I ended up with a box based on the hp n36l micro server which has been the electonic staple of my house ever since.  It replaced my dvr, nas, htpc, and ftp/http server, just to name a few.

After talking with a client, he asked if I could build him something similar.  I wanted to build something better than what I had with more storage and more processing power.  I decided to make it nice and current, with an ivy bridge processor and z77 chipset.  In case anyone is interested I took more pictures than you probably care for.   I’ll start first with a parts list…

• LIAN LI PC-Q08B Black Aluminum ITX Case
• ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard
• Seasonic M12II Bronze 620 Watt Power Supply
• Intel Core i5-3450S Ivy Bridge Processor
• Kingston HyperX Blu 2x4GB PC3-12800 RAM (KHX1600C9D3B1K2/8GX)
• OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD (AGT3-25SAT3-120G)
• 4 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (ST3000DM001)
• LITE-ON BD-ROM drive (iHOS104-06)
• SIIG 2-Port SATA III PCI-Express Card (SC-SA0L11-S1)
• Logitech K400 Wireless Keyboard with Touchpad
• Pulse-Eight USB-CEC Adapter for remote control
• Windows 7 Ultimate
• XBMC 11.0 Eden
• AnyDVD HD
• Drive Bender

To start, the case was somewhat of an obvious choice for me.  I don’t know of another ITX case as small as this, that can fit as many drives.

The power supply couldn’t be any more than 5.5 inches deep to fit in the case so the seasonic was a great choice.  I would have liked a fanless power supply but I couldn’t find one small enough.

Next is the ASRock motherboard.  I originally wanted to get the Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe because it had some added features (namely bluetooth and dual-band wifi) but it wasn’t in stock anywhere when I was trying to do the build.  Those features could also be added by swapping the 2.4 ghz wifi card with something like an intel 6230 card.  When I started to assemble the case and saw how things were going to fit, I thought that the Asus wouldn’t fit anyway because of it’s power daughter board.  In hind site it should fit no problem but I did like not having to work around that daughter board with the ASRock.

For the processor, really any ivy bridge chip was going to do but I was looking for at least an i5 since one of the servers tasks was going to be encoding.  I like to keep things on the low noise, low power end of things as much as possible for an always on device, so this processor fit the bill nicely.  It’s on the low end, for price and wattage (65 watts), of the ivy bridge i5 processors.  I would have loved to get something like the i7-3770T (it’s 44 watts) but it wasn’t in stock anywhere at the time and was too expensive anyway.

Drives.  One of the things I like about this case and my home n36l is that they fit full size optical drives.  It just saves on cost and gives you more selection when you aren’t limited to compact drives.  It was also a welcome surprise that this case has a space between the optical bay and the 3.5 inch drive cage to screw in a 2.5 inch drive… in this instance, the SSD.  For the hard disk drives I actually purchased 4 external seagate drives from costco and pulled the sata drives from their enclosures.  It was about 50 bucks less per drive than I could find any 3TB internal.

For the wireless keyboard I decided to go with logitech and this was an easily assessible option with a touchpad.  I have a KeySonic ACK-540RF+ for my house but I thought logitech’s unifying connection might be a bit more trouble free.

Now, a note on the pci-express SATA card.  I originally purchased a HighPoint RocketRAID 640 card to attach all 4 Seagate drives.  This would have made it easier to route cables and all 4 drives would have been on SATA III.  The computer wouldn’t boot with that card installed.  I used another computer to flash the card with the non-RAID bios (didn’t need raid because I would be using Drive Bender) but it still wouldn’t post attached to the ASRock. I then ordered an IOCREST 2-Port SATA III card based on an ASM1061 chip and decided to just put the other 2 drives on the onboard SATA II ports.  The computer would get to the start of windows and then lock up with that card attached.  I then ordered a SIIG 2-Port SATA III card which I realized was based on the same chip (ASM1061) after I ordered it.  Luckily the SIIG card worked fine.

As far as video playback, the Intel HD graphics built into Ivy Bridge work great, with DXVA activating on everything that you would expect in XBMC and MPC-HC except for VC1.  This isn’t a problem though, since the processor can easily handle it without acceleration.  I’ll post an update once the USB-CEC arrives and I test it.  Here are some final pics.  The computer is ripping fast by the way.  From power button to windows desktop in about 20 seconds.  The add-on sata card bios slowed the boot a bit.

Because of all this, I have often suggested google apps to my clients.  Google is constantly adding features and at this point I can think of little I can’t do with google apps.  However, there are a few things that one should know before moving to google apps.

Firstly, if any of your clients are going to use outlook, save yourself the trouble and get the premiere or business version so that you have access to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook…  an outlook connector that sync’s up mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks between outlook and your google apps account.  Using IMAP with outlook is abysmal and POP should be out of the question if you want your data synced between devices.

The second issue you may or may not run into and further more, you might not care if you do.  If you have used Google Apps before, you probably know you can set up multiple domains as aliases on the primary domain.  This is great if a business has multiple domains, has changed the business name in the past, etc…  Even more rudimentary, you can add alias addresses on the same primary domain to your particular mailbox.  A common example would look something like this…

Primary Domain: primary.com
Alias Domain: alias.com

User: john@primary.com
User Alias 1: john.doe@primary.com
User Alias 2: jdoe@primary.com

Because of the alias domain, John would have all those email addresses @alias.com also.  Now this is all well and good, and in your gmail/google apps account you can add any of these as alternate “send from” addresses.  But here we have the issue.  When setting up alternate send from addresses, google gives you the option of using the google outgoing mail server or your own outgoing mail server.  Because these other addresses are aliases and don’t actually have their own mailbox, they don’t have “their own” outgoing mail server settings which you can use.  No problem, you just do gmail’s servers, right?  Well, yes, you can certainly do that and it will work but because gmail likes to be very compliant, it will add some header information that looks something like this…

If sending as john.doe@primary.com from the john@primary.com account, the header would read, “From john@primary.com on behalf of john.doe@primary.com.”

The kicker is that the only common client that will show you this information, in your face, and not leave it hidden in the header, is outlook.  Now for clients that want to use outlook and want for things to look the way they are specified, this is a problem and using some other SMTP is necessary.

SMTP servers are not like they used to be.  There used to be open relay SMTP servers that are all but gone in light of huge global spam levels.  Other SMTP servers that are available will often have limitations such as changing the “send from” address to match the credentials used to access the server.  This is, for instance, what would happen if you tried to send mail using a normal gmail account credentials and smtp.gmail.com.

There are numerous paid SMTP services with free accounts but most are limited to 200 messages a month for the free account, an amount too small to be realistic for the avid email user.  Mailjet however gives you 6000 messages a month for their free account.  Sign up for a free account and setup your authorized addresses (the aliases that you will be sending as), or if you have a whole domain you can just add the whole domain in one shot.  Then you just copy the randomly generated username and password for your SMTP account and plug it into gmail for all your alternate send from addresses.   You’ll end up with something like this…

Mailjet also supports SPF and DKIM to further legitimize your alias addresses if you have control of the domain(s) in question.   I just did SPF and, as an example, my record looks like this…

v=spf1 include:spf.mailjet.com include:_spf.google.com include:spf.secureserver.net ?all

This says that mail sent via mailjet, google, or godaddy (my hosting) is authorized.

If you have a group of people who want to use mailjet SMTP you can set them each up with a free account and just avoid using the authorization of the whole domain on any one mailjet account.  Better yet, get a paid account, authorize the domain(s) and use the one login for everyone.  Paid plans start at under $10.

Note: You may want to turn off link tracking in mailjet otherwise any link you put in an email will be modified so you can see when someone has clicked a link.

You may have heard in the news about the mass public exodus from GoDaddy last month, over their support for SOPA.  They have since publicly reversed their support for SOPA however it was somewhat of a last straw for me.  I had grown tired of the increasingly garbage laden user interface anyway.

I decided to join in on “Move Your Domain Day” and transferred 13 of my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap.  Being no stranger to domain transfers, I started the whole process at midnight and had everything up and running by 5 am.

People often say that there are too many registrars to choose from, to be unhappy with the one you are with.  I don’t necessarily agree with that.  If you are looking for free, reliable, advanced DNS features, the list gets much smaller, fast.   I prefer to use the registrars name servers in order to use their DNS features.  It provides a great deal of flexibility, allowing you to change one service on your domain without affecting the rest.    It also, if you are with a good one, affords you rapid record updating to minimize down time.

So back to NameCheap.  I chose NameCheap because they actually have a few legs up on GoDaddy.  They allow you to use their DNS even if your domain isnt with them, they have more url forwarding options, they allow root c-names, and the UI is, unsurprisingly, much cleaner.  There are, however, some problems I found the hard way.  Once you figure out they have 3 ways they interpret forwarding so that you get it working the way you want, you find it only works about half the time.  If you do set a root c-name you will find that the mx records you set are ignored and the mx is set the same as the root.  Lastly they don’t have phone support.

I’ll be the first to tell you I’m not crazy about having to constantly ignore all the ads and garbage GoDaddy throws at you but their total DNS works and you can call them if there is a problem.  Still not sure if I’ll be switching back, trying another registrar or sticking with NameCheap but if you are in the mood to transfer and havent done it before here is a little step by step from GoDaddy to NameCheap to give you an idea…

• Make sure all domains in godaddy are unlocked and that the contact emails on the domains are set to an email not associated with your domains.  These settings can be changed on all your domains at once.
• If you don’t have an account at namecheap, open one.
• If email addresses were updated, wait an hour for info to propagate.
• Add the domains you are going to transfer, to namecheap’s freedns service and email activate them.
• Add all the domain records for your domains to the namecheap freedns. While you are getting the current domain records get the authorization code for each domain you are going to transfer from godaddy.
• Change nameservers of domains you are going to transfer to freedns nameservers in godaddy.
• What an hour for settings to propagate.
• At this point your domains are already using namecheap dns.
• Put all the domains in the transfer box of namecheaps website and start transfer.
• Add the authorization codes for each domain in the shopping cart.
• Wait for emails from namecheap and approve.
• Wait for emails from godaddy.  Once they have all arrived, go into godaddy domain center and approve pending transfers.
• Now just wait for them to move from pending transfers to complete transfers in namecheap.
• Once complete go to each domain in namecheap and click “Transfer DNS back to us” if the option is available.
• Click on “All Host Records” under each domain and double check everything is correct.