Tuesday, 18 July 2006

Whenever I get stuff, I always seem to get lots of stuff all at once.

So tonight we went to the lovely Fry's, with a mission to acquire an Ethernet switch to plug in the new printer, which was due to arrive any day now. A co-worker had also recently bought a 160Gb hard drive that cost $40 after rebate, so I was on the lookout for one of them too.

Instead, I came home with 1.6Tb of hard drive. Oh well.

There were some Seagate 400Gb hard drives going for around 30 cents a gigabyte (that figure still blows me away, I remember when it was dollars per megabyte), so I couldn't pass that up. Hopefully it'll motivate me into getting a wriggle-on with building the MythTV box. I figure I'll try to get a USB-2 card and stick it in my 1RU server, attach the four disks to that, and export them via ATA over Ethernet, and I should be able to have an essentially diskless MythTV front-end (maybe boot it from a 1Gb USB key I've got lying around spare, or PXE boot). Should be fun, if I ever get around to it...

Sad, but true. Well, not so much networked, as attached to my Linux box...

With Sarah going back to school, we needed a working printer. Numerous attempts at step-up transformer technology had met with failure, to the point where it was rapidly becoming more economical to buy a new printer. So we did. Today it arrived.

We got a Brother HL-5250DN, for the princely sum of $230 from Amazon. Main reasons for going for it were it had built-in duplexing, like the Panasonic KX-P7100 it was replacing, but unlike the Panasonic, which I unfortunately discovered after purchasing, was a WinPrinter, the Brother is a full-blown PostScript/PCL printer. And it's network-ready to boot. Very sweet. It's very important to be able to telnet to your printer.

It does the whole gamut of networky things (naturally the first thing I did after plugging it in was run nmap over it): FTP, Telnet, HTTP, SMB, LPD, IPP and JetDirect support. Oh, and SNMP. Awesome.

It gave me a good excuse to have a quick tinker with CUPS, and now we can print from Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. Very nice. Much better than the stupid WinPrinter. Hopefully the consumables won't cost a fortune, and I wonder if A4 paper exists in this country?