But here’s what I don’t get.  Apple clearly wasn’t in a rush to get this thing out the door – rumors of an Apple tablet have been flying around ever since the Newton checked out.  It’s not like they had to push it out right now, at once.  Given those facts, why do it now, rather than let it finish cooking and release the product everyone wants?

To me, the device makes sense if you add some stuff to it.  Like for starters, a front-facing camera. This is the ideal form factor for a Skype / iChat Video device, yet it’s missing the camera.  Reading PDFs as part of iBooks should be part of the core functionality.  As near as I can tell, the way you get PDFs on the iPad is with 3rd party apps like Papers. Oh yeah, and it should cost half what it does.  I’d buy an 8GB iPad for $250.  Heck, I might even go $299.  But $499?  You’ve got to be kidding me.

Inevitably, all of these issues will be addressed, and you early adopters will pay the price, having financed iPad 2.0 and 3.0, which will integrate the features that should have been there on day 1.  I’m actually finally considering an iPhone, once I see what this year’s announcement brings.  Apple’s 4th pass at a phone might measure up.  We’ll see.

Physical Attributes

The device’s size is great.  Nice and small.  I had an N97 for a (very) short time not long after it came out, and I was not a fan of the form factor.  It felt almost like carrying around an old 9500.  What a brick that thing was.  Contrasted with this, I’d be totally satisfied with the form factor.  Obviously, thinner would be better, to a point, but I’m not unhappy with the thickness.  In terms of construction, there’s just enough metal to make it feel solid in your hands, like it’s not going to snap in half while you’re typing on it.

One problem I had with the layout – the position of the headphone jack.  On my train ride home from the office yesterday, I had my headphones plugged in while listening to some tunes.  Typing a couple of emails and texts was awkward.  It would have been better if the headphone jack had moved toward the top, but the camera assembly would then need to be relocated.  Typing on the keyboard wasn’t bad, took a bit of getting used to, but nothing ridiculous.

Software

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  S60 is really showing its age.  Yes, S60 v5 has some advances over v3, even FP2, but it’s still got a lot of the baggage that’s accompanied S60 devices over the years – mostly speed related.  This phone won’t win any UI races.  The device lacks any form of multi-touch capabilities, due to its use of a resistive touchscreen.  Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about how you can use resistive screens while wearing gloves.  Frankly, I don’t often find myself trying to use my phone while wearing gloves.  I’d rather have a capacitive screen – much more responsive.

As it’s big brother does, the N97 Mini includes Ovi Maps, and is compatible with the new version of Ovi Maps that includes free navigation.  I love the free navigation concept, and expect others to follow suit.  That said, I much prefer using Google Maps.  I find it faster and more responsive than Ovi Maps overall, and think it’s much better at finding things in the area because of its hooks into the Google Search infrastructure.  I’d use something like Ovi Maps in my car for navigation, but I’ve owned a Garmin Nuvi for several years now, and I’m not quite ready to get rid of it.

For email, I’m using Mail for Exchange.  The latest version for S60 v5 does not include HTML mail support, something I miss from my E72.  I’m planning on trying out RoadSync on this phone as well, but since I already know that it doesn’t support network destinations (i.e. access point groups), I’ll be disappointed there as well, though I will get my HTML mail.

In the browser arena, as expected, I found the Nokia browser to be adequate, but not really as good as I’d like to see it.  I tried out Opera Mobile on the device, and was generally more pleased with its functionality, though I found it to be slightly less responsive than the stock Nokia browser.

Network

I ran a some speed tests from a variety of sites, using both AT&T 3G data as well as via the WLAN in my home.  Over the air, I saw download speeds ranging from 500 – 780 kbps.  Over the WLAN, I saw speeds around 1.2 Mbps.  On my Mac on the same WLAN, I see about 18 Mbps down and 4.2 Mbps up (I have 20/5 FiOS at home).  These performance numbers are consistent with my tests with other S60 phones, like the E71, E72 and my wife’s E75.  It’s also close to what my iPhone toting friends in the area see.

Conclusions

In summary, the N97 Mini is definitely a better choice than the bigger N97.  It’s more pocketable, and has the same features, with a better form factor.  If all you’re after is an S60 v5 touch device, you’d probably be better off with the 5800 Nav Edition, but if you can’t live without a qwerty keyboard, the N97 Mini is a winner.  Will I buy one?  Probably not – I’m satisfied with my E72.  Right now, Android 2.1 has ActiveSync that gets email and contacts.  If they add calender support to it, I’ll be on an Android device before too long.  Why?  Newer devices, more innovation, actual integration with Google Voice – something I actually use on a daily basis and more than one vendor really interested in using it.  Hopefully S60 can turn things around before my next phone purchase.  As a co-worker said the other day, the call quality on Nokia devices is better than anything else I’ve ever used.

1. No RAID
2. Onboard NIC required significant fiddling to get working under ESXi 3.5u4
3. No onboard video, so I needed a video card, plus a network card to get going (the real root cause of #1 above).
4. A bit loud.  The system wasn’t terribly loud, but for something that’s on full-time in the background in my office, it could be distracting at times.

So here we are, it’s a brand-new year, so the big project was an upgrade, inspired by some requirements I found with a project at work.  In the end, the old server was converted into a workstation and now has a happy home.  So what’s the current system?  Another Shuttle XPC.  This time, it’s the SG45H7.  This is a slightly smaller chassis than the already small SP35P2 Pro.  The SP line has space for 2 hard drives up top, above the optical drive that the SG line lacks, resulting in a shorter case.  The SG45H7 is targeted as an HTPC, and includes onboard video with both SVGA and HDMI outputs.  Further, it includes 2 expansion slots, one PCIe x16 and one PCI.

Shuttle SG45H7 Case

System preparation was pretty straight forward.  I followed the basic Shuttle directions for installing the Intel Core 2 Quad 9550  CPU, and the 8GB of DDR2-800 RAM (the ram shifted over from the SP35P2 Pro).  With the latest BIOS upgrade, (which I applied first) the SG45H7 can handle 4x 4GB DIMMs, for a total of 16GB of RAM.  Not too shabby!

The system came with 3 internal SATA-II ports, only 2 of which were pre-cabled (1 extra cable in the box though), and an IDE cable for use with an IDE optical drive.  I removed the IDE cable and one of the 2 SATA cables, which gave me room to run a SAS SFF-8087 to 4x SATA break-out cable through the wiring channel along with the remaining system SATA cable.  The SATA cable was used for a DVD-RW drive (I picked the cheapest Lite-On DVD-RW drive that Newegg was selling at the time), and 2 of the 4 SATA connectors on the break-out cable were for the 2x 1TB Samsung HDDs I installed.  Starring as the RAID controller was an LSI 8344ELP PCIe x4 card.  I got a new card that was actually an HP OEM version.  It’s really HP only as far as the sticker goes.  It still runs the LSI firmware, and happily accepted the latest firmware from the LSI website.  I’ve used this card a number of times now in other system builds, and it works very well, in addition to the low cost (around $150).  That’s right, $150 for a PCIe x4 RAID card that’s real, honest-to-goodness hardware RAID with 8 ports, supports use of SAS expanders to accommodate up to 32 total drives and supports RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 / 50.  Yes, I see the word “obselete” in the URL on LSI’s website, but I’m not terribly bothered by that, since there is excellent support for the card.  Driver support is excellent, and there was a firmware update in November, 2009.  Doesn’t seem all that obselete to me.
Since the onboard NIC was also not supported by ESXi 4.0 update 1, I opted for an Intel Pro 1000 GT PCI NIC.  This was my only quibble with the build.  If this system had both onboard video, and 2 PCIe slots, I could have used a multi-port NIC from Intel.  Now that this build is complete, Shuttle will probably truck out a new version of this model that includes 2 PCIe x16 slots, keeping the onboard video.  I’ll save that for the 3.0 version of the project, maybe in 12-18 months.
After I completed the hardware build, I formatted a USB stick to be bootable, using Method 2, as shown on bootdisk.com.  On that bootable USB stick, I dropped the Shuttle BIOS upgrade files, as well as the RAID controller firmware update.  Then, I booted from the stick and did the upgrades needed.  That took a couple of reboots and probably 10 minutes to complete.  After that, I built the RAID, from the LSI card BIOS, which only took a few minutes, since I was just simply creating a blank RAID-1 volume from a couple of empty drives.

Lastly, I installed VMware ESXi 4.0 update 1, and frankly, it was the most uneventful part of the process.  Why?  It took a good 5 minutes and almost no interaction to complete.  The final migration step was to move VMs over, update the VMware Tools and upgrade Virtual Hardware.

What brought this about?  Facebook has started opening up and federating their IM system with other networks.  First up is AIM.  That’s right, AIM users can now chat with Facebook Chat users.  Since Facebook wisely chose the open XMPP (eXtensible Messaging & Presence Protocol) for this, which allows easy federation (i.e. interoperability) with other IM services, including the greater Jabber/XMPP community, which includes Google Talk, both in its standard and “Apps for Your Domain” flavors.

Here’s the gist, tell your Jabber client (they give precise instructions for Pidgin, Adium and iChat) to connect as your-user-name@chat.facebook.com and you’re all set.  For other Jabber clients, check out the link above for any particulars on the connection parameters.

One thing that they did not do, and it’s a bit irksome – no SSL/TLS support.  Come on kids, we’re in the 21st century here, let’s get with the program a bit.  After all, the standard login.facebook.com page uses SSL, so why not this too?

So overall, it’s great news, but they’ve still got a bit of work to do.

The Apple iPad

Ok, so it’s been a couple of days since Apple announced the latest gadget that’s going to be “revolutionary,” or perhaps this one is “game changing.”  Whatever it is, the iPad, which many had very high hopes for appears to be a big dud.

People have been clamoring for Apple to enter the netbook/tablet market for some time now, at least an hour after the Asus eeePC started gaining popularity.  Well, they finally got their wish this past week.  Unfortunately, it’s a big dud.

Take an iPhone 3GS, make it bigger, slap a huge bezel around the screen, and take away its ability to make phone calls.  Blammo, you now have the iPad.  I’ve got so many questions about this thing, and the choices they made in its design, that I’m not entirely sure where to start.  How about the CPU?  Apple went and designed their own, rather than do something sensible like use the Intel Atom.  It boggles the mind.  Ok, so it plays HD video.  So does the Atom, when outfitted with a proper graphics chip, like the Nvidia ION.  Rather than put all that effort into the CPU, they could have done so much more with the hardware.  And despite touting it as able to play HD video, it’s got a 4:3 ratio screen, rather than the widescreen aspect ratio it deserves.

No front-mounted camera.  Apple loves to trot out the latest iChat video stuff during keynotes.  Why not on this thing?  I thought it was supposed to be “the netbook, but done right,” or something like that.  Then the OS, the iPhone OS?  Blech.  Multitasking anyone?  Sure, I understand their attraction to the fact that it runs iPhone apps out of the box, but that’s bound to be problematic.  Consider games for instance – those are designed down to the pixel on the little screen of the iPhone/iPod Touch.  Now suddenly they’re on a bigger screen.  Is there resolution independence, or will developers be doing hoop jumping to support the iPad?  We’ll find out, eventually.

Then there’s the price.  Wow.  $500 for a 16GB tablet that’s only got wifi?  Yikes.  Want that 3G?  No problem, just add another $130 to the price of an already overpriced gadget.  If you wan the big dog model (64GB) with 3G, that’s going to run you a cool $829.  Oh yeah, and then you still get to pay the monthly recurring charges for your carrier’s data plan.  Since it’s free of contract pricing and you can start and stop at-will, why not just simply sell it unlocked?

Lots of folks are up in arms that it’s yet another device bound for AT&T’s network, but I completely understand (and agree with) the choice.  You want to minimize your build costs to maximize your profitability.  Just like the iPhone, that means GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and UMTS 850/1900/2100, guaranteeing your ability to sell the product pretty much anywhere globally.  Especially perturbing to many is that it isn’t available for use on the Verizon network, for the reasons I just gave.  Honestly folks, everyone’s moving to LTE-based networks, even Verizon, so you’ll just have to wait a few more years, then you can get your iLove on the VzW network.

Last, but most certainly not least – the adapters.  Want to pull pictures from your digital cam into iPad?  There’s an adapter for that.  You still need the special dock cable to connect it to anything as well.  I get it – I understood the use of the dock connector back in the day.  It’s time to abandon it in favor of the Micro-USB connector that everything else is either using, or moving to.  My Nokia E72 uses it, as do all the newer BlackBerrys, as does the Kindle, as do many newer digital cameras.  Join the rest of us in the land of “only 1 cable for all these devices.”

Will people flock to this thing?  Probably.  But, I just don’t see the attraction.  Maybe after 3 or 4 revisions it will be cooked enough, but in its current state, it needs more time in the oven.

Between the N85 and the E72, I tried out the Blackberry 9700, which was lovely, as much as a Blackberry can be, but lacked some of the features I liked, such as a working SIP stack, and especially the ability to tell when my data is moving through the corporate network/BES, vs. WLAN, vs. carrier data that’s not via the BES – I found that utterly impossible on the BB 9700.  Otherwise, a nice phone.  But again, back to the topic at hand.

First, I’ll start with the physical attributes of the E72.  The E72 is a tiny bit wider than the E71, but is the tiniest bit lighter than the E71.  The E72 trades in a good bit of the metal housing for plastic, but gets new & improved features like a 3.5mm headphone jack, instead of the 2.5mm mess that’s on the E71.  Radios are mostly equivalent to the E71.  Mine is the US variant, the E72-2, so it’s a quad-band GSM/EDGE device, with works on UMTS 850/1900/2100 Mhz bands.  The 2100 Mhz band is a nice addition to the device, for users who travel abroad, as is the support for HSPA 7.2 Mbps.  The WLAN in the E72 is essentially the same as the E71 – 802.11b/g. The camera is a nice bump in the E72 as well – a 5MP cam, a step above the E71′s 3.2 MP cam, with a single LED flash.

My favorite part about the phone?  The messaging experience.  At work, one of our options is Exchange ActiveSync, so I’ve been a Mail for Exchange user for quite a while now, even with its deficiencies, like the lack of ability to sync folders other than the Inbox, HTML support, and lack of ability to create a meeting request from the phone.  The device works with Nokia’s Messaging service, which I’m not using at this time.  For my personal mail (hosted by Google Apps), I use the Google Gmail app, which works just as well on the E72 as it did on the E71.

Overall, the E72 is a worthy successor to the E71.  Right now, Amazon’s got it for $369.  If you’re going to buy, please consider using my link to it.

I was tired of performance that VMware Server offered, along with its baggage.  For instance, the Web UI suffered from frequent crashes, and it was also fairly slow.  Having had great success in the lab at the office with VMware ESXi, I decided that was the way to go.  ESXi 4.0 is still fairly new, and I’ve had some trouble with my SSL VM on it, so I decided to sit that one out for a bit, leaving me with 3.5u4.

Next hurdle – my hardware.  I use a Shuttle XPC for my server.  It’s small, and doesn’t inhale too much power, so I found it to be a good choice as a Linux server, what it’s spent most of its time as.  Unfortunately, as it uses a Marvell Ethernet chipset (the sky2 driver), and that’s not on the VMware HCL, there wasn’t a driver for it.  But then, KernelCrash to the rescue.  The author gives very nice build instructions to get a mod_sky2.0 driver that works on ESXi 3.5u4.  It’s been good enough that I haven’t noticed any problems with performance or functionality.

I did have to give up my Linux software raid, so at the moment, I’m sort of running without a net.  My plan is to add an external RAID box, either connected via eSATA or 1GbE NAS.  Obviously eSATA will perform better, but I’m not yet convinced I’ll see much of a practical performance difference.  I’ll add a new Intel e1000 NIC to the system dedicated to storage if I do that.  Anyone have thoughts on VMware iSCSI vs NFS performance?

Now I’ve got VMs for my SSL VPN, my File/Pri DNS/DHCP/kitchen sink server, a secondary DNS, and a FreeNAS, as well as some assorted client systems to test various things.  All in all, it’s worked very well.

If you want to go straight to ESXi 4.0, KernelCrash has you covered there as well.

IDS Install with Tap

I wanted to install a small network ids on my home network using Snort.  I wanted to stick the nids outside of my firewall, so it would be able to examine all Internet traffic coming in & out of the network.  Of course, putting a device online outside my firewall without any protection isn’t terribly attractive, so I decided to install using a tap.  Ignoring the fact that this is really the only possible configuration, given my home ISP (FiOS), it allows me to do a completely stealthed deployment of a nids.  Unfortunately, this type of deployment also precludes the ability to interact with any traffic seen on the wire, so flexresp is out of the question.

Construction of a passive tap

The other bad part about using a tap is that simply by the nature of the tap, you need to have 2 Ethernet ports to sniff on.  Why?  Check out the Snort docs on the subject.  When you setup a tap, you can only push one direction’s worth of traffic onto a single port.  This means you have to combine the traffic on the sniffing device.  Since you can only receive traffic and can’t send on these ports, you must have a third Ethernet port to connect to your internal network, or if you’ve got a larger network, a management LAN.

So, building your tap is pretty simple, when you’ve got the picture here on the right to work from.  Need the parts?  Head over to Home Depot and grab yourself the following parts:

1. A plastic electric box (get one marked for “Old Work”).  An 8 cubic inch box will probably not be deep enough, so go for the one of the 14 cubic inch ones.  Unscrew the little anchor flaps and toss them in the trash.
2. A 4-jack faceplate.  Whatever color you like.  I used white.
3. 4 Cat 5e Ethernet jacks.  I got 2 white and 2 blue.  The white jacks are the Host jacks, and the blue ones are Tap A & B, as shown in the figure at the right.
4. About 6 inches of Ethernet cable.

Strip off the jacket and remove the 8 wires.  Wire up the jacks as shown in the figure.  I found it easiest to wire up one of the host jacks, then run the wires through the tap jacks and finally up to the other host jack.  Try to keep the twists in the wire as much as possible, to prevent NEXT (Near End Crosstalk).  Cap off the jacks and screw the thing into the electric box.

I made two, one to use for the NIDS, and another to carry around for work if I need a tap.

I’m not going to go into how to install Snort, ACID, or any of that stuff.  There are already enough guides out there on that topic.  I will, however, address the need to join the two sniffing interfaces into a single full-duplex interface for Snort to sniff on.  You’ll be using the Linux kernel’s bonding module for this.  I’m going to assume Debian or Ubuntu here.  Add the bonding module to your /etc/modules file, then execute the command modprobe bonding.  In the /etc/network/interfaces file, you’ll need something like this:

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet manual
  up ifconfig $IFACE 0.0.0.0 up
  down ifconfig $IFACE down
  post-up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
  pre-down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1

Obviously, you’ll need to configure Snort to sniff on the bond0 interface.  Don’t forget to install the ifenslave package.  It’s not installed by default on Ubuntu.

The biggest concern lots of tap novices have is accidentally introducing traffic onto the wire via the tap.  Let’s be clear.  This is simply impossible.  Can’t happen.  At all.  Why?  The only pins that are live on the tap ports are 3 and 6.  Guess what happens on those pins?  It’s only RX, not TX, so you can’t transmit on the tap ports.

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets rock.  They’re great timesavers, and a worthy addition to your browser’s bookmark bar.

So, what’s a bookmarklet?  In short, a bookmark, typically constructed with JavaScript that does a specific task.  For example, emailing some data via your favorite webmail provider, or checking Bugmenot for a login to a site you don’t really want to register for, or generating a shorter URL for a site.  Here are the ones I keep around.  Hopefully you’ll use some of them.  To grab them, mouse over the link and drag to your browser’s bookmark bar.  I recommend you make a folder on your bookmark bar and toss your bookmarklets in that folder (that’s what I do).

Here’s the breakdown of my favorite bookmarklets…

Google Services

Google This: Select some text on a page, click the bookmarlet, blammo – you’ve got a Google search for the selected text.

Google Images: Select some text on a page, click the bookmarlet and you’ve got a Google Image search for the selected text.

GAppMail This: Send the selected text via Google Apps for Your Domain Mail. You’ll need to edit this one to change out yourdomain.com for what your domain name actually is.

Gmail This: Send the selected text via Gmail.

Google Cache: Pull up the Google Cache version of the currently loaded page.

Google Map This: Select an address, get a Google map of it.

Geocode: Get the Latitude & Longitude for the center of a Google map.

Google Translate: Translate the currently loaded page into English

Web Development

Show Divs: Show the <div> areas on the currently loaded page.

ReCSS: Reload CSS for the currently loaded page.

W3C HTML Validator: Run the currently loaded page through the W3C’s HTML Validator.

W3C CSS Validator: Run the currently loaded page’s CSS through the W3C’s CSS Validator.

References

Acronym Lookup: Lookup an acronym in the Internet Acronym Database

Urban Dictionary Lookup: Lookup a selected word in the Urban Dictionary.

Social Networking

Del.icio.us Linkbacks: Show del.icio.us links to the current page.

Compulsory Login Bypass

BugMeNot: Lookup usernames & passwords for various sites.

URL Shorteners

DiggBar: Uses the new DiggBar for URL shortening.

Cli.gs: Uses the Cli.gs shortening service.