On The Move

Thecus Woes

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Well I have battled long and hard with my Thecus N2100 and basically i've had enough of it. 

I installed the debian firmware image via the stock gui and rebooted. I was able to login into the installer via SSH. After setting up the disk partitions the next step was to format them. Now what would happen was it would get up to 33% and and not go any further (depending on the size of the disk it can can a long amount of time for the progress bar to go beyond 33% and this is normal) however a ping I would have running would fail to respond after a couple of minutes and the SSH connection would finally drop. I tried this numerous times raid/no raid etc and always the same result. 
Faulty hardware I though so bought another with different disks etc and guess what? yep same problem. 
Next step was a serial connection so after a lot of messing around 9took days) with different cables/connectors etc I finally got one working. 
Now i'm left with one I managed to return to sotck and another which is bricked and says 'No network devices found' the top NIC doesn't even light up when plugging into it so either the chip or ports are toast.
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On The Move

Debian on Thecus N2100 NAS

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I bought a Thecus N2100 NAS a while ago with the view of putting debian on it however what I found was that no matter what combination of disks and hardware I used the process always failed during partition formatting. The progress bar would go up to 33% and after a minute or so all hard disk activity would stop and a few minutes later the ssh connection would drop and the IP being un pingable. 

Now it's common for the progress not to go above 33% for what can be hours depending on your hard disk size however the dropping of the connection is fishy indeed so today i'm going to install a serial header and see what that tells me.
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On The Move

Time to switch

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Since the creation of theoutpost (TOP) in 2005 it's been run on serendipity (S9Y) blogging software. For some time I have had problems with the WYSIWYG editor and not being able to format posts correctly. After a lot of pondering i've decided to make the switch to wordpress due to it's increased functionality and plugin availability. One thing I do like about TOP currently is the theme style and layout, I enjoy the simplicity of it and the fact I was able to easily edit it to meet my needs especially on the gallery side of things. For what seems like an age searching 100's if not 1000's of wordpress themes I think i've finally found one I like that keeps in line with the current clean minimal layout. 

Tonight I will do a backup of TOP and then run the importer script to get everything over to wordpress when I get a chance. I can already foresee it's not going to be that straight forward but fingers crossed. 
See you on the other side………….
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On The Move

Open Pandora

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Just stumbled across a new handheld device running linux descibed by the
creator as ‘A mixture between a PC and a gaming console. That’s why it has
gaming controls (Buttons, DPad and analogue nubs).’

Slightly bigger than a Nintendo DS it’s fast enough to emulate many other
systems, run a full desktop, access the internet via FireFox and play
games such as Quake3. Boasting an 800*480 screen and a claimed battery
life of 10 hours plus.

All sound good? you bet ya, the downside? there’s got to be one hasn’t
there and with this it seems to be the price costing a whopping 440 euros
for it’s entry level 430-MHz system. To me that seems steep by anyones
standards especially when I netbook or laptop can be picked up for around
the same price.

Read all about it here http://openpandora.org

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