Professional Geekism

Bizarrely, I’ve noticed that the Canonical-supplied Adobe Flash 10 plugin isn’t working as well as the Adobe-supplied version.

You could regard this as a possibly moronic statement at first, but there’s a little evidence to back it up. Firstly, I’ve been using the ‘adobe-flashplugin’ package provided via the Canonical Partner repository for some time. I think it works a heck of a lot better than Flash 9, and I’ve been much happier with the experience. That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, but at least Firefox doesn’t crash with every 3rd/4th Youtube video I play.

By standard of course, the Canonical Partner repository is disabled within a fresh Ubuntu installation. So when my girlfriend mentioned that the videos on Llewtube.com weren’t displaying, I wasn’t surprised to find that she was using the latest version of the ‘flashplugin-nonfree’ package:

sudo dpkg -l | grep flash
ii flashplugin-nonfree 10.0.22.87ubuntu1~intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer

Given that I could view the videos on the aforementioned website without a single issue, I went to check my plugin version:

ii adobe-flashplugin 10.0.22.87-2intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin version 10

So we’re supposedly using the same version of the Flash plugin, but from different packages. Would anyone like to explain why one package works and the other does not?

Getting around the problem was a simple task for her: simply enable the Partner repository by navigating to the Software Sources configuration utility (via System -> Administration -> Software Sources) and (after giving your password) checking the two ‘partner’ lines under the Third Party tab. If you don’t have them, you can add them (one at a time) with these two lines:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

(If you’re reading this, and you’ve not yet upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10; the bulk of this guide should work with 8.04 also. You will, however, need to swap out ‘intrepid’ for ‘hardy’! )

When you’ve enabled the partner repositories (check the boxes) it’s a matter of closing Software Sources and letting it reload the package sources when prompted. After that, simply open a terminal and paste in the following:

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree && sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

If you restart Firefox, you should now be sorted. If in doubt, search in Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic) for ‘Flash’ and see what is (or isn’t) installed.

I’ve just had to setup Windows on a physical machine (shudder) to control and monitor the IOMeter disk benchmarks that are needed for my final year project. I didn’t try to run it in Wine, but I suppose I should’ve. Needless to say, I do require it to be perfect in order to maintain the fairness of my testing, so Windows was unfortunately my first choice.

Due to the age of the hardware I had lying around; an old Athlon XP-M system with an Abit NF7-S 2.0 and 512MB of ‘borrowed’ memory (thanks Ian), it was safe to say that it wouldn’t be any good installing Vista on it. Therefore I downloaded and burnt an XP ISO from my MSDN account and set about installing XP to the 200GB SATA drive I had (thanks Neillans, actually!)

The Abit NF7-S range of boards (particularly the V2.0) were highly-regarded during their hay-day: a testament to Abit’s awesome legacy. Not least for their inclusion of SATA ports way back in 2002, when Serial ATA was a relatively new feature on desktop boards. It even included basic RAID functions across the twin ports, courtesy of the Sil3112r chipset, which is still sold today if you look hard enough. When this was my main motherboard I actually ran a pair of 36GB WD Raptors in RAID-0 (scarily the same pair I use as my root drive now! I’m poor, OK?) and everything worked extremely well.. I never had a single problem with it.

But fast-forward to installing XP onto a SATA single disk, and I was stumped for a little while. Aside from the faff in convincing my floppy drive to work with the board (I’d previously disabled it via three, separate options in the BIOS — nightmare) I then had XP’s installation looping continuously, instead of booting from the HDD to continue with the second phase of the installation. It was almost as if XP was failing to write NTLDR into the MBR, somehow.

Now by convention on modern motherboards, SATA ports can typically be set to three modes: RAID, AHCI, and IDE. The latter of which is used purely for compatibility with older operating systems. However, the ‘RAID’ mode typically prevents that particular disk from being presented as a possible boot disk by marking it for use within RAID arrays only. It’s all fairly self-explanatory, however.

However, within the NF7-S’s BIOS, there are no such options. You can either enable/disable the SATA chipset, and optionally enable/disable the ‘SATA RAID ROM’, which you would believe would be only required if creating RAID arrays. I didn’t wish to use the RAID features and therefore I didn’t intend on ear-marking the disk as a RAID disk, as I wanted to boot from it. Sounds sensible, right?

Sadly, unless this ROM option is actually enabled, regardless of whether or not I wished to use any of the RAID features; the disks will not be presented as boot disks. Quite why there is even an option in the first place is beyond me! Because of this, the XP installation CD was failing to find a suitable boot disk and was therefore intent on looping endlessly through the first phase of the installation process. Fun times…

It has since occurred to me just how far SATA adoption and usability has actually come in the last 5-6 years. With most chipsets now natively including anything from two to eight AHCI SATA ports, as well as incorporating much better integration into the BIOS menus. Similarly, with natively AHCI-aware operating systems such as Linux, Solaris (and friends), many BSDs, Vista (and Windows 7!) now becoming largely common-place, there are few reasons for any of the IDE-compatibility options any longer.

That is, unless you’ve only got a single-core processor, 512MB of memory and an old, awkward (but great) motherboard. I just wish the IOMeter devs would consider creating a GTK+/QT4 front-end for dynamo!

I’ve been running a m0n0wall router for some time now. The build and design of the machine was meant to be documented on the ‘RoutITX’ page of this blog, but I’d never gotten around to finishing it off. I may do this now that I have more time, but I’m not promising anything…

Even so, due to the impressive compatibility of the Sony Ericsson K800i and Linux, and the subsequent lack of the same DHCP/CDC USB Ethernet adapter functionality in the K850i, I thought it’d be quite cool to see if the K800i could be configured as a back-up WAN interface within m0n0wall.

So I fish my K800i (now retired, although I wish it wasn’t) out of its resting place, find a USB cable, and plug it into the back of the m0n0wall machine. No new interface appeared on the ‘assign interfaces’ page, so I restarted it. Still no new interfaces. Upon checking the kernel messages in the log, I found these lines pertaining to the CDC USB Ethernet device:

Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: device_attach: cdce0 attach returned 6
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: could not find data bulk in
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson K800, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2

Which, as a Linux geek, confused me somewhat. Google turned up a number of results for ‘cdce0′ problems or ‘attach returned 6′ regarding various other drivers, but only one really addressed the issue in particular, albeit for a much older SE phone. You’ll notice that there haven’t been any replies, either.

A former colleague pointed me in the direction of a patch that was submitted around October 2008 which enables the proper handling of the CDC USB device within the Nokia N80. Hopefully it should help, but it may be some time before the patch filters down to m0n0wall.

This is just one of those times when I wish I’d followed the world of software development a little more.

My domain’s been around quite some time.. Not exactly like this in its current guise, but I’ve had the domain for a number of years now. As a result, I’ve also often become quite frustrated by finding my own ramblings/moans/whinges on Google’s listings, in the search for solutions.

So here’s an experiment. A phrase that I know yields no results on Google (as of this posting date):

Rachel Jennison Harper.

I’ll update when Google does..

Edit: Google has now updated! In no more than 19 hours, too.

In addition to this, I appaer to have made a mini celebrity out of Miss Harper. Given the continued existence of this blog (and the long-standing back-up of Google’s search listings) she won’t be forgotten any time soon!

For those of you who don’t follow XKCD, you really are missing out. It’s just genius, and today’s comic really did tickle me.. (Click for a larger image!)

This really is a true story, and she doesn’t know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn’t worked for weeks.

Well, I laughed at least. And it reminds me of a famous euphemism, too!

Nick: “Jon, why have you locked your door?”
Jon: “I’m re-compiling my kernel!“

I absolutely adored my Sony Ericsson K800i. What a phone; everyone’s had one or used one at some point. Given that they’re quite long in the tooth now, you’d be hard-pushed to have not come across someone that had/has one.

So when the K850i came out, I was quite eager to get my upgrade. And so far there’s been only one real drawback to it, that I’ve found: using it as a modem.

When I first moved into my current abode, I didn’t have any ADSL for a few weeks. Predictably one can steal some wireless broadband, or one can attempt to use some form of mobile broadband. Before signing my life away for a few months, I decided to test my phone (which at the time, was the K800i) with Ubuntu. To my sheer delight, the phone presents itself as a USB Ethernet adapter, and Ubuntu’s network-manager simply sent a DHCP request and received an ACK. No messing about here: I had 3G broadband within 5 seconds of plugging the USB cable in!

So obviously when I attempted the same trick with my K850i, I was really quite dismayed to find that you can’t do this any longer. The USB Ethernet device is there (grep -i CDC /var/log/messages) but for the life of me, I cannot find a way to obtain a DHCP lease via the usb0 interface.

Yes, it works perfectly (and with HSDPA speeds, thanks to my city-centre location) if you use wvdial or one of its GUI front-ends (gnome-ppp worked well) and I’ve been able to connect like this..

But I can’t understand why the Sony Ericsson engineers would want to remove such a simple mechanism in favour of the greatest faff-about in history. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that’s managed to get this working.. Although I fear by the time I get an answer, I’ll be back on some ADSL goodness: HSPDA is alright in a pinch, but T-Mobile UK’s data network seems so heavily sensitive to peak times (I suspect insane levels of contention) and the latency is atrocious. Half a second? Ugh. That’ll be the Deep Packet Inspection they do…

Many people already know that I dabble with Asterisk on a daily basis. Our Linux distribution of choice here at work, also happens to be Gentoo.

Now, when updating Gentoo’s ‘world’ package base, you do get some problems occassionally. This is a downside to being ‘on the cutting edge’ and, it’s obviously no wonder why distributions such-as Ubuntu, Red Hat and SuSe, stick to well-tested release schedules.

Recently, after a well over-due profile update (from 2006.0 to 2008.0) and the following emerge -av –newuse –deep world command, Asterisk simply stopped working. No warning, and it took a while for me to notice.

Once I had noticed, it became apparent that something was really quite awry. Asterisk wouldn’t start via the init script (with has a seemingly immortal, and hideously annoying process), nor via just calling the executable. I eventually realised, with the help of this bug report and the /var/log/asterisk/full logfile, that Asterisk was failing to find the speex modules it required.

Long story short, as per the bug report, you need to downgrade (and mask for good measure) speex to 1.1.12 to retain functionality on anything older than a January/Febuary release of Asterisk 1.4.x.

The fact that Portage still only has Asterisk 1.2.x, means that unless you switch to using the voip overlay, you’re going to find this issue will affect you.

Oh Gentoo, how I love and hate you!

First thing’s first: AAAAAARGH!!! *waves arms in the air maniacally*

I’ve spent the evening getting my RoutITX project off the ground and into service. But to do this, I needed an ADSL2+ modem. So, rather than persist with using my Netgear DB834GT, I thought I’d try out a P660R-D1 from Zyxel. Simple little thing, only about £25, and claims to be able to do bridging to its (single) Ethernet port.

Can it hell. I’ve tried everything I can; it can sync the DSL to a lovely speed, but it can’t get any further than that.

What I’d like is a nice, small, cheap, ADSL2+ modem (preferably including Annex M) that does a perfect bridge, with good reliability and performance.

There’s got to be one out there? I’d love to know.

I’ve recently been building servers again. Aside from the usual 2U stuff, I thought I’d show a few pictures of the current project I’m working on. This 4U Supermicro chassis is destined to be used as our backup/storage server at the co-lo facility. VM backups, database backups, general file store, etc. etc.

Plenty of drive bays there (24 to be exact).

Here you can see how neat it is. Partly because of the good design of the case, and partly because of the tight integration with Supermicro’s own boards. The shroud that ducts air over the CPU also works wonders.

As you can imagine, it sounds like a jet taking-off when it’s going at full pelt. I wonder if co-los typically have an ‘upper noise limit’?

I’ll put more detail down about what I’m doing with it a bit later… I’m currently testing all manner of Solaris-based distributions (a learning experience in its own right) with some funky zpool configurations. More to come!

This isn’t quite work-related, but I feel it is relevant to my performance during term-time…

I have happened across some statistics collected “for demographic reasons” by my University’s Students Union, as a result of their routine swipe of your student card whenever you show up for any paid night at the Uni bar. You wondered what it was for, right? Well now I can tell you!

The sample I’ve acquired is an excerpt of the statistics collected for ‘Project Friday’ at Legends, on Friday the 2nd May 2008:

Year of Study Attendees
1: 65 (52.42%)
2: 33 (26.61%)
3: 19 (15.32%)
M: 2 (1.61%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Gender Attendees
Male: 97 (78.23%)
Female: 22 (17.74%)
Data not current 5: (4.03%)

Department Attendees
Computing, Engineering & Technology: 111 (89.52%)
Health: 5 (4.03%)
Business School: 3 (2.42%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Study Site Attendees
STAFFORD: 116 (93.55%)
THOMAS TELFORD SCHOOL: 2 (1.61%)
STOKE: 1 (0.81%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)


78.23% male!

I’ve long-wondered what the ratio of males to females on the Stafford campus really is, but it appears that we truly are screwed: out-numbering the girls by over 3:1. What’s scarier is that 5 of the ‘patrons’ weren’t even identifiable as male or female.

One could suggest that this would be a blessing in disguise for the female minorities of Stafford, however, with an overwhelming majority of the male attendees being first-year Computing and Engineering students, it could quite possibly the reason why they don’t bother coming in the first place.

Oh, and one last thing: WHO LET THOSE TWO SCHOOL KIDS IN?!

(And no, I don’t care if they’re female!)