After running the D-Link DNS-320 for a while, I decided to shift fonz’s fun_plug (ffp) to run off the USB drive instead of the hard disk. Some benefits of doing so are:

• Reduce mechanical wear and tear – I frequently access the DNS-320 via ssh and by doing so, the disk spins up. By shifting the ffp onto the USB drive, the disks do not spin up as much and hence lesser mechanical wear and  tear
• Power saving – I assume lesser disk spinups translate to marginal power savings in the long run

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The Apple File Protocol (AFP) stopped working the day I upgraded to OS X Lion. Network shares on the NAS (DNS-320, ReadyNAS Duo) can no longer be browsed through AFP because none of them supports AFP 3.X calls and the authentication standards required by Lion.

I need a fix fast! Why? My iMac’s 1TB Seagate HDD got recalled and I needed Time Machine (TM) to work before the tech guy replace it on site.

(Re)setup my compiling environment, this time for the DNS-320. Did some compiling, wrote some shell scripts and Time Machine (on OS X Lion) is working with my D-Link DNS-320 once again. Well, it still throws some CNIB warning messages when accessing the share but at least it works now. The CNIB issue is fixed with help from Ben Archer.

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For the adventurous, you might want to explore XBMC semi-nightly builds. There are no new features but sometimes bugs are fixed. Certainly not for the faint hearted. For those who are on iOS 4.3, you might want to explore nighties as it fixed hardware decoding on iOS 4.3.

Before you proceed, ensure that you have installed the XBMC Official Build. Once you get the official build up and running, do the following:

1. SSH to your Apple TV2
   Hint: use “root” and “alpine” for the username and password respectively
2. Type “cd /private/var/tmp” without the quotes
3. Type “apt-get install wget” without the quotes
4. Type “wget http://hadm.net/xbmc/latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes
5. Type “dpkg -i latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes
6. Type “rm latest_atv2.deb” without the quotes

You have successfully upgraded the XBMC, reboot both the XBMC and Apple TV2 and you are good to go!

Chinese characters appearing as squares in XBMC for Apple TV (ATV2)? This is because ATV2 does not come with unicode fonts hence unicode characters like Chinese cannot be shown properly. By following this guide, you will be able to view unicode characters on your XBMC for ATV2.

Pre-requisites

1. Before we proceed, you will need a particular Unicode font – arialuni.ttf (size: 23560KB). You can easily locate this file on your Windows (C:\Windows\Fonts) or search online for alternative (hint: Google). If it appears as ARIALUNI.TTF, simply rename it to arialuni.ttf.
2. You will need to hook up the Apple TV2 (ATV2) to your network and know your ATV2′s IP address.

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Time Machine

Enabling Time Machine support on the D-Link DNS-320 is, surprisingly, a straight-forward task. Yes, you can use your own NAS (Network Attached Storage) for Time Machine backups instead of Apple Time Capsule. However, Time Machine seems to use all the available space (on the NAS) for backup purposes. So I started to explore how can I limit the amount of disk space used for Time Machine.

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Didn’t really get to use VMware ESXi until recently where I need to set up some virtualization environment for demonstration purposes. Was originally looking at XenServer “Project Boston” (released on 16th May 2011) but chose ESXi in the end, not because ESXi is better than XenServer but instead:

• My previous mini-demo environment were based on VMware Workstation/Player
• Little time to explore new hypervisor hence sticking to what I have on hand

I told myself that I will try running Citrix infrastructure on XenServer the next time.

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