Category Archives: Mini-ITX

All posts about the via mini-itx hardware

Zotac ION-ITX-F Wi-Fi Dual Core 1.6GHz Atom N330 Mini-ITX Motherboard with PCI Express x16 With Windows 7 Home Premium

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Zotac ION-ITX-F

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.

Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.


Zotac ION-ITX-F

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.

Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).

Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.

It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.

FURTHER UPDATE:  having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board.  Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.

MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie.  Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.

Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

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Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin.  Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else.  I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista. 

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.

Visual Studio 2005, Pushok and CVS on Vista / Linux

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Ok I previously blogged how to get visual studio 2003 talking to cvs using putty and pushok.  This is an update to that, which can be found previous to this entry.

Pre-cursor to this is that you have putty working with your linux / unix machine and that you can open a session using ssh without using a password.

I downloaded the version 1.3 of the cvsscc from pushok, I believe thats the one for unix as they have split their programs from unix and windows cvs since I last bought software from them.

I then opened visual studio 2005 and clicked open from source control which presents you with a cvsroot options dialog in the cvsroot just type :ext:paulfarrow@cvs_server:/500gb1/cvsdata now ext depicts the protocol and the pushok program knows to use putty which you should already have set up and running in the tray with your certificates etc (not covered in this blog entry) and then the userid @ the putty saved session, you can see mine is called cvs_server and then the path for the root here mine is /500gb1/cvsdata.

then once you have put that in click check and it should authenticate against the linux server.  You should then be able to clicke elipse next ot cvs module and it will give you a list of directories / modules in your cvs server.

Glad I got that going took me a little while, my next quest is to upgrade to svn and try the pushok plugin for that, will keep you all informed on how it goes.

ah forgot to mention one thing you need an environment variable to point to plink.exe which comes with putty that is CVS_RSH just set that to where plink resides in my case thats CVS_RSH=c:\ssh\plink.exe then pushok knows to use that for the ext protocol.

Accessing Vista with smbclient

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Just bought a new machine and decided to put VISTA on it.  Now biggest problem was accessing the shares via smbclient or Samba.  Hunted high and low on the net couldnt find anything not specific for VISTA and smbclient.

I then looked for windows xp and smbclient and found a post about changing a registry entry.  Up to this point I had tried everything everyone else was saying like enable file sharing, private sharing etc and couldnt get any of that too work at all.

Probably works via another vista machine but not from linux or my apple.

I upgraded samba to the latest version before doing this.  I then added a registry entry in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy which a hexadecimal value of 1 and bobs your uncle you should be able to access shares and admin shares such as C$ on the vista machine from smbclient or mounting it in the fstab.

Hope that helped you, it helped me no end as I was getting very frustrated about it.  And samba is key to my machines here.

 

Taking Delivery Of A MAC Powerbook G4 15 inch

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Took delivery of my new machine yesterday.  Rather swiss, this is my first Mac, they tell me once you taste Mac you never go back !!

First thing I needed to do was to get it on my encrypted wireless network ugh oh !!  Couldnt for the life of me get it on, I use a manual 128 bit key and have my passphrase in key 4, did a bit of reading and realised that the Mac only reads passphrases from KEY 1 so had to move my phrase into that on my existing wireless access points and yes it all works…

Other problem I had was that I couldnt get the Mac to see my shares on the windows 2003 domain controller.  It could connect via ip address and share name but the file finder couldnt browse the list of shares.  Tried for ages to get it going and at last seem to have cracked it.  Basically having read a lot of articles on the subject on the web I realised that in my local policy I had the network client talk securely (if server agrees) disabled as some articles say so made that enabled and just disabled the always talk securely and enabled send smb passwords unencrypted and this appears to have fixed it although I not entirely too confident about that.  But its all working now 🙂 the linux, windows and mac boxes can all talk together and share files no probs.  Can even pass files to my mac laptop which is just great.

Unable to connect to newer mysql database – Client Does Not Support Authentication Protocol Requested By Server, Consider Upgrading MySQL Client

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Kept getting the message ‘Client Does Not Support Authentication Protocol Requested By Server, Consider Upgrading MySQL Client’ after upgrading the mysql server to a newer version than the client odbc driver and after much trawling found that you have to update the mysql user table to hold the password in the old format like so..

UPDATE mysql.user
SET password=OLD_PASSWORD(‘somepassword’)
WHERE user=’someuser’
AND host=’somehost’;

dont forget to update each host and then reload your privaleges, should then work.

🙂