First Time I have Hard Drive Failure

Yesterday, I went to Low Yatt Plaza to send my less than a year 500GB Maxtor SATA HDD for repair (or one-to-one exchange since Maxtor provides a generous 3 years one-one exchange as shown on the sticker on the HDD). The Maxtor HDD is used together with another Seagate Barracuda 500GB under RAID 1 configuration for my DNS-323 NAS.

For several months, I noticed why one of the blue light keep on blinking which means it is trying to write something on the disk forever. Realizing something is not right, I bought SATA/IDE to USB HDD connector. Using that device I then connected both HDD one after another to my Windows XP Professional desktop. Before that, I have this freeware, Ext2fsd on my desktop which enable Windows to read Linux Ext2 file system.

SATA/IDE to USB connector

When the Seagate HDD was connected, I could have access (read/write) on the disk successfully. But Maxtor really failed. It is not recognized at all by Windows. I further troubleshoot by connecting both HDD directly to SATA controller on my Desktop (The motherboard has generous 6 SATA controllers!). The result is expected, Seagate is instantly recognized but the Maxtor took forever and never successfuly been recognized by BIOS.

So, that was how the Maxtor end up to Low Yatt Plaza and the sale rep said it will take 3-4 weeks. So right now, I have to run my DNS-323 with a single HDD. So no torrent for me for now. I do not want to risk all my data in case this Seagate fails as well.

Celcom launches Broadband Prepaid™

Most of the complaint that I received from many of my friends related to 3G broadband service was the monthly commitment on top of their existing phone bill. They said they do not really use that. Well, it is no longer the case now with Celcom Broadband Prepaid™. This is the first of such service in Malaysia.

The Broadbank Prepaid is a ready-to-use package with speeds of up to 384Kbps and van be used without having to register. There will be two packages- RM20 per week or RM6 for 24 hours of use.

The starter pack of this prepaid plan is RM25 which include RM20 credit. To subscribe to either of these packages, users have to activate their SIM card and choose the plan using SMS.

For further information, please refer HERE.

Install optware for DNS-323 ffp 0.5 (fun_plug)

At last, today I managed to install optware for my DNS-323. The OptWare package system was originally created to accompany the Unslung firmware for the NSLU2 (originally the packages were also called Unslung packages). It has since been expanded to cover a variety of other platforms, however much of the documentation hasn’t been updated so you may still see references to Unslung and the NSLU2 when the information also applies to other platform including D-Link DNS-323 NAS.

Thank’s to the much easier script this time provided HERE.

Just download the script from the link. Then place it in /ffp/start and chmod a+x it to make it executable. After that reboot. That’s all.

Restrict phpMyAdmin access to only internal private IP address

I managed to configure my phpmyadmin to only allow access from within my network only (the private IP address range) e.g. 192.168.1.XXX.

This is important to ensure the security of your database, I just do not want people to guest all the password by entering into the phpmyadmin setting.

To do so, copy the following code to config.inc.php in the phpmyadmin folder:
//block root from logging in except from the private networks
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowDeny']['order'] = 'deny,allow';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowDeny']['rules'] = array(
'deny root from all',
'allow root from localhost',
'allow root from 192.168.1.0/24',
);

The “0/24″ denotes wildcat (equivalent to * in Windows)
After that chmod 705 the file
Then restart your lightpd server using the following command:
sh /ffp/start/lighttpd.sh restart

now your phpmyadmin can only be accessed from your LAN network only.

How to install phpMyAdmin into fun_plug 0.5/ffp in DNS-323

I just completed the installation of the phpmyadmin into my DNS-323 NAS.  Before that I also installed the lighttpd with php and also mysql.

Since there is no proper tutorial available in English, I would to share. This guide was actually provided by WOLF-U.li however it is in German.

Here are the steps:

Download phpmyadmin from phpmyadmin website
Use Winrar to unzip (unzip twice) the file since the tar xvf just does not work since the downloaded file has duplicate gz.gz extension.
Rename the last unzipped file contain multiple files into “phpmyadmin”
Create a file named config.inc.php using Notepad++ which contains the following code:
/* Servers configuration */
$i = 0;
/* Server localhost */
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysql';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';
?>

chmod 705 the above file to make it not world writable

Save the file into your newly created phpmyadmin folder

Place the phpmyadmin folder into your www/pages/ folder alongside your web index.php

Now  you need to uncomment mbstring.so by removing the ;  in the php.ini file located in ffp/etc:
extension=mbstring.so

Now you are done

You can open the phpmyadmin from your internet browser using http://<your DNS IP address>/phpmyadmin

Enter using your relevant ID and password, may be your root.