first thing to annoy me is that I need to plug it in to transfer files.

Generally, it’s not too difficult, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to access the phone’s SD card whenever I need to dump something on it.

I think the first time I came across the idea of using SAMBA on a phone was back with my Nokia N80i. Measly and slow as the phone was, it did however have great ability where it lacked in speed. To be honest I have no idea what it was called, but it was there, and was quite useful – when the phone’s WiFi worked that is.

Next I went to the iPhone 3G 16GB which was predictably ‘Apple’, and therefore did not possess any way whatsoever to transfer files other that those supported by iTunes. Once I was jailbroken, I searched and found another version of SAMBA for IOS – which worked great.

Finally, I got my Google Nexus One last year, and low and behold I found the cable to transfer were easily bumped and broken, causing transfer problems. So again, SAMBA to the rescue! It took a fair while to track this one down due to Android being in it’s infancy, but one morning one of my mates noticed it and it nabbed it!

Initially I had to stick with the beta edition which was admittedly buggy and underfeatured, though over time it has become very stable and it does pretty much everything I expected and more. Cheers to JimmyChingala on xda-dev for porting it to Android!

Here’s the link for SAMBA for Android on xda-developers. You can get the latest and greatest developer builds there, or if you just wanted the normal version, search for ‘SAMBA’ in the Android Market or use this link to the market website.

I should note also that it requires a rooted device; if you don’t know what that is, then you probably won’t understand SAMBA anyway.

That’s it for now until I get around to making up another topic of discussion.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get around to syncing my Media drives automatically and i’ll report back (no promises :D)

 

Derryn

Router upgrades finally complete

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Received my eBay el-cheapo ($8) PCI graphics card the other day, and it turned out to be an ExpertColor S3 Trio64 86C764X 8MB; Perfect for my purposes.

I am now very grateful that I didn’t splurge on a PCI-e card which would have costed me ~$70 and would have caused an overheating situation and also increased power consumption.

On that note, I noticed the CPU wasn’t really being used, so I dropped it from 2.6GHz to 1GHz by dropping the CPU multiplier to its lowest. So now I get a reduced power usage, improved thermal efficiency and no really to any performance detriment.

Also, the 4x1GB sticks of RAM seemed a bit much. So I ended up taking out 2 sticks so that I can still have it running in dual-channel mode. I know 2GB is still way too much (its currently utilising a maximum of 1% at any given time) but I just cant bring myself to keep at least enough to have it in dual channel mode. At any rate, at least they aren’t all squeezed together now so there’s room for the heat to dissipate evenly.

 

The only thing left to do is get the media drives (one on the router, one on the media-pc) to sync up automatically. I’ve been using rsync to accomplish this, but I haven’t yet been bothered to figure out how to sync from the router to the media-pc, currently it only works the other way around.

Perhaps I can simply reverse the paths i’m using so:

rsync -r -t -v -u -h --progress /mnt/mediaSMB /mnt/media

Will sync new/updated files from the media-pc to the router

rsync -r -t -v -u -h --progress /mnt/media /mnt/mediaSMB

Should do it the other way around … or will it?

Anyways, we’ll see how it goes, though I’m hesitant to try it considering I have already lost the media drive once.

Later.

FOR THE WIN!!!

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W00t, finally something went my way; well mostly. With me, you can always expect at least something to go wrong.

Anyways, I went with the new/old router upgrade.

I gathered the parts I needed: an old ASUS M4N82 (Socket AM2+, DDR2 Ram, PCI-E, SATA2), 4 x 1GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800.

And then went to MSY for the rest.

Now I went into this with the hope that the motherboard would support headless (without display/kb/mouse), but unfortunately it refuses to boot without a graphics card plugged in, and again unfortunately the only card I had on hand is an 8800GTS (not exactly a power saver). It does however work without a keyboard and mouse.

 

At MSY (Mitcham) I was greeted with an interesting change: they’ve turned it into a regular computer store/showroom. So instead of just asking for what I wanted, I ended up having to look for it myself (less the CPU which was behind the counter).

Anyways, I left the store with an AMD Sempron 140 2.7Ghz (which I later unlocked using NVIDIA Unleashed mode [ACC] in the bios giving me a dual-core processor), and a Vantec ION2 460w Silent PSU. Total cost $76.

When I got home, I ripped out the old motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU, and (quite quickly) threw in all the new components.

Amazingly the only issues were that the PSU was too tall (and required a *clears throat* case modification -see pic below)

 

Case Mod

Hehehe… there’s nothing you can’t fix with a hammer and a hacksaw 😀

Anyway, the transition was almost completely transparent. I just changed the boot order so that the IDE drive boots first, and let it go. Not a problem 😛

Only change I needed to make was to run IPFires’ setup command and reassign the new onboard gigabit port to the green0 network. Other than that, it continues to work as I type, just as it did before.
As the reason for this change was to enable me to use the media drive, I quickly did some tests to ensure that I now have proper speeds and that copying in both directions worked. They did!
I am now able to copy from the media drive at 80MB/s, which isn’t too bad for a Western Digital Green drive.

Currently my only problem is that it’s getting too hot. This is the most part caused by the graphics card, a problem that will be rectified next week when I take delivery of a second hand eBay PCI graphics card. It was either that or I buy the cheapest PCIe card which is gonna be around the $60 mark, which frankly isn’t worth it.

 

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