It’s meant to be a work log, right?
For those of you who don’t follow XKCD, you really are missing out. It’s just genius, and today’s comic really did tickle me.. (Click for a larger image!)
This really is a true story, and she doesn’t know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn’t worked for weeks.
Well, I laughed at least. And it reminds me of a famous euphemism, too..
Nick: “Jon, why have you locked your door?”
Jon: “I’m re-compiling my kernel!“
I absolutely adored my Sony Ericsson K800i. What a phone; everyone’s had one or used one at some point. Given that they’re quite long in the tooth now, you’d be hard-pushed to have not come across someone that had/has one.
So when the K850i came out, I was quite eager to get my upgrade. And so far there’s been only one real drawback to it, that I’ve found: using it as a modem.
When I first moved into my current abode, I didn’t have any ADSL for a few weeks. Predictably one can steal some wireless broadband, or one can attempt to use some form of mobile broadband. Before signing my life away for a few months, I decided to test my phone (which at the time, was the K800i) with Ubuntu. To my sheer delight, the phone presents itself as a USB Ethernet adapter, and Ubuntu’s network-manager simply sent a DHCP request and received an ACK. No messing about here: I had 3G broadband within 5 seconds of plugging the USB cable in!
So obviously when I attempted the same trick with my K850i, I was really quite dismayed to find that you can’t do this any longer. The USB Ethernet device is there (grep -i CDC /var/log/messages) but for the life of me, I cannot find a way to obtain a DHCP lease via the usb0 interface.
Yes, it works perfectly (and with HSDPA speeds, thanks to my city-centre location) if you use wvdial or one of its GUI front-ends (gnome-ppp worked well) and I’ve been able to connect like this..
But I can’t understand why the Sony Ericsson engineers would want to remove such a simple mechanism in favour of the greatest faff-about in history. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that’s managed to get this working.. Although I fear by the time I get an answer, I’ll be back on some ADSL goodness: HSPDA is alright in a pinch, but T-Mobile UK’s data network seems so heavily sensitive to peak times (I suspect insane levels of contention) and the latency is atrocious. Half a second? Ugh. That’ll be the Deep Packet Inspection they do…
Tags: hsdpa, k800i, k850i, sony ericsson, t-mobile
Many people already know that I dabble with Asterisk on a daily basis. Our Linux distribution of choice here at work, also happens to be Gentoo.
Now, when updating Gentoo’s ‘world’ package base, you do get some problems occassionally. This is a downside to being ‘on the cutting edge’ and, it’s obviously no wonder why distributions such-as Ubuntu, Red Hat and SuSe, stick to well-tested release schedules.
Recently, after a well over-due profile update (from 2006.0 to 2008.0) and the following emerge -av –newuse –deep world command, Asterisk simply stopped working. No warning, and it took a while for me to notice.
Once I had noticed, it became apparent that something was really quite awry. Asterisk wouldn’t start via the init script (with has a seemingly immortal, and hideously annoying process), nor via just calling the executable. I eventually realised, with the help of this bug report and the /var/log/asterisk/full logfile, that Asterisk was failing to find the speex modules it required.
Long story short, as per the bug report, you need to downgrade (and mask for good measure) speex to 1.1.12 to retain functionality on anything older than a January/Febuary release of Asterisk 1.4.x. 
The fact that Portage still only has Asterisk 1.2.x, means that unless you switch to using the voip overlay, you’re going to find this issue will affect you.
Oh Gentoo, how I love and hate you!
First thing’s first: AAAAAARGH!!! *waves arms in the air maniacally*
I’ve spent the evening getting my RoutITX project off the ground and into service. But to do this, I needed an ADSL2+ modem. So, rather than persist with using my Netgear DB834GT, I thought I’d try out a P660R-D1 from Zyxel. Simple little thing, only about £25, and claims to be able to do bridging to its (single) Ethernet port.
Can it hell. I’ve tried everything I can; it can sync the DSL to a lovely speed, but it can’t get any further than that.
What I’d like is a nice, small, cheap, ADSL2+ modem (preferably including Annex M) that does a perfect bridge, with good reliability and performance.
There’s got to be one out there? I’d love to know.
Tags: adsl2+, argh, Networking, zyxel
I’ve recently been building servers again. Aside from the usual 2U stuff, I thought I’d show a few pictures of the current project I’m working on. This 4U Supermicro chassis is destined to be used as our backup/storage server at the co-lo facility. VM backups, database backups, general file store, etc. etc.
Plenty of drive bays there (24 to be exact).
Here you can see how neat it is. Partly because of the good design of the case, and partly because of the tight integration with Supermicro’s own boards. The shroud that ducts air over the CPU also works wonders.
As you can imagine, it sounds like a jet taking-off when it’s going at full pelt. I wonder if co-los typically have an ‘upper noise limit’? 
I’ll put more detail down about what I’m doing with it a bit later… I’m currently testing all manner of Solaris-based distributions (a learning experience in its own right) with some funky zpool configurations. More to come!
Tags: servers, Solaris, supermicro, ZFS
This isn’t quite work-related, but I feel it is relevant to my performance during term-time…
I have happened across some statistics collected “for demographic reasons” by my University’s Students Union, as a result of their routine swipe of your student card whenever you show up for any paid night at the Uni bar. You wondered what it was for, right? Well now I can tell you!
The sample I’ve acquired is an excerpt of the statistics collected for ‘Project Friday’ at Legends, on Friday the 2nd May 2008:
Year of Study Attendees
1: 65 (52.42%)
2: 33 (26.61%)
3: 19 (15.32%)
M: 2 (1.61%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)
Gender Attendees
Male: 97 (78.23%)
Female: 22 (17.74%)
Data not current 5: (4.03%)
Department Attendees
Computing, Engineering & Technology: 111 (89.52%)
Health: 5 (4.03%)
Business School: 3 (2.42%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)
Study Site Attendees
STAFFORD: 116 (93.55%)
THOMAS TELFORD SCHOOL: 2 (1.61%)
STOKE: 1 (0.81%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)
78.23% male!
I’ve long-wondered what the ratio of males to females on the Stafford campus really is, but it appears that we truly are screwed: out-numbering the girls by over 3:1. What’s scarier is that 5 of the ‘patrons’ weren’t even identifiable as male or female. 
One could suggest that this would be a blessing in disguise for the female minorities of Stafford, however, with an overwhelming majority of the male attendees being first-year Computing and Engineering students, it could quite possibly the reason why they don’t bother coming in the first place.
Oh, and one last thing: WHO LET THOSE TWO SCHOOL KIDS IN?! 
(And no, I don’t care if they’re female!)
Tags: girls, stafford, statistics, uni
Like many Ubuntu nuts, I’ve recently upgraded my work and home systems to the latest and greatest release: 8.04, code-name ‘Hardy Heron’.
And as per the usual, I updated a little early. Not quite at beta this time; I managed to subdue the upgrade itch until a few days before the final release. The only justification I needed beyond that was that the mirrors always get raped come release day.
So I set about upgrading to the release candidate version (Alt+F2, and run ‘update-manager –devel-release’) of Hardy and let it do its thing. I had a small issue with /boot being full of old kernels, which just required a few ’sudo rm -r’ commands from a terminal, but nothing big.
However, I did encounter a few issues…
The first of which, was the Nvidia binary driver that I had installed for reasons of graphical goodness, but of course it wasn’t the maintained package, therefore the upgrade tool did nothing with it and I was stuck with X’s safe graphics mode. Neat, but genuinely annoying.
To make matters worse (and this one just wasn’t my fault) I was also stuck without any sudo access at all!
teh@snatch:~$ sudo su -
sudo: can't resolve hostname snatch.
teh@snatch:~$
Of course, if I checked out my /etc/hosts file, it looked like this:
teh@snatch:~$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 teh-desktop
Now I knew that was wrong (line #2 is a strange left-over from the default installation) but of course I couldn’t use sudo to elevate my privileges in order to change it! Frustration!
One live CD later, and I managed to alter the offending ‘teh-desktop’ line to read ‘127.0.0.1 snatch’ instead. Job done, and it works fine now.
The question is: why the hell does the /etc/hosts file matter? Curiously, I don’t know, but maybe someone will be willing to give a better explanation. 
I left the Hardy upgrade on my home machine until a few days after the final release, due to a mortal fear of the upgrade tool nobbling dmraid and causing ‘unable to mount roof vfs’ kernel panics, but thankfully it worked without a hitch (more-so than my work PC, in fact - though it goes without saying that I checked /etc/hosts first! ;))
And now that I’ve been using it a little while, I’m quite impressed. There’s a few nice polishes here and there - to compiz-settings in particular. I can now use edges in expose!
However I’m a little baffled as to the whereabouts of my ‘New Tab’ button in Firefox 3b5. It’s there in the Windows installations I have, so why have they deemed it necessary to exclude it from the Ubuntu release? Well.. At least they have an RC and a final release to go yet, so hopefully this will be fixed.
Recently, I’ve been charged with investigating into faster-than-gigabit networking, in an effort to switch our VM hosts away from local storage to an NFS-based NAS system. There are a few reasons for doing this; the greatest of which is Sun’s ZFS file system.
ZFS, for those of you who aren’t familiar, has really shaken-up the world of file systems recently, as it changes almost everything that we perceive about a modern-day file system. On top of these fundamental changes (which I won’t go into detail about here) the ZFS developers have added some really neat features, such-as zero-cost snaphosts, replication between machines, RAID-Z, and quite a lot more.
It’s the promise of these features that has prompted our change over to a NAS-based storage system. Given that we can completely replace our current system of identical live/backup hosts, with slow backup scripts and drbd mirroring, it’s quite promising to think what we can achieve.
The problem is transport. And keeping fast transport. Given the extra overheads of IP/NFS that NAS brings (weighted against the benefits given ZFS over the more efficient use of raw disks in a SAN) it’s been deemed that a single gigabit link just won’t be up to the demanding task. The problem is that once you decide to cross the gigabit ‘barrier’, your costing simply spirals uncontrollably skyward.
There are a few options available to achieve a decent throughput:
So what’s the answer? We’re not a Fortune 500 company, so most of this is still out of reach. On top of it all, we need to rely on Solaris for ZFS - an operating system which seems to have very little manufacturer support, despite its presence in the cluster and virtualisation markets. Sun’s Hardware-Compatibility List is almost devoid of recent Infiniband/10GBase-T adapters, particularly in PCI-E interconnect guises.
It wouldn’t be so bad if some manufacturer had thought to release a small-scale, 8-10 port 10GigE, 10GBase-T switch. They just don’t exist.. At present, it’s quite likely that we’ll have to dump the idea of a switched fabric altogether, opting instead of multiple point-to-point links.
It seems we’re either just a few years ahead of ourselves, or really, really out of our depth.
Tags: 10gigE, fibrechannel, infiniband, nas, nfs, san, sun, ZFS
I’m having a tough time getting this to work, so expect a few revisions to this.
I’m confused as to why this is so difficult. Below is my post to the Cisco NetPro forum. I’m hoping they’ll be able to help eventually, but I thought I’d include it here for the record. I know a few Cisco schmartypantsh people whom might read this. 
Hi all,
I am wondering if someone may be able to point out where I’m going wrong.
I want to be able to see/user the boot cycle/ROMMON mode of a 2811 router, remotely.
As I understand it, the only way to achieve this is with an analogue modem connected to the Console port.
I’m doing the testing here with a Cisco 2651 as it’s the only router I have available to me locally, though as most of the configuration is modem-side, I feel that it shouldn’t make much of a difference..
I’m using a Hayes External Serial modem, connected to the Console port with a Cisco-provided 25pin D -> RJ-45 roll-over.
However, after using this guide, I’ve not had any success. The basic principles appear the same as with a router, but when I dial in, the modems handshake and connect but HyperTerminal displays nothing. There is no output at all UNLESS I enable the ‘post-dial window’, and then I can control the console. My issue is that this is not a native console - there’s no xmodem support and I wouldn’t have a clue how to duplicate this work-around in another client (minicom or screen, for example.)
I’ve noticed that the S37=9 (listed in the guide as the setting for 9600kbps) is not a value that is saved in the current profile. Perhaps the Hayes set has been updated since the article was written. Does anyone know a better way to set this? I have found a way of forcing V.32, which is 9600, but .. is it correct?
Here is the current profile stored on the modem:
ACTIVE PROFILE:
B1 E1 L1 M1 N0 Q0 T V1 W2 X4 Y0 &C1 &D0 &G0 &J0 &K0 &Q5 &R1 &S0 &T5 &X0 &Y0
S00:001 S01:000 S02:043 S03:013 S04:010 S05:008 S06:002 S07:050 S08:002 S09:006
S10:014 S11:085 S12:050 S18:000 S25:005 S26:001 S36:007 S38:020 S46:138 S48:007
S95:000(Note that I set ATE0 and ATQ1 when testing, but these were flipped for the purpose of viewing the config ;))
Here is the config from the router:
line con 0
exec-timeout 5 0
logging synchronousI *think* this is a problem with the speed not detecting the speed of the console properly, but I’m not experienced enough with modems at this level. I’ve even consulted my CCNP2 book, only to find that it concentrated more upon the Aux port.
I can get modem -> Aux working, but that’s just not flexible enough (despite its advantages.)
If anyone can help, I’d be extremely grateful. If you require any more information, I’ll be happy to provide it!
Thanks,
Tom
If anyone has any insight into why HyperTerminal is behaving in such a fashion, I’d love to know.
If you can remember back to my woes with SATA-II disks and 3Ware 9500S cards, you’ll probably be feeling my pain right about now.
The wonderful set of Western Digital RE2 drives, which saved the day all those months ago, now seem to be dropping out of the RAID5 array.
However, the biggest clue as to why, was provided by the following 3DM2 alert e-mail:
20080117061603 - Controller 0
ERROR - Drive timeout detected: port=0
Searching the 3Ware knowledge base for ‘WD timeout’ leads us to this KB article, concerning certain WD drives that inadvertantly drop-out of an array because of a fault in their ‘doze time’ implementation. Whether or not the firmware patches describe rid the drive of any ‘doze time’ altogether, or just tweak it for better compatibility is beyond me, but the corrected firmwares can be had from this download page on the Western Digital website.
So, I guess I’m going to UKS on monday to upgrade the firmware on four WD5000YS drives.
Update: As it turns out, the disk firmware was already up to date! Now I wish I’d known you could check the drive firmware in 3DM2 before I bothered connecting each drive to the on-board controller, booting up with an FDD and waiting to be told 4 times that the firmware was already current! Whoops
If anyone else comes across this, and they’re sure their drives are from the older firmware set, you would do well to upgrade your 9500S (or other 3Ware controller) firmware first. The latest release (at least for the 9500S) has an update that allows the WD firmware upgrade to transverse the 3Ware controller: so no need to meddle about with connecting disks to on-board controllers.
Anyway. The array has been fine since; no time-outs at all. As above, I upgraded the 3Ware card’s firmware by a few revisions, so hopefully that will sort the issue out. Guess we’ll just have to wait another 6 months to find out!