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So, just my luck… recently my Apple 500G Time Capsule died.  After some quick googling I find this is a very common problem.  I went to my local Apple store and there was nothing they could do for me, I didn’t have Apple care and they couldn’t guarantee my data.  ”It would be a few hundred dollars to fix, you might as well buy a new one” the Apple genius told me.  Damn you Apple and your “Server-grade storage“ claims!  This is what I get for not using a WRT54g.  Well, I figured it was time to void my warranty like I do with everything else!  Yay (in a non-sarcastic way)!

Mod #1: Fix Time Capsule, replace power supply

Thanks to some pioneers such as LaPastenague (fan mod, power supply mod) they’ve found the flaws to be in the power supply inside the Time Capsule, and usually that the hard drives and CPUs are perfectly intact! With some brief testing I found this to be the case for me, but I found the suggested solution (mounting a female Molex connector in the Time Capsule) to be very tacky so off into my piles of random crap I go searching… and look what I stumble upon…

$39.95 – PicoPSU ATX DC-DC Power Supply (mini-box.com)

That is a PicoPSU, an ATX DC-DC Power Supply that takes 12V input and outputs 12v and 5v, and it’s rated at above the output amperage of the old internal power supply. You can find it at the link above, or search on mini-box.com.  Not only that, but this came with a external power supply adapter that fits perfectly into the existing power port on the Time Capsule as seen here.

Now the soldering I had to do (thus far) is to unsolder the existing power adapters for the motherboard and hard drive from the dead power supply and solder it to an adapter for the PicoPSU, which looked something like this…

Keep in mind since this power supply has an ATX connector I had to jump the two pins to make this power supply always on when connected to power.

I plugged it up to see if it would work… it looked like this…

Lo and behold, it worked!  All my data was there, so I quickly backed up all my data to a external drive and shut it down again. I figured heck, if I have my Time Capsule open I might as well hack it as far as it can go.  It’s already got a voided warranty, so why the heck not.

Mod #2: Maximize Storage Space

So the first mod I did (besides fixing my power supply) was to upgrade the hard drive.  This is a trivial thing to do once your Time Capsule is open.  Literally just swap the drive, the actual Time Capsule OS is stored on Flash Memory on the device.  So out comes the 500G drive and in goes a new sexy and quiet 2TB Western Digital Green Drive.  NOTE: There is a temperature sensor on the old drive underneath some padded tape.  I pulled this tape up, and then removed the temperature sensor and screws from the old drive.  I screwed the screws onto the new drive, and stuck the temperature sensor on the new drive also.   Note: This sensor I found to be obsolete by my third mod (fan mod), but here’s a interesting fact… if you leave this sensor disconnected while the Time Capsule is running it complains about overheating, so I guess it defaults to “hot” if it can’t detect the temperature, so might as well just plug it up.  Regardless, if you have a fully working Time Capsule that you don’t mind voiding the warranty, feel free to do this if you want more space it’s a simple, effective mod.  Once you upgrade the hard drive you just have to use the Airport Utility and Erase the new drive and it’s ready to go!

Mod #3: Make fan always-on at reduced RPM with increased circulation

By default, the Time Capsule ONLY turns on the fan when the hard drive gets REALLY hot and there is no air inlet.  I found this (as others did) to be a very poor design, as the processor and (original) PSU also generated tons of heat which was not being detected by their placement of the sensor.  When I put the Time Capsule back together and tested it, even though the green drive runs a bit cooler, with less power, and the power supply is now external it was STILL running hot.  So, I went ahead and did the fan mod that everyone does. I took some insight from LaPastenague’s site, but also some ideas (wiring) from the appletimecapsule.me tutorial and  Nate’s tutorial. I ended up first ripping out the on/off cable (pin 3) by unsoldering it on the base of the fan, and pulling the cable out of the motherboard connector completely.  I tried the fan it in this configuration… the fan ran LOUD and excessively fast, especially for the new cooler hard drive and external power brick/supply.

So, next I wired a 33ohm resistor on the 5v line to restrict how much power it received, and therefore how much air flow it pushed and how loud it was. Many others (tutorials above) mention this is about the sweet spot, and I totally confirm it, it’s perfect. Now my device while the hard drive is being used is luke-warm to the touch, and while it’s not in use it is about room temperature and the fan is barely audible only if I go up to the device and listen for it.  Perfect!

Finally, I did what everyone else does and cut a hole in the bottom of my time capsule for air intake, and taped close the inside inlet for the fan, so the air is pulled from outside and pushed sideways into the Time Capsule, as seen below, this gives some great circulation for the Time Capsule and keeps it just above room temperature.

And since this was going inside the Time Capsule I wrapped the PicoPSU generously with electrical tape, didn’t want it touching the motherboard in any way, that would be… bad.  So this is what it looks like…

And here’s a good overhead with the fan attached and taped, and the fan resistor all taped up.

And this is what it looks like from the bottom when it’s all back together, yes I know, no fan grate.  But honestly, this is in a very safe/clean environment and location.  I will eventually add a grate though when I get around to it.

And here’s what it looks like all back together!  Looks sexy, eh?  Better than a Molex sticking out…  ;)

Wrap-up Notes: I’m a happy camper, but this isn’t for everyone…

With the Time Capsule all back together, now it requires a external brick power supply, which is better for the device since the heat is mostly external now, and the fan is always on instead of just coming on when it gets way too hot which I really like.  Additionally, if I ever need to replace the power supply again it’ll be a simple swap-in, and now I can enjoy the 2TB of massive storage (although Apple now sells a 2TB Time Capsule).

This is definitely not for the faint of heart or the unexperienced hardware hacker or solderer but it could just give your old Time Capsule some new life, or it could be a cheap way to get yourself a Time Capsule!  You could buy an older 250/500GB model online at a cheap price, a quick search on craigslist in my area I found two working ones for around $140/ea.  You could get even it cheaper if it was dead and the original owner has no hope/interest in trying to fix it like this.  For only an additional $39 for the power supply and $120 for the 2TB HDD and a little elbow grease, you’re looking at a cheap way to get a great storage unit and router that’s very friendly with the Macs (and PCs) in your network.

I hope you enjoyed my article, thanks again to all the people that have pioneered this front and make this information publicly available, I’m just continuing the trend.  Cheers!

Overall Max Difficulty: 4/10  (1 easy / 10 very hard)

1. 1/10 – Opening the device is pretty easy, I found that I ripped the bottom up a little bit, and mine was old enough that there was no stickieness remaining.  To re-attach I just used a very small amount of some craft-glue and let it dry for 24 hours.  There are 10 screws you have to take off, but it’s all pretty simple.
2. 2/10 – Swapping the drive is simple, the only reason it gets a 2 instead of 1 is because opening this thing is a bit of work, especially for just swapping the drive.
3. 3/10 – Cutting the fan hole for intake, this was pretty trivial to do as long as you have the right tool and you’re not afraid to use it.  Getting the fan back on those rubber grommets is really annoying, and/or getting the grommets back in the holes on the TC is annoying.  Not hard, just time consuming.
4. 4/10 – Making fan always-on low-rpm modifications were still relatively simple, rip out one cable, and solder a resistor in-line in the power line.  The cables are much finer and more delicate and there’s not tons of cable to spare, you have to get this right on the first (or second) time or you’re out of cable.  If you skipped the resistor this would only be 2/10, but your fan would run really fast and it’s pretty loud (go ahead, try it).
5. 4/10 – Unsoldering the power supply connectors from the old power supply was a bit challenging, and handling a power supply that is possibly not discharged can be dangerous.  I didn’t have to discharge the caps possibly because it had been left unplugged for a month.  I left the power supply intact and just unsoldered the 3 cables I needed from it and tossed the original power supply.  I found that around 600deg on my solder (Weller WESD51) plus a generous helping of adding solder helped heat the entire connector up enough to pull them out.  Do one at a time, and heat and add solder generously.
6. 2/10 – Soldering the PicoPSU cable to the now-unsoldered cable.  This was cake as long as you’ve soldered two things together before.  They’re both very big wires/connectors, so it’s simple!
7. 1/10 – Putting it back together is easy, it’s really not possible to put anything back wrong.  If you did all the mods I did above, just make sure to generously protect any metal from hitting the motherboard by taping or cable-wrapping.

1. IPMI Support
2. Jabber support
3. NOTE (corrected): SSH did not make it into this one, I will package it in the next release

NOTE: If you have problems installing zabbix-web because of the PHP >= 5.2 dependency, please visit this link: PHP >= 5.2 requirements for zabbix-web

All you need to do if you have my repository is run `yum update` to upgrade your packages, if you don’t know about it yet, visit the link below for more info on my repository! :)

  Article links:

1. My Yum RPM Repository
2. Zabbix 1.8.1 RPM Spec File
3. Zabbix 1.8r5 Previous RPM update
4. PHP >= 5.2 requirements for zabbix-web

In order to accomplish this you could make a user with your System Preferences which I have done in the past, the problem is then every time you log into your computer you’ll see this postgres user for no reason. Ugh, I hate that.  So to work around this you just have to run the following commands in your OS-X terminal to add a group and user for postgres, with the user “home” being the default compilation target directory for PostgreSQL (/usr/local/pgsql)

This is confirmed to work on every version of Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Cheers and enjoy!

1. Zabbix-Proxy RPM
2. LibCURL support (web scenarios work now)
3. Fixed x86_64 repo (was missing repodata)
4. Package upgrade issue (thanks Tom for catching this)
5. Fixed some file permissions (thanks ericgearhart)
6. Added all necessary buildRequirements to specfile

Go upgrade your packages, if you don’t know much about it, visit the link below for my repository! :)

  Article links:

1. Zabbix 1.8r5 RPM Spec File
2. My Yum RPM Repository
3. Zabbix Forums post regarding my Zabbix RPMs

First, somewhere relevant to your repositories make a “scripts” folder. This is generally where I store all my svn-pre/post scripts. I put mine in /srv/svn/scripts (my other repositories are in /srv/svn). In this new folder create a new file called svn_email_commit.sh with the following contents.

Then navigate to your repository root and go into the hooks folder. In there, create a file called post-commit with the following contents…

And that's it! :) Don't forget to chmod +x both of the files above though. Now every time someone commits if they are in the SENDTO field of the post-commit script, they'll get emailed!

The reason I do this in two scripts instead of one is so for each of my repositories I can specify different emails. This helps in a server environment with many repositories with different projects and varying team members, clients or contractors working on the project.

NOTE: You need to put this post-commit file into the hooks folder of each repository that you want emails from.

If you have any problems, please don't hesitate to leave some comments and I'll make edits where necessary. This above works perfectly (with the right software installed) on Ubuntu, Gentoo, and CentOS.

Cheers!

First thing that you need to do is find out the name of the raw disk you want to use. To do this, startup your OS-X Disk Utility application (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app). Once inside, control-click on the device that you want to use on the left, and select Information OR click on the disk and hit CMD-I OR click on it and go to the File Menu, and select Get Info. Control clicking should look like…

Next, you’re looking for what it says under Disk Identifier, seen below highlighted in red.

You’ll see in my example above I am looking at disk4. This is IMPORTANT to remember for the commands below… now, you need to decide which partition you want to use, and we’ll need the Terminal for this. Run the following command, replacing disk4 with whatever disk identifier your disk has.

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk4

That command should ask for your password, and the results should look something like (although yours WILL be different) the following…

Nr Start Size Type Id Sytem
– ———- ———- —- — ————————
1 63 401562 BIOS 83 Linux
2 401625 3919860 BIOS 82 Linux swap
3 4321485 73834740 BIOS 83 Linux

The above is a typical Linux installation with a 200MB boot partition (partition 1), swap (partition 2) and the root (/) partition (partition 3). This particular example I am doing because I wanted to backup all the files on this disk before reformatting it. So I want to grab the root partition, which is partition 3 on this list. You need to use this partition number in the next command to actually create your raw disk for VMWare Fusion to use…

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk4 3 /MyRawDisk4Partition3 lsilogic

Unfortunately due to the fact that you need to run sudo for this command, the resulting files in the root of your OS-X install are now owned by root, with 600 (locked down) permissions. You need to set your user as the owner to fix this problem…

sudo chown yourunixusername /MyRawDisk4Partition3*

NOTE: Replace the “yourunixusername” with your actual OS-X “short” unix user name. This can be found by opening a new terminal and typing the command pwd. It should show something like “/Users/afarley” making afarley my username.

You should have two files in your / partition named MyRawDisk4Partition3.vmdk and MyRawDisk4Partition3-pt.vmdk.

Now to put this virtual disk into one of your Virtual Machines, that was the point of this tutorial after all! Problem is… Fusion isn’t very friendly about this. When you create a raw disk device like this, it doesn’t let you just +(add) the device in the “Disks” settings area. You must manually add it to the configuration file of the VM you want to add this disk to. In my example I have a simple Linux VM with a single disk (bootcamp-partition) as a SCSI device. So I need to add a second SCSI drive to this machine by adding the following to the configuration file. Here is the procedure…

1. First, make sure your VMWare Fusion application is not running (this is VERY important).
2. Second, navigate to your Virtual Machines folder where the configuration files are stored (typically ~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/).
3. Third, go into the folder that is the VM you want to edit.
4. Fourth, make a BACKUP of your configuration file (should be the only .vmx file in this folder) incase you mess it up, easiest way is to right-click on it and select duplicate, or just click on the .vmx file and hit CMD-D. If you cannot see file extensions then you should enable them, or do this in the terminal. Do NOT duplicate this whole folder, that would be a huge waste of space.
5. Fifth, open up this .vmx file in your favorite text editor! Mine is TextMate.
6. Sixth, add the following lines to this file, preferably right after your scsi0:0 similar drive declaration. Also, search through the rest of the .vmx file for ’scsi0:1.present = “FALSE”‘. Usually by default they have this somewhere littered towards the end of the config file. Just delete this entry since you have it set to true in the additions above.

scsi0:1.present = “TRUE”
scsi0:1.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
scsi0:1.fileName = “/MyRawDisk4Partition3.vmdk”

WARNING: This above example is assuming you already have a scsi device setup as your primary disk so that SCSI is already enabled for your VM. If you do not, there are a few other options that you need to add and this will get messy. If this is your case… you should first go into your Fusion settings interface and add a virtual SCSI device just so SCSI is enabled. You cannot use IDE for raw devices imho.

Now save and close this file… startup your VMWare, and launch this VM! It will (of course) ask you for your administrator credentials to access a raw device, and then it will start. Hopefully, with your new drive in there. You should be able to fdisk it and see the drive’s raw partitions, in my case…

# fdisk /dev/sdb

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0×000e91cb

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 25 200781 2d Unknown
/dev/sdb2 26 269 1959930 2d Unknown
/dev/sdb3 270 4865 36917370 83 Linux

The reason you don’t see sdb1 and sdb2’s actual partition types above, is VMWare abstracts them and does this to recommend that you don’t access them. Access to them is not restricted though, you can still mount sdb1 and sdb2 if you wish.

NOTE: Because of how this process works, you will need to run through this whole procedure for every raw disk/partition you want to use.

NOTE2: This example will work also for passing through NTFS partitions into a Windows VM. Thought I’d mention it to not leave you Windows-junkies out! :)

That concludes my tutorial! If you ran into any problems or questions, leave a comment!

Cheers!

My repository can be found at http://repo.andrewfarley.com

Or add my source to your RHEL-compatible Linux with the following command in your terminal…

And then you can install zabbix agent, zabbix server, zabbix get, or zabbix proxy with…

sudo yum install zabbix-agent
sudo yum install zabbix-server
sudo yum install zabbix-get
sudo yum install zabbix-proxy

If it fails to install, you might need to clean the metadata with the following command and try again…

sudo yum clean metadata

Warning: I of course take no responsibility for the integrity of the packages. I’m simply providing them for myself and anyone else who needs similar packages as myself, where possible I also provide full spec/make/build files so you can go build the packages yourself if you don’t trust me.

On a final note… I will be adding packages on a as-needed basis, but I plan to keep packages relatively up-to-date. So when a new version of something comes out, expect to see the newest version in here pretty quickly.

Merry Christmas, and Enjoy!

  Article links:

1. Zabbix 1.8.1 RPM Spec File
2. CentOS/RHEL RPMs
3. PHP >= 5.2 requirements for zabbix-web

My first foray into this arena led me to making a class to make it easy for myself (and anyone else) to have a simple way to access Zabbix from PHP. First before you use the code you need to make a Zabbix user and group with the proper privileges. From my example below, I used the user apiuser, and password ap1. I recommend making it a LOT more secure.

So here is an example of what your user and his privileges should look like…

And here is what your group should look like when you’re done…

And finally, here’s an example of how to use the API… and as you’ll see in the example below, the hostname of my zabbix server is “genbook”, one of my private development environments. Scroll to the bottom to get the download link for the API and example code.

Grab my Zabbix API Class (v1.0), and example code here: zabbix_php_api_v1_0.zip

Your feedback, input, and patches are welcome. For now please use my comment form below to submit feedback. I will setup another method to contact me regarding suggesting improvements in the future.

Enjoy!