Tranquilli.org

mini-itx fanless home server and nas storage

In the process of upgrading my home network, I’ve just picked

- a new NAS, Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, with 1.5TB+1.5TB disks in x-raid configuration (netgear’s raid1 with dynamic exapansion); this is replacing my older Maxtor Shared Storage II

- a fanless CPU/Motherboard, Intel D510MO with Intel’s next-gen Pine Trail Atom processor, as my (always-on) mini-itx linux home server; it replaced an old (unstable) VIA C7+Jetway mobo

ReadyNAS Duo storage server

I use the ReadyNAS Duo to provide redundant/scalable storage to CIFS/AFP and NFS clients, for local/remote backups (rsync for Unix , Time Machine for Apple clients) and media streaming as well. Videos, music and pictures can be streamed to any uPnP/DLNA client on local net (an EVA2000 internet set-top box connected to the TV,  the iPhone…  a future Squeezebox) or iTunes clients (through FireFly straming server).

mini-itx case

The Home Server

The linux based home server will do its work as usual:

- development/testbed server, rsynced to a production VPS in the cloud, for personal hobby/projects
- Asterisk PBX for my voip phones
- OpenVPN endpoint for remote access to the home lan
- SSL tunneling for some home devices (e.g.. imap/ssl access from voip phone)
- mysql server
- monitoring (I’m going to try Zenoss) and usage statistics (mrtg, webalizer)

Dec 02 2009 UPDATE: this is now freely available on the App Store
Dec 04 2009 UPDATE: It’s 4th on the top free applications for the travel category (Italian App Store)
Dec 17 2009 UPDATE: updated version (1.1) now available (includes georeferenced webcams and Last.fm events)

Main application screen

Lately I spent some time learning how to write iPhone applications.
Having been an avid C programmer for so many years it wasn’t difficult to start writing code in Objective-C (a powerful yet simple OOP language based on C);
a good book and the standard Apple docs that come with the SDK did the rest for the Cocoa touch API and the iPhone SDK in general

Finally, a couple of hours ago I managed to submit a first application to the App Store; nothing original but it still can handle maps, gps data, tables and scroll views, images, graphical transitions, REST API calls and results parsing for different webservices (yr.no weather data, geonames, flickr, panoramio, bing, yahoo search, google maps, upcoming.org) mostly through asynchronous network calls. Almost 7K lines of code.

I’m  releasing a new Facebook application: PostInjector.

PostInjector can post your Flickr images collected by the SuckRSS engine to your Facebook profile or page, along with a thumbnail and relevant Exif data (focal length, exposure, metering mode, gps coordinates, etc). A link to a map and a reverse geocoded place name are provided for georeferenced images, as usual.
The application uses the new Open Stream API and has already been whitelisted by Facebook.

More about SuckRSS
PostInjector Facebook application

This is a quick post just to let you know a thing related to my SuckRSS software. From now on, the “HTML generation” module will retrieve EXIF data and automatically add information on some of the camera settings (exposure, aperture, metering mode, gps position and altitude, etc) for ‘educational’ purposes.
I’ve reprocessed some of the past postings.

I’m no longer using FeedBurner. I activated a 30 day redirection but unfortunately
some feed readers (including Google Reader) forget about permanent HTTP redirects and don’t update the subscription URL.

Please make sure you’re pointing to the correct RSS URL:

http://www.tranquilli.org/feed/

The old one will stop working soon. - Thanks!.