USB Device Sharing: Solution for Old Printer Driver
I had a situation where we have a perfectly fine Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that is a few years old now but still a quality printer but we had been using it with 3 iMacs in a lab area. The Epson printer driver has some nicer features than the Gutenprint one that ships with the Apple drivers and we wanted to have the printer driver be set to that.
Via direct USB, the printer driver worked fine. The Epson driver was developed for PPC I believe and since it is such an old printer, it probably is the last version we will see. Rosetta also needs to be installed to handle it, but that is pretty-much automatic. So direct USB is fine and if you do printer sharing on the iMac that has a direct USB connection, you could get the machine that was piggy-backing on the sharing iMac to work with AppleTalk. But, when we upgraded to 10.6.x we lost AppleTalk on those iMacs and we lost the Epson driver nice stuff on two of the three computers. Sharing via Bonjour or IP did not work for the Epson driver, so we had to figure another solution out or re-purpose the printer.
So, enter the IOGEAR GUB431 4-Port USB Automatic Printer Switch
It can be used without software, but the software is a critical piece because it can be set to do automatic switching. After setup, we got the old R2400 going and the three iMacs into the switch. Each iMac sees the native USB so the driver is happy and shows all the options the users like and the USB switch is smart enough to handle switching between the computers when a print job is dished to it. The default software setup is to have the computer printing grab hold and own the printer for 3 minutes then let go, but I changed the settings so it would automatically let go when needed by other iMacs. It seems to be working well and we will keep testing it with users to see if it can handle what we need. I like the solution and well worth a try to keep a perfectly good piece of hardware going even if the vendor might have some driver issues across the network. We could have tried a print server on ethernet, but I was hesitant to try it since printer sharing wasn't even working. To clarify, one could print via Bonjour printer sharing, but NOT with the extra driver features Epson bakes-in to the USB type of connection which is a major deal for us.
The device has Mac and Windows software and seems very solid. So far, so good.
For more info checkout
Synology DS410 Review and Experience
Here are just a few initial notes on setup of our Synology DS410.
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- Packaging
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- Out of the box
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- Installing the drives
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- Drives in and chassis off
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- Running LEDs
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- Building the RAID-5
Drives: Installing easy, one drive lower than fans, notice it runs a littel hotter too. To install the lowest of the 4 trays, you need to remove the back fans, but no biggie. The sleds are nice and simple. The kit comes with little baggies of screws so that is great. Also, the drive sleds slide right in and the SATA connector is aligned perfectly so you can just nudge the drives into place without any stress on the drive or sled. I went with some Western Digital 2TB Green drives. I have never had great luck with WD, but the power consumption on these newer drives seemed like a good call and the price point was great.
Operation: It is just amazingly quiet! Geez, you put in 4 2TB drives and you expect the thing to be noisy, but it is super quiet. This is a huge benefit for me as I hate the electronics sounds around the house, so this is great even though it will be the garage. I have a Nextstar simple RAID-1 with a couple of SATA drives and it is super loud in comparison.
Building the RAID: RAID-5 took forever due to size of the logical volume. I could have gone with the fast/rapid option, but anyone who has ever been burned by a bad RAID setup because they did the quick format only to have to do a full low-level format later knows why I went this route right off the bat.
Little Things: There are many things to appreciate throughout their setup process I wanted to note. After setting up a ton of different network devices, we all know changing network address is a pain because the device can get confused during the process and if the configuration is web-based, it can get messy when you lose contact with the old address. I was waiting for that to happen when I went from DHCP to fixed IP through the web GUI, but to my surprise it redirected to the new IP address (nice!). I am so used to HP, Cisco, Linksys and other that don't care to take this into account and force the admin to enter the new URL / IP address but when it is done right, it is so nice to see. Nice GUI touches throughout. They use AJAXy stuff, but not overdoing it. Linux support in documentation. Date and time already correct due to network time.
Initial Setup: The box came with CD with a Mac, Windows or Linux installer. I am really happy that Synology has Linux 'baked-in' to everything they do with their products and I really want to support that. My DS410 came with DS v 2.2, so had to upgrade to latest 2.3. I downloaded the updated firmware (v2.3) and in the expansion process, Archive utility expanded a little too much so it didn't keep the .pat file in-place for the GUI to recognize that the update was a legit firmware update. But, in going to their support site and FAQ, they had an article for that and I had change archive utility to not expand more.
Support Site: As mentioned above, their support website rocked. The FAQ area was great and exactly what I needed. They have this down.
Testing: after initial setup, I went to move the DS410 and the power cable was loose causing the DS410 to lose power. Plugged it back in and all was well! Copied some files across the network and the drives and throughput felt great. I also turned-on the various applications and have been testing with a great success on the internal network, from work and from remote on my iPhone using the Synology iPhone Apps. Being able to consolidate music and stream anywhere will be awesome the more I consolidate it on the Diskstation.
Very happy camper right now...
Xmind Is A Great Rapid Mind-Mapper And Diagram Tool
I have used a ton of different mind-mapping, flow-charting and graphing applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and they all have specific positives and negatives. The ones that are the most complex also tend to be the slowest to rapidly diagram with but have the most features to really enable complex rendering.
Xmind (http://www.xmind.net) is a great cross-platform solution for basic mapping of structures and data. It is a topic/sub-topic mapper so it is really useful for elaboration on database structures and single concept diagrams. Xmind is a very rapid tool with keyboard shortcuts to quickly add topics and sub-topics which allows you to get a structure up and going fast so then you can tweak after you get the data out there.
Symantec BackupExec 2010, RALUS and Centos 5 Works
Whew, what a pain this has been.
Always had a heck of a time with BackupExec 12.5 and below backing up CentOS versions. I think early versions of RALUS were operational and worked back in the BackupExec 8-10.5 days prior to Symantec's acquistion of Veritas. But, it has never been really easy to get this going well and incorporating a RedHat-like but not RedHat system into the BackupExec remote client world. Bring in 64-bit CentOS, and it got even more of a pain.
Well, now it seems it is possible and repeatable with Symantec BackupExec 2010. The change in naming conventions off the versions to years (even though everyone else is going back to the versions and moving off of years now!) signifies some code investment from Symantec in what must be a cash-cow for them in BackupExec.
We have a few Windows 2003 and 2008 servers along with some OS X 10.5.x servers and are backing them up to a LTO3 library on a 2008 server and made the move to BackupExec 2010 recently to try and shake some of the lingering issues with 12.5 rehashed code and makeshift RALUS client patches for Unix, Linux and Mac clients Symantec seems to have inherited and continued.
It seems you need to disable IPv6 to get the negotiation to happen correctly on top of the obvious IPTables and IPTables configurations to allow TCP ports 10000 and 6101 to communication between the BackupExec Server and your RALUS client.
Disabling IPv6 on CentOS (run all as root or you can sudo everything below)
- in /etc/sysconfig/network you need to add
NETWORKING_IPV6=no
- in /etc/modprobe.conf add:
alias ipv6 off
alias net-pf-10 off
- make sure IPTablesv6 is disabled at startup
/sbin/chkconfig ip6tables off
After all of that, give your network a restart
/etc/init.d/network restart
Then run the RALUS install from the Symantec BE 2010 download. If you have issues here during the install and possibly have multiple network interfaces straddling different networks, try ip addresses in lieu of hostnames. Also, on the BE 2010 server, restart all the services. Starting the RALUS client on CentOS 5 is
/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init start
or
/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init restart
Problems with Lacie iamakey USB Flash Drives fixed
I really like the design of the Lacie iamakey and related USB flash memory sticks that look like actual keys. I was thinking about moving off the consistent performers I issue to employees, faculty and staff from Sandisk. So, I got an 8 gig and 32 gig to test over the last couple of months.
I am constantly moving files between Macs, Windows and Linux workstations and servers, so they really can take a pounding. The Sandisk Cruzer models are really solid once you get rid of the software that comes with them through their uninstallers. Initially, the Lacie iamkey USB drives have given me a lot of problems. I need to format them as FAT32 so I can have read/write on on the operating systems I am hitting.
The crazy thing is when I would copy large amounts of files (say many software installers for Office, Adobe, etc.) they would take the write just fine, but when I brought them to another Mac or Windows machine, the partition/format would not be read. I reformatted many times on the Mac and over the course of a few weeks still have constant issues with all operating systems.
It wasn't until I did a low-level format of the drive on Windows (not a quick format) did the FAT32 partition stick. I have been using now for a week or so without problems between OS X, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, CentOS and Ubuntu. Performance is great now.
So, if you are having issues, try a solid low-level format and I think you will have better results. It will take some time. the 32 gig took an hour or two I believe, but you will be happy you did.