tensixtyone

Last night I spent a few hours getting Liverpool LUG’s website on its own Xen VM, so hopefully we can provide some services to members, like webhosting and email aliases. This was my first venture into creating a Xen VM for myself, previously Chris has spent the time to set it up for me.

I’ll name this little adventure: Trip on the Fail Boat

Ok, so I was a little stupid. I didn’t read any existing documentation and bungled through it based on a few commands in the bash_history file. I know, stupid. For a while I hissed and cursed about incomplete setup which I thought debbootstrap would do, reading the documentation this morning has highlited how much of a monumental idiot I actually was. So now i’ll go through my idiotic bitching and explain why I was wrong…

1. 4Gb Fixup error messages
When I started up the VM I was assaulted by thousands of messages regarding a “4Gb memory fixup” or something to that nature. Of course, I was too busy trying to edit files in vi to actually look at the issue but was more than happy to shout and scream at my console formatting getting mixed up.

The fix? Install libc6-xen, or move /lib/tls to /lib/tls.disabled

2. Missing network config
The VM couldn’t see eth0, or lo for that matter. After hammering my head against the table checking the Xen config files I finally realised that updating /etc/network/inferfaces could help.

3. “Why is the hostname dom0?”
Stupidity ensues, thankfully I noticed before I issued the shutdown on dom0.

4. Services randomly failing to start up
Missing loopback network device, no actual 127.0.0.1. You would be suprised how much this can effect your system.

So for now, The VM is working. I’ll get round to posting some more details about LivLUG services soon, but for now i’m going to get some coffee…

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I went to the post office and got my hands on the Huawei E160G with my reduced contract, and so far I am very pleased with it. The modem itself is a large USB stick, very comparable in size to a cigarette lighter. What is interesting is that the electronics can now be packaged in such a small kit, why ain’t they producing mobile phones of this size?

My first step was to get it working on Windows, I plugged in the modem on my old Windows PC and followed the numerous (and strange) online prompts to setup the software. After a lot of beeping, detecting new hardware and other jiggery pokery, I was presented with the Three Modem Manager application. The modem manager is a simple too that enables you to run the “dialup” connection through the modem. I whipped open the setup manual which informed me that no other setup was required bar setting up the software. So I clicked “Connect”…

… and it failed?

According to the tool I had to check my settings to see if they’re correct. This is a fresh setup of the tool, why would I need to check the settings when Three’s own guide mentions theres no setup needed. After 10-15 minutes poking around in the settings menu I finally threw in the towel. Sod it, I wanted to run this thing on Linux anyway so why am I putting myself through the pain?

Linux is, well, the way it was supposed to happen. I plugged in the stick and straight away I had numerous devices available, the “CD-ROM drive” for the drivers, the MicroSD reader, and the “tty” ports for the actual GSM modem. At this time I could of gone the route of setting up Gnome PPP and related tools to dialout to the provider and start using my new fancy net connection, but I’d heard that Network Manager 0.7 had the features to use 3G/GPRS built in without any extra settings. I decided to investigate the new version of Network Manager.

After much digging around on the ‘tubes, I finally found a Debian repository containing a build of the lastest Network Manager SVN. A little apt pinning and installation later I had the new version of the tool install. I browsed the existing menu and found a new option: “Auto connection to 3G/GPRS” , I selected the option and it connected.

I have to have a little moment to reflect here, “Mobile Broadband” is a new fad at the moment for most telecoms providers worldwide, so you would expect the Linux software support to be a little sketchy and buggy, but as it turns out the Linux method is alot simplier and easier to use. I’m not sure if I was missing anything obvious in Windows, but isn’t this stuff just supposed to work?

So, signed on to 3G I decided to give it a run for it’s money. I’m running these tests at 1:08am so it maybe a little bias, as I doubt many people would be actually using the APs at this time. I seem to be getting a variable speed of about 1-2mbps, and 150kbps upstream, not bad at all for a mobile provider. The documentation mentions that you should expect up to 2.5mbps, not the 7.2mbps advertised on some sites, all in all Three do a good job of pre-warning you that the speed on the box is not always what you get.

So far I’m happy with it, I’ve had a few minor issues with the stick not registering on the network but I’m not sure if this was down to my settings or just a small outage. I’ll post a guide in the next few days on configuring Debian up for Network Manager 0.7 and setting it up to work with the E160G.

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Peter pointed out on the ManLUG mailing list that Liverpool will play host to a “micro-festival” on open source software in media production. The Open Source City festival is running from the 17th – 22nd of June at Mello Mello and various other sites across the city centre. This event has twigged interest from me due to the presentation on open source software from a speaker on IP from the Green Party, i’ve always known that the greens are very pro-open source but i’ve never heard it “from the horses mouth”.

So, my name is down and it’s booked into my calendar. Drop me a message if your also visiting.

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As part of a new year resolution (of a sort), I’ve decided to become more involved in the Linux community and one of the big stepping stones is the local LUGs. While ManLUG is active and quite easy to attend and keep up to speed with, some of the smaller local ones have fell into decline over the last few years. I guess a major issue is that we have such a well respected LUG within a few miles, Manchester LUG has been formed since 1994 and theres people in that group who have helped with major milestones in Linux (such as the MCC Interim releases). So today, I posted on the Liverpool LUG mailing list in a attempt to stirr up some action. Hopefully in the next few days we can get something organised, even if its just a pub meet it’ll be better than nothing.

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In the past I’ve mentioned about how insecure Windows is, generally I try and avoid it for any end users wherever possible. Today I spotted a article on Digg regarding the new Samsung printer drivers, and its got me wondering now, is it actually Windows that’s insecure or the developers who can’t be bothered developing correctly for the platform?

Usually, vendor provided drivers for Linux aren’t the best, and are only used in dire circumstances that a free driver hasn’t been wrote, Samsung’s April 2007 now contain a disturbing “setup” script that essentially gives setuid privileges to XSANE, OpenOffice and possibly a few other applications.

Take a look a this script on linuxfr.org

Without seeing the suwrap script I can’t be sure what it’s actually doing, but I assume its modifying the lib path with the specific Samsung drivers, the initial setup script is just punching massive holes in the security of linux, users would be able to edit /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow with these permissions.

So, are all Windows issues down to the OS?

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I just spotted a post by Nik Butler on Pownce saying that CUPS (a widely used printing system for *BSD, Linux and OSX) has been bought by Apple, no licenses will be affected and it’ll remain GPL2, but for how long?

I wonder how exactly Apple can buy this project, It seems that the Dev has been hired by Apple and he’s handed over the rights to Apple. So with Apple at the helm what can we expect? Personally, while i’m not anti-apple, I do feel that theres something to worry about here. With Apple being in control of the copyright it may be relicensed under the Apple opensource license or worse, close sourced.

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I’ve been running my MythTV box for a few weeks now and its slowly getting bogged down with numerous recordings that I want to keep, Non auto-expiring recordings are taking over the majority of my hard drive and I need to setup a system of getting them off the box and onto DVD.

MythArchive, i hear you scream, unfortunatly i’ve not got a DVD-R drive in the Myth box. So which method to use? MythTranscode or Nuvexport? My previous experiments with Nuvexport have outputted low quality rubbish no matter what settings i’ve been using, I must be doing something wrong. MythTranscode on the other hand seems to convert my DVB Mpeg2 recordings to Nuv format with little size difference.

I’ve hunted around previously for settings and processes but got nowhere, can anyone advise me on their setup or point me the in the right direction? All my recordings are from pure DVB sources so i’m working with MPEG2 files.

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Over the last two weeks i’ve been consumed with the need to setup a MythTV box, PVR and TiVo-esq features bundled with the power and verciticy of Linux, yes I know that reads like some marketing document but I don’t care. Jo was totally bemused as to what I was doing, all she could see what the several hundreds of pounds of hardware purchasing.

My old mobile sold, as did a few pieces of idle electronics from the house, and from nowhere I’d managed to drum together £200 for the inital parts. CPU, Motherboard, 1.5Gb RAM for £70 from eBay, Nvidia FX 5200 for £14, 200GB HDD for £22, also eBay. Chieftec Case from my local Freecycle and various other parts from my electronics “stash”, Throw in a DVB-T, DVB-C and analogue tuner and i’ve got a MythTV box ready to go.

So, was it worth it all? I’d say so. While I only have one tuner its still a very flexible platform. Myth’s recording logic is very good, especially when combined with reliable listings such as Radio Times, the box can detect programs for the next 14 days and schedule in times to record the program you’ve selected, avoiding conflicts wherever possible. This small feature alone is enough to use MythTV, while other software probably supports it as well this is the first PVR/DVR system i’ve used.

As for the PAF, Jo has said its around 7 at the moment, which is good for a system which has its little quirks and crashes every so often when recording programs, mostly due to corrupt feeds.

More will come with experience.

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In the last few days I’ve had issues with my temperamental PSU, I’m not sure if its due to high load or just being faulty after a year of using it, but it just sometimes refuses to start up the PC. Yesterday I had to fix it, I went to Alpha Computers and purchased a £16 450 Watt PSU. The PC now boots first time and I’m happy.

Or at least I thought I was…

I wandered into the computer room this morning to find my PC off, I get the PC started again but I’m bemused to what has happened. Checking the logs I see one painful line:

localhost kernel: ACPI: Critical trip point

No mention of any temperatures or overheating processors, everything is running below 30c and high load presents no heat spikes, not even on the GPU. I check lm_sensors to see what else is failing to see a flurry of “ALARM” entries, all on the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v lines. It seems that this cheap PSU can’t even keep up with a load of a Geforce 6 series, 2 HDDs and a Athlon64.

So now i’ll have to invest in a worthwhile PSU, at a higher cost. Really I deserved it for trying to skimp on one of the most critical parts of a PC.

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