BT Vision Network Problem

Comtrend Homeplug Weirdness!

If you are one of the poor souls who BT have conned that their BT Vision service is a viable alternative to BSKYB's satellite of Virgin Media's cable TV services then you may well have encountered the Comtrend PowerGrid 9020 home plug Ethernet access point kit. These kits are basically two plugin devices that enable an Ethernet signal to be carried over the mains voltage wiring of a house. This gives a more reliable and faster connection than WiFi which enables HD video to be streamed from the router to the BT Vision box. Thus enabling BT to charge you a small fortune for re-runs of crap TV shows you were fortunate enough to miss first time around. The upside of these is you can get pretty reliable wired Ethernet connection around your house without ripping up carpets and floorboards to run Cat5 cables. Having said that nothing beats proper wired Ethernet for reliability if you can it is well worth doing. Next time you rewire forward plan and run with Cat5e or even better Cat6 cable.

The reason for this post is the ham fisted way these things are set up. Well not set up as such but configured, because they should come pre-configured to just work out of the box, which for the most part they do. The problem come when they don’t work for some reason and the unsuspecting user starts pressing the little button on the front marked CONFIG/RESET. Now you'd have thought that maybe pressing this button would put it into a configuration mode and possibly pushing and holding it for a few seconds would perform a reset back to defaults. Well whatever you seem to do make the leds on the front of the device flash at random which only seems to be a way of telling you that all you now have is an extremely ugly expensive paper weight.

This problem is highlighted in a DigitalSpy forum post citing four interesting things regarding this problem:

1. Basically the button has to be pressed really hard or it does nothing apart from making the leds flash.
2. The red Status led does not necessarily mean there is something wrong with or that connection between units is slow.
3. This can show up as being a phantom problem when it isn't really one if mains supply is interrupted.
4. To reset the security buttons on both units must be pressed (real hard) simultaneously (you may need very long arms for this).

The instructions given by the manufacturer [pdf] can be found on the Comtrend's web site but as so often the case they aren't always straight forward. Doing the afore mentioned security reset turns an AP device into an EP device so that has to be turned back with more pressing of the errant CONFIG/RESET button and it all goes tits up again. Jonathan Hadden posts in his blog on a different approach to resetting the devices which gives much better feedback whether the reset has taken or not. I wish I'd seen his post before I had spent valuable time working it out for myself. To accomplish the factory reset the security has to returned to default settings as well as the networking set to DCHP etc.

I did it thus:

Noting the serial numbers of the devices the AP (Access Point) device has a serial ending in an A an the EP (End Point) device has one ending in a B, I wrote down serial of the AP device serial because I was going to need it later. Plugged the AP device into the mains and connect to the network with an Ethernet cable. Logged in to my router to see the ip address of the device, mine was under Attached Devices different routers vary where they display the info. Logged onto the 9020 AP device using the ip address in a web browser using the default password "admin", have these people never heard of security? The device's webserver threw up a configuration web page, I clicked "Change Configuration" then "Mac" where I changed the Network Identifier to the serial number which I'd made note of because I was going to need it later, clever huh? I gave the device an ASCII Encryption Key which I made note of because guess what... I was going to need it later, then I did several okays and came out of the configuration. Repeated the previous with the other device using the SAME SERIAL the one ending in an A and the Encryption Key I'd made a note of, smart or what? Again several okays and I had all green lights and the units are playing nicely again.

What I think's happening is the reset using the hardware button is not actually resetting the security which for some reason is getting screwed up. Resetting via the configuration webpage fixes this. Anyway Johathan Hadden also explains the operation so if mine confuses his most likely will clarify.

I know I'm moaning but these are pretty good little units which work really well most of the time it's just these little glitches that are a bit of an annoyance.  If you don't use BT Vision, I most certainly do not Comtrend 9020s are great for extending your wired network without the upheaval of rewiring and can be obtained at around £35 per set on eBay. Hang around because there are always loads for sale you may just get a bargain, I have seen them sell at auction or as little as £20 per set.

HTPC, MCPC, XBMC, BIOS and other FLAs (four letter acronyms)

Or Home Theatre PC Pt II

Once I had got my new HTPC booting up to the BIOS without it sounding like a jet fighter on take off, it was time to decide which interface to employ, bearing in mind it has to be usable from around 3-4 metres away on my Sony Bravia KDL-46NX723 46" LCD TV. These interfaces are known as a TFUI (Ten Foot User Interface) for obvious reasons. Anybody who has tried to use a standard desktop from 3m+ on a TV will understand how difficult it can be to use.

So which operating system and which UI?

The OS boils down to two choices realistically; Windows or Linux, both having various versions to choose from. Windows has the choice of four XP Media Center Edition, Vista, 7 or possibly Windows 8. For the Microsoft platform I immediately discounted Vista, because it is resource hungry and just plain sucks, XP is pretty much end of life now, MS are killing it of for good at the beginning of 2014. Windows 8 has only just been released to manufacturing so I would have to install the consumer preview and upgrade later, also the Windows Media Center UI is an add-on and it still isn't clear if that will be a pay for extra. So Windows 7 looks like a candidate. I like Windows 7 it is the best version MS have released to date, stable and has some nice features for the desktop. But this isn't going to be a desktop and I would need to either use the Windows Media Center UI with its restricted availability of codecs and not particularly pleasant GUI or install a different TFUI. The cost of a full stand alone Windows 7 in its Home Premium guise at the time of writing is a shade over £100 at Amazon.co.uk.

There is an interface for windows with far better codec support which is Free Software; that is "Free as in Freedom not as in Beer" see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. XBMC "is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows". This has the bonus that is is also free in cost so for the Windows platform the cost for software come in at £102 plus shipping that with the £42 for the case and we are looking at less than £150.

If the TFUI/Media playing software is available for free and is cross platform there is no reason not to use it on a different operating system. This is a PC so to all intents and purposes Apple OSX is out. I know I could go down the Hackintosh route but as this machine runs an AMD processor we are at another cul-de-sac. Anyway as anybody who has tried creating a Hackintosh can lead to a whole load of hurt if you don't choose the components to be compatible right from the start. I you do fancy trying OSX out on PC hardware I suggest you check out Life Hacker's "Always up to date guide" or tonymac86  who seems to be the most clued up on this dark art.
  

So XBMC on Linux; it seems to be in many distribution's repositories but as I want this to be just a Media Centre I don't need a full desktop install of Linux. I found a version of Ubuntu Linux that is a stand alone HTPC OS, TFUI and media player. It is based on Lubuntu 11.10 which is an officially supported Ubuntu Linux variant so is not of questionable provenance should be around for the foreseeable future. It boots into the XBMC interface by default but you can log in to XBMCbuntu an LXDE desktop using the Open Box window manager. This has very few applications just a file manager and a terminal emulator but does also have the Synaptic Package Manager enabling the installation of any of the myriad of applications available in the Ubuntu software repositories. I just installed the Leafpad text graphical text editor in case I need to edit any configuration files and left it at that, although it has Vim and Pico installed so that was not strictly necessary.

XBMC runs great however I had issues getting sound to work, extensive googling came up with the answer. I from the command line in XBMCbuntu had to do an

aplay -l

this give me the numbers of my sound cards and devices which resulted in

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: [Analog]
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: [Digital]
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: [HDMI 0]

I could then log out and back into the XBMC interface and tell it to use customised hardware settings under settings | system | audio output | audio | output device | custom, and in the format of  [device name]:[card number],[device number] as the defaults do not work so

plughw:0,0

works for analog audio through the sound card speaker output and

plughw:1,3

for my HDMI to the TV, I input the same values for passthrough and set the audio output field to HDMI then had great quality sound coming through the sound bar attached to my TV

All my files are stored on a Windows network so to be able to play them sources are input directly as a Samba  path  i.e. smb://[share]/[folder] with the the username and passwords saved.

The library function is not much use to me for video as I have my files categorised by file/folder names but for music it is invaluable as my music is stored in an iTunes library. So a database scan by right clicking my music source and selecting "Scan item to library" pulls in all the meta tags and the library pretty much works like iTunes, only a million times quicker, and doesn't fall over every two minutes. The image below shows the library categories rather than just files and add-ons, and the side bar pop our allows searching via genre, artist, album, song, year etc.

All in all I'm quite pleased with this even though I'm still getting some fan noise. I especially like the ability to play my iTunes library and the way it manages to play just about any video file format I throw at it. To make for a nicer user experience I have invested in a mini wireless keyboard and trackpad solution from RiiTek which was a very reasonable £19 from an eBay seller. There are many compatible Microsoft Media Center remote controllers available but the general consensus of opinion around Internet forums is they are of dubious quality/functionality unless genuine Microsoft certified. This little device however works perfectly.

Now I have done this build I'm thinking is this possible on a ultra micro computer with minimal power overhead and no fan noise whatsoever? Rasberry Pi can it be done? Watch this space...

Home Theatre PC

 HTPC (Home Theatre PC) aka The Media Centre PC

I had a thought, I know that's a dangerous thing to have, never the less I had one, "Wouldn't it be handy to have a HTPC". So I have a spare motherboard and processor, 4Gb of DDR2 memory and a 500Gb hard drive; just need a case. This is where my troubles began. I wanted a full height media centre case because I happen to have a fairly decent 500w power supply that runs fairly quietly, which is essential for a HTPC. Looking around the Net for a case I found loads of ITX and slimline micro ATX form factor cases and one or two very expensive enclosures from the likes of Antec, and Zalman costing upwards of £150, way out of my price range. My requirements were fairly modest, it had to be a black desktop style case to match my TV and peripherals, microATX and have a minimalistic appearance. Front facing USB naturally to accept thumb drives etc. and a card reader would be nice.

I settled on a X-Case Q100 from X-Case.co.uk at £36 + £7 next day shipping well under my £50 budget for a case. Their site has a few reviews mostly positive, it looked the part and came with a remote for Windows Media Centre although it didn't have a card reader it ticked all the other boxes so I took the plunge. X-Case.co.uk true to their word delivered next day.
This case is a strange beast with the power supply surprisingly situated at the front of the case. There is a vent in the case lid immediately above the power supply air intake and it exhausts out of the underside of the case fascia.
Hot air is expelled by two 60mm fans to the rear of the unit roughly where the power supply would be on a more conventional case. It is supposed to be designed for microATX for factor motherboards at (244mm x 244mm), however to fit my Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H microATX board, which is a full 1mm smaller in both dimensions so some percussive maintenance was required. The drive cage encroached on the motherboards turf by 1.5mm so I had to use a large flat blade screwdriver to hammer a slight dent in the upright pillar at the bottom enabling the board a snug fit.

Once I had fitted the motherboard I built the rest of the PC up without much incident although the drive cage wasn't the sturdiest nor easiest I have encountered, so all seemed well at this point.
However booting the machine into the bios it was apparent that cooling was going to be a serious issue. Now was where I discovered the the obvious mistake the designers made, plenty of vents to expel hot air but not enough opportunity for cool air to enter. This results in the screaming fan of my stock AMD cooler running at full blast and spectacularly failing to cool the processor while making my ears bleed. To cure this problem more cool air over the processor was needed so I performed a case modification by installing a 90mm whisper quiet fan in the case lid directly over the CPU cooler to force cool air onto the heat sink and fan, thus turbocharging the cooling. The two 60mm exhaust fans I left in place to expel the hot air and its good to go.

The image above shows the intake vent for the power supply at the bottom and the case mod intake fan I installed above the processor. Quite why X-Case.co.uk are selling what is essentially a seriously flawed product your guess is as good as mine. If it hadn't visually complimented my existing HiFi separates and BlueRay player so well I would definitely returned the unit, but it looks damn good so it stays. One other gripe the blue power led is seriously so bright you could almost read by it in the pitch dark.

Next entry operating system and software for HTPC...

The Netbook From Hell

Acer Expire Aspire???

I've had a problem with an Acer Aspire One D255 Netbook over the past few days. I have previously restored this one back to factory default setting via the recovery partition. Luckily when I last had it here I made the owner, a teenager, a set of recovery media. These DVDs were tested and verified and all seemed well.

Well the inevitable happened teenagers and Windows don't make good bedfellows and Windows XP Home was unusable. It was looping at boot time giving a millisecond glimpse of a blue screen of death. I did all the usual fixes after backing all the owners data using a USB optical drive, The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and my trusty copy of Fab's Auto Backup For Tech. This comprised of; chkdsk, fixboot and fixmbr from a recovery console accessed from booting a Windows install disc. Enough time was already spent so I decided a nuke and pave the system was in order.

Nuke and pave is where the old system partition is deleted along with the entire operating system. Any user data stored on that partition is also destroyed and a fresh copy of the o/s, Windows XP Home in this case, is installed. This should eradicate any virus, malware or root kit infection which may have been causing the boot failure.

For some reason the recovery partition was toasted as was the small Android partition, which is no great shakes, if you have ever tried Android on a netbook you will know it's not a pleasant experience. This may well have been due to what I expect was a serious malware/root kit infection. Installing via the verified recovery DVDs went smoothly until the reboot where the damn thing went straight back into the same boot loop. So either the recovery media is corrupt or I'm thinking there is some issue with the master boot record area of the hard disk. I tried installing LinuxMint on it just to verify that it isn't a hardware issue and it worked flawlessly except the Mint installer really does not like the paltry 600 pixel vertical screen resolution and some guess work with the tab and enter keys was needed.

So I'm thinking a fresh clean install repair install of XP Home over the top of the non-booting install from the recovery media may work. This fails after inputting the product key attached to the machine, which is accepted, a dialog box requires activation before it will login. I tried an automatic activation via the Internet using hard wired Ethernet which was also accepted but a repeat of the same dialog box requiring activation before it will allow a login. The same happens when it prompts me to do a phone activation. And no amount of Googling helps for fsck sake!

I then had a brain wave maybe its my XP Home OEM disc that is the problem, this is a proper authentic MS install disc with all holograms and product key stickers that came with a machine purchased from a reputable source. So I downloaded a OEM iso via bit torrent and installed via that with the genuine product key from the underside of the netbook. Bingo it worked, great so now I do a recovery media install coupled with a repair install from my new torrented iso and reboot.

Some Acer recovery configuration program runs on startup and hangs on the Android setup because there isn't Android partition partition anymore, so I stopped it from auto-running on boot. Now the issue seems to be that it will not activate at least the Windows Activation Utility won't run and my only choice seem to be which of the four walls I'm surrounded by I should throw this b'stard feckin' thing at first!

More Googling... according to this post “After system repair, Windows Activation Wizard won't run” on Microsoft's TechNet Forums the answer is to install IE8 from a standalone file. I expect this was due to the original recovery install being SP2 where as the repair XP Home OEM cd is a SP3 disc. This seems to have done the trick and allows Windows Update to run and fix the miriad of other niggles that reared their ugly head too.

Finally IE8 wouldn't run properly due to incompatible addons so needed to be run in "No Addons" mode to disable the errant beasties, a download of all the normal freeware and Open Source goodies to trick it out, OpenOffice.org, Java, Ccleaner etc. Run MS Update and restore the backed up data and we are good to go.

So Acer you don't make it easy do you. How's a lowly PC tech supposed to calculate the invoice for this one? If I billed it by the hour they could have bought a shiny new MacBook Air with the money they wasted on this troublesome beast.