Mon, 22 Mar 2010
N900 back!
So, a short while ago, the battery of my N900 had run flat. As in, completely, utterly flat. In itself, that's no big deal -- you connect it to a power outlet, wait until it's gone past the low-battery charging bits, then boot and use as usual.
Except that it wouldn't. I'd recently installed a firmware update from Nokia (which contained some bug fix that I really was waiting for), and now the bloody thing wouldn't boot. Rather than do the low-battery charging dance, it thought the battery had enough power that it could just go ahead and boot.
Of course it was wrong, so whenever I powered it on, it would sit there fore 30 seconds, try to boot, fail, power off for about a second, and start over. I left it like that for a night, but it didn't recharge.
Needless to say, that was quite annoying.
So I sent it in for repair, and today there was a package in the mail, containing my (repaired) N900.
They'd reflashed it. A reasonable course of action, I guess, but of course that meant all data was gone. Good thing it has a backup application, and good thing I stored those backups on an external micro-SD card.
Restoring those back-ups was a breeze; they'd also stored the contents of sources.list and have done something akin to "dpkg --get-selections", since now the application manager kindly asks me whether I wish to reinstall the applications that I had installed. Cute.
At any rate, I'm very happy I finally got rid of this awful Samsung "cellphone". It's a SGH-C140 that I had as a replacement until my N900 got back, but there was something very very wrong with it; I don't know whether it's a design flaw or just a wear-and-tear issue (these replacement phones aren't usually handled in the best possible way), but it managed to lose connection to the network every once in a while. So people who would call me would immediately get my voicemail, and then they'd be angry with me later because I was unavailable. Well, duh.
Anyway, that's over now. Whee.
Fri, 05 Mar 2010
Netgear WNDR3700 and OpenWRT
I wanted a machine on which I could easily run OpenWRT. So I'd went to the #openwrt channel on freenode a while back, and just asked for suggestions; people suggested to me that the Netgear WNDR3700 was a good choice, so I ordered that.
I assumed that it would be easy enough to install OpenWRT on this device, but hadn't actually looked into it, planning to wait with that until the device had arrived. Little did I know that the machine actually comes with OpenWRT preinstalled. Now there's an interesting twist.
Now you do need to run some "telnetenable" thingy to be able to get a shell, after which "telnet <device>" gets you a root shell (with no username or password by default). Supposedly you should update that by using "passwd", but they managed to break that in the firmware that comes with the device.
I am missing a few things, though.
root@WNDR3700:/bin# dmesg /bin/ash: dmesg: not found root@WNDR3700:~# uname -a /bin/ash: uname: not found root@WNDR3700:~# hexdump /bin/config |more /bin/ash: less: not found
Unh?
root@WNDR3700:~# alias more='less' vim='vi' root@WNDR3700:~#
Aahh.
And for those who were wondering: no, it does not have any 'vi' installed, either.
Oh well.
The fun thing is, this device has a USB connector, too; so it should be possible to connect a USB storage device, install Debian, and use it as a very potent home server/router/switch/whatever. That'd require me to understand how hostap works, though, which I haven't played with yet. I'm sure I'll figure that bit out -- at some point.
Tue, 08 Dec 2009
Hardware RNG
So, as many people probably know by now, the nice folks over at Simtec Electronics, some of whom were at DebConf9 last summer, have created a nice small device that plugs in a USB port and, with a userland daemon and some encryption for security, generates entropy (randomness) for the Linux kernel to use (through /dev/random and friends).
I've plugged one in my server today, and suddenly my server's entropy pool was full. This is a really nice thing. For a simple example of what happens when you insert such a thing into a server, check out my munin graphs.
Very nice for such a cheap device...
Sun, 11 Oct 2009
Fuck you, Sony.
I had wanted to buy a PS3 ever since I learned about this interesting processor that is called the Cell. Not that I'm very much into console gaming or any such thing; I'd have settled for any kind of affordable Cell hardware, really, but that basically is 'the PS3' these days.
What I had missed, however, was the fact that recent PS3 machines don't support running Linux anymore. Apparently this was all over the interwebs, but unfortunately I didn't see that.
That's €300 I won't see again, for a useless (to me) piece of hardware.
Stupid morons.
Tue, 21 Jul 2009
I love vista.
No, I don't use it, and I wouldn't want to. However, its hardware requirements are so ridiculously high, that hardware manufacturers these days have no option but to seriously bump the performance of their systems. As a result, they ship with ridiculous amounts of RAM and CPU power, while still keeping prices reasonable.
Of course performance still sucks your pants off if you indeed do use Vista, but not if you use an actual operating system.
I love vista.
Wed, 15 Jul 2009
RepRap: followup.
I received some comments on my previous blog post; one of them I guess was from one of the people who helps develop reprap, and who pointed out that the Java software is not the only thing; there are apparently alternatives in python, and a C-based one in development. Goodie.
Another managed to put out this gibberish:
I'd just like to point out that C and POSIX isn't very easily portable to the majority of computer systems that users use (ie. Windows), not to mention that C doesn't have a whole lot of abstractions away from the OS (eg. building up path names is not easily portable in C).
My friend, that is why they have these things called 'libraries' and 'cygwin', or even 'MingW'. There are many programs who were written in C and who are portable across Windows and POSIX; Apache, OpenSC, to name but a few. I'll grant you that it is more work to develop applications that are cross-platform using C, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. At least, however, they'll be easier to install.
RepRap
Stumbled upon RepRap. Seemed interesting. Before trying to build my own, however, I thought I'd have a look at their software.
So, I downloaded the thing. Then had a deep sigh, as the bloody thing uses Java. And they still live in the middle ages, since the 'Linux version' ships with some .so files for i386 only. Fidgeting around until I find the right version of the amd64 .so file seems somewhat hard.
I think I'll pass on that one, for now.
Whenever someone tells you that 'java' is the right solution if you're looking for 'portability', they're on crack. Seriously. I'll have C and POSIX any day, kthxbye.
Tue, 14 Jul 2009
Serial API
I've previously expressed my "love" (ahem) for the serial port protocol. There are just too many options.
Now while I dislike the hardware I've never had the "joy" of working with the POSIX serial API. Until now, that is.
If I were nine, I'd say mommy, make it go away!
Whoever came up with the idea of the CREAD control flag (which enables or disables reading from the serial port) and made it be the default to disable reading from said port, should face criminal charges for making life unnecessarily miserable.
That is all.
Sat, 21 Feb 2009
Blue LEDs must die!
Preferably by way of a blunt chainsaw. One with a broken engine.
That is all.
Fri, 20 Feb 2009
New toys
Got myself a new laptop this week. Not that the other one broke down or some such, but it was getting old; and its single-core 1.3Ghz PowerPC was starting to be somewhat slow in comparison to what's available on the market today. Additionally, while it was still functional, there were some issues with wear-out; for instance, sometimes the battery would just fall out while I was walking around with it, or the network cable connection would not fit entirely, and similar minor problems
The new one is quite a bargain; 2G of RAM, 2Ghz Core2Duo, one of those newfangled 'n' wireless network interfaces, plenty of diskspace, and other interesting things; and all that for only €600ish. You'd say it's a netbook, but it isn't—although I guess the low price of those netbook systems is pulling down the bottom line of these machines.
Anyway. After using it for slightly more than a day, I'm quite happy with it. I did have to upgrade a few packages in order to make all the hardware work properly; for instance, kernel 2.6.26 does not yet support the wireless (so I'm running 2.6.28 now), and the X.org in unstable can only get at the screen in vesa mode, which means I'm running the 7.4 X.org packages from experimental. But overall, most of it (that I care about) works flawlessly.
With a single exception: I have no audio. The weird thing is, the audio chipset is recognized, and I can play around with alsamixer; but no matter, there is no sound. Which is kindof annoying. It doesn't appear that I'm the only one with this problem (witness this debugging page on the alsa wiki), so I'm sure I'll get there. Eventually.
Oh wel.
While fetching the laptop, I was told that the NSLU2 which I had on backorder had arrived, so I took that with me, too. Add to that the 160G disk that I'd fetched earlier, and the USB NIC that I also got, and the Thecus N2100 that's still running at my parents' place will soon be moved to my home again—and its 500G RAID1 with it.
Whee.
Tue, 12 Aug 2008
Nouveau, followup
I blogged yesterday about trying out nouveau semi-successfully on my laptop. The driver is very new and not ready yet, so I did expect bugs when trying it out; and I was not let down. Or perhaps I was, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, mostly it's been a pleasant experience. Originally, using the nouveau driver would cause a full system lockup when shutting down the X server; but after I followed the suggestion by someone over on #nouveau on freenode that I try offb rather than nvidiafb, that problem was fixed. There's some weirdness going on still (such as the default font being thicker and larger, and the fact that moving windows to a second screen doesn't seem to work properly), but other than that, it seems to work.
I'll be using nouveau for a while now, and hopefully reporting any bugs I find. This should be good.
Mon, 11 Aug 2008
Nouveau
No, I've not moved south. Nouveau is the name of an X.org driver for nVidia cards, that does more than the only other free driver, 'nv'. The main difference being that the former currently breaks more often (which is why it's in Debian Experimental, and not on the road to stable), and that it also supports external video.
Someone blogged a while back about it over on Planet Debian, and while I made a mental note of trying it out at some point, that hadn't immediately happened.
It has now, though. I'm happy to report that I won't need to borrow someone else's laptop for my DebianDay talk. Whee.
Nouveau developers: if I ever meet you in person, I owe you a beer—just as much as I owe beers to those people who wrote a driver for the Broadcom 43xx wireless drivers. Thanks!
Tue, 15 May 2007
Graphics hardware
Next time I need to buy a graphics board, It might be an AMD one. That, or an Intel one—Intel already provide open drivers (whereas for AMD it's still vapourware for the time being), but Intel's 3D abilities aren't as shiny. Guess it'll depend on what the hardware will be fore.
Sun, 06 May 2007
New toys
A few days ago, I went to fetch the hardware that I'd ordered.
I don't think I've ever ordered as much in one go ever before. Well -- at least not when it wasn't for a customer.
My brother's girlfriend needed a new hard disk for her laptop, since her old one had broken (and of course she didn't have no backups, so now I'll have to find my 2,5" ATA -> desktop ATA converter and try to rescue what's there to rescue). Now since I had been planning to buy me some hardware before, and since my supplier implements an ordering fee for every order (no, they're not an end-user store), I decided to batch them up together in an effort to share the ordering fee over slightly more hardware.
I am now the proud owner of:
- A Linksys SPA921 VoIP deskphone.
- A Linksys something router with two builtin ATA ports (one FXS and one FXO). Since they didn't have an affordable ATA without the router stuff (the only ones they had without router were some 24-ish port €2000+ corporate boxes, but I don't need those), I had to pick this one. Not that I'll ever use the router bits.
- A 3Com 8port 1000BASE-T switch. As a result, I just retired my aging and flaky 5port 10BASE-T/10BASE-2 hub, and with it the single last 10BASE-2 segment in my network. After that, I moved the 100BASE-T switch to where the 10BASE-T one stood previously, and now the network is 100BASE-T at least everywhere. Not that I have the hardware to match on the other end of the connection everywhere (I don't have any Gbit NICs, and only a few 100BASE-T NICs; most of my NICs are 10BASE-T, though), but that doesn't matter.
- A Belkin 802.11g access point to replace the old and unsafe 802.11b one. Funny bit about that is that the old access point could talk 802.11x (aka the WPA variant that requires to set up a Radius server), but no WPA-PSK, whereas the new box supports WPA-PSK, but not 802.11x. Oh well.
- Two 500G SATA disks.
I also ordered a Thecus N2100, aka a "Yes box", to put the two 500G disks in — but those haven't arrived yet (still a few more days). Not that I'm even remotely interested in such an "external hard disk" type of thing, but there is some interesting stuff to be done with that hardware. Stay tuned.
Apart from the computer hardware, today I also went to Lemca in Deurne, and bought me a YFL 311 as an early birthday present to myself. I'd been in doubt between the 311 and the YFL 411, so tried both at the shop before deciding to go with the 311. While there is a difference in sound between the two (most notable in the lower octave), I didn't think the result was stunning enough to justify the €700+ extra for the 411. YMMV, of course.
I think I'll be playing a lot of music tomorrow.
Sun, 12 Nov 2006
Hardware support
A while back, my brother's computer had issues. It would dump core of
random programs, and would produce a BSOD under Windows at random times,
too. Running memtest86 showed that something was wrong with the memory,
so we replaced it. Unfortunately, that didn't help; so the conclusion I
made was that there was something wrong with something between the
processor and the RAM
—the cache (L1 or L2), some data or
address line degrading, or perhaps even the memory controller. In any
way, that didn't matter; what mattered is fixing the issue.
So we replaced the mainboard and the processor with something newer. He's now got a pretty modern mainboard, with all the interesting bits and pieces found in such a thing, and a Dual Core Pentium4 at 3.4Ghz. Occasionally, I must say that the socket 775 is pretty... weird. But I digress.
Upon installing everything, I found that trying to run the system with broken memory had managed to corrupt whatever was on the hard disk; his ReiserFS superblock thought the filesystem was some incredible amount larger than it really was, and Windows would turn up a BSOD before even booting. The first was pretty easy to fix; I hit 'e' in the grub menu, added init=/bin/bash to the end of the kernel command line, and instructed some tool from the reiserfs toolkit to fix the filesystem. After that finished, and after a subsequent exec /sbin/init finished, Debian was up and running again. That took all of a few minutes. Having booted it, I proceeded to install the security updates that had accumulated for Sarge since the time his system had started to break down (which is a few months). Then I realized that I had to reconfigure the system to understand the new mainboard.
Only that had already happened. Hotplug, discover, and perhaps some friends, had all done their work and there was nothing to be done anymore. Isn't that nice.
The same couldn't be said for Windows. Booting from the install medium and choosing "recovery" in the install menu didn't fix things. Even reinstalling the system without formatting the hard drive didn't get us any further. The only thing we could do was to wipe the drive clean and reinstall.
Windows better hardware support? My ass.
Thu, 19 Oct 2006
nVidia
I know, I just ranted about it. However, it would seem that the Xorg driver can do more with the video card in my laptop than would appear at first sight. If I plug a VGA monitor to the mini-DVI output of my PowerBook and start X, then the nv(4) driver seems to detect it. Behold the diff:
--- Xorg.0.log.not-connected 2006-10-19 14:49:07.000000000 +0200 +++ Xorg.0.log.connected 2006-10-19 14:49:51.000000000 +0200 @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. -(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Thu Oct 19 14:42:00 2006 +(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Thu Oct 19 14:42:46 2006 (++) Using config file: "xorg.conf" (==) ServerLayout "Default Layout" (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen" (0) @@ -444,7 +444,7 @@ (II) NV(0): Probing for analog device on output A... (--) NV(0): ...can't find one (II) NV(0): Probing for analog device on output B... -(--) NV(0): ...can't find one +(--) NV(0): ...found one (II) NV(0): Probing for EDID on I2C bus A... (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" registered at address 0xA0. (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" removed. @@ -452,7 +452,46 @@ (II) NV(0): Probing for EDID on I2C bus B... (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" registered at address 0xA0. (II) NV(0): I2C device "DDC:ddc2" removed. -(II) NV(0): ... none found +(--) NV(0): DDC detected a CRT: +(II) NV(0): Manufacturer: MAX Model: 178e Serial#: 2006 +(II) NV(0): Year: 2000 Week: 13 +(II) NV(0): EDID Version: 1.0 +(II) NV(0): Analog Display Input, Input Voltage Level: 0.714/0.286 V +(II) NV(0): Sync: Separate +(II) NV(0): Max H-Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 36 vert.: 27 +(II) NV(0): Gamma: 2.76 +(II) NV(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off; RGB/Color Display +(II) NV(0): redX: 0.632 redY: 0.329 greenX: 0.272 greenY: 0.604 +(II) NV(0): blueX: 0.142 blueY: 0.062 whiteX: 0.280 whiteY: 0.311 +(II) NV(0): Supported VESA Video Modes: +(II) NV(0): 640x480@60Hz +(II) NV(0): 640x480@75Hz +(II) NV(0): 800x600@75Hz [...more data about the monitor goes here...]
The nv(4) manpage also contains this bit:
Option "CrtcNumber" "integer"
Many graphics cards with NVIDIA chips have two video outputs.
The driver attempts to autodetect which one the monitor is con‐
nected to. In the case that autodetection picks the wrong one,
this option may be used to force usage of a particular output.
The options are "0" or "1". Default: autodetected.
... but when I set that to 1 in the Section "Device" of my xorg.conf, it still uses the internal monitor of my laptop. Am I missing something?
Fri, 03 Mar 2006
MythTV
Several people replied to my last blog post about a silly TV station scheduling ST: Enterprise at 8 AM, pointing me to MythTV. Well, point taken. However, to do that, you need a specific piece of hardware—one which I don't have. And a cable to my computer, which, I presume, isn't going to happen very soonishly.
The alternative would be to use the VCR to videotape it. Not as good a quality, but at least it should work, right?
Try again. I did try, but the VCR ate the fscking video tape.
Maybe I shouldn't be angry with Kanaal 2 and be angry with the fact that hardware will always let you down, but that's just too easy.
Tue, 21 Feb 2006
Western broken
western, my Sun Ultra10 which I used to use as server/gateway/firewall, broke down last weekend.
Since western had only one 9G hard disk which was getting full, I wanted to add another disk. The 80G disk that I had bought for my desktop turned out not to be needed (since there were 2 extra disks hidden in the machine anyway), so I added it to the Ultra. However, it didn't get detected; according to Philip, an Ultra10 has a PIO-only IDE interface, which may be the cause of the problem—it's not that unlikely that the newest IDE disks, such as this 80G one, do not support outdated transfer modes such as PIO anymore. So, I decided to take out one of the disks from rock, my desktop, and put in the 80G one instead. 40G is still plenty for a server which until recently had only 9G.
Thank $DEITY for LVM
Connected the 80G disk as /dev/hdd to rock, and ran the following commands:
rock:~# cfdisk /dev/hdd [create a partition] rock:~# pvcreate /dev/hdd1 rock:~# vgextend rock /dev/hdd1 rock:~# pvmove /dev/hde1 rock:~# vgreduce -a
Now shut down the box again, and remove /dev/hde. And no, the hde part is not a typo: rock has four IDE controllers.
Meanwhile, however, I was noticing something peculiar about western: its external network card did not get a DHCP lease anymore, for some reason. That card was a 3com 905, with a slightly loose RJ45 connector; by unplugging or reconnecting the cable, it might be that I moved it a bit too much around and broke it. While it's a pity that I lost that 3c905, it's not really much of a problem: put in a different card, boot again, done.
The Realtek ne2k-pci board that I put in next didn't work. It did get a DHCP lease, but it couldn't use the connection for some reason. Ne2k boards are crap, so it could be related.
I put in yet another card, and booted the machine again, this time without replacing the cover (in case that card wouldn't work either). After it had been running for about 1 minute, the system suddenly shut itself off for no apparent reason. So I put the cover back on and tried to boot. After 10 seconds, even before silo was loaded, the system shut itself off for no apparent reason. I thought maybe it was the card, and even tried the 3c905 again. The system shut itself off for no apparent reason.
It hasn't stopped doing that. I finally, on sunday evening, set up rock as a replacement server and put the 9G disk in there too, so that I could at least access the data and config files. But I'd love to get western to boot again. Stupid thing.
Any hints are very welcome. Really. I'll even give you a Free Beer at FOSDEM if you give me the hint that fixes it.
Thu, 16 Feb 2006
Broadcom driver not working.
After reading about the bcm43xx driver which supposedly supports the Apple Airport Express card—a wireless interface that I have in this laptop—I tried to install it. It compiles, detects the hardware, and is able to detect my wireless network ("iwlist scan" does indeed detect my cell, the one of the neighbour across the street, and even two extra cells that I didn't know of beforehand).
It does seem to be able to associate with my access point, too; when I set the ESSID to the one of my access point, it does list the MAC address of my Access Point in the "iwlist" output. However, actually using the network does not seem to be possible—running dhclient does not result in getting an IP address, nor does manually setting an IP address and trying to ping any host on the network actually do anything. Also, "wavemon" does not work, either.
Pity. I guess I'll have to stick to my zd1211 USB wireless thing for the time being. Which isn't too bad either—except that I forgot it at the office last week, and I haven't had the chance to pick it up yet, in the mean time.
Oh well. Tomorrow, it's back :-)
Fri, 10 Feb 2006
Hard disk keys
A while back, my desktop's 60G hard disk died. I didn't have an immediate replacement at the time; the only disk that I could put in the machine was a 13G one with data. Yesterday, however, an 80G hard disk that I bought on eBay arrived, so I shut down my desktop and prepared to put the new disk in. The machine has a removeable hard disk bay, so I put the disk in a casing and wanted to slide it in the bay. To activate it then, I need to use a key to unlock and then re-lock the bay.
I appear to have lost the fucking key.
I think I'll try to break the hardware lock mechanism and to short-circuit the cables that tell whether the bay is locked tomorrow. That lock doesn't serve any useful real-world purpose anyway.
Fri, 03 Feb 2006
b0rken cardreader
Grmbl.
My multi-cardreader refused to work today, after it had been flakey for a few weeks already. So I opened it up, to see which wire was loose and whether I could fix it.
Turns out I'll need a new connector to fix it. The USB connector itself is still okay, but one of the cables at the connector at the end where it's connected to the board broke off. And it's impossible to fix that without a new connector -- some cable remnants are left inside, and it's going to be physically impossible to remove those without breaking it apart. At which point I won't be able to use it anymore to fix it, obviously.
Problematic bit is now that I don't have access to my SSH or GPG keys anymore from my laptop, since they are stored on a CF card, and the piece of hardware which just broke down is how I access them...
Thu, 05 Jan 2006
Replacing a mainboard
About a week or two ago, my sister called me that her computer didn't boot anymore. After looking at it for a short while and asking her how it had stopped working, there was only one conclusion that I could come to: the processor fan had broken down, which meant that she'd had a processor meltdown (she had a Pentium I-class system; back then, builtin thermometers weren't as common as they are now). She needed a replacement. Now I do have a bunch of spare hardware, but I didn't have anything that could compare to her 200-something Mhz system, and she was already complaining that the thing was rather slow; so I helped her find a 233Mhz Pentium mainboard (with processor) on eBay.
That arrived on monday at her place, and she brought it to me to install it.
That's done now, but not before I had to tell the thing it was the worst mainboard design that I have ever seen. No, really. And I've seen quite some mainboards already, since I used to work for a place where they sold hardware, a while back.
The power connector, IDE connectors, serial ports, parallel port, and floppy drive connector are all positioned in the top left corner of the mainboard, above the PCI slots and right below where the power block is supposed to be. As a result, it's nearly impossible to reach them. When you do reach them, they're all placed so fucking close to eachother that it's nearly impossible to fit them all and to do so correctly. The one exception to that rule is the parallel port, which is fairly close to the rest, but still in the same area. It gets in fairly easily—unfortunately, it also gets out fairly easily if you touch them cables, which you have to do to put the topmost PCI card in its slot. Grmbl. Can't they put those cables in the center right, where they belong?!?
After fighting with them cables, it was time for the RAM. That mainboard contains two DIMM slots and four 72-pin SIMM thingies. I have one RAM module for the DIMM slots, but unfortunately it didn't work with that module; I'm not sure whether it's the RAM that's broken, or whether the mainboard simply doesn't want to accept it. Fortunately, I have some 72pin RAM modules left.
Unfortunately, I found that the 72pin slots were placed so close to the top of the mainboard that I had to get it out again in its entirety to be able to fit the topmost module. Grmbl. One centimeter of space is too much to ask?
After that, it turned out that the machine still didn't boot. At first I thought this was one of those braindead BIOSes that doesn't boot unless you hook up a keyboard, but in the end that didn't seem to be the case. After one by one disconnecting everything, it turned out that the system would boot when I didn't connect the CD writer, but it would not boot at all when I did connect it. And when I say "not boot", I really mean it that way; it didn't even start the POST.
Replacing the IDE data cable didn't help. I even tried using the one of the hard disk (which worked, because I had already done a boot from disk), or to connect the writer to as slave to the primary connector, but no luck; it simply wouldn't boot with that writer connected.
Well, I'm tired of it now. Maybe I'll go to the shop with that writer again (it was a christmas present, so should still be under warranty) and ask them to have a look at it, but otherwise sis won't have a writer.
Thu, 22 Dec 2005
3 systems
I'm typing this on my laptop, an Apple PowerBook 12", at a customer's site while I'm waiting for my contact to return.
I'm configuring a server here; to do so, I'm logged in to one of their system, which has an SSH connection open to the server, and I have a second system which I'm using to test out the configuration. That second system is a laptop running Windows 2000.
Unfortunately, the system went into suspend mode because I hadn't plugged it into the power, and now it's locked. And I don't have the password. So I can't test my configuration, and will have to wait until my contact returns so that he can unlock it.
Since everything is preferable to waiting, I took out my own laptop
and started reading some Usenet posts (they prefer me not to log on my
laptop to the network here, but luckily there's leafnode). As I was
sitting there, typing away on the laptop, one of the employees of this
place walked and saw me typing. Quote: Isn't one computer enough
these days?
.
Heh. Well, no; I explained that I actually do need all three of them. What I didn't tell him, however, is that at home and at the office, three isn't even enough...
Perhaps I should rearrange my computers.
Wed, 30 Nov 2005
Rock up again
Last time I booted rock to do some actual work on the thing has been a long time ago; the major reason being that it's (60G) hard disk had died, and that I didn't have an immediate replacement disk of the same size (or larger).
So, rock was powered down in my bed room for what was probably around half a year. Or at least I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
There was still one (13G) disk in rock that did work, however; but I didn't use it, because it still contained some data. Until today, when I realized that I had perfect backups of that data, and that I didn't actually need that disk anymore.
Bye, data. Have fun in the eternal bit fields.
Rock is now running ext3-on-lvm on its 13G disk, based off of an etch beta1 installation. The idea of the LVM stuff being that I'll add a larger disk some time from now, and I don't want to make it too complex. Long live LVM. I hope.
With that, I also moved away from ReiserFS. I'd been using Reiser on rock ever since it appeared in linux-2.4.0, and never migrated away from it. When I sidegraded rock from a Pentium III/600 to the dual Celeron 433 that it is now, it became horribly unstable, especially under load. Now that I've reinstalled it without Reiser, it suddenly is stable as a, uh, rock (no pun intended). Could it be that ReiserFS isn't SMP-safe?
Sun, 25 Sep 2005
(A)AUI considered harmful
I've just been trying to figure out for the last hour or so why Branden's Quadra didn't get a DHCP lease. In the end, it turned out that the AAUI connector had been moved a little bit, so it didn't properly make contact anymore. Grmbl.
Hardware should Just Work, thank you.
Oh, and BTW: Happy Birthday. I hope you enjoyed the stuff I sent you.
Wed, 14 Sep 2005
Wireless
Finally got around to buying myself a USB wireless thingy. Only took me almost a year to do that. Oh well.
The device is made by Peabird, and uses the ZyDAS ZD1211 chipset. The driver for this chipset has been written and (consecutively) GPL'ed by the manufacturer, which is a good thing. It does need a firmware blob to be used, however, which is unfortunate, but, well. I guess that's standard procedure these days.
What's less interesting is that the driver hasn't made it into the vanilla kernel yet, other than the driver for the ZD1201, it's 802.11b counterpart. That's a pity, but not something I can't handle. At least it works, and I don't have to do anything totally out of the ordinary (apart from compiling a module)
It also appears this module hasn't been packaged yet. Maybe that'll happen—but seen how I don't understand a <censored> about the kernel internals, I don't feel too inclined to do that. Especially not since the firmware blob required by this module is embedded in a .h file, rather than in a separate file for /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware, as would be required to package it.
Thu, 08 Sep 2005
Cellphone dead.
One would wish that like software, hardware would simply live forever. Alas.
My cellphone apparently dropped out of my pocket one time too often. The little engine inside that provides the vibration function had already been loose since the very first time I dropped it (when I had it for about a month or so) and I never used it since that time; but by now, it's come even more loose, and something has gone very bad. About half of the time it says "contact service" when I power it up, and when it does get switched on properly, it usually doesn't find a network. And even then still—on the off chance that I can power it on and it properly connects to the network, it either switches itself off for no particular reason after a while, or just loses it's network connection. Chances of that happening are lower if I don't move the thing, but then a cellphone that can't be used isn't very helpful.
This morning, I tried getting a connection for about 10 minutes before I finally gave up and used my parent's land line.
I went to a local hardware store (as in, metal and the likes rather than computer hardware) and bought myself a T6 screwdriver, so that I could open up the thing, and I removed the vibration engine.
That didn't work. On the contrary; without that engine, I have not been able to get any network connection anymore. Considering how the engine is positioned suspiciously close to the phone's antenna, I suspect that Nokia's engineers introduced a clever hack to extend the antenna size without having to add too much metal. Either that, or the engine broke off a few important bits inside the phone.
So, now I'm down to having to go buy a new cellphone. Luckily, it appears as if the 6310i is still being manufacturered, so perhaps I'll be able to still get myself one outstanding cellphone without bullshit functionality (who needs camera's and color screens on cellphones, of all things, anyway?). Only need to get the budget for a new phone first. Oh well.
Wed, 10 Aug 2005
Bluetooth gone
A while ago, someone mailed me with problems getting bluetooth going on his iBook. He'd done a firmware upgrade from MuckOS, and now suddenly the bluetooth didn't work anymore under Linux. I couldn't help him—but a few days later, he mailed me back, saying that with a command called 'hid2hci' he could switch his bluetooth-hardware-with-newer-firmware to HCI mode, and that it then suddenly did work.
Of course, I'm on the train right now, want to connect to my cell phone over bluetooth so that I can dial in to somewhere, and find that the new logic board in my PowerBook (which they had to put there because the old one had simply broken down) 'conveniently' already contains this problematic firmware upgrade. So, no network. And no fixing that without network. Grmbl.
What's worse, 'apt-cache search hid2hci' renders nothing. I guess I'll have to go and google for that one. Hopefully it exists anywhere outside the mention of it in my mailbox.
Well. Guess I'll find out soon enough. But not as soon as I'd like. Oh well.
Update: after arriving at the office, a simple google search told me that it's actually part of bluez-utils. Which I obviously have installed. Aargh.
Mon, 08 Aug 2005
Grmbl.
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 064 064 060 Pre-fail Always - 224137572
This is my desktop's hard disk. I gather it won't be long before I'll start getting BACKUP YOUR DATA NOW messages in syslog. Guess I'll have to start looking for a new hard disk.
I hate it when that happens. And yes, the disk is dying; I hear it making all kinds of ugly noises it shouldn't be making, and my system is unresponsive while those noises happen.
And then I'm not even mentioning the mails I'm getting from smartd on my laptop, which tells me that there are some unreadable sectors over there. Well—at least SMART has been able to correct for that. For the time being...
Any hard disk manufacturers out there, let me tell you that I wouldn't mind at all buying a slightly smaller (measured in space available on it) and slower disk, provided it increases reliability by a factor two, or so. No, really. My 2GB Quantum Bigfoot that I bought about eight years ago only now begins to break down, whereas every other disk I've had has done so after three years, max. Pity they don't make no Bigfoots anymore.
Update: OK, next time don't post obscure outputs of commands without explaining what they mean. At least not if you don't want your mailbox to overflow an hour later :-)
Look at the "VALUE" column. It says "64", whereas every disk ships with a value of "100" there. Once it gets under 60 ("THRESH"), the SMART bits of the hard disk will start panicking. And given that this value was at about 74 just a few weeks ago, this is bad. Very bad.
Mon, 01 Aug 2005
Alternate use of CompactFlash cards
Leaving DebConf5, I went to Bratislava to join the ensemble on our concert trip. There, three people complained that they were having problems with their digital camera's storage media, so I started looking for a computer shop to buy my a flash media reader to be able to help these people out. As such, I now own a device that can read CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SD/MMC, and SmartMedia through USB2.0. As a Mass Storage thing.
What I don't have (anymore, at least) is a USB stick that I can use to store my GPG key on. The last one I did have broke down a few months ago, and I didn't buy myself a new one yet.
Since we have a stock of 32MB CF cards at the office (for use root filesystem in soekris devices which we sometimes sell), I took one of those, put it in the combined reader, and use that as my "USB stick". Seems to work. And is a bit more flexible, too.
Mon, 27 Jun 2005
No luck.
As I mentioned two days ago, my laptop doesn't boot anymore. I hoped it would after it had been recharged, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Darn.
I brought it to my neighbour/Apple salesman yesterday, who's taken it to work with him again. He knows I'd love to have it back by wednesday morning, and told me he'd try to get it done by then. Let's hope that's possible. In the mean time, I contacted some people to try and borrow a replacement laptop for the duration of DebConf, just in case. I guess we'll see what happens.
Wed, 04 May 2005
Why computers stop working
Todd Troxel pointed us to an 80s-era article entitled Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?, which makes some nice reading, especially when comparing it to the state of the art as it is today. Quote:
To give an example, modern discs are rated for an MTBF above 10,000 hours -- a hard failure once a year.
If anything, it would appear that the state of the art has decreased in that area. Oh well.
It's funny to compare how the state of the art in editing text changed, too. I suspect the article (which can only be downloaded in PDF form) was printed using a daisy wheel printer.
Mon, 18 Apr 2005
Broken hard disk
No, there's no data loss... at least not much, and in any case not with my system.
A few weeks ago, I rearranged my systems. rock became pop, folk was decommissioned (as was the old pop), and an SMP box that was given to me by Osamu Aoki became the new rock.
This last time, however, there was some problem. After placing pop's hard disk in its new home, and trying to boot it, I got an error messages from the BIOS instead of a booting system. So I tried to investigate. As pop is my parents' machine, and as they still run Windows after a failed attempt of mine to convert them, this means their data is on a VFAT partition. So I would boot pop from the Windows installation CD-ROM, and ran scandisk.
... which would find a lot of inconsistencies. At first, I instructed it to fix them; but as the number of inconsistencies turned out to be increasingly high, I told it to stop, and took a closer physical look at the hard disk. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but looking around on the disk showed an extremely corrupt data partition. My worst nightmare...
Actually, my dad's. But still.
At that point, I disconnected the hard disk from pop, and installed pop using a separate hard disk. Osamu had given me two spare hard disks along with the system he so nicely donated, so I could certainly use one of those disks. Pop's been running for a month or two with the new disk now, and it seems fine.
Of course, dad still wanted his data back. Something had gone wrong with the disk, and I didn't know what; I had put it back in the original pop, and had tried to boot that thing with a boot disk, s that I could exclude the possibility that it was in fact that machine being terribly broken, or so. Didn't appear to be the case – the disk showed corruption there, too.
It took me a few weeks of hoping the problem would go away until I got the idea of calling a friend of mine to help me out, as two minds know more than one. Kris had a look at the disk yesterday, saw that one of the IDE connector pins had broken off at the soldering point, soldered a wire in between, ran some recovering software on the disk, and copied dad's data to a CD-ROM.
To think that it was something that easy...
It does make me wonder about the quality of hard disks, though. The connector pin must have broken off because of the stress I put on it when removing the data cable from the disk; I can't think of anything else, and I do remember having to use quite some force to get the cable disconnected from the hard disk. Hardware sucks...
Fri, 01 Apr 2005
Sick and tired of hardware.
There are days when I long for the time when I used proprietary software.
Aahh. Noo. Don't!
Really. I love Debian; it's a wonderful system. The fact that it is so cross-platform allows me to choose my hardware platform based on my actual requirements, rather than on the available software for that platform. The fact that it's Free Software allows me to modify the system the way I want it to, and also gives me peace of mind that nobody is silently subverting my system and sending my private data to some secret database somewhere. Or so.
But when it comes to vendor support, you're essentially stuffed.
Not that I really need vendor support. This laptop is my third; all three have had a Debian installation on it, and they all worked, at least to the extent that I could do some serious work with it. But there was always something.
- The first laptop's video interface wasn't properly supported when it came out. As a result, it was dog slow. I also had some weird problems with keyboard mapping under X. I eventually found a way to work around them, but never actually fixed the issue.
- The second laptop's video interface worked perfectly; and most of its hardware worked to satisfaction, too. I didn't get the internal wireless to work reliably, however, and there were some issues with the backlight as well. But overall, I was satisfied with the thing.
- My current laptop's internal wireless simply doesn't work. I need to get myself a USB wireless interface, but that still needs to happen. I got the LCD backlight controls to work (resulting in an enourmous reduction of battery use), and bluetooth, and everything; essentially, apart from sleep support, wireless, external video, and the modem, everything worked perfectly.
Much to my surprise, however, I now find that the LCD backlight controls don't work anymore under Debian. When I boot the system, it will put the backlight intensity to whatever was set when Mac OS was running, and leave it at that. Pbbuttonsd seems to think the screen's intensity is set at 0 all the time, rather than at what it actually is. So bye-bye, long battery life.
I'm so sick of all this. If there were anyone who would start a company that would
- Manufacture laptops
- Write drivers for them
- Preload them with Debian
- Give support afterwards, and
- Be Europe-based,
I'd quite likely buy my next laptop there. Not that I couldn't install Debian on a laptop myself (I've already done that more than enough to be able to do this), but I really just want to get a laptop out of its box, flip it on, enter my name and a password, and start working. Potentially by running apt-get install something
Why do I need to use proprietary software to be able to do that?
Mon, 28 Feb 2005
Laptop back.
Pity it had to be a few days late. Oh well.
It appears something's going wrong with the hard disk, though; might have had a too hard shock in some car. Really hope it's not actually something going bad, but I don't think so; the kernel message mentions the same sector all the time. I'll have it run e2fsck -c this night.
In the mean time, western is misbehaving. Not exactly sure why, but it doesn't do networking for some reason. Have I finally got my laptop back, now the server starts misbehaving. sigh...
Mon, 21 Feb 2005
How does one replace a NIC?
As I wrote a few days ago, the RJ45 connector on my laptop is a bit broken. So, I went to my neighbour's house (the one who sold me the thing), and handed it over to him on Saturday.
Today, he mailed me telling that they need to replace the logic board. I haven't heard much more details (could be that it is broken, too), but if the only way to replace that connector is to replace the entire logic board, then something's wrong, I'm afraid...
Anyway. He's told me that I should have my laptop back by Wednesday or Thursday. I really hope this is true; I had my (previous) laptop in repair on last year's FOSDEM as well, I don't want to have to go to FOSDEM without one two years in a row...
Fri, 18 Feb 2005
Looks like my laptop's MII is broken...
When I got home last night, I didn't get network, even though the network cable was plugged in. After fiddling around a bit, I saw that the MII gave an I/O error. Not 'no link', just EIO.
Rebooting didn't help. Nor did removing the cable. Nor did most of the other things I tried. After a few minutes, just as I was about to give up, it suddenly worked again. Did what I wanted, and afterwards, shut down the thing.
This morning, when I wanted to synchronize my mail, it didn't work again. I tried to do what I did last night again, but today nothing worked. mii-tool -R usually resulted in EIO, mii-tool never gave anything else than 'no link'. mii-tool -A <anything> was a good recipe to make it throw EIO again. mii-tool -r sometimes did not, but never worked the way it should.
I'm hoping the hub is broken, but it probably isn't. I'll find out when I get to work today...
Update: doesn't seem to be the MII; I apparently missed that one of the contacts in the RJ45 connector is a little bit bended, and it doesn't make contact any more. That's probably all.
