Home Media, Part 2 (Storage. No, firewall.)

For starters, I need more storage. My main office computer is a Mac Mini hooked up to a 20" flat screen. It's got an 80g drive which filled up last year sometime. At that point, I went with an external USB enclosure with a 500g drive. It was fairly cheap (thanks Newegg!) and allowed me to move my iTunes library off to another drive, which freed up my primary volume considerably.

At 500g, I had way more space then I needed. I decided to partition the drive in half and give Time Machine a try. It was incredibly simple and easy to setup. Just the way I like it! On top of that, I felt moderately better that I was backing up important documents, photos, and home video.

Anyway, back to the point. I need more storage. I would like to start moving my DVD collection online so that I can stream it downstairs to the PS3. I'm pretty lazy and this would save me some trips up the stairs. Furthermore, I get kind of tired of swapping disks in the PS3 from playing games to watching DVDs.

So, because I'm not only lazy, but also cheap, I started looking around at the spare equipment that I had stored up in the office. I just figured I'd repurpose some existing equipment and fire up Linux and Samba and be done with it. There are probably enough parts lying around to build about 3 pc's, but it's all pretty old stuff. I have 2 working pc's, one of which is a Windows gaming machine that powers down randomly. The other is my firewall which runs Debian at the moment.

The firewall it is. But, before I repurpose that box, I need a different firewall. (I know this is a long ways from storage, but bear with me) I decided to upgrade my wireless access point to be wireless access point/firewall. The excellent DD-WRT package made this very easy in addition to adding some nice QoS functionality that I wasn't using before. I won't go into all the details of how to do it, because I believe that it is documented well elsewhere. Definitely drop a comment if you have some questions about it. I can go into details of my setup in a future post.

Before I closed out the firewall project, I ran over to Shields Up to verify the firewall settings were sufficiently hiding me from portscans. Yep, all good! Everything comes back "stealth". Now... where was I?

Wake Up

I access my home computers from over the Internet all the time. Because of this, I typically leave them on 24x7 so that I can always log into them. Yeah, this uses some power, but the convenience of it has always been more important to me. I knew about wakeonlan capability, but just never took the time to figure it out.

After I read this write-up, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. Turns out to be way easier then I thought. You should give it a try!

I ended up using a different utility then the ones suggested in the article though. Since I tend to log in via ssh, I needed a utility that will work via command line. This one works nicely on my Mac (cuz OS X just comes with PERL out of the box). I also grabbed it on my Debian system with "apt-get install wakeonlan".

One thing to note, it will be easier to use this if you happen to recall the ethernet address of all your home machines. I could tell you that I have all mine memorized, but I would be lying. Instead, I just created a quick notebook on Google and stored them all there.

My machines now have power management settings enabled. They will enjoy a well deserved rest tonight. Give it a try and let me know how it goes...

Connect to your home network (SSH)

In my last post, I discussed how I keep track of my home IP address so that I could connect from "outside", whether I'm at my parent's house, traveling, or in a coffee shop.

Now, if you are going to connect from the typical open wireless access that you will find at a coffee shop, then you should be thinking about the security of the information you pass to your home network. It is incredibly easy to eavesdrop on your web session on an open wireless network. There are, as always, multiple ways to connect home securely. I will show you a couple of different ways to do it.

From here on out, this post will reference a Mac system that is connected directly to the Internet without any sort of firewall in the middle. Next week, I'll do a similar post for those of you gutsy enough to connect your Windows system directly to your external connection.

On my home system, I have configured the SSH server to allow traffic from my internet connection. I can then connect to that from a Windows, Mac, or *nix system. When making the SSH connection, I choose the options to allow tunneling. This allows me to then connect to my home system while "tunneling" through the secure SSH connection.

From the Mac system that you are currently sitting at, the command you would use to do this is (all one line):

ssh -L 5931:localhost:5900 username_on_home_system@my_home_system.dyndns.org

By running this command, you are attempting to login to your system at home using an account named "username_on_home_system". Once you authenticate successfully, you instruct SSH to connect port 5931 on the system sitting in front of you to port 5900 on your home system.

Once you have successfully made this connection, then you can use a remote desktop application like RDP (for Windows) or VNC (for Windows, Mac, and lots of other systems). I use VNC on my home system, so that is why I chose the port number 5900 when connecting SSH. To connect to my home system, I use a VNC client like Chicken of the VNC and configure it to connect to the local systems sitting in front of me.


It may seem odd to be trying to connect VNC to the system that you are currently sitting at, but keep in mind that the SSH program is going to forward anything you send to your local port 5931 to the port 5900 on your system at home. If you've done everything correctly, you should be looking at your home desktop, and it will be completely encrypted while doing so! Now, you can launch programs on your home system just as if you were sitting there.

I hope you find this helpful. It can be complicated, but your privacy and security are well worth taking the time to figure it out. If you have questions, leave a comment for me and I'll do my best to help you out.

Run a Windows application on your Mac

I decided to try out a product called Parallels the other day. I did this because I love my Macs, but I also love Quicken for Windows. I had heard about Parallels from a number of places, but figured now was the time to give it a try.

After installing it and installing Windows XP as a guest VM, I got to really see what was so special about this product.

The feature of Parallels that I really liked is called Coherence. With the Coherence feature enabled, it becomes very seamless when running a Windows application on your host OSX operating system. You no longer have to "swap" between the two operating systems. You can now have the Windows shell natively embedded into your OSX environment. For a peek at what this looks like, check out the image below.



It is really a powerful, clean way to implement better usability of the guest environment. You can even go farther with cross-launching applications between the two environments, but that just isn't something I'm all that interested in. My goal is to use Quicken for Windows on my Mac and this Parallels is a great way to do it!

The drawback... Have plenty of physical memory. The Mac Mini that I was running this on has 1G of memory and that was just not quite enough for a pleasurable VM experience. Swapping back and forth between the guest environment and the host environment was very noticeable and almost unusable. I'm very familiar with VM technology, both at home and at work, so I'm confident that this was not a problem with Parallels. It just takes more then 512M of memory for each operating system (the guest and the host) to run smoothly, and any VM product has to deal with this.

Backup Gmail Data

I ran across an interesting post the other day about making a backup of your email that is hosted by Google. The original author did a good job with instructions, so I won't repeat them here. I will note that I needed to a couple of things differently to make this work on my Mac.

First of all, fetchmail was already available on my Mac. (Don't you just love that OSX is really Unix? I do.)

Secondly, when configuring the .fetchmailrc file, I added a couple of things:

1. and wants mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" - The default behavior of fetchmail is to try and forward the mail that it downloaded to your systems SMTP service. In my case, I had never intended for my desktop machine to receive mail directly, so this was not enabled. The first time I ran fetchmail, it choked and died at this step. By adding the "mda" option, you direct fetchmail to deliver the mail locally to your default system mailbox. This will be a file that matches your username in the /var/mail directory. You can view it with a texteditor or by using the command 'mail' when you are in the Terminal.


2. keep - I added this keep option so that I don't need to use the "-k" option when running the fetchmail command. Not sure why the original author didn't do this.

Okay, so my .fetchmailrc file looks like this now:

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns
user 'you@gmail.com' there with password 'itsasecret' is 'YourOSXUsername' here and wants mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" options ssl keep

Upon running fetchmail, it downloads a few hundred messages at a time. My Gmail currently has about 1800 messages, so this will take a while to download, but that's fine. My intent here was to get a copy of my mail on my own hard drive just in case my relationship with Google ever fell through. I'll schedule this nightly via cron and in a week or two, I'll have a copy of everything.