Draino's Networking and Tech

Google Plus killed the technology blog

2011-11-20T15:04:00.000+08:00

This may be the final entry in this and my other blogs.

I managed to painstakingly avoid using Facebook for many years, and instead waited patiently for Google to create it's social networking site, Google Plus (If you have never heard of Google+, I strongly urge you to go back to the rock you have so obviously been living under and/or go read some other non-technical site).

Ever since I have been active on Google+ (since soon after it's initial Beta period), have found it to be absolutely brilliant, if not addictive, and a far better medium to which I can expose my technical knowledge and findings to the masses.

This means that there is little or no time for the blog and I am almost positively confident of using one or more Google+ page(s) to replace this and most probably all of my other blogs.

Thank you Blogger for your great blogging service, but thank you so much more Google plus for finally giveing me what I (and so many other Google fans) wanted.

mirgating to libata

2011-03-10T09:04:00.001+08:00

Since IDE/MFM/RLL is now depreciated, I thought I'd share my experiences of migrating to the newer libsata (SATA prod) drivers in 2.6 kernel.

Since I only have 2 devices on IDE ports (WD 320Gb HDD and a cdrw), there was very little for me to do as I had just about everything spread across both ata and libsata, so I removed all instances of ata, set built-in ATA driver support (since the system boots from IDE - for now) under libsata and enabled what I needed as modules for my SATA JBOD's

The whole thing almost went perfectly as planned (and as documented), except for the following minor irritations:

Forgot to change the real_root option in grub.conf from /dev/hda3 to /dev/sda3 :-P
udev was naming my cdrom to cdrw1/cdrom1

Admittedly, it took my a while figure out that I forgot to change the bootloader for the change in device names, but I quickly worked out how to change the cdrom device name back to default, by editing "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules"

Xbox 1 savegames on XBOX 360

2010-07-13T13:43:00.002+08:00

Since discovered that Burnout 3 and other Xbox 1 titles are now available through XBOX Live! games on demand, I decided to do away with disc swapping and focus my attention on purchasing games for XBOX360 and Xbox Originals online through Live!

Then it dawned on me... What about all the long and painful hours I dedicated to all those Xbox 1 Originals? Do I have to play them all over again including unlocking everything and developing perfect saves etc?

The short answer (more or less from Microsoft) is: No

The Long(er) answer is: Yes, but only with specific hardware, software and some patience (as well as unsigned savegames).

Quite a bit of research later, I discovered that it is theoretically possible as the XBOX 360 has a directory on it's HDD (Partition 3/Compatibility/Xbox1/UDATA to be precise). Besides, how else would it save normally backwards compatible game data?

So after I borrowing a Datel XPort 360 HDD adapter from an awesome friend, I was able to connect the XBOX 360 HDD onto my PC, and read (and also write to) the HDD contents within minutes, all I needed was Xport 360 Software

Next up I deleted my Halo save that I created on the XBOX360 HDD and dragged the Xbox Original savegame folder (ID: 4d530004) onto the XBOX 360 HDD disconnected it and it worked!

I then repeated this with Burnout 3 and tested it, but it failed to load save and shows Unusable in the in-game load menu for the savegam(e). Apparently this is because the savegame(s) are signed with HDD key so it will probably never work for this game *sob*

I decided to proceed with copying all my Xbox Original save games (or at least he ones I care about anyway) onto the XBOX 360 HDD, so I will update this post if and when I have the Games available to test.

isp faithfulness

2010-06-03T16:14:00.000+08:00

I just discovered today that I was being charged by my ISP for a broadband account in a place I used to live in...

I applied for broadband back in 2006 when I was living in Sorrento, but broadband was not available in that area until about 6 months after I left that suburb and cancelled my dial-up. My ISP has been charging me for it ever since!

Luckily for me, my ISP not only cancelled the old unused account, but have also refunded the last 6 months. At least my ISP seems to reward faithful customers...

Buzz, knol, Goole and... stuff

2010-04-16T19:16:00.000+08:00

I thought that I might post another article since it could very well be the last!

Purely because of the fact that I am considering replacing it (and maybe my other two), with knol or Google Buzz.

I stumbled across knol whilst digging around in the help and settings for Google Buzz (which just appeared in my Gmail one day) and quickly realised the potential social outreach it has.

So, now I am looking to see if it's possible to convert the blog(s) to knowl/Buzz...

xbox360 and WMP11 fail

2009-11-25T19:57:00.003+08:00

After about two years of procrastination, I finally got an xbox360 to fulfil my ~~Burnout~~ gaming needs. Before I got the (MW2) bundle, I installed Windows Media Player 11 (using the validation bypass trick). Now sitting here relieved that I finally got media sharing to work, I thought I'd blog about the one simple thing wrong with media sharing:

UNC network paths.

It took almost 2 weeks to find an answer to why my library was not showing up on the xbox360 and the answer lies here.

In summary (for those that don't want to follow that URL for some reason):

"If you want to share files that are not located locally on your machine, Microsoft has chosen to prevent you from sharing content located on network locations (UNC paths) like \\MACHINENAME\sharename"

Luckilly there is an undocumented registry "hack" that will fix this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
“EnableRemoteContentSharing”=dword:00000001

Huge thanks go out to GibStorm for documenting this so well...

vim + gnupg = password manager

2009-08-21T12:43:00.006+08:00

After finding that there are very little native password managers for linux, I decided to see if I could find a way to open my encrypted password file using a console-based editor without putting any plain text onto the disk at all (ie. transparent editing of gnupg encrypted files).

I stumbled onto the vim website (by way a Google search) and found a nice little script (plugin) that does all this for me!

Initially, I had some issues with getting it working but that was mainly due to exporting $GPG_TTY incorrectly :-P

However, as I use screen to manage everthing I do from the one terminal window/ssh session (vim incuded), the plugin works fine but fails to decrypt files when vim is invoked as a new screen.

I suspect that it's attributed to the $GPG_TTY variable, but my knowledge of screen and some other aspects of Linux are limited.

I now use vim + gnupg for my encrypted password file.

UPDATE 21/08/2009 @ 13:15
There seems to be an issue where the the GPG_TTY variable needs to re-exported every time you change to a another screen/pts. I have made myself a workaround, whereby I run a simple script that first exports the variable and then opens vim with the encrypted pwd file, but then vim removes the standard UDLR keybord controlls and falls back to classic vi mode. *sigh*

iPhone battery fail

2009-08-12T19:17:00.004+08:00

My iPhone 3GS seems to be working well but with one small problem. Battery life sux.

The stupid thing lasts anywhere from about ½ a day to about about 1 day, which doesn't seem right at all.

I had also already jailbroken the the thing within the first few weeks of owning it, but since the latest firmware (3.0.1) came out recently, I thought I would update it in the hopes that Apple had silently fixed a possible power issue and to remove any jailbreak packages that could be causing this problem. No luck here folks.

About a week later I discovered that the phone was constantly emitting RF as a cheap set of speakers that I had turned on, would pick up the RF as interference and damn was this phone was being noisy!

After calling the Virgin Mobile iPhone hotline to get some support (which still didn't help mind), I stumbled onto apple's own iPhone battery information page and went through the troubleshooting steps, I seemed to have found the answer! Push mode notification. Turning it off has quietened it and the battery bar has stopped draining quicker than a cold beer in summer.

I am happy the problem is fixed and the battery is still in reasonably good condition, but this begs the question: Why is it on by default?

10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

2009-07-31T00:00:00.001+08:00

Today marks the 10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Treat some lonely, unforgiven and/or unloved sysadmin with a gift and/or note of appreciation today and show how much you appreciate the hard work and effort that they do (myself included).

They are usually the same people that make your internets work! so show us some love. Please.

Happy Sysadmin Day!

/respect

silence isn't golden

2009-07-11T14:49:00.016+08:00

Not only did the internal speaker in my my old Nokia 6610i fail not long after I got it, but so too did my Openmoko Neo Freerunner (GTA-02v5) (or so it would seem)!

*Grrr*

I was testing someone else's microphone+earphone's hands-free kit on the 'moko earlier on in the day, which didn't seem to phase the device as it simply didn't work, but after putting my phone on silent a few hours later, the 'moko now has no audio output except from the headphone jack!?!

After re-installing koolu's Android (v1.0_beta7), the thing still refuses to output audio to anything but the external headphone jack and I suspect that it's either the switch pins inside the female jack are stuck or the internal speaker has broken. I am yet to boot it with 0m2008.12 via uSDHC to confirm that it's a hardware fault.

The 'moko certainly has been a very interesting device to toy around with, but it has proved to be quite troublesome, making me want an iPhone 3Gs. If I can't get the audio issue sorted out soon, I will most likely get one. Problem is trying to buy one outright as I fear that no providers will because they all seem to list plans, but fail to give full price or outright purchase details *sigh*.

UPDATE 13/07/2009 @ 15:12
The 'moko now intermittently rings, but the microphone is still muted making calls impossible.

UPDATE 14/07/2009 @ 12:38
I found out from a scumb^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer service person @ Allphones, that Apple are not allowing retailers and telcos to sell the iPhone outright because it's apparently not cost-effective for them to do so.

Lucky for me, I have a friend who is willing to sell me his 16Gb 3G one for the cost of his 3G-s upgrade.

UPDATE 21/07/2009 @ 09:42
I found the link to the Australian Apple store online and I will be using half of my tax return on buying an iPhone. *sniff* Good bye 'moko... You have served me... err... not so well... :P

internets anew

2009-03-10T21:25:00.007+09:00

Thanks to this article I was able to transform my crappy dg632 router into a dumb modem so that I could get better control (including better security) on my internet link.

The only problems I encountered was that I found it difficult to set the router into bridged mode, but finally found the answer here. The documentation on the gentoo wiki differed slightly too, in that the iptables exported variable for the WAN interface should be ppp0 instead of eth1.

Other than that I can now enjoy a properly firewalled, dyndns capable and port-forwarding capable setup at no extra cost.

Now all I need to do is get bind, ldap and openvpn working... having all this free time without a job does have it's benefits...

kde4

2009-02-17T19:50:00.004+09:00

KDE4 finally hit stable in gentoo's portage! *woohoo!* (as of about a month ago :P)

I had to wait a few weeks so that package blocks got sorted out in portage (well, at least now there is only 2 rather than the 4 from last week), which just goes to show that immediately trying to update to anything isn't always a good idea! :P

so now the dell xps is chugging away at building all the kde packages and dependencies (as well as updates from about 4 weeks ago) etc etc and hopefully when I wake up tomorrow I will be greeted with a shiny slick new KDM :)

I really should be updating my diary-blog but I wanted to keep a record of the fact that I have figured out that waiting for sane dependency handling by portage updates is a good thing!

moar storage

2008-11-29T12:23:00.002+09:00

I acquired two more 1Tb HDD's effectively making my current total storage space about 4Tb.

I want to software raid my 1Tb disks, but I need a silent UPS before I can (this system sits in my room, so I don't it waking me or anyone else if the power drops during the night), so my server is going to have to stay JBOD for now *sigh*

I am also contemplating putting Vista (x64) onto my lappy to make it easier for work, but I can't bear to loose my Gentoo/KDE after all the hard work that I have done in getting it functional.

I need to make some hard decisions here...

Also, I will hopefully get around to implementing IPTABLES + bridged mode modem + pppoe on my fileserver soon :)

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid

2008-11-19T21:54:00.003+09:00

Thanks to Senator Conroy, Australia may have to suffer not only internet censorship but very slow internet speeds, due to an old yet unfeasable policy that the government seems determined to force into our homes (and probably businesses too).

I now direct you to http://nocleanfeed.com/ which explains (better than I can at least) what this is, how it affects you and most importantly, what you can do to help prevent it.

No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

OPENMOKO

2008-10-28T15:26:00.005+09:00

I have finally been able to purchase a neo freerunner from openmoko!

Due to the current market, the Australian dollar is really low compared to the US Dollar (1 USD = 1.62063 AUD). But I needed a phone real bad and I really, really really wanted this one because of it 99% open (as in open source) nature.

I'm preparing for the arrival of it by purchasing a 16Gb microSDHC card (as well as the fact that I have dfu-util installed from a gentoo overlay from some time ago).

I'm considering putting Debian onto an SD card for uBoot... maybe a little too nerdy but hey, I didn't buy this thing as a fashion accessory :P

UPDATE 13/11/2008 @ 16:01
Today I discovered a nifty hardware feature. The hone can operate without it's battery as long as it's plugged in via it's USB cable!!! See here

Also, I managed to get host USB working the other day too.

Due to the available distributions it's very hard to find one and stick with it as some have feature and/or bugs that other do/don't have. FDOM sounds like it's for me though.

There is nothing this phone can't do (that which I need it to) :D

bubs is dead

2008-09-06T12:51:00.004+08:00

My server (named bubs after the homestarruner character of the same name) died today after a power spike/power outage.

I'm not sure if bubs actually caused the outage, but one thing is for sure: It ain't turning back on.

My initial thoughts are that the power supply was damaged in the surge, but until I can get a reliable unit to test it with, I won't know for sure.

I have an old PSU from a PII computer but I doubt that will work on an amd64-based motherboard.

I just prey that the motherboard is ok becase it's going to get expensive to rebuild with new parts...

Might need to overnight some parts (or at lease a PSU)...

UPDATE 06/09/2008 @ 14:36
Bubs is back online!
Seems that all I should have done is removed it from power for a few minutes, toggle the (PSU) switch, apply power and hit the machines power button.

Also a quick test proved that an old PII/PIII ATX PSU is capable of powering an ASUS A8V board. Who would have thought :P

Home Network Redesign

2008-08-28T17:33:00.004+08:00

I think I may have the motivation to redesign my network for the following reasons:

Increased Security: Better Firewall solution
Increased Security: Segmented network design, allowing for More control with untrusted hosts such as:
- internet (DMZ)
- Wireless and
- temp hosts (ie. LAN party ^_^).
Manageability: Implementing a secure routing protocol (RIP? maybe) may assist with network growth/changes
Gloating: Show off my 1337 net skillz to my friends :P

The most important aspect of this is the first point (increased security). It should also allow me to easily create a vpn endpoint onto my server for remote access (from outside the network) and for internet access from the wireless network... *hmmm* radius anyone?

This should help me un-lazy myself and develop (internal) dns zone(s) too...

Hopefully I can have the design done and implemented by the end of next UNI break!

openmoko freerunner units

2008-07-30T20:00:00.003+08:00

Since one of my ~~geek~~ tech friend's has introduced me to the openmoko FreeRunner I have been wanting to purchase one, but unfortunately they sold out before I could place an order. They have been OUT OF STOCK since early July (7/8 July maybe... can't remember) and their webstore says that the "next batch of shipments are scheduled to arrive on July 25th", problem is it's 5-day past that initial notice and no word of any kind has surfaced as to the availability of these units...

I DON'T want an iTurd but I really need a new phone... I did read somewhere that the company is operating like an open source project, so perhaps they are emulating delays and lack of communication that is normally haunted by most open-source software projects? :P

2Tb of goodness

2008-06-27T14:08:00.003+08:00

So I finally shelled out (about ~$400+) for some more storage capacity (2 x 1Tb WD HDD). I was planning on buying a brand new fileserver ($2.5K worth) and doing software raid across them, but due to the cost of recovering from the car incident, I decided to do this on the cheap (JBOB). So now I have about 2Tb of storage at my disposal until I can afford the 10Tb fileserver (RAID6) *grin*

dmix

2008-06-15T13:40:00.006+08:00

After many changes in my USE flags (alsa/arts) and the fact that I kept breaking my audio (NWN would have no sound, wine kept blocking other apps from accessing the audio harware and many other problematic things), I finally got a working dmixed (and arts free) audio setup *yay*.

This is how I (FINALLY) fixed it:

Created a working /etc/asound.conf (see bellow) and restart alsasound.

Removed arts altogether in favour of alsa (USE="-arts alsa") in /etc/make.conf, ran emerge -NDv world

while tired="true"; do; sleep 8h; done

Restarted X (/etc/init.d/xdm restart).

...and now I have dmix (which now works with wine!!!)!

Here is my /etc/asound.conf


pcm.dmixed {
    ipc_key 1025
    type dmix
    slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
}

#one called "dsnooped" for capturing 
pcm.dsnooped {
    ipc_key 1027
    type dsnoop
    slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
}

#and this is the real magic
pcm.asymed {
    type asym
    playback.pcm "dmixed"
    capture.pcm "dsnooped"
}

#a quick plug plugin for above device to do the converting magic
pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymed"
}

#a ctl device to keep xmms happy
ctl.pasymed {
    type hw
    card 0
}

#for aoss:
pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymed"
}

ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

And as you can see in the screenshot below, you can see wine (foobar2000) using the dmix plug as it's output device :)

NOTE: Step 3 (sleeping) is optional :P

VMPlayer Anoyances

2008-05-08T17:38:00.003+08:00

Here's something that I discovered whilst trying to figure out why I could only start some VM's and not others on an ntfs3g volume.

# cat ntfs3g.txt
If you are running your Virtual Machine on an ntfs3g formatted volume and you encounter the following error:

VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
A log file is available in "vmname.log".  Please request support and include the contents of the log file.  
To collect data to submit to VMware support, run "vm-support".
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

Try adding the following line to your VMX (configuration file):

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE 

NOTE: replace vmname with the name of your Virtual Machine.

I found this out from the following VMware Communities forum thread here

Adventures in Open Source (Part 2)

2008-04-24T16:25:00.004+08:00

Welcome to Part 2 of Adventures in Open Source!

This post is continuation on the previous article Adventures in Open Source (Part 1). In this post I will give you even more Tips, Tricks and useful information about Linux open source applications and their uses.

dellBiosUpdate
As the name suggests, dellBiosUpdate (which is provided by libsmbios) is tool for updating a Dell BIOS in linux. This came about because one day, I noticed an unanswered and unread post on forums.gentoo.org titled Dell BIOS update: extract_hdr, and I decided to investigate/research this because I also wanted to know if it was possible to flash your BIOS under Linux. I then found out (Thanks to the likes of the the Gentoo unofficial wiki post, HOWTO Dell BIOS Upgrade) that I don't even need M$DOS to flash the BIOS on my M1730!


quagmire ~ #modprobe dell_rbu
quagmire ~ # dellBiosUpdate -t -f system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01f7_version_a06/bios.hdr
BIOS file matches this system and is newer.
quagmire ~ # dellBiosUpdate -u -f system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01f7_version_a06/bios.hdr
Supported RBU type for this system: (MONOLITHIC, PACKET)
Using RBU v2 driver. Initializing Driver.
Setting RBU type in v2 driver to: PACKET
writing (4096) to file: /sys/devices/platform/dell_rbu/packet_size
Writing RBU data (4096bytes/dot):
........................................................................................
........................................................................................
........................................................................................
........................................................................................
........................................................................................
........................................................................................
.............
Done writing packet data.
Activate CMOS bit to notify BIOS that update is ready on next boot.
Update staged sucessfully. BIOS update will occur on next reboot.
quagmire ~ # rmmod dell_rbu

After doing the above, It occured to me that this process is somewhat the same as when you flash in windows, as the bios data is written to a special section of the bios or EEPROM, then a "bios update" flag is set so that the system will immediately start the flash process upon reboot. Nifty eh?

SCP (SSH)
I learned that it is possible to transfer files (and folders) to/from a remote path that has one or more spaces in it!

You need to enclose the entirety of the remote hosts argument in quotes and put escape sequences into it. For example:

scp -r "/media/sdd/2008-semester1/csg2207/Unit Schedule" "remotehost:~/UNI/2008-semester1/csg2207/Unit\ Schedule"

Gentoolkit (eclean-dist)
eclean-dist (a wrapper for eclean distfiles), is a tool provided by app-portage/gentoolkit that provides easy distfile cleaning (deleting)

After searching for a solution (thanks to the powers of google), I found that the Gentoo tool exists already. It seems to do an intelligent job at checking against installed packages and removing old distfiles (or tarballs). Pretty neat :)

rsync
That's right. rsync! I haven't done much research into the differences between cvs and rsync, but it seems to be a much easier to use alternative for synchronisation of file trees (UNI, savegames, software repositories, music, movies etc.) and using openssl (ssh) as a transport mechanism with almost no effort!

Here's an example (or proof) of me synchronising a folder of uni unit to my file server:


dean@quagmire ~ $ rsync -uav /media/UNI/2008-semester1/csg2207/ dean@192.168.1.2:~/UNI/2008-semester1/csg2207
Password:
building file list ... done
Assessments/assignment2/contrib/
Assessments/assignment2/contrib/delete.me
Assessments/assignment2/tmp/
Assessments/assignment2/tmp/the sample of risk management.docx.exe
Unit Schedule/
Unit Schedule/delete.me

sent 17094 bytes  received 104 bytes  6879.20 bytes/sec
total size is 45568991  speedup is 2649.67

NOTE: I have to reserve TrueCrypt for private data only, as TrueCrypt requires elevated privileges, which I don't have on most UNI computers :(

That's it for this edition! I hope this was as interesting to read as it was for me to research and discover how to use them! Feel free to drop me a line if you have any contributions or corrections. Next post irssi!

Mouse Rage

2008-04-21T11:12:00.003+08:00

So I finally "spat the dummy" and had a bit of a rage and killed my Logitech G7 mouse because it kept on randomly stopping (mouse pointer kept freezing for short periods of time). I slammed it a little too hard onto the mouse pad, causing it to stop responding. Indefinitely. Oh well. Now I have a replacement Logitech MX400 and hopefully, this one will survive more than 5 months :P

Why Gentoo?

2008-04-10T15:26:00.003+08:00

In response to Ben's Blog about the some topic, bellow is a culmination of my reasons for choosing this fantastic distribution.

Oganisation
I have found that most of the system is will organized and seems to adhere to a strict guideline of naming conventions and standards of which, most are documented on the official Gentoo documentation or the Unofficial Wiki

Minimalistic Approach
I have learned allot (more) about Linux in general since I started using this distribution. It's stage 3 install process not only seems like a "Linux from Scratch" but with this method you can install a base system for less disk cost that the latest Windows® Vista™ Service pack...

Configurability
The ability to configure everything with text files is pretty mush a norm for any Linux distribution, but Gentoo has an edge in this area, as there are many command-line tools to assist with configuration such as: etc-update, rc-update, euse, equery, eselect and (lets not forget the almighty) emerge.

Genkernel is also a winner in my books too.

Sane (Simple) Package management
Emerge for me is by far the most powerful and easiest to use (once you understand the do's and don'ts) package management that I have ever come across. Being able to have packages a tweaked to my architecture, pre-configured and all dependencies met by typing one command is very important aspect for me.

Apart from these reasons above, I still stand most of my old arguments from a while back.

Adventures in Open Source (Part 1)

2008-03-23T22:19:00.007+09:00

Welcome to the "Adventures in Open Source Series"!

Since buying my Dell XPS M1730, I have been using Gentoo Linux on it exclusively and with surprisingly good results, however I have also learned allot more about certain open source software package in general, so here I will outline some of the these (and also some of the failures) that I've experienced so far.

Screen
I have learned to use screen in a much more powerful way than ever before. Until now I was not aware of screen's configuration file capabilities, so had never used it. I found that not only can you make screen automagically setup all your screens for you, but you can also do some awesome console customisation as well (see my ~/.screenrc bellow).


screen -t default
screen -t "compile (emerge)"
screen -t config
screen -t rtorrent rtorrent
screen -t misc
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}%-Lw%{= kW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= kG}%+Lw%< %{= kG}%-=%c:%s%{-}'

Here is a picture of what it looks like:

PS: This is actually in use on my fileserver (also a Gentoo box), hence the different hostname.

TrueCrypt
Since I almost lost my band new 8Gb USB mass storage device at UNI last week, I have decided to start using cryptography, so I remembered reading a planet.gentoo.org article about it and considering I am using Linux at home and Windows *shudder* Vista at UNI, I thought I would give this a try, Not just for portability and security but for any easy backup mechanism also (all I have to backup/synchronise one single file rather than managing lots of files and folders).

I followed the guide on the Gentoo Wiki here, and created a new volume now all I have to do is mount it and it's all there!


dean@quagmire ~ $ truecrypt -u /media/UNI/uni-2008-semester1.dat /media/UNI/uni
Enter password for '/media/UNI/uni-2008-semester1.dat':
dean@quagmire ~ $ ls -alh /media/UNI/uni
total 24K
drwx------ 6 dean dean 4.0K 1970-01-01 08:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 dean root 4.0K 1970-01-01 08:00 ..
drwx------ 6 dean dean 4.0K 2008-03-23 12:30 csg2207
drwx------ 7 dean dean 4.0K 2008-03-23 12:30 csg3308
drwx------ 7 dean dean 4.0K 2008-03-23 12:30 csi2102
drwx------ 7 dean dean 4.0K 2008-03-23 12:30 csi3207

And of course here's the proof that it's all working:


dean@quagmire ~ $ mount |grep -i truecrypt
/dev/mapper/truecrypt0 on /media/UNI/uni type vfat (rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=077)
dean@quagmire ~ $

Wine
Well, as you may or may not be aware, my wine success has been pretty hit and miss (more like miss when it comes to M$ products and games), but this is due to the fact that wine is considered to be in perpetual development and the fact that I am trying to run proprietary software on a non-native platform *wink*

VirtualBox OSE
Alright, I must admit that I had an issue with this piece of software, but once I got it working it ran like a dream... I've been able to install Windows XP and (of course) Gentoo into Virtual Machines with no hassles whatsoever!

So it seems that I am not only more productive with a powerful Linux desktop, but I am also a much happier computer user as a whole even with the few "glitches" the arise every now and again.

If you learned something, enjoyed reading this article or have anything to contribute (or correct) ,feel free to leave feedback as comments on this post.

Coming soon: "Adventures in Open Source (Part 2)"!

Gentoo GNU/Linux on Dell XPS M1730 (Part 2)

2008-02-26T11:44:00.004+09:00

I have made significant progress on this project and have decided to continue with my findings so far.

I fixed the sound problem. Seems that snd-hda-intel was broken in alsa-1.0.14 (from kernel 2.6.20 - 2.5.22). I simply emerged the latest kernel, and now it works! even with surround!!

Next up I got TwinView working (finally). Seems that the nvidia driver thinks that my LCD (2702WFP) is a CRT, so I plugged in a DVI-VGA converter on the notebooks DVI port and hooked the LCD up via VGA (DB15 - DB15) cable and now she works. Interestingly enough, TwinView uses a form of xinerama, so all I had to do to stop getting a desktop stretched across both screens (and apps placed between both monitors), was to add USE="xinerama" into make.conf and re-emerged everything (emerge -uDavN) and now the WM detects the boundaries between displays!!!

TODO List
Wireless: I have installed ipw3945, but according to the Gentoo Wiki ipw3945 Hardware Article, it seems that iwlwifi is both newer and easier to implement and it will be available in gentoo-sources-2.4.24, but since it's masked, I'm reluctant to use it.

Software Suspend (to disk): This will be very important especially when using this beast at UNI. As I mentioned above, the 2.6.24 kernel has iwlwifi inbuilt, but I realised that the tuxonice-sources is at 2.4.24 (masked) so why not "kill two birds with one stone"?

TavelRemote: Since I also use this system to watch stuff (on the 27" monitor), it would be nice to be able to utilise lirc with the travel remote.

g15 GamePanel: According to some users, it's possible to use this via the g15tools, but it is low priority for me, since I use this thing as desktop-like system, where I can't even see the damn thing :P

MultiMedia Keys: This is yet another low-priority job. I will tinker again with xmodmap and app support to see if I can get it working in the future.

Who needs Microsoft® Windows™? Not me!

UPDATE: 26/02/2008 @ 1353
I discovered that the g15 Gamepanel is now working!
I had the g15daemon and libg15 stuff emerged a while back but I never noticed it working until now (I suspect the the newer kernel-2.6.23 has made a difference).

Digital Camera Debacle

2008-01-18T10:16:00.001+09:00

So, now that I'm going to Sydney, I want to preserve some of my memory's of the place by capturing them on a camera, which by now you have probably guessed, that I don't have one :P

I was looking to purchase a Pentax Optio A30 (the "A" series is the most advanced of Pentax's Optio range), but since it's near impossible to get one due to the announcement of it's successor (A40) which is due out some time in February, I am stuck with a very difficult buying decision...

Do I buy the older A30 or do I risk it with the newer A40 model, which could be potentially unavailable (I need this by 6/02/2008)?

My friend has already bought his (not so practical, but awesome) camera, and he is trying to convince me to buy the A30.

Because of this, I feel a bit boned...

UPDATE: 19/01/2008 @ 1219
I have decided to buy a JVC GZ-HD3 video camera instead :)
I just hope it arrives in time for me to configure it (play around with it) before Sydney...

HOWTO: Encode single-file (CD) to FLAC with embeded CUE sheet

2008-01-05T12:25:00.000+09:00

I finally remembered how to do it (hence the reason for bloging about it)

This is intended as a rough guide on how to do it manually (I am still looking into automating this process with abcde):

Rip the audio CD as RW_RAW using cdrdao or some other program that can generate a compatible cuesheet and/or tocfile. I used the following command to do this (For more information on command syntax please read the cdrdao man page):
```
cdrdao read-cd -v 3 --device=x,y,z --driver generic-mmc \
--read-raw --read-subchan rw_raw --datafile image.bin \
image.toc
```
Convert your tocfile that was created in the previous step to a cuesheet (cdrdao comes with program 'toc2cue' that can generate a very simple cuesheet). If you already have a cuesheet, then move onto the next step.
Encode the raw image. I used the following commandline to encode mine.
```
flac --cuesheet=image.cue -8 image.bin --endian=big \
--channels=2 --sign=signed --sample-rate=44100 --bps=16
```
NOTE: The --sign and --endian options may differ for you (especially if you use PPC or something like that).

NOTES: the --ogg option doesn't seem to work when using the --cusheet option and flac exits with the following error (this will probably happen to you if you try to use that option as well):


image.bin: 100% complete, ratio=0.895
image.bin: ERROR during encoding
           state = FLAC__STREAM_ENCODER_OGG_ERROR

I have included my command-line usage for reference purposes only! So, don't come crying to me if you just copied and pasted those commands at it doesn't work!

I miss my KDE...

2008-01-03T16:14:00.000+09:00

Since I'm stuck up north on yet another shift I'm beginning to have withdrawals from some of the nifty little features that makes KDE so awesome. Stuff like temporary focus-grabbing on the Kmix dock icon (being able to adjust the volume without having to change window focus is very neat... now that I realise it's missing :P ) and virtual desktops... by default!

I forgot to mention (until now) that I managed to get sound working on the XPS M1730 although doing so confirmed my suspicions somewhat. It seems that alsa in the latest kernel has broken snd-hda-intel (stac92xx) support.

I Still haven't gotten WiFi working yet either (ran out of time last RDO due to Portal), so this beast is glued to the one (hot) spot in the house for now. Maybe this heat will force me to get wifi working so that I can enjoy some nice cool aircond offered in the lounge room?

Dell (Australia) Refuses Vista Refunds

2007-12-08T07:09:00.001+09:00

It would seem that after contacting Dell for about 5 days straight, I have been thusfar unable to obtain a refund for my UNUSED copy of Windows® Vista™ Home Premium (32bit) that came with my XPS M1730.

Here are some of the lame "reasons" they gave me:

We are unable to refund due to Microsoft Licensing.
You accepted the agreement when you purchased the computer online as part of our policy.
You will be breaching the Microsoft License if you send the product back.
Because this is OEM version, we are unable to provide a refund because it is bundled with your computer.

These "reasons" didn't seem to make any sense, so I did some digging around on the Dell website for these policies and this is what I came up with:

The Dell's "Total Satisfaction" Policy states the following:

"You may return software for refund or credit only if the sealed package containing the diskette(s) or CD(s) is unopened"

I also checked their Terms and Conditions of Sale ("Terms and Conditions") and that states the following:

"All software provided is subject to the terms and conditions of the license agreement relating to that software. Customer acknowledges its obligations to abide by such license agreements. Customer acknowledges that Dell does not warrant any software under these Terms and Conditions. In addition to any rights the customer may have under statute, all software is warranted in accordance with the license agreement that governs its use."

So, if I do NOT to agree to the the Windows® Vista™ EULA and adhere to the conditions within it (don't use it and uninstall said software), am I not entitled to a refund???

One thing is for sure: The call centre minions at Dell don't know ANYTHING about software licensing and are not trained to deal with this situation, which means I am now stuck with a rather expensive coaster :P

UPDATE: 08/12/2007 @1620
I have lodged a complaint with OFT as I believe that Dell is not acting in accordance with their own policies and is therefore acting illegally by refusing a refund (IANAL).

UPDATE: 03/01/2008 @1605
I got a call from an Australian Dell representative (Sydney) and they left a message for me to contact them, just have to wait until 10/01/2008 before I can call him. Hopefully he can give me some good news...

UPDATE: 06/06/2008 @1036
This is a very late update. There will be no refund from Dell as I have not only lost the telephone number for the person I needed to speak to, but I have failed to get this done within 90 days of the purchase, due mainly to work and the fact that I don't want to have to do this process in a hurry again. Since the release of Windows® Vista™ I will no longer use windows for personal use (and soon to be for work use to), so even though I will have to go this process yet again, my next Dell Notebook *WILL* be Windows-free!

Gentoo GNU/Linux on Dell XPS M1730

2007-11-29T13:20:00.000+09:00

So I just received my brand new M1730 from Dell and since Dell sent a 32bit version of Windows Vista I have decided to decline the Windows Vista EULA, opt for a refund/credit and install Gentoo on it instead.

Heres how I did it (this is not intended as a howto).

First of all I ghosted (both) installed HDD's for the factory configuration (in case I had to restore for some reason).

Next I slid the good 'ol Gentoo 2007.0 LiveDVD into the DVD drive and proceeded to boot the machine with a one-time boot option (F12) but after trying many different versions and arch types I finally resorted to the amd64 LiveDVD which seemed to do the trick (except iiNet's rsync mirror seems to be borked).

Once I installed the base system it was as easy as doing a normal install except for the following options that I added to /etc/make.conf

CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"

I was intending to use suspend2-sources as this is a laptop and it would be nice to be able to suspend/resume this beast between UNI and home (suspend2-sources are patched with both genpatches which includes the patches found in gentoo-sources, and Software Suspend 2 which is a new and improved implementation of suspend-to-disk for the Linux kernel¹) but unfortunately its masked for the amd64 arch.

About the only problem I encountered (other than accidentally trying to use the wrong arch for the stage3) was the CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START option in the default kernel configuration, as it was set to 10000. As per this webpage, I edited the .config and set it to 20000 and then the kernel happily compiled (I even have 32bit emulation too!).

All I need to do now is emerge xorg, wine/cedega, firefox and openoffice, then configure suspend2 (tuxonice), dual monitors and all the other niggly little laptop features on this thing (like aux LCD, mic sense jack, media buttons and wifi) :P

I will try to remember to post as I get devices working on this beast.

UPDATE: 07/12/2007 @ 1336
I managed to get output on the DVI interface in single link mode, but the resolution is all wrong (way too small)! It is either an xorg.conf MetaMode miss configuration or the latest nvidia drivers are borked...

Squid logging issues

2007-11-26T13:36:00.000+09:00

I finally got denied websites and ntlm group-based authentication working on the squid server at work, but it seems that it (still) doesn't log usernames in the access.log (which also has to be explicitly defined in squid.conf to be able to log for some reason...

I have tried allot of Google searches for it but there's nothing relevant that I can find, so I think this is either an undocumented 2.6 bug or I am not looking properly for any possible userid logging bugs.

This sure is beginning to bug me.

Maybe I have missed something...

No Alienware Laptop for me...

2007-10-30T13:45:00.000+09:00

On the 4/9/2007 I purchased an Alienware Aroura m9700 notebook. Until the last few days I have not received any correspondence or communication from Alienware about my order because it looks like they have gone into receivership.

Below is a snippet of the email that was sent to me that confirmed this:

From: sales@alienware.com.au
Sent: Tuesday, 9 October 2007 3:59 p.m.
To: <deleted>
Subject: RE: Arora m9700 status.

Dear Mr <deleted>,

We apologise for the serious delay in your order. Alienware Australia which was a subsidiary company of Jackar Holdings has been affected as its parent company Jackar Holdings which operated the Alienware license in Australia has fallen into bankruptcy last week. Alienware America has taken over all operations and will honour all sales and warranty claims. We are able to process your order and it will be dispatched to you in the next 7 – 14 days.

I will try and push your order through faster and keep you updated.

Best Regards,

Alienware Sales

Alienware Australia

After waiting even longer for it, they still failed to get my order done within that time period as the next email states:

Sent: 29 Oct 2007 13:08
To: <deleted>
Subject: RE: Arora m9700 status.

Dear <deleted>,

Firstly I would like to apologise for the current situation as stated below your order was affected by the bankruptcy of our local partner. The M9700 has gone end of life I am able to upgrade you to the M9750 at no extra cost however we would need you to do a chargeback on your credit card for the last order and re process your card. If this is of interest please provide a contact number and I will give you a call to run you through the process.

Best Regards,

Alienware Sales

Alienware

The problem with this was not necessarily the waiting, but the lack of communication and the fact that this was also arranged with my current employer as a salary sacrifice. Alienware also will not directly refund me so I now have to fill out a funds dispute form for my bank and so hopefully I should get a refunded soon.

Anyway, it looks like Dell have a similar product for about the same costs and specifications.

UPDATE: 8/12/2007 @1638
The Credit Card Charge back went through last week and now my funds (and happiness) is back. Hooray!

Very Clean USB Flash Disk

2007-10-26T09:03:00.001+08:00

I now have a very clean USB flash disk. Not wiped clean of data, but hermetically/hygienically clean :P. I not only accidently left it in my pocket during my scheduled clothes washing, but I also left it outside to alow it to dry, only to forget about it and have it get rained on. Funny thing is, it still works!

With this in mind, I think I will continue to buy Astone USB mass storage devices due to there (tested) reliability and toughness when completely submerged into liquid, dried and used again!

WSUS Breaks itself

2007-10-24T15:04:00.000+08:00

It seems that the WSUS-3.0-sp1 update from Automatic Updates has broken WSUS on one of the servers at work!

Apon initial investigation, I found that WSUS 3.0 was installed, the files were all there and the database existed, however there was no registry entry for the configuration.

This is how I fixed it (after realising that it refused to uninstall).

Logged onto the Perth main WSUS server and exported HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Update Services\Server\Setup and imported it into my replica server. I immediately uninstalled WSUS and installed the default 3.0 version and I am now back in business :)

NOTE TO SELF: Move away from Windows-based servers and workstations...

GWN Contributions

2007-09-22T09:46:00.000+08:00

Well, I have finally decided to contribute to my favourite OS!

I have sent an email to the gwn-feedback team to see if I can help by writing articles for them every so often. If accepted, I will write-up about planet.gentoo.org blogs and maybe even Gentoo Press related articles ^_^

I just hope this this doesn't take up too much of my time like these blogs of mine :P

CIFS and Windows Server 2003

2007-08-18T11:32:00.000+08:00

Today I had an incident this morning (which, as of the time of writing this, I am still working on) where a Windows XP machine decided to BSOD with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

Doesn't surprise me to see that the KB article above won't help me fix this issue as I found out a few hours later that there was a power surge from the night before!!!

So to fix this I (naturally) fired up a Linux distro (this time it was Knoppix

Next up I begin receiving this error when trying to connect to mapped network drives for storage of the recovered data using smbmount(8)...

    cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory
    4650: protocol negotiation failed
    SMB connection failed

Well, after about 5 minutes of pulling my hair out while googling for a solution, I found the answer!!! CIFS! I thought that smbmount(8) was broken (I've had some bad experience in the past) however it seems that if if you use CIFS instead it will happily connect to a Windows 2003 Server file share!!

Now if only I could get all this data recovered :P

Time to call Dell for a replacement HDD (gotta love their support) and purchase one in the interim...

Random Post #2

2007-08-16T16:53:00.000+08:00

I used the Dell Support Request form for the first time and noticed that the fscking web application won't work with a standards compliant browser (Mozilla Firefox) *argh*

I am also starting to really dislike administering Windows servers at the moment because of weird user home directory permissions and active directory in general (replication times over frame really are soooooo sloooowwww!)

Not only, but also, I am in the process of migrating my DCSE to a self-managed account so that regardless of what company I work for, I will always have access to, and be able to manage my DCSE profile.

CLI-Tip #0001:


    mstsc /v:server

    This allows a user to quickly connect to a server running
    terminal services (or a Windoes XP machine with remote
    desktop configured) by specifying the name or IP address
    on the command-line. Very handy for those that use
    "rdesktop" alot :)

Cygwin is broken.. no wait! windows is!!

2007-08-05T17:29:00.000+08:00

Well I was starting to wonder why my good 'ol mkisofs for windows (cygwyn port) was not working.

I'd had this issue such a long time ago but I forgot how to overcome it because I didn't have a blog back then and didn't bother to document any of the technical stuff I did (I'm also still lazy that I don't document these sorts of things, but instead I occasionally blog it here)

Anyways here goes:

I usually like to dump my command-line tools in %SystemRoot%\commands and seperate some of the bigger projects and utils that need additional libraries (cygwin is one of them) and throw them into seperate directories underneath that one and put all the path environment variables into windows so that everything just works... but it didn't :-/

I got some DLL entrypoint was not found error in cygevt__somethingorother so I thought "WTFOMG!!!11!!1 cygwin is broken!" I was only half right.... ...

I downloaded the latest cygwin base tarball, extracted it and I was having the same error. This didn't seem right it all! so I scoured the utils directories to see if one of them had a corrupt/bad version of cygwin... and lo behold! my cdrdao package directory had a fUxx0r3d version!!! (not only that I noticed that the directory it was in, was defined in the %PATH% environment variable before cygwin was!

FIXED!!!!
I AM AWESOME.. SO AWSOME
... well not really :P

At least I have all my essential command-line unix-ported tools now on my windows box at work :)

3G4Linux

2007-06-19T06:45:00.000+08:00

Since I can't get broadband in my dormitory up north, I have decided to go halves for the cost of Telstra 3G Wireless Broadband with a workmate of mine. Problem is this. I refuse to put ANY windows machine onto the internet without a free (and fully functional) open source firewall solution.

So I decided to look (again) at windows-based free open source firewall software and here it is! WIPFW. If it's truly based on OpenBSD's pf, it sounds very promising. (yes I'm a big OpenBSD fan). It has a very experimental GUI, but I don't necessarily need it.

Acording to this article I think it might actually be a better idea to just buy a Motium MPC-210 Mobility PC (or equivalent cheap but small machine) for use as a (Gentoo) Linux firewall for this thing. Probem is, I have have never used iptables before :P

Breaking My Gentoo

2007-05-21T11:15:00.000+08:00

After much deliberation and scouring the net for a Linux command-line based passwordsafe (and ompatible with Counterpane's Password Safe) program, I found pwsafe.

This seems like the ideal app that I had in mind, problem is it's not masked or even in portage!
Not to worry! Gentoo Sunrise has come to my rescue!

There is an overlay for it that seems like it's in the process of being reviewed, however it hasn't got a maintainer (this is probably the reason why it's not in portage yet).

Now I am wondering if I should just add it and install it using the once off ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" use flag and hope that it doesn't kill my system.
I already have the masked version of Hamachi installed how can this be any different?

I think I will end up installing yet another masked package :P

/crazy

New Monitor

2007-05-13T15:52:00.000+08:00

Not much to blog except for the fact that I have just purchased a Dell 27" Monitor (2707WFP) ^_^

Now that I have my old 17" up north in my dormitory, I have determined that I probably should have done it the other way around :P

Oh well, at least sending it to the Perth office helps guarantee delivery.

Microsoft Breaks Automatic Updates

2007-04-28T14:58:00.000+08:00

I have discovered that Microsoft^®'s own Automatic Updates service for both Windows^® XP^™ and Windows^® 2000^™ is broken. There is a KB article that states that there is a known problem with Widown Updates that sometimes causes 100% CPU utilization (more like always!), causing the operating system to become unresponsive.

Although Microsoft have released not one, but two patches for this problem, it still exists! but here's the kicker: Not only is the patch not included in Windows Updates, but it isn't even available for Windows^® 2000^™!!?!??!!

<sarcasm>
Great to see Microsoft^® continuing to make quality software!
</sarcasm>

CD Backup Script (Updated)

2007-04-23T16:27:00.000+08:00

Bellow is an updated version of my CD backup script that I developed a while back:



#!/bin/sh
#
version="1.5.5"
version_date="Mon Oct 30 15:59:14 WST 2006"
version_author="Dean Bergin (dean.bergin@gmail.com)"
version_desc="A basic automated CD backup script"

master()
{
 # initiate a variable to hold the iso filename as a sting
 iso_filename=backup-`date +%Y%m%d`.iso
 # Check for existance of an iso with the same datestamp
 # and rename acordingly
 if [ -f /u1/${iso_filename} ]
 then
  mv /u1/${iso_filename} /u1/old.${iso_filename}
  mkisofs -v -J -V backup -A '' -N -sysid '' -o /u1/$iso_filename $backup_dir
 else
  # TODO: Add more checking to see if the files we have for
  # a backup will fit onto a CD

  # If all is fine then go ahead and make the iso
  mkisofs -v -J -V backup -A '' -N -sysid '' -o /u1/$iso_filename $backup_dir
  chmod 0740 $iso_filename

 fi
}

archive()
{
 # Initialise a list of directories to include in the backup cycle
 dirlist="/boot /etc /root /tmp /var"
 # Dynamically create tarballs based on the directory names
 for dirname in $dirlist
 do
  tar cfvz ${backup_dir}${dirname}.tgz $dirname
 done
 # This section deals with specific exceptions for dirictory names
 # that requires additional filename formatting
 tar cfvz ${backup_dir}/usr-home.tgz /usr/home
}

# Directory cleaning function that will automatically delete
# all files in the $backup_dir automatically. It is assumed that
# previous backup iso's have been performed
clean()
{
 for file in `ls ${backup_dir}`
 do
  rm -rf $file
 done
}

# Initialise $backup_dir and give it a value
backup_dir="/u1/backup"
# call the custom made functions
clean
archive
master

DISCLAMER:
This script has been tested, and works fine (on my own system).
Feel free to copy and modify this script to suit your own needs, but don't come crying to me if it doesn't work on your system! There is no warranty or any of that stuff and the above code is provided "as-is". Perhaps you should write your own scripts then you won't have to worry about all this legal stuff :)

Converted to Genkernel

2007-04-23T15:44:00.000+08:00

Genkernel makes Admin on a Linux system easy!

In one single step (genkernel all), Genkernel can:

Create a (custom-built) kernel (bzImage) from the latest sources.

Make kernel modules and install them.

Include all (custom) CHOST optimisations that are set in make.conf in your kernel

Minimise human error (ie. manually copying a kernel bzImage and forgetting to rename it or relink it etc).

Not only but also, genkernel keeps config files in it's own directory (/usr/share/genkernel by default) so that means I never have to worry about whether I copied the previous kernel .config file from /usr/src/linux before purging older kernel sources by running: emerge -Pa gentoo-sources

I recommend Genkernel not only to newbies but also to Linux pros that want to make kernel upgrades less of a troublesome task.

/hug Gentoo

Screen makes mv dissapear

2007-04-06T13:10:00.000+08:00

bash: /usr/bin/mv: No such file or directory

Just discovered this error today. Seems that screen (v 4.00.03) occasionally breaks coreutils/bash in that it can't find the mv executable in any other screen other than the first one that you create...

Not sure how screen actually works, but it seems like theres a bug in the way that it handles creating a new environment for a screen when using the -t option (or mabee when you try pass it a command enclosed in `'s)

Tempted to post this as a bug, but I have never done a bug report, and I haven't got the time to investigate why this is (intermittently) happening. Besides, I would much rather rant here on my blog :P

Gentoo GNU/Linux LiveUSB

2007-03-25T13:54:00.000+08:00

Not long after buying a 10Gb ASTONE USB Mass storage device, I decided to turn it into a portable OS. Naturally, I chose Gentoo :)

One small hitch that I came across was the fact that busybox was failing to compile. This is how I fixed it.
emerge --sync
emerge binutils
emerge busybox

Now all I need to do is get wireless support/war-driving tools and some other rescue utils installed and noone will be able t stop me!

Have I ever told you that I love using Gentoo? :P

DVD Burning annoyances

2007-03-09T16:41:00.000+09:00

About 2-3 years ago I noticed that Jörg Schilling had developed Cdrecord-ProDVD, and being that I was quite happy with using cdrtools on both Linux and Windows, I decided to give his DVD burning software a try.

Cdrecord-ProDVD worked reasonably well on Linux (apart from the annoying licensing variable), however It would NOT run under Windows at all. Today I thought I would revisit the use of it it and try to get it working again, but to no avail.

Apart from the fact that Jörg Schilling doesn't like Windows, why is it that Linux gets free, powerfull, and working (command-line!) DVD burning software and Windows get's none?

Now the only thing that's in the way of me ditching windows in favour of Gentoo on my desktop is WoW :P

Linux Kernel Fun: Adding a new IDE Controller

2007-02-06T06:48:00.000+09:00

I managed to afford a new HDD for my upgrades and an IDE addon card to boot (<--- Pun intended :)

The plan:

Buy new 250Gb IDE HDD

Swap the 200Gb currently in my fileserver with the new 250Gb HDD

Swap the (newer) 200Gb taken out of my fileserver with the (older) 200Gb HDD in my XBOX and vicea versa

Install an IDE addon card into fileserver and attach the 200Gb to it

Most of this went well except for the addon card.
After many hours and 4-letter words being said, I realised that the new addon card wanted take over as the first available IDE chip after the kernel had initialised the hardware giving me VFS kernel panic errors even after changing the lilo 'root=' kernel option (and editing fstab). It seemed to work fine when I manually specified the root= option at the lilo prompt, but I was forgetting one important thing...

I forgot to use the kernel option "Boot off-board chipsets first support" which funnily enough tells you what the option is for in the linux kernel help: "This can improve the usability of some boot managers such as lilo when booting from a drive on an off-board controller."

Nuff' Said :P

Dell BIOS Wierdness

2007-01-30T18:40:00.000+09:00

Today I not only discovered that a Dell Inspiron D800 and a Precision M60 are essentially the same laptop (identical/interchangable M/B) with a different BIOS and to turn a Precision M60 into a Inspiron D800 is as simple as flashing the BIOS using a "/forcetype" as a command-line argument at run-time of the bios binary. Furthermore it seems that some (specifically the D800) BIOS binaries will run on either win32 or MS-DOS, but to get the previously mentioned hack to work, you have to use MS-DOS.

WARNING: Try this at your own risk. I will not be held accountable in any way shape or form if you turn your Lappy into a brick!

UPDATE (20070329): It seems that Dell still use similar motherboards for their D820/M65 product lines, but the BIOS from a D820 cannot be flashed to an M65 by using the /forcetype command-line switch anymore. Way to go Dell.

V.Busy = "no WoW"

2007-01-21T10:01:00.000+09:00

I have been so busy that I haven't even had time to pick up WoW since just before the expansion was available... until now, however I have been able to buy random assortments of gadgets and useful stuff, such as...

a few USB Nokia phone chargers (3rd party)
A new Astone 2.0Gb USB flash disk (umass) for work
2 copies of StreetSmart® StreetExpress™ on CD-ROM (one for me and a friend)
...and of course WoW: BC ^_^

As for the StreetSmart® StreetExpress™ those not wanting to continually insert the the CD every time they want to use it, can simply copy Data directory into the installation point. This should also improve load-times too :)

Work Ensues.... Soon.

2006-12-21T10:12:00.000+09:00

I have managed to score a job through Canlde!

This job entails doing Dell service work through Unisys West and will probably continue on through while I am at UNI as well.

I am in the process of finishing up the necessary (online) training through the Dell Certified Systems Expert Certification program, which is proving to be very informative.

That being said I may be unable to blog certain information due to Dell/Unisys non-disclosure agreement(s).

Anyway, it looks like I might be able to afford to by a Dell 24" LCD Monitor [2407WFP] after all :)

Gentoo business viability

2006-11-06T16:32:00.001+08:00

After having a heated discussion (argument) on the weekend about it, my friends don't believe that Gentoo could be used as, or in a production server environment, sticking to their beliefs that Debian is a better choice because of it's (default) usage of binary packages as opposed to a source-based one and their idea that because Gentoo is ultimately more customizable, it is therefore more susceptible to "breaking".

So can any Linux distribution. An unskilled person with little or no knowledge should not maintain/administer a Gentoo system unless they are prepared to continually break their machine due to lack of knowledge of the system.

I can honestly say that my own (personal) Gentoo server has been "borked" before, but that was in my early initiation period in learning what NOT to do to in a Gentoo system (installing from the the wrong stage3 arch and accidentally forgetting to remove the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" flag when doing a world update). Because of this, my friends have only given examples based on my early mistakes, but haven't provided any real evidence to back up their theory as to why Gentoo should NOT be used (as a production system).

If SUN have certified Gentoo for use on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 machines doesn't this mean that Gentoo is worthy of being heralded as viable for production use?

Some of the reasons that I have abandoned Debian in favor of Gentoo is for that of customization, ease of package management using portage, having complete control of my system, ability to tune applications and the system itself for specific hardware optimization AND the availability of excellent howtos and official documentation.

I believe that a Gentoo system utilising the "hardened" profile and administered by a knowledgeable admin can provide high availability/uptime and be just as stable as any other Linux system if not more stable (especially with nice hardware such as that mentioned above).

"Do not judge me, until you have tried my way of life for yourselves". -- Bender (Futurama [episode 3ACV18 - Anthology of interest, Part 2])

Invalid gcc profile

2006-10-29T22:15:00.000+08:00

Tried to install a package today and received the following horrifying output from running emerge flac

configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.

Found out in this (excellent) Gentoo forum thread that it was only due to the fact that $CHOSTS flag (from /etc/make.conf) was not being exported at build-time due to gcc using an invalid profile.

So I ran gcc-config -l and sure enough it outputted the following:

# gcc-config -l

* /usr/bin/gcc-config: Profile does not exist or invalid setting for /etc/env.d/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.1.1

[1] i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.1.1 * [invalid]

To fix this problem all I had to do was to run gcc-config again only this time I had to specify the profile to use which coincidently was the only one to use anyway.

# gcc-config 1
* Switching native-compiler to i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.1.1 ... [ ok ]

Now everything compiles properly. I believe this was caused after using revdep-rebuild which was recommended by emerge when I tried to use the prune option on the "world" ebuild meta-package with emerge -P world.

Dead XBOX HDD???

2006-10-29T18:12:00.000+08:00

Yesterday (last night), It seemed like my (modded) XBOX HDD had died, however after testing it in a PC with the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostic tools it seemed fine and worked happily in my XBOX again.

It isn't the first time that I have had problems with it, but all it seems to take to fix most problems is to pull it apart and put it back together again. Perhaps the HDD is about to die soon?
Either way this has re-iterated the necessity for backups and prompted me to do so.

At least I have lftp avaliable to make the job a bit easier.

Shell Scripting FTW

2006-10-28T15:14:00.000+08:00

Today I made a nice little handy script that automates my (CD) backups for future cron job use.
Still requires more work so that it only outputs relevant info in cronjob logs.


#!/bin/sh

master()
{
    tmp=${backup_dir}-`date +%Y%m%d`.iso
    if [ -f $tmp ]
    then
        mv $tmp old.${tmp}
    else
        mkisofs -v -J -V backup -A '' -N -sysid '' -o $tmp $backup_dir
    fi
}

archive()
{
    list="/boot /etc /root /tmp /var"
    other="/usr/home"

    for index in $list
    do
        tar cfv ${backup_dir}/`basename ${index}`.tgz $index
    done
    tar cfvz ${backup_dir}/usr-home.tgz /usr/home/
}

clean()
{
    for blah in `ls ${backup_dir}`
    do
        rm -rf $blah
    done
}

backup_dir="/u1/backup"
clean
archive
master

<insert usual software disclamer here>

Comming soon: Howto setup cron :)

Google Calendar Borked

2006-10-25T18:27:00.000+08:00

I managed to bork my Google Calendar rendering the notifications/reminders feature unusable.

I only recently found out that you can only have notifications (reminders) for events that are in a primary calendar and the feature-lack was preventing me from being able to receive event notifications for a second Birthday calendar that I had made, so I decided to (backup) export my calendars, delete them and then recreate/rename them appropriately so that the Birthdays calendar was the primary and ...failed :P

Here is how I did it!

Step 1). Signed in.
Step 2). Exported all My Calendars to .ics (vCal) files via the private URL feature.
Step 3). Deleted ALL My Calendars (exept for the primary one).

Note: You cannot actually delete your primary calendar but you can delete all events.

Step 4). Created a new daily calendar for daily stuff (the only other calendar).
Step 5). Imported the Birthdays vCal file into the primary calendar and the everyday stuff vCal into the newly created one.

Both calendars now display an event notification icon in the top right-hand corner of the event, but only one calendar (the primary one) can actually edit notification info. It now fails to notify me of event reminders...

Earlier this afternoon I sent a small message off to Goggle to see if they can fix the problem, but I might have to get them to forciblly delete the primary calendar an/or delete the Calendar Service form my Gmail account.

Windows XP Home Hasstle

2006-09-26T09:47:00.000+08:00

How many of us geeks (that actially use windoze) use Windows XP Home? Almost None.
I found this out the hard way as I will explain bellow.

21/09/2006: A client came to me with a computer (compaq presario sr1128an) that had a failed HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and provided me with a new one to install.

22/09/2006: Installed new HDD (easy) and proceeded to install Windows XP, but realised that the client only had a Windows XP Home licence (sticker on the side of the machine).

23/09/2006: I had begun preparations to install Windows XP Home when I discovered that my own copy was broken! *sigh* Not only that but when I asked the Client to provide me with his copy he claims that he has lost it! Naturally I start calling favours from my other geek friends to locate a copy.

25/09/2006: This evening I finally located a copy of Windows XP Home locally (I don't trust downloaded copies) but to my horror it was a DeLLified copy for a dell inspirion laptop. *sigh*

26/09/2006: Began the arduous task of un-dellifying the CD... Here is what I had to do;
1) Copy the contents of the CD to a temp folder.
2) Deleted the $OEM$ folder and the following files
i386\compdata\dellps.htm
i386\compdata\dellps.txt
i386\compdata\dellth.htm
i386\compdata\dellth.txt
i386\!dell_xp.cab
i386\!dpchfen.cab
i386\!pcvenxp.cab
i386\txtsetup.sif
3) Overwrote the file CD:\i386\winnt.sif with my own unnatended setup.
4) renamed i386\txtsetup.sif.txt to txtsetup.sif and removed lines 257-259 (inclusive).
5) Tested the CD iso image with VMware after re-mastering it with mkisofs2.

Apart from receiving the following error message, the CD seems to install a Dell-Free version of Windows XP Home ^_^

If anyone has more information on how to fix this so that the errormessage does not show up please email me at dean[dot]bergin[at]gmail.com

Debian Misconceptions

2006-08-18T15:21:00.000+08:00

As a follow-up from my previous post, Is Gentoo becoming more like Debian? I unfairly treated Debian as an outdated distribution without proving the full facts.

A friend of mine (who knows the OS much better than I do), provided me with a more realistic insight into the misconceptions of Debian being an outdated distribution.

He writes:

"Debian isn't really outdated. This is really bad misconception.

And the misconception stems from the fact that those who don't know Debian believe Debian is just one GNU/Linux distribution. It's not.

Debian is in fact several different distributions.

The main one's of which are Debian GNU/Linux Stable, Debian GNU/Linux Testing and Debian GNU/Linux Unstable (for the purposes of this article, I'll here on in call them Stable, Testing and Unstable respectively). Other Debian distributions include GNU/Linux Experimental, GNU/Linux Frozen and even GNU/Hurd, but they are not as widely used by Debian users and are not central to my point).

Which one of the main three you choose is depending on what you require from your software distribution.

Unstable is a developer's playground. Unstable is where new packages are introduced in to the system by the Debian Developers. It is considered bleeding-edge, as it receives new functionality (new software versions) daily. While the quality of Debian software is generally very good, sometimes Unstable breaks in bad ways (e.g. loss of data, or requiring you to rebuild the machine). If you must have the latest and greatest of every application version on your computer, regardless of the fact that your machine might get hosed every now and again, use Unstable and be prepared to fix your machine if it breaks.

Testing is a good trade off between the latest applications and better quality then Unstable. Packages are only introduced in to Testing after 12 days of no one reporting a bug in the Unstable package.
This means that when Testing breaks, it's usually a trivial part of the system rather than debilitating the whole system. It's not an absolute guarantee, but the Debian Developers and Users are usually pretty good about noticing problems in Unstable before they get moved in to Testing. If you want a reasonable amount of quality and mostly up to date application versions, Testing can balance this trade-off quite well.

Finally, let me dispell a final myth about Debian software. Stable is indeed updated frequently but with a catch, only for bug fixes. Once a new version of Stable is released, the only reason it will receive an update is to correct security flaws that are discovered in its software. And while this means that no new software functionality is added, it also means you get really good quality software that is frequently updated for security problems. If you require really good quality software with as little downtime for breakages as possible (say on production servers that run 24x7), Stable is what you want.

So yes, while Debian Stable has fewer functionality upgrades than Gentoo, it is actually desirable to be so. Stable means to be (like the name says), stable. If you want more up to date software, you may wish to consider Testing or Unstable depending on your proficiency or willingness to fix breakages.

And now you know that Debian is updated constantly - just with different caveats attached depending on which of the Debian distributions you choose.

P.S. More information on Debian release cycles and Debian distribution goals can be found at Debian’s website (http://www.debian.org/releases/). If you wish to know how Testing becomes Stable, follow the links on that page to the Debian FAQ."

Thanks go out to Spods for providing an insight into this issue.
Till next time.

Installing Hamachi under Gentoo

2006-08-13T12:32:00.000+08:00

I have found an easy way to cleanly install Hamachi within Gentoo!!
just follow these easy step-by-step instructions.

1). Follow the instructions here for information on how to get tun/tap support (alternatively there is a forum thread here)

2). Download and extract the net-misc folder fom the hamachiOverlay tarball found here to your /usr/portage tree (or wherever you keep portage tree)

NOTE: This is an Unnofficial eBuild!!!

3). Run 'emerge hamachi' and if all goes well hamachi should install with no errors.

NOTE: Hamachi is distributed as a binary-only package and therefore no compiling output is displayed during emerge.

4). Configure hamachi :) if your not sure of what its commands are, simply type 'hamachi -c /etc/hamachi ?'

NOTE: When configuring hamachi I noticed that I had to continually use the -c option

I have been using this utility for some time and it is supprisingly stable, secure and works fine even over dialup! (one of my friends is having "difficulties" upgrading to broadband. If you're reading, this you know who you are! :P).

Thanks go out to those that developed the hamachiOverlay ebuild :)

Disclamer:
This is not an official howto! and I take no responsibility for any of the content mentioned here or externally. I will also NOT be held liable for any loss of data, hardware or software as a result of following these instructions.

/info.depot/ Knowledge for those that seek it.

2006-08-13T11:11:00.000+08:00

/info.depot/ Knowledge for those that seek it.

Another freind of mine Spods, has begun work on documenting some of the cool but fiddly things that can be done with unix. for now it has a kind of howto for setting up remote X.

More to come in the near future (if I bug him to update a little more often :)

The Tech Dragons Hax: Windows Port of Xscreensaver

2006-08-13T00:39:00.000+08:00

The Tech Dragons Hax: Windows Port of Xscreensaver

Do you remeniss about the good old unix days?
Having to endure working on a Windoze system all day?
Then why not bring some unix charm to you Windoze desktop with WinXScreensavers!

The package comes in a single installer, has a single executable to manage all the installed screensavers as a MetaSaver that allows you to choose the ones you like, and displays them at random.

NOTE: My own testing has deduced that some (most?) of the screensavers only display on one screen of a multi-monitor setup.

Is Gentoo becoming more like Debian?

2006-08-12T23:45:00.000+08:00

As it seems that the Gentoo stage3 tarball is fairly outdated, I decided to find out why and/or find an estimated release date for a newer one. I have been pouring though (almost) all of the Gentoo documentation to find out what I can and there seems to be no information about a newer stage3 release (nameley 2006.1).

I have found it increasingly difficult to build from an outdated stage3 tarball, due to newer profiles are being merged and the massive list of updates to get to current from the base 2006.0.

Since 2004 I have seen diminishing releases each year, with 3 releases in 2004, 2.5 (if you count 2005.1-r1) in 2005 and 1 so far in 2006.

What is happening to this brilliant OS?
Is it going the way of Debian (it's suppossed beginings) by being constantly delayed and outdated?

Perhaps I should deal with it by being more patient instead of ranting (whining) about it.

NOTE: Although Debian may be outdated, it is by far one of the best Linux distributions around due to it's stable branch being... well very stable!).