The Potchery

2012-01-19T20:50:00.001Z

I just installed NetBSD 5.1 on my new workhorse machine, which is built around an Intel D945GLF2 mITX mainboard that has an Atom 330 chip soldered to it. I have yet to build a custom kernel or build any packages for it, but at least it's booting. This will be my first dual-core Atom box.

Generic Kernel


Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
    2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 5.1 (GENERIC) #0: Sun Nov  7 14:39:56 UTC 2010
 builds@b6.netbsd.org:/home/builds/ab/netbsd-5-1-RELEASE/i386/201011061943Z-obj/home/builds/ab/netbsd-5-1-RELEASE/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
total memory = 1013 MB
avail memory = 984 MB
timecounter: Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
timecounter: Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 100
                                                                  (                        )
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0 apid 0: Intel 686-class, 1596MHz, id 0x106c2
cpu1 at mainbus0 apid 2: Intel 686-class, 1596MHz, id 0x106c2
cpu2 at mainbus0 apid 1: Intel 686-class, 1596MHz, id 0x106c2
cpu3 at mainbus0 apid 3: Intel 686-class, 1596MHz, id 0x106c2
ioapic0 at mainbus0 apid 2: pa 0xfec00000, version 20, 24 pins
acpi0 at mainbus0: Intel ACPICA 20080321
acpi0: X/RSDT: OemId <INTEL ,D945GLF2,0000008c>, AslId <    ,01000013>
acpi0: SCI interrupting at int 9
acpi0: fixed-feature power button present
timecounter: Timecounter "ACPI-Fast" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
ACPI-Fast 24-bit timer
acpibut0 at acpi0 (SLPB, PNP0C0E): ACPI Sleep Button
npx1 at acpi0 (FPU, PNP0C04): io 0xf0 irq 13
npx1: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
attimer1 at acpi0 (TMR, PNP0100): io 0x40-0x43,0x50-0x53 irq 0
pcppi1 at acpi0 (SPKR, PNP0800): io 0x61
midi0 at pcppi1: PC speaker (CPU-intensive output)
sysbeep0 at pcppi1
ECP (PNP0401) at acpi0 not configured
UAR1 (PNP0501) at acpi0 not configured
APIC (PNP0003) at acpi0 not configured
apm0 at acpi0: Power Management spec V1.2
attimer1: attached to pcppi1
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
pci0: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, rd/mult, wr/inv ok
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
pchb0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x2770 (rev. 0x02)
pchb0: returns constant 0xff stream, RNG disabled.
agp0 at pchb0: detected 7932k stolen memory
agp0: aperture at 0x40000000, size 0x10000000
vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x2772 (rev. 0x02)
wsdisplay0 at vga1 kbdmux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsmux1: connecting to wsdisplay0
drm at vga1 not configured
azalia0 at pci0 dev 27 function 0: Generic High Definition Audio Controller
azalia0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 22
azalia0: host: 0x8086/0x27d8 (rev. 1), HDA rev. 1.0
ppb0 at pci0 dev 28 function 0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27d0 (rev. 0x01)
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, wr/inv ok
re0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0: RealTek 8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet (rev. 0x02)
re0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 16
re0: Ethernet address 00:1c:c0:c6:39:ae
re0: using 256 tx descriptors
rgephy0 at re0 phy 7: RTL8169S/8110S/8211 1000BASE-T media interface, rev. 2
rgephy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
ppb1 at pci0 dev 28 function 2: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27d4 (rev. 0x01)
pci2 at ppb1 bus 2
pci2: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, wr/inv ok
ppb2 at pci0 dev 28 function 3: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27d6 (rev. 0x01)
pci3 at ppb2 bus 3
pci3: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, wr/inv ok
uhci0 at pci0 dev 29 function 0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27c8 (rev. 0x01)
uhci0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 23
usb0 at uhci0: USB revision 1.0
uhci1 at pci0 dev 29 function 1: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27c9 (rev. 0x01)
uhci1: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 19
usb1 at uhci1: USB revision 1.0
uhci2 at pci0 dev 29 function 2: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27ca (rev. 0x01)
uhci2: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 18
usb2 at uhci2: USB revision 1.0
uhci3 at pci0 dev 29 function 3: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27cb (rev. 0x01)
uhci3: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 16
usb3 at uhci3: USB revision 1.0
ehci0 at pci0 dev 29 function 7: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27cc (rev. 0x01)
ehci0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 23
ehci0: EHCI version 1.0
ehci0: companion controllers, 2 ports each: uhci0 uhci1 uhci2 uhci3
usb4 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
ppb3 at pci0 dev 30 function 0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x244e (rev. 0xe1)
pci4 at ppb3 bus 4
pci4: i/o space, memory space enabled
ichlpcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0
ichlpcib0: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27b8 (rev. 0x01)
timecounter: Timecounter "ichlpcib0" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
ichlpcib0: 24-bit timer
ichlpcib0: TCO (watchdog) timer configured.
piixide0 at pci0 dev 31 function 1
piixide0: Intel 82801GB/GR IDE Controller (ICH7) (rev. 0x01)
piixide0: bus-master DMA support present
piixide0: primary channel configured to compatibility mode
piixide0: primary channel interrupting at ioapic0 pin 14
atabus0 at piixide0 channel 0
piixide0: secondary channel configured to compatibility mode
piixide0: secondary channel ignored (disabled)
piixide1 at pci0 dev 31 function 2
piixide1: Intel 82801GB/GR Serial ATA/Raid Controller (ICH7) (rev. 0x01)
piixide1: bus-master DMA support present
piixide1: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
piixide1: using ioapic0 pin 19 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus1 at piixide1 channel 0
piixide1: secondary channel configured to native-PCI mode
atabus2 at piixide1 channel 1
ichsmb0 at pci0 dev 31 function 3: vendor 0x8086 product 0x27da (rev. 0x01)
ichsmb0: interrupting at ioapic0 pin 19
iic0 at ichsmb0: I2C bus
isa0 at ichlpcib0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x378-0x37b irq 7
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4: ns16550a, working fifo
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60-0x64
timecounter: Timecounter "clockinterrupt" frequency 100 Hz quality 0
azalia0: codec[2]: Realtek ALC662-GR (rev. 1.1), HDA rev. 1.0
audio0 at azalia0: full duplex, playback, capture, independent
uhub0 at usb0: vendor 0x8086 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
uhub1 at usb1: vendor 0x8086 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub1: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
uhub2 at usb2: vendor 0x8086 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub2: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
uhub3 at usb3: vendor 0x8086 UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub3: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
uhub4 at usb4: vendor 0x8086 EHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub4: 8 ports with 8 removable, self powered
uhub5 at uhub1 port 1: vendor 0x0409 product 0x55ab, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 2
uhub5: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
wd0 at atabus1 drive 0: <ST380815AS>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd0: 76319 MB, 155061 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 156301488 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd0(piixide1:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)
uhidev0 at uhub5 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0
uhidev0: Alps Electric M2452, rev 1.00/1.01, addr 3, iclass 3/1
ukbd0 at uhidev0
wskbd0 at ukbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
atapibus0 at atabus2: 2 targets
cd0 at atapibus0 drive 0: <TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223B, 0Y23456789QLMNOP, SB01> cdrom removable
cd0: 32-bit data port
cd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
cd0(piixide1:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100) (using DMA)
Kernelized RAIDframe activated
pad0: outputs: 44100Hz, 16-bit, stereo
audio1 at pad0: half duplex, playback, capture
boot device: wd0
root on wd0a dumps on wd0b
root file system type: ffs
wsdisplay0: screen 1 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 2 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 3 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 4 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)

Look what I just found!

2011-10-06T15:19:00.004Z

sd0 at scsibus0 target 2 lun 0:  disk fixed
sd0: 41046 KB, 928 cyl, 2 head, 44 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 82092 sectors
sd0: sync (248.00ns offset 8), 8-bit (4.032MB/s) transfers

It's a 3.5" SCSI hard disk and it seems to work, albeit slowly (write 641 K/S, read 836 K/S). It might suit an Atari ST, Amiga or old Apple Mac. Anyone know a collector? :-)

Font Fix

2011-09-01T11:34:00.003Z

I use tightvnc server on NetBSD hosts where I need graphical tools but won't always be physically sitting at the console. It allows me to remotely connect to a virtual desktop using a VNC viewer tunneled through an ssh connection.

I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a bug but tightvnc seems to build an X11 with literally no fonts, which prevents the VNC server from firing up. The following command links tightvnc's X server to the fonts that shipped with NetBSD.

ln -s /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts /usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts

Valvetastic!

2011-06-17T05:54:00.003Z

Web site of the Month: Virtually the National Valve Museum. Americans call these vacuum tubes (how they're made) but we call them valves (what they do).

Current Affairs

2011-05-13T20:13:00.004Z

I use this 'ready-reckoner' during some conversations about electric vehicle charging.

kW	120 V	240 V
1.8	15 A	(7½ A)
2.4	20 A	(10 A)
3.12	(26 A)	13 A
3.6	30 A	15 A
4.8		20 A
7.2		30 A
12		50 A

Toolup

2010-12-03T18:02:00.003Z

I don't have to be connected to all of these hosts all of the time but there are occasions when it gets busy on screen. To reduce the risk of typing the wrong command into the wrong window, I've colour coded them. The following shell script illustrates the concept, but makes no attempt to connect to the hosts in question. That's partly because of the convoluted way I have to connect to some of them.

#!/bin/sh xclock -hl Firebrick -geometry 128x96-8+8& xload -hl red -geometry 128x96-8+131& xman -geometry 128x96-8+254& xterm -title Phil -fg white -bg 'Dark Slate Blue' -geometry 80x24+8+8& xterm -title iPaq -fg white -bg Firebrick -geometry 80x24+100+100& xterm -title Cumine -fg white -bg 'Saddle Brown' -geometry 80x24+192+192& xterm -title Delia -fg white -bg 'Dark Slate Gray' -geometry 80x24+284+284& xterm -title Atomic -fg white -bg black -geometry 80x24+376+376&

Some like it hot...

2010-11-09T16:00:00.003Z

Not that I can afford a solar hot water system, but we'll need a new water heater before too long so I did a little research into what would be appropriate for Illinois. It's possible to buy a hot water tank with a heat exchanger in it for a pressurized glycol loop up to a flat plate collector on the roof. I'd need the tank, a pump, collector controller and some valves, including a temper valve.

$ Redirection

2010-10-28T04:00:00.003Z

It seems like every MS Windows machine I see is infected. The sample may be skewed by the nature of my day job and user error is a contributing factor but clearly Windows has vulnerabilities that cost individuals, businesses and other organisations a lot of money every year in antivirus software, virus removals and wasted IT staff labour. I can't help thinking that money could be put to better use.

Building Brains

2010-09-21T17:34:00.004Z

I have just finished watching Professor Steve Furber's Dennis Gabor Lecture 2010: Building Brains. It's a concise, yet fascinating look at the pace of computer development over the past six decades and the challenges posed as we push up against limits of fabrication technology. Furber touches on some parallels and differences between biological brains and electronic computers and briefly introduces his group's work on SpiNNaker, a project that uses silicon to mimic (in simplified form) the way that braincells are wired together, to explore resilience in the face of inherent unreliability.

The lecture appealed to me on a number of different levels: As a geek I'm interested in the development of microprocessors and computers in general. As a middle–aged British geek I appreciate Furber's work on the BBC Micro and especially the ARM microprocessor, which is a thing of beauty. As someone who has to fix things when they break, I am keen on redundancy and resilience. Finally, as the father of a stroke survivor, I marvel at the brain's ability to rewire itself and 'route around' dead circuits and I believe there's a lot we can learn from this that could help computer engineers and other people with brains.

Mythbuntu

2010-09-15T03:02:00.004Z

We're doing away with (amongst other things) Cable television. At some point I would like to put an antenna up the tower along with a masthead preamplifier, but that can probably wait a while.

At the other end of the coax cable, we would like to have a video recorder (DVR, PVR, whatever). We could buy one from someone like TiVo, but then we're at their mercy for firmware fixes. Instead I would rather use Mythbuntu, which is capable of doing more (e.g. streaming recorded content over the computer network) and is an active open–source software project so can't be killed off by the hardware vendor.

All of this work will cost us a bit up front but every month we'll be saving money (via a somewhat convoluted service switch) and we should end up with a more pleasant, less restrictive overall home entertainment experience.

Flash Harry

2010-07-08T02:10:00.005Z

I'm a big fan of RAID: lashing together more than one disk drive to provide redundancy so that an important computer can still be used when one disk fails (I'm confident that the few people likely to read this already know that it's a question of "when", not "if"). Occasionally I have cause to throw together an impromptu array from USB flash drives, either because I want to test something or because I need a little temporary space and don't have a spare external hard disk to hand. Today I started to do that because I'm using a laptop with a failed hard disk and I wanted some space for pkgsrc.

First I tested the read and write speeds of two 4 Gbyte USB flash drives. Each yielded about 12 Mbytes/sec write speed and about 18 Mbytes/sec read. I then used raidframe (NetBSD's software RAID facility) to write a stripe across both flash drives. This is RAID level 0, so it doesn't provide any redundancy but it's a convenient way to stitch two drives together and usually provides a slight performance improvement. When I tested the speed of the array, I was surprised by the results. The read speed improved to about 24 Mbytes/sec, which was about what I expected. Writes however had slowed to about 3 Mbytes/sec, which would have been slow enough to impact the work I had in mind.

I've used raidframe enough that I doubted that was the cause, but I wanted to rule it out as the culprit. I tore down the raidframe array and used some older, more simple software called ccd (for concatenated disk) to stitch the USB flash drives together. When configuring ccd, I had the option of interleaving data (writing alternately to one drive and then the other) or simple concatenation (switching drives half way through). I started with the interleave because on paper that helps with speed but it yielded basically identical results to raidframe (3 Mbyte/sec writes). Switching to simple concatenation gave me what I was after: performance similar to the individual drives, but with the convenience of a single block device to write a filesystem on.

I suspect the problem is in hardware and is some sort of "log jam" that forms when I throw more data at the laptop's USB ports than most people would. Whether or not that's true, I'm glad I took a moment to test the speed of the array before I started work.

Initial ZFS notes

2009-12-06T07:17:00.002Z

zpool create poolname mirror c9t0d0 c10t0d0
zpool status
zpool export poolname
zpool import poolname
zpool destroy poolname

( s/mirror/raidz/ for equivalent to RAID-5 )

gpsbabel

2009-12-06T07:10:00.002Z

To upload a track from a Garmin eTrex GPS receiver to a unix host over a serial cable...

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f tty00 -o gpx -F tracklog.gpx

Don't ask...

2009-08-17T17:49:00.003Z

Some C potchery for a friend...

#include int main(void) { int state=0; char received; while(1) { received=getchar(); switch (state) { case 0: if (received=='f') state = state++; break; case 1: if (received=='i') state = state++; else state = 0; break; case 2: if (received=='r') state = state++; else state = 0; break; case 3: if (received=='e') printf("\n*FIRE!*\n"); state = 0; } } }

Time's a-wastin'

2009-07-11T05:59:00.008Z

It has been about six months since I last posted here, so it seems somehow appropriate to return with a note about time.

After a frustrating morning of potching with consumer routers that don't work (I'll save the details for another blog post, ;-) I finally got around to setting up a local server for the network time protocol (NTP). Most of the following is straight out of the NetBSD Guide.

#This goes in /etc/rc.conf ntpdate=YES ntpdate_hosts="ntp1.cso.uiuc.edu" ntpd=YES

The first line tells the NetBSD host to be an NTP client, syncing its clock against a machine at the University of Illinois. The next line asks it to be an NTP server so that other computers here can sync against it without having to go out across the Internet.

Windows and Ubuntu workstations sync happily against the NetBSD host. I'm not sure yet how to persuade the Ubuntu Server box to do that.

Xubuntu via VNC

2008-12-19T03:06:00.008Z

I just got around to doing a clean Xubuntu install on cumine, a 550 MHz Pentium III box that just inherited 512 Mbytes of RAM from my test rig, which failed noisily.

Xubuntu is a Linux distribution that comes with a tweaked Xfce desktop. It comes from the nice people at the Ubuntu project and is comparable to Ubuntu, which comes with the GNOME desktop and Kubuntu, which comes with KDE. I have another box with Ubuntu Server, which comes by default without a GUI desktop environment. Clearly these Ubuntu people value choice!

Xubuntu is normally used from the console: the keyboard, mouse and display that are attached to the computer. For various reasons I want to be able to use it from elsewhere: from the iBook in the comfy chair, from a Windows machine at work or wherever.

I installed the vnc4server package, which creates a "fake" X server in memory and makes it viewable from any VNC viewer. I use vncviewer on BSD and Linux, 'Chicken of the VNC' on MacOS X and RealVNC on MS Windows machines.

To make Xubuntu's Xfce desktop available via VNC though, I had to edit my .vnc/xstartup file to include...

xfdesktop& xfwm4& xfce4-panel

...and comment out a few other lines, including the one that would have otherwise launched twm. vnc4server's X server has some limitations, but it does most of what I need for now.

My first php OOP attempt...

2008-12-11T15:44:00.007Z

I have to use php at work and it seems to lack an ordinary compound structure like Pascal and C have, so I thought perhaps I'd use an object instead. Here's my first crack at some OOP in php, which yields the following...

OOP test
Constructing an instance of asbtest
My Donkey is Unwell
In method asbtest::vet
My Donkey is Healthy
Job done!

I wonder if objects get automatically destroyed when the php interpreter falls off the end of the source. Thanks to nils_ and rindolf from Freenode's #webdezvous channel and AcidReign from ##php for important help with this.

A sound idea?

2008-12-02T16:02:00.006Z

One of the projects that's been on "low simmer" for several years is a few Web terminals for an educational site. Since the applications will be running on a central computer, I may just connect a small amplifier and some bookshelf speakers to that (rather than buying cheap speakers and streaming audio to each terminal). The plan is for four terminals sitting next to each other. If I put one speaker at either end and adjust each terminal's software mixer balance, I should be able to make each terminal's sound "appear" where the terminal is.

Ubuntu (VNC) Server

2008-12-01T14:17:00.002Z

This isn't likely to surprise anyone, but I'll post it here to remind myself of the procedure. This is how I make an Ubuntu Server box that several people can use at once, either from 'VNC viewer' software running on a computer or from a VNC–capable graphical terminal:

Install Ubuntu Server on a suitable computer
Install binary packages for VNC, Xfce and any other software that the users will need (SeaMonkey, OpenOffice.org etc.).
Create user accounts and arrange for the VNC server instances to start automatically
Edit the .vnc/xstartup scripts to use Xfce
Fix the Xfce "panel" menu bar
Test, rinse and repeat.

Like an election...

2008-11-12T15:07:00.002Z

I seem to have fallen back into professional software development. I accepted a programming internship as a favour to a friend (even though I'm a networking major). I was "downsized" from my day job, picked up more hours at the internship site and stuck around beyond the official end of the internship.

My primary project involves porting a web application from an evil blend of ASP, MS Access, SPSS ShowCase Query etc. to php working against IBM DB2 and J.D. Edwards. Apache, php, DB2 and J.D. Edwards are all running on IBM i5/OS. I don't actually hate php, though there have been a couple of disappointments. It's fair to say that I quite like DB2, though it and i5/OS have the disadvantage of being proprietary, closed-source products.

Because I'm reproducing pages from an existing application, I have been asked to retain the screen layout, which includes a narrow column at the left of the screen containing a menu and a wider column to the right of that with each page's contents. I really want to control (or at least influence) the layout using CSS, but Microsoft Internet Explorer lacks decent CSS support so I am looking at potential work–arounds. One person suggested JavaScript (which I have managed to avoid so far for this application) and another said I should resort to forcing the layout using <table> in the XHTML source. As in so many elections I find myself in the position of having to choose the lesser of two evils unless someone reading this knows of a better way to achieve what I'm after: two columns, the left automatically sizing to fit its contents and the right taking up the remainder of the viewport (or more, where its contents are too wide to fit).

Wordle

2008-09-26T01:49:00.001Z

Wordletastic.

Apple revisited...

2008-09-19T06:52:00.003Z

I'm a firm believer in the maxim "if it aint broke, don't fix it!" Lately I've been getting a lot of use out of an Apple iBook that Mike very kindly loaned me. It's one of the later white G3 models (900 MHz PowerPC 750cxe, 384 Mbytes RAM, built–in 802.11b wireless, 40 Gbyte hard disk). One of the reasons I've been getting more use out of it is that I was able to install Apple's X11 server so I can run programs on other computers and have them appear on the iBook as though they were run locally (the iBook displays each program's output and feeds it keyboard and trackpad events).

So far as computer hardware is concerned, I've been concentrating lately on servers, minicomputers ("mid–range" if you're an IBM person ;-) and the odd LAN workstation. A discussion prompted me to look at notebook computers and it struck me that Apple are shipping machines that are physically quite similar to the G3 iBook I'm using to type this blog post. The innards are different of course, but they've stuck with the same form factor for their white G3 and G4 iBook and now their Intel–powered MacBook. It's not quite as small as the PowerBook Duo, but it doesn't need a DuoDock for LAN connectivity and of course the screen is quite a bit larger, even on the 12" or 13" models. The iBook is fast enough for most of what I do, but if I had to go out and buy a notebook PC today, it's nice to know that I could get something a lot like this.

J.D. Edwards date hack

2008-09-15T16:25:00.004Z

J.D. Edwards store dates on i5/OS as CYYDDD, where C is 0 for the 20th Century and 1 for the 21st, YY is the year within that century and DDD is the day within that year, so '072041' is 10th February 1972. The DB2 database engine on i5/OS provides support for a number of date formats, none of which is CYYDDD, so I came up with the following to convert them to YYYYDDD, which DB2's DATE function recognises and treats appropriately:


   DATE(
      CASE
         WHEN LEFT('072041',1) = '0' THEN '19'
         WHEN LEFT('072041',1) = '1' THEN '20'
      END ||
      RIGHT('072041',5)
   )

Substitute a string or field in J.D. Edwards' date format for '072041'.

In a right state (province, territory...)

2008-08-28T17:07:00.006Z

It's doubtful you'll ever need this, because I think most of us are smart enough to create an enumerated 'country' field for any database that will have to store international addresses. I find myself working with something (that I'm not allowed to change) where U.S, Canadian and possibly other addresses have all been shoved in the same half–assed table. I knocked up the following to help unpick at least the .us and .ca addresses based on the contents of the 'state' field. It's by no means perfect: I've seen at least one record where an address line says 'LONDON / ONTARIO' and the state field contains 'CAN'. I don't think it's practical to test for every possible perversion though.


CASE WHEN al.ALADDS IN ('AK', 'AL', 'AR', 'AZ', 'CA', 'CO', 'CT',
  'DC', 'DE', 'FL', 'GA', 'IA', 'ID', 'IL', 'IN', 'KS', 'KY', 'LA',
  'MA', 'MD', 'ME', 'MI', 'MN', 'MO', 'MS', 'MT', 'NC', 'ND', 'NE',
  'NH', 'NJ', 'NM', 'NV', 'NY', 'OH', 'OK', 'OR', 'PA', 'RI', 'SC',
  'SD', 'TN', 'TX', 'UT', 'VA', 'VT', 'WA', 'WI', 'WV', 'WY' )
  THEN
    'US'
  ELSE
    CASE WHEN al.ALADDS IN ('AB', 'BC', 'MB', 'NB', 'NL', 'NS', 'NT',
      'NU', 'ON', 'PE', 'QC', 'SK', 'YT')
    THEN
      'CA'
    ELSE
      ''
  END
END

Now on to the postcodes and zip codes, which are all mashed into the same alphanumeric field. :-/

raidframe notes

2008-07-26T23:48:00.004Z

Use disklabel to create a single partition of type "RAID" for each element (disk) of the array.
Create a simple config file (see the raidctl manual page for details).
raidctl -C config_file_name raid0
raidctl -I serial_number raid0
raidctl -A yes raid0
raidctl -i raid0
newfs /dev/raid0a

My Last Mile

2008-06-11T01:11:00.006Z

I telephoned AT&T today, just to make sure that my DSL contract has passed and I'm now a month–to–month customer. Their customer service person confirmed that and let slip that they're raising the price US$ 5 per month. Circumstances dictate an economy drive, so we would like to ditch our analogue telephone (POTS) line, which seems to cost us upwards of US$ 30 every month, with US$ 20 on top of that for DSL.

A little digging today unearthed the following options for Internet service...

Satellite Internet: US$ 400 equipment and installation plus US$ 60/month for service. Massive latency.
Terrestrial fixed wireless: US$ 150 installation plus US$ 50/month, sketchy about technical details but at least they've heard of Linux.
GPRS/EDGE: US$ 10/month for additional telephone number, US$ 20/month for service. Slower than ISDN BRI with much higher latency.

Earthlink DSL looked promising at US$ 30/month, but they will not (or perhaps can not) provision a dry loop. I'm open to other suggestions!

Making lemonade...

2008-05-10T02:13:00.003Z

When it comes to open–source advocacy, timing helps. I spend one day a week with a manufacturing concern whose business runs on an IBM mid–range system (apparently it's old fashioned to call them minicomputers). My job is to rewrite an ASP application so that it will run on another virtual server in the mini.

Today I arrived on–site to the sound of alarm bells. The server hosting the current version of the application went down at some point yesterday. It's at a co–location facility, so not easily prodded with the sharpened stick. The net result is that the server "went away", perhaps never to return. Okay, why don't we just upload a backup to one of the other Web servers? Oh, it's ASP. That only runs on MS Windows machines (perhaps it could be ported to something like Mono, but not within our target timeframe). The two other Web servers available both run (and depend on) non–Windows operating systems.

When people are running around waving their hands in the air, they tend to be startled when I call a time–out. Sometimes that's the best time to stop and think though. I had been charged with porting this application from ASP to another proprietary programming language that was tied to a single commercial, closed–source operating system, which in turn is available on single–source server hardware. We can't move the application to the available servers because it was coded in a proprietary, non–portable language. If we rewrite it in another, similarly constricted language then we're repeating that past mistake instead of learning from it.

The Web server came back up (after it took a short car ride), but not before I was able to present a sound business case for rewriting the application in PHP, which will run on the minicomputer, on unix and even on MS-Windows if that's necessary. I have to go now, I have a lot of PHP to write...

Capacity on Demand Vs. Capacity on Payment

2008-04-05T01:59:00.006Z

I am dipping my toes into another world. Because of a project that will involve IBM mid–range systems, I've been reading a little about IBM i. I've not used it, so I'll reserve judgement about the operating system (formerly known as OS/400) itself, but just reading about the licensing makes it clear I'm steering into unfamiliar waters. As I understand it you have to pay a per–processor license fee and then a per–user fee on top of that. If your server gets busy, you can pay an additional ongoing fee for "Capacity on Demand", which I'm told enables hardware that's already in your server.

I can't help but contrast this with my most recent (admittedly very small) server project: we bought the hardware, which includes a dual–core Intel Xeon processor, 2 Gbytes of RAM, a few hard disks and so on. I installed NetBSD, which I downloaded at no cost. It is my usual practice to compile a kernel tailored for each NetBSD host I put into service so this time I enabled SMP, so the load is spread between the cores in the machine. NetBSD recognizes all of the RAM, so that's available too. Although NetBSD people might not compare themselves to IBM (apples and oranges), it strikes me that we got real on–demand capacity (albeit on a very small scale): the hardware is there when we need it, with no action (and no payment!) required.

Facewhat?

2008-03-19T18:25:00.005Z

I don't think I've ever used Facebook. From what I've heard, it sounds like MySpace, which I dislike on a variety of levels. That said, I found this television discussion about Facebook, which is general enough that some of the ideas raised apply not just to similar sites, but to life on–line generally.

Ubuntu UK Podcast

2008-03-14T21:32:00.004Z

If you are interested in Linux or open source software generally, you may be interested in the ubuntu-uk.org podcast. Stories from the first episode include Ubuntu Brainstorm, the FOSDEM developer conference, the Open Rights Group and an Ubuntu Demo Day at the computer museum in Swindon.

Click, Share...

2008-03-12T01:16:00.008Z

In 1991, on Macintosh System 7, sharing a folder for network use involved highlighting the folder and choosing Share from the File menu. There were probably a couple of additional steps, but it was a simple, painless procedure. Not long afterwards Microsoft caught up (at least in this one, small regard) and Windows was provided with similarly friendly sharing.

I've been a unix user for many, many years and I'm comfortable at the command line. My favorite unix uses plain text configuration files for the most part, which is convenient for documentation and when I need to duplicate a working configuration on another host. I have long held the belief that GUIs should be optional on server operating systems, and secretly harboured a strong suspicion that graphics hardware had no place on a server. Something happened to me this week to challenge that doctrine.

My favorite unix is NetBSD, which I have used for years and know my way around fairly well. It's great for server use because it's rock solid and has a very friendly community of users and developers. It was an obvious choice when I had to set up a file server for a small network, mostly of Windows desktop machines. Because Windows has its own protocol for sharing file space over a network, I had to install Samba to run on top of NetBSD and serve up file space to the workstations. Samba is held in high regard and I certainly take my hat off to its developers.

Unfortunately I found it incomprehensible (yes, I read lots of fine manuals) and spent two very full days beating my head against it before LumberCartel, a member of the NetBSD community took pity on me and very patiently walked me through the ridiculously intricate ceremony to coax Samba into life (create lock directories, users, groups, share directories, hack Samba config file around, rinse and repeat). By 04:30 (local time) this morning, I found myself wishing that I could just "Click, Share." Sincere thanks to LumberCartel and other people from #netbsd on FreeNode who donated their time and attention.

Full circle...

2008-03-07T01:05:00.005Z

Depending on how long you've been around computers (or just plain "been around" ;-) you may remember Word Star, WordPerfect or the Amstrad PCW. If you've ever fought with Microsoft Word over auto-correction, mangled layouts, style tags that won't stay put or if you just hate the paperclip idiocy, you might like Writeroom. I found that via the Spark wiki.

No light in Alexandria...

2008-01-30T21:41:00.000Z

Partly for historical reasons, a U.S. manufacturing concern that shall remain unnamed runs its day–to–day operations on a server in India. Usually this is invisible to a person sitting in front of the client software because the response time is surprisingly good. Today the same user sits glumly, unable to connect to the server. Traceroute shows a route out through Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo to Hong Kong with a ping time around one third of a second. Between Hong Kong and Alexandria however, something has clearly gone quite wrong. Some pings get through to Alexandria, Bahrain and Mumbai but ping times and timeouts don't look promising. Apparently something grim happened to a submarine fibre near Alexandria. Our aforementioned user may find little comfort in the knowlege that he is in good company and perhaps make use of the time by reading a good book.

Still potching...

2008-01-29T07:29:00.000Z

I thought about letting this blog end with the end of 2007, but Phoebe Walker linked to the Potchery, so I feel duty–bound to continue the nonsense! :-)

My money's not good enough...

2007-12-19T06:32:00.000Z

I tried to buy QuickTime Pro the other day, but Apple ~~wouldn't~~ couldn't sell it to me. Their on–line store was broken and they didn't answer the telephone when I tried that alternative. I live in the U.S. and have a camcorder that records prevailing North American standards. My parents live in Britain and their television and DVD player can't play home movies of their granddaughter unless they are first converted to British formats. I would prefer portable open–source software for a variety of reasons, not least that it doesn't tie me to a single computer or operating system. I've had no luck building video software from source so I resigned myself to buying QuickTime Pro. When Apple seemed to have "nobody home", I took an alternative route: I'm sending my parents an American portable DVD player.

Sansa Stuffed...

2007-12-11T02:16:00.000Z

I really like my SanDisk Sansa m250, or perhaps I should say that "I really liked it". For some reason it will power up, but just sits there at the Sansa splash screen and refuses to progress any further. Now I have to contact SanDisk to see whether I can return it to them for repair or replacement.

I have an Apple iPod mini that I don't use much because it depends on special software (either iTunes or gtkpod) to "bless" any MP3 files that I put on it. My friend Nigel took an alternative tack, installing Rockbox on the iPod itself. Although I have yet to find mention of it in the Rockbox manual, or on the Web site, people on IRC tell me that it can also play Ogg/Vorbis files, which would be a definite plus.

Men in tights...

2007-11-29T03:19:00.000Z

Be thankful there's no image attached to this post, because according to asarch I'm some sort of superhero. I think it's safe to assume that I wouldn't look good in tights! :-o

Laptop mania

2007-11-20T22:19:00.000Z

Well okay, two people at work bought laptops in the same week. Both people are in management positions, so they can afford shiny things. Both laptops have reasonably efficient 64–bit, dual–core microprocessors: one an Intel Core2 Duo and the other has an AMD Turion64 x2. Both have integrated webcams (one of which follows you around the room, Scooby Doo style :-) Both machines are full–fledged "desktop replacement" candidates and are priced accordingly.

A big laptop would be nice for the lady of the house, but I've been spoiled by the Apple PowerBook Duo and would prefer something smaller. Asus' Eee PC is a likely candidate. I think it's a shame that it doesn't have a Pentium M instead of a Celeron. It might increase the price a little, but my understanding is that the Pentium M has enhanced SpeedStep, which should yield a longer battery life. The Eee PC ships with Linux but it's not clear to me whether the provided GUI is X, or just a graphical framebuffer. If I could use it as a portable, wireless X–terminal then its lack of a hard disk would be a non–issue, since I could run software on a more powerful box tucked away somewhere out of sight.

IBM 1401

2007-11-15T03:03:00.000Z

I know at least three people who used to program IBM 1401 computers.

And then, nothing...

2007-11-15T02:51:00.000Z

The 300 MHz iBook seems to have developed a fault. I'll sit there typing away and suddenly the screen will go black and the disk drive will stop spinning. I need a Linux machine for college, so it's fortunate that I have a desktop machine with Fedora already installed. I might have been using that already if the room we've designated the "study" (currently a room with overloaded bookshelves and a few boxes) had a grounded outlet. It's taken me a while to find a suitable adaptor that I can use with a GFCI until I get around to rewiring the house.

Hard (disk) lessons...

2007-11-12T22:57:00.000Z

For years I have been telling people that "an untested backup is worse than no backup at all because it lulls you into a false sense of security". Some people who matter to me recently lost a lot of document files because I was not careful to practice what I preach. They're a non–profit organisation with no permanent I.T. staff, so I'm the closest thing they have even though I live 132 miles (212 km) away.

After I installed the tape drive I did some simple tests to reassure myself that it it was working and during occasional visits to the site I would back up all the document files to tape. My workload elsewhere increased to the point that my visits to the site became infrequent and I delegated backups to someone who was there every day. Sadly the tape drive failed shortly before the last hard disk that held the document files. The person on–site had not been running a compare after each backup, or restoring files from tape to compare checksums against the original.

Since I'm the closest thing they have to an I.T. staff, I bear responsibility for the loss of this data. I knew that backups were being made, but I did not take the time to test them, or to ask important questions about how many copies of the data there were. Hard disks are mechanical devices with moving parts. I know that it's not a question of if they fail, but when. I knew better and I let these people down. In doing so, I have learned some important lessons:-

Practice what I preach!
If I delegate something, I have to verify that it's being done correctly.
Sometimes it's kinder to walk away than to over–extend myself
Use tar for tape backups, nothing proprietary or closed-source.

xearth

2007-11-02T17:23:00.000Z

I'm looking for a program that I have used in the past to draw maps that included the approximate position of passing spacecraft. xearth isn't that program, but it produces a nice clean globe that I can mark points on. Sadly the built-in markers don't work if you write the image to a file, but I suppose I could render to a window and then capture that using the GIMP.

xearth -pos "fixed 45 -88" -noroot -markerfile xearthmarkerfile

Computers? Oh yes, I remember those...

2007-11-02T03:44:00.000Z

Since we moved house, probably about 1½ months ago, none of our ordinary computers have been set up. In part this is because the would-be-study was crammed full of boxes (no, real boxes, I'm not talking about computers here!) and there was no room for a desk. Another reason is that once Mrs. Ball found the DSL modem, I set up a 300 MHz Apple iBook in the kitchen, configured mostly for use as an Internet terminal of sorts. It has Firefox, gAIM and irssi, all running on top of Terra Soft Yellow Dog Linux. There's no email software because we both have Web mail accounts and AT&T showed no interest in making our AT&T email account work. Okay, it can't play video or the vast majority of audio files. It's not up to videoconferencing. It has been robust enough to put up with daily use though and provides a big chunk of the functionality we "need" every day. When we're done with it we simply close the lid and it goes to sleep. Open it up and within a few seconds we're right back where we were. Although it wasn't conceived as an experiment, I think we've proven that we could survive with just an Internet terminal. We'll still use desktop PCs for digital photography, office applications, gaming and hopefully digital video work, but I think it's handy to have a machine sitting around that lets us jump on the Web without having to wait for an operating system to boot, or without being confined to the study. I expect a 600 MHz G3 iBook (the shiny white ones) with an Airport card would probably do the job.

Echoes of Econet

2007-10-03T22:50:00.000Z

I don't actually hate local area networks. I don't look for LAN work because I suspect that often it's PC support work in disguise. If you've sat down with me and talked about computers, it's a safe bet that eventually conversation worked its way around to the Acorn BBC Micro and Econet, its serial LAN. It occurs to me that early experience with Econet and Acorn NFS shaped my expectations where LANs are concerned. Back in the 1980s we had silent diskless workstations, centralized administration, remote control, instant messaging, shared filesystems, a personal home directory and probably many other things that I've since forgotten.

A stand-alone PC in effect has to be its own server, so most resources that the PC needs have to be either inside the box or connected directly to it. I've seen networks built by PC people where every workstation was a stand-alone PC: money that could have been spent on decent shared resources (e.g. laser printers, file servers) instead went towards less useful duplicate add-ons for each seat. The "dead giveaway" though is when each workstation is provided with a stand-alone operating system that networks reluctantly, if at all. Each workstation requires individual prodding to update application software or to distribute configuration changes. Clearly these LANs are built by people who don't grok networking, perhaps because they have never seen it done the right way.

Exploring Fedora

2007-09-08T01:28:00.000Z

The previous two notes stemmed from a desk cleaning session, although you wouldn't think it to look at the desk now. :-/

Installing Fedora 7 was swift and painless. Like other Linux distributions that I have looked at in recent years Fedora made some odd assumptions, including a screen mode that only makes sense on a 25" (38cm) display. The people in #fedora on freenode were actively hostile, even before my BSD background was mentioned. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the friendly NetBSD people.

ATI Cards...

2007-09-03T04:10:00.000Z

Some ATI Radeon cards for me to consider as an alternative to Rage XL: 9000, 9100, 9200 and 9250 (which has no fan!). ES-1000 == Radeon 7000, 2D server graphics chip.

ISO -> DVD

2007-09-03T03:46:00.000Z

To burn an ISO-9660 image to a DVD+R:

cdrecord -speed=1 cabbage.iso

Server Stress...

2007-08-08T16:06:00.000Z

I've been burning a lot of cycles lately thinking (and reading) about servers. I need a light-duty fileserver for a small LAN with about ten workstations. Years of experience tell me that a server belongs in a rack, should have hot-swap SCA SCSI drives and a proper serial console, which is helpful for remote management.

My first instinct was to look at Sun's 1U servers. The Sun Netra T1 AC200 is a discontinued (but still readily available) 1U rack-mount server with an UltraSPARC IIe microprocessor and SCA drive bays. It has a nicely–balanced architecture with storage on one 32-bit PCI bus and I/O on another. Both of the 32-bit PCI busses hang from an appropriate 64-bit PCI bus. Sadly it lacks gigabit Ethernet and tops out at 1 Gbyte of RAM (enough for now, but it's always good to have some headroom).

A logical step up from the AC200 might be the Sun Fire v120. It's similar to the AC200, but it can take up to 4 Gbytes of RAM. Sadly it also lacks gigabit Ethernet and seems to cost much more than the AC200. I was leaning towards SUN because their systems are designed and built with unix in mind so they understand disklabels and kernels. They also have a decent serial console.

One slight concern is that if I should be hit by a bus, the people using the server might end up having to find a somewhat housetrained BSD or Solaris geek, a surprisingly difficult task even in a university town. The final "deal-killer" for the machines I've mentioned so far though is the cost of SCA drives. I know that they're appropriate for a multitasking environment and that they supposedly have longer MTBF, but I can buy two or three SATA drives of comparable capacity, with the same warranty, for the price of a SCSI drive.

Giving up on Sun's UltraSPARC servers for a while, I went on to look at 1U servers with AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon microprocessors. Currently I'm leaning more towards Intel because I'm told they're more cooperative with the open-source community and that their hardware receives better software support in return. Tyan used to be famous for their server mainboards and I was interested to see that they also sell barebones servers with hot-swap SATA drive bays. Their "Tank " series looks promising. I was also a little startled to find that Sun now sell 1U Opteron servers such as the Fire X2100 brand new for less than I am being quoted for refurbished UltraSPARC boxen!

The real catch to any of these servers is that almost anything rack-mount is going to be proprietary and I'm wary of vendor lock-in. I could put an mITX board in a Travla C146 case, but it's a challenge to find an mITX board that has 100baseT and SATA without a lot of multimedia/HDTV chaff, the PSU in that case is proprietary and there's no room for hot-swap drive bays. I will keep looking for an appropriate server, but in the interim it looks as though I'll have to hack something together in an ATX tower case.

Wireless Routers from Hell...

2007-07-31T02:07:00.000Z

Saturday was long. I drove to a site 150 miles (241 km) away to install a wireless LAN, stopping mid-way to visit one of my favorite computer shops to pick up a couple of wireless routers. "These have detachable antennae, right?" I asked.
"Oh yes"; I was assured. I arrived on site and unpacked the first router only to find that it had fake antennae (plastic moulded to look like an antenna, with ordinary hookup wire visible at the hinge). Needless to say I'm disgusted at Linksys for producing something so awful. Presumably they get away with this because a lot of people buying wireless routers don't know any better. I was also kicking myself for not having torn the boxes open there in the shop to inspect the goods.

I drove to the next city in search of a replacement and found a disposeable Netgear wireless router. Both of the people who read my blog probably already know that I swore off Netgear routers some years ago when I went though about five firmware revisions in the course of a week, each being slightly worse than the previous one. This on a router that we bought to replace a Netgear router that had broken firmware. :-( spot the recurrent theme). Saturday's Netgear router lived up to its badge and refused to work. "It should be working..." said the nice man from Netgear. I think that was his obvious statement for the day. After another round trip to the next city to get a refund on the broken Netgear, I found a Belkin wireless router at the last place I could think of looking. Hopefully that one will work long enough for me to wrap my head around smesh (or something similar) and find credible wireless routers to replace the solitary Belkin.

DHCP

2007-07-22T03:02:00.000Z

Usually I build networks that do not use DHCP, instead I assign a static IP address to each piece of equipment. One reason for this is that I like things to stay where they are put (yes, I preferred DIP switches and jumper links to "Plug-n-Play"!) and I find static IP addresses convenient for port forwarding (e.g. forwarding HTTP or SSH connections from a site's public IP address to a box on the LAN). Last weekend Michael and I visited a long-neglected site and had to manually update the DNS numbers on each workstation. That might not have been necessary if each workstation requested its network configuration from a server via DHCP. What I should probably do is set up a DHCP server, but configure it to hand out predetermined IP addresses to each machine based on its MAC address. That may give us the best of both worlds.

Mesh networks...

2007-06-13T22:48:00.000Z

During my first year of college, an imaginative lecturer assigned us the hypothetical task of rewiring the main campus. The solution I proposed was (although I may not have called it that at the time) a wired mesh network. My rationalé was that the cost of some layer-3 routers and a few reels of fibre would be more than offset by dramatically reduced down-time and repair costs. I thought that the generous aggregate on-campus bandwidth would be a nice bonus too, potentially enabling more imaginative uses of the campus network.

During the brief gap between Spring and Summer semesters this year, I did some reading about wireless mesh networks that have actually been built. A little way South of me, in Urbana, Illinois, CUWiN have been building a metropolitan area wireless mesh network. Looking at the map, it seems that few of the sites allow public access to the network, but I suppose each participant site serves as a repeater (increasing the potential for more points of public access in the future) and the network serves as an interesting testbed anyway.

On a smaller scale, but with the added complication of having to hand-off mobile clients, the SMesh project at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland used an interesting approach: consumer off-the-shelf wireless routers running custom software. Apparently they have it working well with unmodified client machines, all the magic seems to be done within the routers.

Meraki is based on work done at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts and seem positioned to succeed commercially with indoor wireless routers at US$ 50, outdoor ones at US$ 100 and solar power as an option. I don't know whether the routing software is proprietary, but I'm told the routers run Linux, so perhaps that could be corrected even if it were the case.

Video over Firewire...

2007-06-07T20:42:00.000Z

Not much going on at "Ball Labs" lately. The two colleges I attend have slightly offset calendars, so there was not much of a gap between my Spring and Summer semesters. I did take time to put a Firewire card in Almond (my desktop computer) and with help from the inhabitants of #netbsd on irc.freenode.net, expecially xtraeme who schooled me on the finer points of post-upgrade tinkering, I was able to capture video squirted down a Firewire cable from a miniDV camcorder. Now I need to find some software that can convert captured video into MPEG format, preferably 720x576 at 25 frames/second for playback on British DVD players.

Ice chips...

2007-05-05T22:38:00.000Z

A good friend of mine mentioned in a recent email message that his microprocessor was hitting 54°C, where it usually runs at 36°—45°C. I've been watchful of processor thermal performance since the 5V Pentium debacle or even the i486 DX4: the first mainstream processor with a fan on the heatsink. I've been obsessed with it since the fan on another friend's AMD K6-2 failed and let the smoke out of it, leaving her without a computer. In fairness, the machine could have alerted the user to the fan failure had someone not skimped by installing a two-wire fan that provided no feedback to the mainboard.

There are all kinds of elaborate processor cooling setups, from simple heatsinks with fans, through water cooling right up to liquid nitrogen for the overclocking record nutcases! My own feeling is that finding ways to get rid of the heat is addressing the symptom rather than the root problem, which is that many processors waste far too much energy in the form of heat. If we don't generate the heat, then we don't have to worry about getting rid of it and things are far less likely to catch fire when the fan fails. Melissa's machine has been running all day (IRC > BUS-101 homework ;-) and its 2 GHz Celeron processor is running at 32°C (Northwood > Prescott). I'm ready to build her a new machine, but it's not easy to find desktop mainboards for the cool-running processors that I prefer.

The only Pentium 4 chip that I would consider is the "Northwood" Pentium 4-M (note that this is different from the Mobile Pentium 4 and an entirely different animal to the Pentium M and Core series, which mark Intel's return to ~~sanity~~ the Pentium III branch of their processor family tree. I'm accumulating parts for my own PC: I've been given an AMD Athlon 64 and a really nice microATX case. I still need a mainboard, RAM, a pair of hard disks and a DVD-RAM drive. I like AMD's on-die memory controller and HyperTransport, but like Intel's cool-running chips. AMD Turion seems to offer the best of both worlds, but so far I've only found desktop mainboards for the single-core versions.

Striped beans...

2007-04-21T04:56:00.000Z

I'm currently fetching pkgsrc onto a 1.8 Gbyte stripe across two 1 Gbyte DaneElec zMate USB flash "beans" (that's what I'm calling them because they're about the size of a large broad bean and they're generally bean-shaped). Thanks go to the inhabitants of ##linux on freenode.net for the following procedure:-

Replace the stock FAT partition on each bean with an $FD (Linux RAID auto) partition.
mdadm -C /dev/md0 -l raid0 -n2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

...job done.

Linux Revisited and the Roaming Gnome...

2007-04-19T20:59:00.000Z

Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) 4.1 was broken out of the box on the clamshell iBook (300 MHz PowerPC 750, 160 Mbyte RAM) that I've been working with lately. Out of the box YDL just wedges hard when it tries to launch the X window system. Eventually I discovered Xautoconfig4, which magically enabled 24-bit colour. For some reason Blackbox, which is my usual window manager, would not build. I know from past experience that KDE is unusable on a vintage machine and I needed to evaluate Gnome anyway, so I installed that. Gnome looks promising as something that I can put on people's desks: It's friendly, functional and fairly snappy even on a slow machine so it should run nicely on a 1 GHz desktop workstation with a gigabyte of RAM.

Linux, Gnome and a couple of basic applications filled the 4 Gbyte hard disk almost to the brim, so the iBook is at home busily building software from pkgsrc on a tiny DaneElec 1 Gb USB flash drive 'bean' (US$ 15 from Target). I plan to buy a matching bean soon for some software RAID potchery.

Display Doldrums...

2007-04-06T23:58:00.000Z

I'm not much of a gamer, so my display needs are quite basic. For years I've happily been using an ATI Xpert 98 PCI card that has 8 Mbytes of RAM on board. NetBSD's XFree86 using the mach64 driver is lightning fast and I've never owned a display large enough for the card's scan rates or memory to be a problem. If I were building a new machine for myself, I would probably look for an AGP equivalent of my old card, perhaps with a DVI output in case I ever get a digital display or HDTV. I could pop the Xpert 98 in a PCI slot and run with two displays. These cards have 3D hardware, but I've never had software support for it.

A good friend recently asked for display adaptor recommendations and I really didn't know what to suggest. I'm told that nVidia produce binary drivers for Linux, but binary drivers leave people at the mercy of the vendor, they only work on Linux and often only on x86 PCs. (I don't like binary drivers, can you tell? ;-) I don't know how good ATI have been in recent years about providing documentation to open-source developers, but I'm told that NetBSD now has (somewhat experimental) support for 3D for certain ATI and Intel cards.

I pulled an all-nighter last night. I wasn't working on college homework, but reinstalling Yellow Dog Linux on an old Apple iBook. I managed to weed out KDE, which was unuseable on its 300 MHz G3 processor. Sadly I can only make the display work in 8-bit colour depth, which I suspect is because Linux is drawing via OpenFirmware.

Almond Refurb

2007-03-23T20:27:00.000Z

Until recently my primary desktop computer (Almond) was a PC with a 450 MHz AMD K6-2+ microprocessor, 64 Mbytes of RAM (four 16 Mbyte SIMMs) and a 13 Gbyte ATA hard disk. For various reasons (none of which was extra speed ;-) I moved most of my work over to another machine (Tinman), which was another PC (500 MHz AMD K6-2 microprocessor, 802.11g PCI network adaptor). Tinman's power supply unit failed the other day. It's SFX sized, which is smaller than an ordinary ATX power supply. So far I haven't found an appealing replacement and I'm not sure the machine is worth saving. I need a computer though, so I decided it was time to look at Almond again.

As my primary machine, Almond had been in almost continuous use for about four years and had picked up some impressive 'dust bunnies'. I cleaned out the case and removed the four SIMMs, hard disk, floppy drive and a modem. I installed a 128 Mbyte PC100 SDRAM DIMM and an 80mm temperature-controlled cooling fan. The first hard disk that fell to hand was a 6½ Gbyte Quantum Bigfoot CY6480A 5¼" ATA drive. Apparently it only spins at 3,600 RPM and the 5¼" form factor probably means longer seeks, but a crude test shows about 5½ Mbytes/sec transfer rates (read and write). As luck would have it, the drive contained a clean install of NetBSD/i386. This saved me some time as well as the chore of fitting some kind of bootable drive.

Hopefully Almond will continue to run while I accumulate parts (mainboard, RAM and a pair of hard disks) for a 64-bit replacement.

Terminal Thoughts

2007-03-20T22:19:00.000Z

I was going to email this to a few geek friends but at risk of being laughed at, I've decided instead to make a blog post out of it. This should keep people's comments together in one place and lighten the load on everyone's email inbox.

Here are some computers that I found interesting from a form-factor point of view...

Apricot Portable (1984)
Apple Messagepad 2100 (1998)
Psion NetPad (2001)

...if I had an unlimited budget, I would love to build something about the same size and shape as the Psion NetPad, with a VESA mount on the back (so it could hover at a convenient height above my desk) and PS/2 or USB keyboard and mouse sockets. Perhaps I'd put Bluetooth in there for those people who prefer cordless stuff. It would have a slot where a wireless LAN card or 100baseTX port could be plugged in. I would be tempted to put IrDA on there and an RS-232 port. On-board software would be limited to an X server (or perhaps a VNC viewer), NAS to serve up an on-board speaker (and headphone socket) and perhaps a full-screen terminal emulator (VT-102 with xterm colour support).

I could use a pad like this from the sofa (using just a stylus) or on the desktop (with a mouse and keyboard, as an adjunct to my main desktop computer). There are still applications where a simple terminal (text or graphics) would suffice. I often see PCs doing a job that's better suited to something like a Wyse 30. I suppose IT people deploy what they know best, or what they can explain easily to the bean counters. It would be interesting to see if anyone bought something like the terminal I have in mind though.

What would you add, change or remove?

Making connections...

2007-03-09T06:09:00.000Z

During a recent email conversation with Joe Futrelle on the subject of supercomputers, cryptography surfaced as "the granddaddy of all parallel applications". Naturally enough this lead directly to Bletchley Park, the Bombe, Collossus and Tommy Flowers.

Eventually I tore myself away from reading about supercomputers to study for a presentation that I have to give on Monday about "what I might like to do when I grow up". I've always been interested in telecommunications and telephony and have even managed to find work repairing domestic payphones, small PABX and GSM base station radios in the past. Being a lineman would be ideal in many ways (outdoors, change of scenery every now and again, plenty of wires to twist) but there are few things as dangerous as a fat man up a ladder (I have the hospital receipts to prove that). With that in mind I opted for Central Office Technician, which is an American way of describing a technician who works in a telephone exchange.

During some background research, I found myself at Wikipedia reading about TXE series of British telephone exchanges and sure enough, there's Flowers again. In the TXE (as in Colossus) he was opposed to the use of relays, favouring the use of purely electronic valves (vacuum tubes). I like relays because in many cases I can hear, or even see them work and they're easy to test. I like valves because they're fast, they glow, they sound nice and they are forgiving of the occasional antenna mismatch. I have the luxury of no longer depending on either to switch my telephone calls. It's a shame that I never got to meet Tommy Flowers.

Serious Toys...

2007-02-23T23:50:00.000Z

I recently sent an email to some of my geek friends when I stumbled across video of Joe Futrelle reading about a "Mildly-Parallel Palmtop Array". This made me laugh a lot.

It wasn't until after I'd fired off the email message that I realised he's not far from here at NCSA (hands up if you remember Mosaic) in Urbana. NCSA seems to be connected with the University of Illinois, home of (amongst other things) the Turing cluster, which sprang to mind as an example of U of I having "interesting toys" during a recent discussion about my search for a bachelor's degree programme. I was reminded of that irreverent turn of phrase when I discovered that some geeks there had built a Playstation 2 Cluster!

I've been interested in parallel systems for a while, but the closest I've been was an Intel Paragon that I once stuck my nose into. As a geek I'm interested in the nuts-and-bolts realisation and the challenge of writing software that spreads well across parallel processors. As a human being I'm interested in how this stuff can be applied to tasks that really help people.

Pod People...

2007-02-22T04:02:00.000Z

Sandisk Sansa m250 flash MP3 player Just Works™ with NetBSD. Mount it like any other disk drive, copy MP3 files to it, unmount and rock out (or something ;-) An Apple iPod Mini works provided I have gtkpod around to beat it over the head with. I've been thinking of making a short series of podcasts myself, but I lack suitable recording hardware. There are some nice recording devices around (24 bit 96 kHz anyone?) but they all seem to cost upwards US$ 400. What little spare money I have laying around is already earmarked for fast IrDA adaptors and new disk drives (tinman is officially full). Other items higher on the "gear to buy" stack include a Socket 939 mainboard and suitable RAM. Perhaps I should sniff around for a Sony Walkman Pro (analogue's good enough for BBC Radio Gloucester, it's good enough for me! :-)

I'm on telly!

2007-02-09T03:48:00.000Z

Not broadcast television though thankfully (although that might account for the move towards wider screens. ;-) This afternoon I finally got around to trying a video capture card in tinman (500 MHz AMD K6-2). I connected a VCR that was sitting nearby, shoved in a tape containing a short presentation that I gave in college on Wednesday and FXTV played the incoming video smoothly in a window. I have yet to test the card's RF tuner and haven't tried capturing video to disk or grabbing individual frames. The card is a Hauppage WinCast/TV and works courtesy of NetBSD's bktr driver.

Ballphone...

2007-01-30T19:39:00.000Z

Our five-year-old Vtech 2.4 GHz digital cordless phones are starting to show their age a bit. The keymats have worn out and sometimes the battery seems to lose contact with the body, ending a call rather apruptly. Resisting the temptation to buy a crate of No. 706 or 2500 sets, I started looking at wireless VoIP handsets (why buy a cordless phone that will fight with my wireless LAN when I can buy one that will use it?). Pictured above is one example from Belkin, programmed to work with the Skype service. Skype would let me buy a British telephone number and point that at my phone, so that people at home could call me without paying international rates. I would prefer one that used open standards such as SIP instead of Skype's proprietary protocol and I've not had any luck trying to add money to a Skype account. One important feature I'm looking for is the ability to choose between trunk lines, which would let me route one through an analogue adaptor into our ordinary (POTS) line, for local and inbound calls from the PSTN.

Straw Poll Results

2007-01-28T21:00:00.000Z

The permission slips are all in, so here are the results of my most recent straw poll. The question posed was "What is the geekiest thing you have done in the past month?".

Chris

Hmmm... that would be either stripping jacketing off 10+ feet of CAT-5 cable to braid the individual strands and make speaker cable out of it, or maybe sitting in front of a vintage McIntosh CD player and a new Pioneer DV-somethingorother swapping the same CD back and forth, hitting play, and running back to my listening position to see which player I liked better. never did decide. Very different sound from each, however. Which gets me thinking - I need to do more listening tonight!

Helen

If you mean techno geek, nothing.
If you mean green geek...everything! Probably taking stuff home from the office to recycle.

The software I use at work prints half a page of rubbish at the end of every transaction. Before I arrived on the scene they were all being thrown away. Now I print things on the other side. Still a waste of toner and electricity though <shrug> - Andy.

Jeff

I don't know what the geekiest think I've done in the past month is, but hiding my blogspot blog address behind my own domain name, and converting all my filesystems from ReiserFS to SGI XFS, probably rank somewhere near the top!

Jim

I've looked at the source code of a co-worker's website and noted how they could have made it easier on themselves if they had used CSS instead of tables. I almost took it one step further and created the CSS for them, but I am incredibly lazy...

Marty

I attempted to tune a friend's piano - what a disaster! I spent about three hours, and it was only marginally in better tune than when I started.

Mike

Spending 2.5 hours setting up a 5.0 surround sound system only to think when I was done that I should take all the speaker wires down and upgrade.
Spending 3 straight hours playing Neverwinter Nights 2.
Spending god knows how much time reading instruction manuals for various wireless equipment just cuz I was bored.

Nige

I made a tall, thin vertical structure using dry stalks of cereal plants.

A straw pole perchance? - Andy :-)

Rob A.

Frantically disassembled every DVD player, Satellite TV receiver, wireless bridge, ADSL router, etc. in the house to attach a TTL to serial converter to it and see what sort of things are hidden from the average user.
Conclusion: Lots.

Shelly

Probably the hours i spent trying to get SSH running on the...web server, since FTP is blocked on campus. the problem is that my server doesn't have a true public IP address, and is using a redirect on the MIS equipment that specifies port 81, meaning I can't specify port 22 for SSH. still haven't solved that problem.

sshd on port 81? - Andy

Stu

Well, last week I put on this tight rubber suit, got down on all fours and.... Hold on... I thought you said Gimpiest.
My mistake.
Forget I said anything....

Wireless...

2007-01-19T09:09:00.000Z

Working: Atheros AR5005G 802.11abg chipset on a D-Link DWL-G510 PCI wireless network card (PCI 168C/001A) under NetBSD-current. My wife will be pleased that she no longer has to step over cat5e at knee height! :-)

Things that work...

2007-01-06T03:35:00.000Z

Around 04:15 this morning I achieved something that I've been meaning to try since I first saw it done in the early 1990s: I connected two computers (in this case NetBSD hosts) together using a serial DTE-DTE "null modem" cable and built an network connection between them using SLIP.

It seems to be a commonly-held belief that SLIP is obsolete. This may be because dial-up Internet service providers usually use PPP instead of SLIP. The simplicity of SLIP appeals to me though, not least because I know the payload between the machines is strictly IP. With the help of Hauke Fath and Matthias Scheler, both from the netbsd-users mailing list and general encouragement from the inhabitants of #netbsd on freenode.net, I reached a point this morning where I could ssh from either machine to the other over the serial cable.

Aside from saving me the job of running new UTP cable around the room, it opens up to me new possibilities with legacy hardware and especially some embedded control boards that I plan to use in various attempts to take over the world.

Note to self: I had to put the following in /etc/ifconfig.sl0 ! /sbin/slattach -h -s 115200 /dev/tty00 inet 192.168.3.129 192.168.3.128 up
...but with the IP addresses reversed at one end of the cable.

Things that don't work...

2007-01-04T09:43:00.000Z

This is just a reminder for myself. The following things don't seem to work on NetBSD/i386 3.1:-

~~Atheros AR5005G 802.11abg chipset on a D-Link DWL-G510 PCI wireless network card (PCI 168C/001A).~~
Western Digital MyBook 320 Gbyte USB/FireWire external hard disk.
Nice nameless ME-340U2F USB/FireWire enclosure with DVD-RAM or hard disk inside. Works with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM and USB though.

JavaStation

2006-12-02T05:54:00.000Z

For a while I've had my eye out for a JavaStation.

Sun Microsystems were one of the few companies that seemed to appreciate diskless workstations years before the whole "Network Computer" (NC) fad made it fassionable. I don't know much about the Sun 1 and 2 series of the early eighties, but by 1985 and the Sun 3 series, they were shipping diskless workstations and deskside or rack-mount machines that served up disk space to them. This continued to be an option into the nineties SPARC era, with the SLC and ELC workstations, which were built into 17" (26cm) mono monitors. The JavaStation series seems to have been a last gasp for diskless workstations from Sun, albeit running Java applications instead of unix ones. The JavaStation was killed off to make room for Sun Ray, a range of graphical terminals.

Historical interest aside, I bought a JavaStation NC "Krups" ~~because it's purple~~ so that I could potch a bit with diskless booting and because I'm told it can run NetBSD. Powering up Krups startles me somewhat. Rationally I know it's diskless, but when I push the power button the screen lights up but the box remains perfectly silent: no disks, no fans, no noise. It should be perfect in our front room playing Ogg/Vorbis or MP3 files through the stereo.

Missing Mainboards

2006-11-25T04:02:00.000Z

Melissa has a desktop PC with a 2 GHz Northwood Celeron microprocessor in it. Perhaps you flinched when you read the word Celeron, in which case you probably date back to the dismal Covington. The Northwood Celeron is just like the Northwood Pentium 4, but with a 128 Kbyte secondary cache on-chip. The chip is adequate for Melissa's current needs, but I'm very suspicious of the mainboard that came bundled with it. A suitable replacement board would be DFI's 865PE-ML, which takes an AGP display adaptor and would also let us add SATA hard disks. Unfortunately I've yet to find anywhere that still sells it. There's not a microprocessor upgrade path much beyond 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 (512 Kbytes secondary cache would probably help). There are faster Northwoods and also Prescott, but we're aiming for a working computer, not a toaster oven. Perhaps it's time to buy her an Intel Core Solo and a mainboard with an upgrade path to Core 2 Duo. Hmm... if I buy her a Mac Mini and put an REM sticker over the Apple logo... ;-)

Human-Computer Interaction

2006-11-15T17:02:00.000Z

I remember when my friend Stu told me about the Macintosh, its graphical user interface and how would change the way that people interact with computers. I was reminded of that conversation when I saw this presentation by Jeff Han (you'll need sound and video capability to watch it).

Space...

2006-11-11T01:46:00.000Z

Disk space that is. I finally got around to disassembling the SnapServer 1000. I would like to have words with the person who designed it because the disk is mounted upside down (generally not recommended). The tiny cooling fan didn't go round when I powered up the snapserver. That could be because it's thermostatically controlled, or it could just be because it wore out. I still have some more tests to do, but if the board is still useable, it's going in a box with a larger fan and perhaps a temperature alarm. If I can mount the disk on a NetBSD box, there's a chance I might be able to recover the data. It's a Maxtor though.

NotPad

2006-11-09T00:46:00.000Z

That GPX-2 thing reminded me of the Psion Teklogix Netpad, a compact tablet that looked quite promising. It could benefit from open-source system software (pref. NetBSD), from an analogue thumbstick and some buttons ...and from not having been discontinued. :-/

Dear Father Christmas...

2006-11-08T21:09:00.000Z

Scary Bob says I need a Gamepark GPX-2. I would like to see a 640x240 display (for 80-column text) and a USB controller so that I could plug in a keyboard, mouse, 802.11b adaptor, serial ports, disk drives and other strange things. It would also be a good idea if they made it reversable (like the old Atari Lynx: so that left-handed people could (if they so wished) just rotate it 180 degrees to have the joystick on the right. Even without these tweaks, if someone donated one, I'd happily potch about with it. If only I were ready to write X clients, I could try my hand at some programming again!

Rotten Apple?

2006-11-08T01:07:00.000Z

I was in a meeting yesterday with a tutor from a community college. He visibly flinched when I pulled out an old clamshell iBook. It turns out that the vintage of the laptop wasn't the cause of his evident discomfort: it was the Apple logo. "It's the thought of the Apple environment" he said.
"The environment is determined by the system software," I pointed out "and as you know I don't run MS Windows or the MacOS. To a large extent unix is unix, whether you run it on a PC, Mac, SPARCstation or whatever." I was wasting my breath of course, as long as that Apple logo was on the case, he wasn't even going to prod it with a pokey stick. Naturally he's an I.T. lecturer. It's even more true since Apple moved to Intel processors: they're just nice PCs with perhaps manky firmware. What makes an Apple computer a Macintosh is the MacOS, which is pretty and easy to use. If I had a Mac capable of running it, I'd probably use it the way I use the old 300 MHz iBook: as an X terminal with a little convenient local intelligence.

UNIX® is a trademark of The Open Group.

wait(1)

2006-11-08T00:24:00.000Z

I have not abandoned this blog, really. I just haven't been doing much with computers lately. I still check my email, browse the Web a little and chat on IRC, but it's mostly been in #hamradio or #photogeeks and computer has just been a way to get there. The content of the emails mattered, not the program that I used to read them. The Web pages were interesting, I didn't notice the browser. I have a list as long as my arm of things that I should be doing to various computers, but what little free time I have is spent entertaining my daughter. While she's napping, I'm working on things more interesting things than computers.

Fibre Vs Financial Constipation...

2006-10-07T04:45:00.000Z

Peter Cochrane talks a lot of sense. I had seen him on the telly in Britain of course, but I was really struck by an article that I read in 1997 (published some time before, I found it in a journal in EIU's reference library) which explored the benefits reaped from BT's adoption of single-mode fibre for long lines. Strangely I still find myself getting into copper Vs fibre arguments with people today. I recently had a new copper pair dropped to my home. The major cost of that operation was labour (Illinois Bell foot the bill anyway) and the very capable lineman could just as easily have run a fibre to the jack as copper, but there's nothing up the pole to connect a fibre to because everyone gets copper and that seems to be just accepted. Is it insulting to suppose that they just don't know any better? Is that the telco's fault? I had a telephone call the other day from a former boss. She had lost (amongst other things) her DSL modem and 10baseT card in a lightning storm. I could order her a 10baseFL card for less than US$ 20, but again there's nowhere to plug it in.

Something I've noticed both in Britain and the U.S. is a fairly consistent tendancy for businesses to choose a low up-front cost every time, even if that means higher ongoing expenses and a much higher final total cost. I tell them they could invest a bit more up front to save a lot of money in the long run, but it's no good: their eyes glaze over and all they see is the ticket price. In fairness, it may be that the recurring costs are somehow "less visible" than the initial purchase price and are perhaps easier to sneak under the RADAR. A month ago today, Mr. Cochrane touched on this in his article No more copper - fibre rules, which includes my Quote of the Month: "It was as if the whole industry lost the plot overnight!"

Bring your Brolly

2006-10-03T22:29:00.000Z

This storm knocked out power at home from about 23:30 to 03:50 CDT. There was a fair amount of debris (mostly small branches) laying around on the roads and apparently some people had their cars or houses mashed by larger tree limbs. The ComEd (Commonwealth Eddison) repair crews were already out working to restore power by the time I got home from the factory (I left early because the lights were out there too). It was a timely reminder that I need some uninterruptible power supplies. I'm leaning towards APC BackUPS Pro because they seem well supported on unix. I'm not sure whether to get a single larger one (more efficient, but all my eggs would be in one basket) or a few smaller ones. I should probably get at least one smaller one to plug the DSL gear into.

Telco Torment

2006-10-03T01:19:00.000Z

When my wife and I first moved into the flat ("appartment") that we live in, I called the telephone company to check ISDN pricing. ISDN is the worldwide standard for digital telephone lines. Basic Rate Interface (BRI, the ordinary domestic version) provides two channels that can be used independently for voice or data calls. My wife could be chatting on the telephone (using one channel) and another channel would be free for me to either place a telephone call of my own, or connect to a remote computer or the Internet. I understand that in some parts of Europe, if you order a new telephone line you get ISDN by default. Sadly in the U.S. ISDN seems to have been marketed just as a business data circuit and priced accordingly. When I called to ask how much residential ISDN was, I was told "you can't have that".

When we moved in, broadband wasn't an option. Today we have a choice of cable Internet or DSL. A couple of friends had shared their DSL horror stories, but at least with DSL I could get some idea of pricing: US$ 156 +ehft for the first year and about US$ 360 thereafter. I was also familiar with DSL having done a few installs at various sites where it worked well. I ordered it in for the start of October and so yesterday evening found me wrestling with Cat5e and wall warts. In Charleston ICTC (now Consolidated Communications) thoughtfully provided a sheet of paper with all the important information: username, password, DNS, default route and so on. Here however, the local telephone company is AT&T (who swallowed SBC, who swallowed Ameritech) and to get a username and password, the customer has to log into a Web site that only works with MS Internet Explorer (and I'm told "perhaps Safari"). If you run BSD, Linux or just want DSL for VoIP, then you can't have that™.

Something Snapped...

2006-09-21T00:26:00.000Z

I advise a non-profit organisation that has a small LAN with seven permanent workstations, a NetBSD box and a few network-attached devices including a fancy network printer/photocopier thing. When I first arrived on the scene, it was a peer-to-peer LAN cobbled together from stand-alone PCs, one of which held files that the other workstations shared. Significantly some of those files belonged to a rather sad (but mission-critical) database that I have yet to weed out. Since the PCs all ran MS Windows, they'd crash, hang or generally freak out from time to time and when that happened to the machine that hosted the database files, everyone using the program was pretty much stuffed. In leiu of a file server (which wasn't in the budget) we stuck a Quantum Snapserver on the LAN to host the files.

Fairly high up the list of things that I don't enjoy are voicemail messages that begin "We can see the folders, but all the files have disappeared..." One staff member claims that the files fell victim to a virus, which is a very real risk with MS Windows, but the Snapserver tells me that its disk has no filesystem, so I'm more inclined to suspect its disk gave out. There were backups of course, but they weren't as fresh as I would have liked. Frustratingly I had intended to make a full backup while I was on site installing the last workstation, but at 22:30 I decided that it could wait. You know what they say about the road to hell. :-/

I may repair the Snapserver as a convenient place to dump workstation images and things, but I'm ready now to build an actual fileserver. I shall resist the temptation to find a Netra T1 AC200 and probably use a PC instead. I'm thinking duplexed SATA drives, ample RAM and the all-important tape drive for backups. Servers should be rack-mount, but it would be less expensive to buy an ordinary desktop case and put it on a shelf. In a properly crafted network, the fileserver would have a 1000baseT link to the office switch. The workstations have 100baseTX and so no workstation would be able to saturate the file server's network connection. An upgrade for the office switch will have to wait though because the fileserver itself has to be paid for first.

MS Windows Surcharge

2006-09-09T04:32:00.000Z

Last Saturday was a nightmare. New MS Windows XP installation discs absolutely refused to boot on the new workstation. An older XP disk would boot quite happily, but wouldn't accept the new product key. NetBSD would boot and install without a problem. I wasted the whole afternoon and evening on-site before I managed by nefarious means to get the new instance of XP installed (no, the disc never booted). I should charge danger money every time I have to work with MS Windows.

"Fork bomb"

2006-08-30T05:34:00.000Z

Sometimes I start what should be one simple job only to find that it spawns five more. For various reasons, I reached a point where I needed a machine with the most current stable release of NetBSD. .oO( No problem! ) I think, I have a couple of spare PCs laying around. I grab one: a full-tower ATX box that turns out to have a 366 MHz AMD K6-2 on a Gigabyte GA-5AX mainboard, 64 Mbytes of RAM and a 6 Gbyte Quantum Bigfoot ATA hard disk. The machine wouldn't boot from CD-ROM and someone had password protected the NVR ("CMOS settings"). Hmm... well I should be able to boot from a couple of floppy disks and then install the operating system from CD-ROM. The only trouble is, I don't have any floppies laying around... well, not 3½" ones. Curiously I have a box full of 5¼" right next to me. I don't use floppies much these days: this being the 21st Century and all I don't put floppy drives in the LAN workstations that I build, and I'm reticent about even putting optical drives in them. Most have just a hard disk. I give up on the floppy idea and decide to wipe the NVR (which I'll have to do eventually anyway). A couple of things become apparent once I have the case open and the machine on my lap:

floppy disks wouldn't have helped anyway, since the floppy drive (which turns out to be a SuperDisk drive) isn't connected to anything,
the NVR battery is directly under the display adaptor and
the microprocessor cooling fan doesn't spin freely and is hot to the touch.

My list of things to do on that machine just went from "Install NetBSD-3.0.1" to "Buy some thermal compound, fit a new heatsink and/or fan, whip out the display adaptor, clear the NVR, replace the display adaptor, whip out the floppy drive, fit a blanking plate, reassemble the machine and then Install NetBSD-3.0.1". It's a good job I'm not billing anyone for this: my time would cost much more than the machine's worth.

I'm happy because...

2006-08-28T23:42:00.000Z

I arrived at work, pressed the power button on my monitor and nothing happened. No display and no power light. I pushed the power cable firmly into the back of the monitor and checked that the other end was plugged into the power strip (I'm not important enough to warrant a UPS ;-) YES! The dim, fuzzy monitor that has been torturing my eyes for the last 2½ years finally bit the dust! Joyously I called the friendly I.T. chap and had him bring a new monitor. The new one's so bright I feel like I need tanning goggles. 8-) I think there is a good chance I'll be able to actually read sales orders now!

Application Server

2006-08-22T04:58:00.000Z

I hope to build an application server that a few graphical terminals will connect to. This will need more RAM and more i/o and memory bandwidth than the machines I've been building of late. A slightly faster microprocessor would help too. I had been looking at various Intel Core Duo chips because of their low power consumption (and presumably low operating temperature). They're expensive at the higher clock speeds though and I haven't found a mainboard that really suits the application. Perhaps that's just as well because another kind family member has offered up a 1.8 GHz Athlon 64 chip. Although has a single core, less secondary cache and a higher TDP than the Core Duo, the ability to run 64-bit code is nice and AMD's HyperTransport should really help with the i/o bandwidth. It's a Socket 939 chip, so it has a 128-bit RAM interface, so there's plenty of memory bandwidth too. I have a few friends with Asus A8V mainboards who speak highly of them. The A8V has SATA and a 1000baseT port, both of which suit the application. Unless I find something very similar with PCI-express, an A8V board may be the way to go.

The Pentium Pro

2006-08-22T01:59:00.000Z

The Pentium Pro was a much-maligned microprocessor. At the time of it's release MS Windows was still riddled with 16-bit code and because the Pentium Pro was optimised for 32-bit code, people didn't see the performance increase that they were expecting unless they were running better system software. Pentium II fixed this perceived "problem" by speeding up old, 16-bit code. It also moved the secondary cache back out of the microprocessor package, which meant that it could only run at half speed. Pentium II added MMX to the P6 core and also introduced Slot-1, which skeptics viewed as a blatant attempt at vendor lock-in (because Intel's competitors weren't allowed to make Slot-1 chips). A kind family member who knows of my affliction for old hardware recently donated a Pentium Pro along with a baby AT mainboard. I've bid on an AT mini-tower case on eBay and if I "win" the auction, I'll build a machine around it, perhaps a graphical terminal for another project that I'm working on.

LAN Workstations

2006-08-22T01:08:00.000Z

Doris' Workstation may be the last of the batch. They're based around VIA EPIA M10000 miniITX boards that have a 1 GHz C3 Nehemiah chip soldered directly to them and a modest heatsink and tiny fan already fitted. I specified Nehemiah because the FPU runs at full speed, unlike earlier C3 Ezra chips. The boards make ideal LAN workstations because they have almost everything built in: VGA, USB, Firewire, sound, ethernet and so on. There's also a (32-bit, 33 MHz) PCI expansion slot where odd things can be added later. We ordered 1 Gbyte RAM along with the board. Screw it into in a microATX desktop case along with a hard disk and perhaps a DVD-RAM drive, and there you are: instant LAN workstation. One slight frustration is that I can't seem to order the InWin D-500N any more, so we get the almost identical D-500T, which has audio ports at the front. I'm not going to connect them because things look neater with the speakers plugged in around the back. Perhaps the front audio ports would make sense in a call centre if people were plugging in headsets, or in a lab where students might plug in headphones. It's a small complaint, but I'm a perfectionist. The C3 consumes very little power and unlike a lot of x86 chips don't waste a lot of that power as heat. That makes for reliable LAN workstations, which is handy because the site they're installed at is 150 miles (240 km) away. Another nice side effect is that they're quiet. One user reported recently that visitors to his office couldn't believe his machine was switched on until he wiggled the mouse and his monitor lit up!

Welcome!

2006-08-22T00:22:00.000Z

I still find myself potching about with computers quite a bit. That's what this blog (for want of a better word) is about. It's supposed to serve double duty, being both...

a place for me to save notes that I can refer back to when I find myself thinking things like .oO( which X server did I use with that card again? ) and
somewhere that I can point people at once, so that I don't keep bombarding their email inboxes with mainboard questions.

Don't expect to find anything of interest here if you're not a hardware geek.