Linus Mixte3

Here is Emily’s new commuter bike. She is going to use it for school trips and hauling things around the local area. It’s a neat bike and one of the only Mixte’s we could find on the market right now. It’s made by Linus bikes and we picked it up from the Seattle Dutch Bike Company. Emily also got some very nice saddle bags from www.clarijscovers.com which make these neat dutch style bags that hang from your rear rack. They are waterproof and attach with a bit of velcro.

The bike itself is the 3 speed Mixte from Linus bikes. It’s a nice upright transport bike.

Trek 520 project part 2

Here’s the completed bike. Quite a difference from the original look that’s for sure. The plan was to upgrade a number of items to get it into good riding condition and make a daily commuter out of it.

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Trek 7.2fx kids hybrid

Here are a few pictures of Emily’s Trek 7.2fx bike. It’s a 24 inch tire hybrid road bike that made a nice transition between her 20 inch days and her first large sized adult bike. It was a very stock bike with only the basics on it. It did have indexed shifting with a 3×9 drive train. Bought it for $350, sold it 4 years later for $200 on craigslist!
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Trek 520 project

So next up I decided to build up a Vintage Trek 520 touring bike as a project. It started as a very clean 1984 Trek 520. I was the 3rd owner of the bike which I found on Craigslist in Bellingham WA. The bike was built in the USA in Waterford WI, back in the days when Trek used lugged steel to build their frames. Of course today these are the most sought after frames for vintage restorations, since they still ride very nicely all these years later. The bike was mostly original, even having the original rubber on the rims! Of course that means that much had to be upgraded and changed. All the bearings needed repacked and everything needed cleaning. A bit of wheel truing and the basics were ready for the upgrade.

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Electric Townie

So what do you get when you take a basic Electra Townie and add your own electric motor kit? Why you get the world’s easiest to ride bike! The motor kit was from amped bikes which make a complete kit to electrify any basic bike. It comes with a new wheel that has the hub motor installed. You simply bolt it on and wire it up. I got a LIPO4 battery direct from China off of Ebay. a Ping battery they are called. This gave it a 20 mile range at 25mph!

I added a complete motor and battery management system which allowed the monitoring of the state of change and used energy while you were riding. This really made a bike that would blast up any hill you found!

Check it out yourself if you are interested in building one. www.ampedbikes.com

Torrent-Flux

TorrentFlux is an open source bit torrent client for Linux, Unix & BSD platforms that runs on a web server. It is implemented on the LAMP stack. Manage all of your Torrent downloads through a convenient web interface on a high powered server, on a fast network connection from anywhere!

Drive Setup

Now that we have a basic Ubuntu box up and running the next step in building a media server is to have some storage to hold the goods. Taking some basic SATA cards and 6 new 500gb SATA drives I proceeded to assemble a raid system.

The key to the software Raid5 setup is to use MDADM. You can find full instructions for the setup of raid disks under Linux at Gregory Gulik’s site.

I liked the idea to use LVM which allows you some future flexibility to expand volumes, add more arrays to your volumes and in general get out of a bind if need be. The basic idea is to virtualize your array and volume setup so they can be modified without loosing data.

Lastly the Linux Raid wiki has lots of good info about the setup of software raid systems. Read through some of this info to get a good feeling about what you are doing before depending on the raid system for your live data.

Ubuntu Install

First up is the Ubuntu install. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD for an easy install. I installed the server version as it’s the cleanest base install for a media server. You could also use the desktop version if you desired. Keep in mind that the server version has no (and I mean NO) GUI interface for management and setup, so you must be comfortable getting jiggy with command line interfaces and editing text files. Hey it’s Linux, it’s not that bad. Kind of reminds me of the 80′s and my work on HP3000 systems.

Some great places to get more info about the basic Ubuntu setup include:

https://help.ubuntu.com/

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/

NAS Server Update

Well, after a few weeks of playing around with FreeNAS, it was time to build out the plan for real. First up was some added hardware to create a “real” NAS box. Hard drives are top of the list, then network, cables, etc.

Hardware Procurement list

1. 6 – 500GB Hitachi Sata II Drives
2. Misc Sata cables to hookup everything
3. Adaptec 2610 (Dell) RAID card – for hardware raid (from Ebay)
4. CF to IDE boot drive adapter (from Ebay)
5. Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network adapter
6. New case (from Re-Pc)

So, first up was to build out the new raid system. The plan was to use 6 500 gig drives using a hardware raid controller to present them to FreeNAS. The problem was the hardware raid controller would not build out greater than 1.5T and would not complete building the raid group with the new disks. Next challenge was that when the system booted up freeNAS it would fail upon creating a volume on the hardware raid controller. After much research I decided on moving to software raid as the best solution.

1. I added 2 Sata HBA cards to directly hookup the 6 drives

With my new HBA direct connections to the drives, I forged ahead with FreeNAS software Raid setup. In short, it failed miserably. I couldn’t get anything to build out cleanly and never got a stable drive set out of it. Lots of research, many hours of testing, before I finally gave up. Hum, what to do next?

PUNT

Next up I installed Ubuntu Linux onto my existing NAS hardware setup. With great hopes I pushed install with a new CD in the drive…

Apple TV

Well, we finally took the plunge into the 21st century and got a new TV along with a new AppleTV. The system is slowly coming together. The FreeNAS box has all the storage, which an older iMac G5 serves out content via iTunes. The AppleTV then streams it’s TV & Movies from the iMac to allow a larger content store than you can normally sync up to the AppleTV. This solution is very seamless and works great thus far.
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