Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.2 - x: Flashing an LSI 9211-8i/9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware

Don't have enough ports available in your (Storage/ESXi) server? Even though modern motherboards come with 6 onboard port now a days, maybe it's not enough for you. Or you are using a little bit older hardware and don't have enough 6G ports (Only important to SSD's really). A quick and easy way is adding a PCIe based storage controller. And while True Hardware RAID can be good to have, on lower end controllers it's often more of a hindrance then a benefit. Especially when using something life software RAID or ZFS.

This guide will show you how to flash an LSI 9211-8i or 9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware. IT stands for "Intergrated Target". This way the disks get presented to the OS is a raw form, much like your motherboard ports would do. This enables complete control, SMART data for your OS and Power Management such as spindown. It will also help you if you encounter the "Failed to initialize PAL" error while flashing.

Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.1 - x: HDD Preperations

I have been building private servers for over 12 years now, as written before my current server is incarnation/version 8 with several even having minor revision numbers between the big numbers. During this time I have accumulated some best practices for myself and one of them is to always perform a full surface scan on (new) disks I receive. Read more about it in this article!

Compact Haswell HTPC

A while back I built myself a powerful PC based HTPC and today a friend asked me to design one for him. Since I have it all figured out anyway, I can just as well put it up on here.

Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 3 - x: ZFSguru Hardware and Layout (ZFS using FreeBSD)

This third part will be a hardware and design overview of the Storage server that I am using. This server combines a NAS with some secondary functions for me such as SabNZBd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, FTP, CrashPlan, etc. I know that kind of taints it's pure function (serve me storage) but since I used a pretty hefty machine for it, all seems to be working quite well and since this is not a company installation I believe the otherwise wasted CPU power can be put to good use! This article will be one of the most complex because it will hold the configuration I made and also partially the reasons why.

Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 2 - x: VMware ESXi Server

First in the line of my Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup posts will by my ESXi server. I will list the hardware involved, power usage, etc.

Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1 - x: The General Setup

This will be a series of posts about the renewing and current setup I have done upgrading my home Server/Storage/Lab setup. I will go into the hardware I decided to use, and also a bit of the reasoning behind it. Included will be some tips and tricks and maybe the articles will help you make your own setup!

New TimeLapse Method for TI DaVinci DM368/DM365 DSP based cameras

After creating a timelapse method using FFmpeg and after that using VLC a new method was discovered by one of my commentators. He dissected the firmware files and found that you can access an URL which then gives you a picture. This of course is the ideal way of generating pictures with a set time interval and I'll walk you through the process in this post.

New Firmware Version 2.5.0.0 for DM368/DM365 DSP IP Camera

Someone made a comment on my original post about the 5Mpix TI DaVinci DM368 DSP camera that tpsee (the internal board manufacturer) has released firmware 2.5.0.0 for our cameras. I believe that to be worthy to open a new topic for!

update-- A word of warning: It seems the cloud functionality is still expanding and it now actually works. This would be great, if it was possible to disable this function, but it is not and per default EVERY camera is accessible from the outside of your network when they know the device ID! Very VERY bad! A watchful reader made me aware of this fact, much gratitude!

If you decide to run the P2P intergrated firmware, but sure to realize what this means. Anyone in the world can watch your camera, I would advise to only use it if you can block/drop it with your firewall.

--update I have made a new post about firmware version 2.5.1.8 which was recently released. I will keep this post alive because there are a lot of valuable comments in here! If you upgraded, please comment in the newer post!

Bunnies do not like UTP cables

If you have seen some demo clips I have recorded over the last few blog posts you would have seen I use my bunnies as 'test subjects'. Today, they retaliated...

Passive POE for use with Outdoor IP Cameras

For a while now I have been writing about the TI DaVinci DM368 DSP based cameras. And while these chinese cameras work very well in most situations, they always come with only a small amount of cable in which you need to plug your UTP and power cable. And while the camera might be weatherproof, this connection certainly isn't. I have a cheap solution which I use for this, read on inside!

China Camera's the second wave (Aote IP Camera Review)

It's been a while since my original posting about the IP Camera I had acquired with the TI DaVinci DM368 DSP. Since then, that article has been expanded quite a bit with more firmware levels, and I wrote some other articles on how to make a timelapse. I have since aquired 6 more camera's with the same chipset, all in different forms and configurations, read more about those and where you can buy them in this article.

Review: SanDisk Extreme MicroSDXC 64GB card

Since I bought the new Asus Transformer Pad I wanted to have some storage to go with it. And because I always want the best available I bought a SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-1 64GB. I also believe that buying more expensive now will mean it will last me longer, both in speed and size. So, to test this out I ran some benchmarks on the card.

Asus Transformer Pad (TF701) performance report/review

I recently bought a new tablet, the Asus Transformer Pad (TF701) and since not much information is known about it yet, here are some benchmarks I ran on the tablet! This is a copy of a post I made on the TransformerForums.com website.

Repair incorrectly reported broken/failed Intel RAID0

Since I purchased a new motherboard I have started using Intel RAID0 for 2xSamsung 840 Pro 256GB and 2xHitachi 1TB 2.5" disks. Performance is great and everything worked well, untill I had to reset my BIOS a few times because of overclocking. For some reason my second RAID0 array (On the Hitachi HDD's) would always come up failed. 

This was strange to me (I have a background in Storage) as there was no reason why the RAID would have failed. So I started investigating and I found a way to repair the situation without data loss.

RTSP to JPEG Timelapse script using VLC with GPU acceleration

Having written the previous article on how to do this with FFMPEG I have become painfully aware of the limitations FFMPEG posses in the RTSP department. I was unable to reliably get a non-corrupted output from it. Thus I looked onward for another tool to do this for me, I ended up with VLC and I wrote a new script for it.

RTSP to JPEG Timelapse script using FFMPEG

The IP cameras I own do not have the HTTP picture URL ability some do. But I still want to use them to create timelapse videos. So I devised a way to do this using a cameras RTSP stream with FFMPEG.

update-- Since writing this I have determined this method will always produce corrupted JPG files with my 5Mpix IP camera. I have devised a new method using VLC which does not have these corruption problems. The described method below remains valid but please check your results and then decide which method to use.

Picture by Timothy Allen

Fixing RTSP stream corruption (Guide for Genius Vision)

Ever since I started with the IP camera's described in my previous posts I've been plagued by a problem that the RTSP streams would sometimes show corruption in the lower/bottom part of the picture as shown below:

IPQ1649X - 1080P Outdoor IP Camera with 5 Megapixel sensor 40m IR

This will be my review of the IPQ1649X - 1080P Outdoor IP Camera with 5 Megapixel sensor 40m IR from www.securitycamera2000.com.

I bought this camera about a year ago as can be read in my previous blog entry. I was on a quest for a good but cheap Megapixel IP camera and this camera would have been the 'holy grail' if it had worked correctly. A lot has happened since then!

Cheap Megapixel IP camera's from China (Review)

Welcome to this first post on my new blog!

This post will be about cheap Megapixel IP camera's from China and my experience with them. Over the last year I've had 4 different models all with their own problems and faults.