Yesterday, we finally had the chance to touch an iPad the first time at the new Gravis store in Essen (Germany). When it was introduced I thought: Hmm… nice, but is it really worth 499$ (or here in Germany 499€!)?

With more and more reports and videos that I’ve read and seen in the last few weeks since it came out officially in the US and now also in Europe, I was really warming up for this device, though – I haven’t ordered one from the Apple store. I wanted to buy it on my own, but that’s another story.

By having the chance to test it in a quiet atmosphere, I found some painpoints that hinders me from getting one (not mentioning that you have simply no chance to get one until July).

For example: It’s really heavy. If you see it, you don’t think it’s that heavy. Sure, compared to a good reference book, it’s a lightweight, but that wouldn’t be my main function for this which drives me to the result that I simply don’t need it: checking websites. You can check websites also on the iPad simulator with the same effect and you could be sure if it works or not.

I’m having my MacBook around pretty often and it’s very comfortable to work with. Sure, playing videos makes it hot easily, but I don’t see the reason to spend 499€ for this device as I don’t see a real usage for myself in it. It’s hyped, that’s it. If you’ve read some of my last articles or my old blog, you know, that I enjoy to use Apple products since software is mostly better designer and more intuitive compared to their Windows competitors, but I also try not to react “Fanboy”-like. Apple does a lot mistakes in my mind when it comes to politics, but that’s not what I want to discuss here. Just to highlight: At the moment, Microsoft is more congenial than Apple – they are opening more and more stuff to OpenSource which is a step into the right direction and letting me do more with Windows 7 than I could ever do on my Mac (for example: customize it). With one leg, I’m already back in bed with Windows :/ Now: Complain! Just as an argument why: Outlook. I haven’t tried Entourage yet, but Outlook for Windows is in my mind THE BEST eMail & Collaboration software in the world – shout at me, but in my mind it is (if it’s connected to a great working Exchange Server).

I wouldn’t say that I would never get an iPad for me or my wife. I also can’t see the future through a glass bowl and I’ll try to keep my mind open.

Another issue I run into is the cellphone. Not “THE”, but mine. I’m happily using my iPhone 2G for 3 1/2 years now, but I would love to make the next step and get a 3G connection when I’m out of my office. iPhone 4G/HD – whatever, will be 100% sold by T-Mobile in Germany and you can’t select another provider. I guess there’s nearly no chance to get an unlocked one unless you’ll get one from Belgium or Italy. No big deal, because Bruxelles is just 200km from here, but… I don’t know. Having the iPhone was nice and so, but again: mixed with Exchange it’s nice, but also you can’t use all the stuff that Exchange provides. Call it: Tasks for example.

So, I’ve also taken a deeper look onto unlocked cellphones on the market and let me say one thing: It’s horrible! The only GUI that is nice enough is Android, and guess what: you can’t upgrade it as easy as an iPhone to a new software version. Why? Well, because the companies like HTC and Co want to sell phones! New version of Android called “Froyo”? Yes, but the best chance to get it to buy a new phone. In some ways I miss the old times. I was a happy user of my SonyEricsson K600i – it simply worked, could do some videos and photos, play some MP3s and that’s it. Sure, eMail and Web was horrible, but in the past it doesn’t matter that much. As resumé – I will see what will come at the WWDC tomorrow and then I will take my time (and give Apple time to ship it to the local stores) and then choose if I want to get one or not. My iPhone 2G is phone and would be perfect if it wouldn’t miss the 3G Maybe I should get an iPhone 3GS when the 4G comes out

Now I’ve written a lot and need to change the title from “Hmm… iPad” to a better fitting title yey…

Have a great day!

Ciao
Dennis 

As recent blog reader you know that I’ve 2 Onnto DataTale RAID5 boxes which are connected to my Mac Pro via eSATA (PCIe x1 card). Well, as much as I appreciate the stability and the good performance, I hate the noise they create.

Turning off the Mac Pro and not using it is no option – in my mind that would be a waste of money. Also selling it is no option. I’ve gone through this process times 3x already (bought G5, sold it, bought used G5, sold it a few months later, bought the Mac Pro 2008 – and sold it 3/4 year later). Why? No idea I was switching between Windows & Mac OS X too often. Both systems have it ups & downs. While appreciate the openess of Windows (I know how crazy that sounds, I’m talking about expansion options), I really enjoy the workflow, the look & feel and of course the design of Macs.

The reason to use the MacBook only in my home office were:

• I don’t NEED the power on my desktop
• With the RAID boxes, it was too noisy

So, I’d put the 80GB Intel Postville G2 SSD from my Mac Pro back into the MacBook, bought the Mini DisplayPort to DualLink DVI cable (as posted earlier) and installed Snow Leopard from scratch. I’m still very happy with the performance and while using it for the last 2 weeks often enough I asked myself why I had bought the Mac Pro and if I should sell it. The answer on this question was, that I love to work with different systems: OSX, Windows Server, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris – I’ll try a lot and I see a lot pros in using them mixed. Because of that I’d bought 12GB of RAM for the Mac Pro.

Funny enough, my 3D tool and Photoshop are more than fast enough on my MacBook (with 4GB or RAM) – I just need some decent speed if I want to render something, if it’s a cut movie, a 3D still or animation.

Yesterday, I decided to put the Mac Pro into the basement. Attaching the RAID boxes there is a great way for still being able to access them via the GBit house network and also having the needed silence in my home office. I admit, I love silence. Currently, typing this, I just hear the little fountain in the garden. The MacBook is superquiet, not even a click from the HD since it’s a SSD now. For my satisfaction, the 30″ display offers me great screen real estate. Sure, it’s not what I had before nor is it more than 1x 30″ – but it’s very ok and I’m happy with this compromise.

The Mac Pro is running in the basement, but just using it as fileserver would be a huge mistake and a waste of power. I gave him a real job, serving me a Mac OS X Server in a VMWare Fusion session side by side with a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 session that has an installed and full useable Exchange 2010 server. It’s really amazing what the Xeon says about it – the cores still have not much to do, yeah it sucks RAM. OS X Server got 2GB and the Win Server 4GB, so I still have 6GB left. I’m also running a Parallels version 5 on the Mac Pro for my previously “desktop” Windows 7 (Home Premium) which I need for some Office 2007 stuff.

For rendering, Apple’s QMaster will do the job, but I think I’ve to dig into the documentation to see how this works. I must say that I’m very happy with OS X Client as base OS for this kind of “server”. I quickly connect to it using the VNC/Screensharing to control it if I don’t use ssh. The VMs are running quiet fast and so I use VNC/Screensharing for the OS X Server and Microsoft’s Remotedesktop for Mac to connect to the Win server.

Using the Mac Pro as fileserver also has some (in my mind) special pros. One is the software KNOX that I’ve just bought 2 days ago. It’s a great software to easily encrypt volumes or even complete harddisks. I’ve encrypted the external RAID boxes using this great software. Why? Because I care about my data

Another pro is that the Mac Pro delivers a LOT ports for expansion. Using the 2 eSATA ports, I could expand to FireWire 800 and USB2. The overall capacity of the system is stunning. I’ve made a text overview of the storage that I’ve connected to it. Here’s a screenshot:

Returning to the MacBook, I just can recommend, if you don’t use VMs like a devil and want to buy a new Mac, be sure not to spend too much money on a desktop machine. I did and in some way I regret that buy. I’m happy to run my stuff on it now and so it’s still the perfect solution for my usage, but most people would be fine with a MacBook or MacBook Pro in my mind. Having a silent and cool (yeah cool – the Mac Pro creates a lot of heat ) home office is worth thinking about your buy several times.

Ciao
Dennis 

What is Belldandy?

Belldandy is a name of a fictional person, used in the Manga “Oh! My goddess“, one of my favorite comics. Reading this post, you will see that I use more japanese comic names for virtual machines.

But what is YOUR Belldandy?

Well, Belldandy is the name of my newest server. I write “newest”, because over the years I tried so much different systems and types of servers, that I’m really happy to announce a very stable server here.

What kind of server is it?

It’s a self-build one, but I used hardware parts that where recommended from Constantin Gonzalez from Sun. I’m using my old but very reliable TAGAN 450W power supply, an ASUS M4A78LT-M AMD mainboard which supports ECC memory and 6GB of ECC RAM. The OS harddisk is a new 160GB IDE HD. It’s not a 19″ server – it’s a regular Midi tower (MESH series by Chieftec).

Why IDE? Isn’t this a rather old standard? What about SATA?

I’m using all 6 onboard SATA ports for the zpool. IDE may be an old standard, but it works fine for the OS itself. With 6GB of RAM I don’t think too much about HD IOs on this HD. It’s more important, that the zpools are bound to a fast bus. I simply found it a waste of an port using a SATA HD for the system.

So you’ve 6 HDs inside the server?

Yes! I’ve installed 6x 1TB WD “Green” HDs into the server. Those are connected to the zpool “storage” which is the main storage of the server.

What is that “zpool”?

zpool is pool of HDs you’ve virtually stacked into one large virtual HD. It’s widely comparable to RAID, but it offers a lot advantages compared to a traditional RAID. I’m using 3x Mirror drives. Each mirror contains 2 HDs with the capacity of 1TB each. Together, because they are internally mirrored, I’ve 50% of the capacity. If you want to learn more about zpool and ZFS, I could highly recommend googling for it – there are tons of interesting and funny material out there.

Why do you mirror? Are your HDs so bad?

No It’s a thing of security for my data. Harddisks are not made forever and the fail. The question is just: When. Having a mirror protects my data from getting lost when one or more HDs are crashing the same time. Of course, if it’s a series issue, maybe I’m also not secured against this – 3 HDs where bought at the same day, but I think it’s a very way which let’s me sleep deep.

Which OS is that? Linux?

No, I’m running OpenSolaris which is something between Linux and UNIX, I would think it contains the best of both worlds. It’s mainly based on Sun’s Solaris but with a GNome environment. It’s a great system, but I’m also rather new to it, so I need to learn a lot about it. It’s amazingly pretty easy to create storages and zpools.

How do you connect to your server from your clients?

I’ve installed netatalk on the OpenSolaris machine to be able to use it with our Macs. It’s pretty much forward. A bad idea is to use SMB and Macs, there seems to be a bug inside the Finder’s SMB implementation. Anyway – it’s cool to have AFP running (netatalk).

Of course, I could always use the SCP protocol to connect to the server if I need to, but that’s more useful for the administration than for normal usage.

Isn’t it loud? Have you stored it in your office?

It’s really too loud as I’ve installed 4 very efficient fans into the server. I had it for a couple of days in our office and it was not very comfortable, so we decided to putit into the basement. I honestly prefer a quiet office (even music sometimes annoys me and I’m working mostly in silence).

You have some external boxes on that desk – what are they for?

The bigger box is a great box – it is my Onnto DataTale. It allows me to put 4 HDs into and comes with a hardware RAID. I’ve currently installed 4x 640GB WD Blue HDs and connected it via eSATA to the server to store temporary data onto. It gives me 1.8TB of usable storage.

What are these other 4 boxes for?

That’s (from left to right) a Seagate Desktop drive, a MacPower enclosure with another 1TB Seagate HD inside and 2 Hitachi external HDs. They are all connected via a USB2-Hub to the server and are set up as an RAIDz1 backup zpool. It gives me 2.7TB of available storage for backing up our data. RAIDz1 is more or less comparable with RAID5.

How do you connect the server to the internet, or is it an offline server for local use only?

It’s connected directly to the internet and out 2 DSL lines. OpenSolaris itself is connected to the Vodafone line which offers a fix IP and NO disconnect every 24h’s, so it’s a real and cheap dedicated line. It gives me 6MBit/s download and 640KBit/s upload. So or so, I don’t run any services on the host system itself for protection. The other line is from the Deutsche Telekom and allows us to surf with 16MBit/s (1MBit/s upstream). This is mostly used for the clients only.

Do you run any virtual machine on the server?

Yes, indeed. I run 2x Debian (“Urd” & “Mila”) (one as development machine for my web design & development, the other as media streaming device (namely Firefly iTunes server or “mt-daapd)). I also run a Windows Server (“Miyuki”) on the server as mailserver. It’s a Windows Server 2008 r2 x64 with an Exchange 2010 installed on top of it. If Microsoft creates a great product, it’s in my mind Exchange. And I say that as Mac user

Which software do you use to virtualize this stuff?

Sun gives away their virtualization software VirtualBox for free – and of course it runs fantastic on their own OpenSolaris. I’m very happy that it runs so well.

On my clients we run Parallels on my Mac Pro for Windows virtualization and my wife is running a VMWare Fusion on her MacBook for Windows 7.

Do you have a firewall installed in your rack?

Yes and no, I’ve a IBM NetVista mounted inside the rack. It’s a very small and slow machine – a Thin Client – but it’s fantastic to run IPCop on. Currently, because it was a long road to get to this very satisfying server, it’s switched off, but I will turn it on again soon, and even if it’s for local proxy, free DNS servers and local DNS (don’t you guys also hate to type IPs for LAN servers? ).

How much HD capacity/usable capacity have you attached to Belldandy?

- 6x 1 TB internal
- 1x 160 GB internal
- 4x 640 GB external
- 4x 1 TB external

Makes around about 12 TB of storage, I can use up to 7,8 TB for real storage. There’s a lot of overhead for security, but I think it’s really worth it. ZFS as filesystem itself is very secure, but in this combination, it’s fantastic and I’m really looking forward to have a permanent server. In case I want to try something else, I will now simply create a new VM to play with instead of killing the server itself.

Do you run Linux anywhere?

I do! “Obelix” – my dedicated webserver runs Debian Lenny, the 2 virtual machines are also both Debian and IPCop is also based on Linux. I would say, I’m using a good mix of the different operating systems.

Many thanks for reading this post! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed typing it

Ciao
Dennis