travis' brain dump

Sorry if anyone who subscribes saw a reminder for my last post twice… playing with some new options and such so it tossed out a couple on the previous post. 🙂

Just finished a round of upgrades (some more to follow tomorrow) on the wordpress software and some of the plugins… pretty cool stuff coming down the pipeline.

In other news… I figured out some round-about ways of getting Nimbus MySan working on my Small Business Server. It requires a good chunk of a few hours but it’s working quite well. 🙂 (this info for all those following the whole xbox360 media center server 2003 stuff). It actually wasn’t too bad.

1. Uninstall SP2 (ignoring all the warnings *eeek*)
2. Install SP1
3. Ensure you’ve got .NET 2.0 installed
4. Install MySAN
5. Reinstall SP2
6. Reinstall all the updates hanging out there (including the .NET service packs)
7. Run MySAN and setup your drives. (make sure to give your VISTA machine exclusive rights to the drive)

The only catch is it will need for format the partition you’re intending to use, so you’ll need to backup your data first… I luckily had a drive big enough to hold all the data temporarily while I did this little manuever and now it’s working quite well… I’m currently in the middle of copying some 39,000 files over to the ipSAN drive but it’s working quite nicely without a hiccup and the stuff that has copied over already shows up in the population in media connector and in media center. 🙂

I might post up some screen shots tomorrow or something if I can find some time. I’ve been trying to get all the software for the blogsites updated, new pictures uploaded, two new sites created and manage getting my household duties completed as well. Lot’s of fun. Anyway… I’m getting the look from Amanda… it’s time for bed. 🙂

Aside from the fact I came in this morning to our tape libraries are down and the usual cleanup from the weekend it’s pretty calm… so all in all not too bad of a day actually… especially the fact I’m out of here in about 30-45 minutes. 🙂

This weekend was pretty awesome I must say, aside from the fact I’ve been sick since I got back from Mexico… no, I didn’t bring back any illegal immigrants in my intestines again, it’s just a freakin sinus annoyance. It’s a good thing I kick these pretty well. We got back to find almost a foot of snow in the neighborhood… that was kinda cool. Christmas day dumped a nice amount with some followups on Thursday. It’s so nice to see all the snow falling not only here but in the mountains as well…

Went up with Amanda, Becca and Mike on Saturday to do a little boarding which was fun. It started out pretty rough for poor Amanda but in the afternoon session she started to get some balance and learn the ins and outs of her balance. I’m so proud of her. Becca did pretty good too… she was the first to get up on balance but still needs a couple more days up there to get some steering down. I also got in a good run at least with Mike so that was nice. 🙂 I look forward to snaggin another day up there soon though to go beat myself up… maybe this weekend if I’m feeling better.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing some cleaning… Christmas Tree removal, etc… Also doing the new year cleaning frenzy which is always fun. I’m trying to figure out how much of the downstairs stuff I can clean out to prepare for the remodel of that room… Time to do some project budgeting again! YAY!

At some point I need to get out in the garage and pull the turbo off the rolla… stupid thing decided to blow up on me… *sigh* oh well… at least it wasn’t the motor this time, lol. I actually think it might be cold related somehow… it appears only a seal has busted and oil leaked into the system…. all that means is I get to feed my OCD side and do some massive cleaning on the old girl…

Oh… speaking of the garage…. some nice remodel/additions going on in there as well actually… Andy got me a new workbench/desk for Christmas… I’ve so got to take some pictures but it’s really cool. Thanks a ton man, that was an awesome addition to the garage! Now I just have to clean the files and misc crud out of the old desk so we can break it down and move it out of there… I think sometime this winter (maybe while working on the family room) I need to pick up some more sheetrock and put a ceiling in the garage. It’s time to try to insulate that thing and make it a little more livable out there during the winter months… it’s ridiculous right now. Part of it will be getting that furnace working out there as well, that will make a huge difference. So many things to do…

Well, time to get some things wrapped up here so I can get out of here… Happy New Year!

Ok, as promised here is a run down. I’m going to make an assumption that if you’ve gotten Windows 2003 Server running in your home environment there are some things I don’t have to explain. If for some reason you really don’t get it… then post a comment and I’ll take more time to reply more steps.

Here’s my scenario and the hardware used:

1x Windows 2003 Small Business Server
1x Windows Vista Ultimate (running media center)
1x XBOX 360 (connecting to the Vista Ultimate system)

As I mentioned in a previous blog, the biggest problem I ran into was finding a way to see all of my media (which was stored on the SBS server for obvious reasons) on my XBOX 360 in both media center *AND* streaming from WM11’s media connector sharing. I had searched high and low across the internet with no luck. There are possible solutions for various versions of Windows Media Center and Vista flavors but nothing that would work 100%… Here is my solution which I believe will work on any Windows system.

First and formost, iSCSI is your friend. There are a few target servers available out there but they seem to fall into the category of a) they won’t run on the version of 2003 Server you have or b) they cost insanely too much. In my searches I found one tool found over at iSCSI-Cake. It’s free, it’s small and it’s incredibly easy. Here’s what you do:

1) Download & Install iSCSI Target to your Windows 2003 System.
2) Download & Install Microsoft iSCSI Initiator to your Windows Media Center. (If you have it as part of Vista already (it’s in the control panel) skip this step.
3) Configure the Target by opening up the application… Typically you just unpack this app to your server and run it. It’s *that* easy. You then right click on the iSCSI Disk icon in the application and select ‘ New Disk ‘. From here you can pick the disk, the folder, or whatever you’re wanting to share out as an iSCSI device.
4) Configure the Initiator in Windows by filling out the correct server where necessary. (sorry i don’t have pictures of that right now and I’m not at my computer, I’m blogging this from Mexico because I have a few minutes… lol)

Once this is done, you should see some new drives in ‘My Computer’. You can change the letters if you want from Disk Management if you see fit to. Either way, this disk or disks will show up as valid hardware devices and therefore be seen from the XBOX with no issues at all. No logins are necessary as these drives are system-wide and loaded at boot. No security permissions are necessary for reading as long as ‘Everyone’ is set to read rights on the folder on the target server.

The software is a freebie from the site. I would like to try MySan from Nimbus when they come out with a compatible version but for now this has been working fine. If you setup your WM11 and your Media Center as if they were local drives on your machine, every aspect of the 360 will see it just like they were physical drives sitting in your media center. Questions or comments if I missed something obviously important *will* get a response posted. 🙂

Merry Christmas, good luck and hopefully this solves your issues as it did mine!

Now most of you have no idea what that means and for those that don’t, just stop reading here because you’re going to have a headache probably… However, I’m sure to anyone who has come across this via a google search you’re in hopes of discovering a method to being able to access media stored on your Windows 2003 Server using your XBOX 360 Media Center Extender. I hope that this is the last place you have to look for the solution.

Honestly I was getting pretty frustrated. It seemed everyone’s solution to the problem was to use login scripts and setup permissions all over the place when at the end of the day when you had tried so many of those… 80% of the time it doesn’t work. I know this was very frustrating for me as nothing was working for me and nothing provided a perfect solution for *BOTH* Media Center and the streaming during gameplay using Windows Media Connect through WMP11.

So with some work and some thought, I came up with a solution last night which is working PERFECTLY for both Media Center *AND* WMC.

Here’s the thought process that got me to this theory… how does one make a local drive out of a network share? I don’t mean a mapped drive, I mean a full on, seen by Vista (or XP MC2005) honest to goodness hard disk without actually having it installed? iSCSI. 🙂

After doing some digging around on google, I was able to find several vendors out there (some free) that carried iSCSI Target software that could map local hard drives to iSCSI shares. I’m currently doing some testing with a couple of them but my first attempt actually backed up my theory right off using a trial version of RocketDivision’s StarWind. Windows Vista Ultimate comes with Microsoft’s iSCSI Initiator, so there was nothing to install for me on the client side. If you’re running a version of Windows that doesn’t have it, click the link and it should take you to their download. So far, so good. Now to just find something that will work that doesn’t cost my first born. 🙂 My hopes are that Nimbus will release a new version of their MySan product which will work with Windows Server 2003 SP2 since their current version only works on SP1 w/ .NET 2.0. Not downgrading just to test so here’s hoping to a quick release of 1.0 which I was told in a support ticket should be “very soon”.

The nice thing about iSCSI, as any server administrator who has a SAN knows, it links up at bootup so the drive is available system-wide and not limited to just one profile.

At this time, since I stated I’m testing, I’m unable to type up any instructions but I just wanted to blog out that there was a solution that is solid. As soon as I’m done I’ll post up with some instructions.

There is hope! 🙂