However, as I had to find the Icybox 4220 again today I did some research how to find it with Linux and someone on http://www.ubuntuusers.de gave me the answer 3 minutes after my question was posted (!!!).

You should install the programm "nmap" and then run the following code:
nmap -sP xxx.xxx.x.*
This will show you all devices (servers, nas, computers) in your network.

You would guess that the company offers this guy a job, right? Not so Creative. They blame the young Brazilian to "steel their goods". Oh man, no wonder those guys make losses. If they themselves would make their products work, this young programmer could do something more "creative" in his spare time, than fixing drivers of sound cards (that should actually work out of the box).

To me it seems like Creative designed those Vista drivers with certain flaws as a business strategy, so they can sell more "premium products", which are probably the same, just with a driver that actually works. From a legal point of view, it might be their right to "castrate" their sound cards (I am not a lawyer).

But from a business point of view I wouldn't call it clever.

The actions of their vice president of corporate communications, Phil O'Shaughnessy, might do more harm to the company than they might help. I am not sure if all those PR guys are already prepared for a world WITH internet. Things that might have worked for the last 20 years of PR might not working so well any more. Things have changed and PR guys should learn that, I guess.

Wake up! Welcome to the 21st century!

Customers communicate worldwide. We ALL have to live with globalization. I just hope for the guys at Creative that their shortsightedness might not have a too negative impact on their business.

I am not too sure if those things are really well thought by the companies. For my part I won't buy a sound card of this company. I don't like how they treat people that help others to make stuff work. I am not sure how long customers will cope with practices like this.

The small size has of course its positive and negative aspects: You could really take it everywhere. It is lightweight and fits into almost any bag or back bag. The keyboard is too small for proper 10 finger typing and the screen is too small for proper working, even for my taste.

But I that is not what the Eee PC is targeted for. While on a trip, for staying in contact with family and friends, doing some minor things in Open Office, checking and writing some emails, etc. this little helper would be perfect.

I didn't have the chance for a proper test, but I could type some text and got an impression of the interface. Too windowsy for my taste. I first thought they had Windows XP installed. The built quality looked pretty good, for such an inexpensive tool.

The alternative from Elitegroup doesn't look too bad either: ECS G10IL.

Now, after installing Ubuntu 7.10 the battery live in normal conditions is just below 2 hours (1:50h). Did anyone have the same problems? Any solutions?

Intel offered a little software to improve battery life on notebooks running Linux. The tricks are helping a little bit, but how can I make the changes permanent? Ideally you have experience with the Amilo si1520, but any tip will help, I guess.

In this case Raidsonic offers a tool on the cd, to find the Icybox NAS, when connected to a network. Unfortunately this tools is for Windows only. I tried to use it via Wine. The application started but did not find anything. So I had to start Windows to find the IP that my DHCP server had assigned to the Icybox. Once I have found this IP address I could access the web interface, which is available in several languages (e.g. English, German).

I would like to find a tool, or a way to allocate the IP of the Icybox 4220 without having to start Windows. I am sure there is an easy way, so I will do some research in the next few days. If someone has a solutions for Ubuntu/Linux, please let me know, preferably in the comments (UPDATE: I found a way to allocate servers, computers and NAS devices in your network under Linux).

My set up of the Icybox is a Raid1. This means that two 500GB hard discs are mirrored: files saved to the Icybox are copied to both hard discs, which protects files during a hard disk crash. However, it can not protect data from human mistakes. Therefore you will need an additional back up process.

Setting up the raid1 is fairly easy. Go to "Maintenance" -> "RAID Settings" and follow the instructions their. Establishing the raid takes a few minutes. You should not interrupt this process. Well, and that's it, basically. You should then create a "Share", where you can save your files.

To connect from my notebook to the Icybox via LAN and WLAN I am using NFS. The process to connect is very straight forward, but as a Linux beginner I had to do some research.

If you just want to use your desktop to access NFS shares (e.g. for accessing the Icybox) you need to install "nfs-common" and "portmap", if you want to share files or directories on your computer via NFS, then you also need to install "nfs-kernel-server". Just go to Synaptic an install the packages you need (This paragraph was added thanks to a comment by Simon).

Let's assume the share is called "xyz", the IP address of the Icybox is "192.168.2.???" and we call the share "icybox1". To mount the Icybox on Ubuntu you will have todo the following:

• Open the terminal
• Change to the directory "media": cd /media
• Make a directory for the share on the icybox: sudo mkdir icybox1
• Mount the share with the following code: sudo mount 192.168.2.???:/mnt/md1/icybox1 /media/icybox1

Now you should be available to access your share on the icybox.

However, it is quite annoying, when you have to mount the share each time by hand. So I decided to include the share in the "fstab", then the Icybox share is available automatically when I am at home and connected to my home network.

For this you will have to add a line to /etc/fstab for each share:


• 192.168.2.???:/mnt/md1/icybox1 /media/icybox1 nfs rw,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0

That's it. You will now have to mount your share:


• sudo mount -a

Now you should have a folder on your desktop to access your share using NFS.

• Open the 2 screws at the bottom of the Icybox 4220. There are actually 4 screws, two of which are holding the interior of the box to the exterior case, the two other are in a little plastic bag together with other screws, which are used to fix the hard disks in the case.
• Pull the interior case from the exterior case.
• First connect the cables to the first hard disk, then fix the hard disk with the little screws from the plastic bag and connect the cables (SATA, electricity).
  Tip from my side: connect the cables first and then fix the screws. I fixed the screws first, but I just couldn't connect the cables any more. So I had to unscrew the hard disks again.
• Fix the sensor for the temperature on top of the first hard disk with the tape from the little plastic bag.
• Install the second hard disk, just like the first hard disk.
• Once done just put the interior case back into the exterior housing and fix the 4 little screws on the bottom.
• That's it. You can now start your Icybox IB-NAS4220-B for the first time.

I think this is enough for today. Tomorrow we will talk about the first steps using the Icybox 4220.

Buy your own Raidsonic Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B Raid/Dual SATA, Gigabit at Amazon.

But why the hell do external hard drive cases have to be ugly?

At least that is the impression you can get when you look at what the market has to offer. However, there are a few exceptions, one of which is the Passport series of Western Digital. With 2.5" hard disks up to capacities of 250GB and MacBook inspired designs in different colours like black, white, red, green and pink (?!) those portable hard disks are really nice to look at. They do not need an external power supply. The receive their energy directly from the USB 2.0 slot, which works nicely on my FSC Amilo si1520.

There is some windows software on the hard disk, so first thing I did was emptying the hard disk. Then I wanted to do a back-up of my files, so that I could take the risk to finally update to Ubuntu 7.10. I used Sbackup under Ubuntu 7.04 which worked nicely and was easy to configure.

But it only created a compressed file of 4GB. I was sure the files to back-up where much bigger than that. The reason for that was easy to find. The WD Passport is formatted with FAT32, which can only handle files up to 4GB. Some other day I will have to format the hard disk, maybe with EXT3, so that I can use the hard disk with Sbackup, but this will have an impact on the possibility to transport files from my computer to others. FAT32 is fine for Linux, Windows and Mac OS. So I am not sure what to do. Maybe I will use Sbackup only with backups to the Icybox NAS 4220 and will do everything manually with the WD Passport, so this portable hard disk can still be accessed by different operating systems.

Get your own WD Passport hard disk (250GB)

• Gigabit ethernet
• Dual nas supports 2 harddisks (RAID 0, 1, Span, JBOD)
• 2 USB-Hosts (for USB sticks, external hard disks or a print server)
• Samba for Windows networks, NFS (for Linux, Unix), FTP (to access your files via internet), DHCP (automatic network configuration)
• etc.

This is just to mention the most important characteristics. For more details just download the Icybox 4220 datasheet as PDF.

As harddisks from Samsung seem to cause problems with the Icybox 4220 NAS I orderd 2 WesternDigital WD Caviar SE16 500GB SATA II 16MB. I hope those will do just fine. I will configure a Raid1 for better data security and those hard disks will be backed up to a external USB hard disk every week or so. This gives me space for 500GB of data, the second disk will contain an exact copy of the first hard disk.

While not ensuring perfect security, this will be enough data security for me. Togehter with the Icybox I have also received a Western Digital Passport portable hard disk with 250GB, which should do well for transportation purposes and additional backups.

As the time around Christmas is fairly busy and we will get some visitors within the next days I will probably have to wait until the new year to get the Raidsonic NAS up and running. I will give some updates about the product as soon as I had the time to go more into details.

My first impressions:

• The Icybox 4220 is smaller than expected and the product pictures make you think.
• The built quality looks really good: no plastics, all metal.
• It is fairly nice looking. Not really important for a tool like a NAS, but when on your desk the good look won't hurt, right? .
• It comes along with a good hand book in really good German. Not comparable with some other products, where you just can not understand anything. There actually some good explanations, even on basics like the advantages and disadvantages of different RAID levels, etc.

Interesting links regarding the Icybox 4220

• A forum with a lot of information and a lot of posts (in German): http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=319399
• A wiki about the Icybox NAS 4220 with information about hardware compatibility: http://en.nas-4220.org/

I will keep you updated about my progress. I hope my version will not cause any trouble and the two hard disks will work fine with my Raidsonic Icybox IB-NAS4220-B.

Here just a few posts that I think are interesting:

• Using the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Si 1520 as a navigation system
• How to disable the Synaptics touchpad on the Si 1520 (but I do not have this problem)
• Additional battery for the Si 1520 from an Chinese Ebay-Shop (not sure if I would risk it)

I will definitely keep an eye on this blog. As I am fairly new to Ubuntu/Linux it might help me to solve some problems.

Buy the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Si 1520 12,0 Inch Notebook (Intel Core Duo T7200 2,0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD+- DL RW, Vista Premium)

Obviously Ubuntu 7.04 has problems with hidden SSIDs (as suggested for the router). Once I was showing the SSID again it worked. If someone has a solution: just let me know. But also the Mac had some trouble to connect, but at least it worked. My Ubuntu was searching and searching and never got actually connected.

An other thing I am currently struggling with is syncing Evolution with Google Calendar via multisync-gui for opensync. Evolution seems to block all attempts to synchronize. On my search to find a solution I stumbled upon a project for a new GUI for Opensync, called GnomeSync. While still in a very basic design phase, the prototypes of the GUI look very interesting and more sophisticated than Multisync-GUI. But as this will probably take a while I will have to find a solution for Multisync-GUI.

Apart from that it I am very happy with Ubuntu on my notebook. And to be honest: I would have had these tools for Windows anyway (and I was searching quite a while). But I would really like to get this thing going.

Buy the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Si 1520 12,0 Inch Notebook (Intel Core Duo T7200 2,0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD+- DL RW, Vista Premium)