Making the new disk bootable was the quite hard part: the floppy drive of the server turned out to be completely broken, not reading/writing disks. A scsi cd/dvd drive I added could make the machine boot from CD, but took ages to read the rescue cd, sounding like it had serious reading problems. So I used an ide cd-rom drive (but I had to disconnect one of the ide harddisks first to be able to use this), which the machine did see, and used that to make the whole system bootable again. It took a while of working, but I have a working server again.
2007-04-17 (#)
I bought a new 400G disk at MyCom yesterday. I thought I had to setup the logical volumes all over again because the total size would grow above 1T but that maximum size is the maximum size of one logical volume. So just moving the /scratch volume off the suspect disk and on the new disk was an easy operation using the lvm howto part on removing an old disk. Now to change disks so I can boot from that new disk .. and making it bootable first.
2007-04-15 (#)
Friday the homeserver developed a problem in one sector of /dev/hda, a Maxtor disk that's been in there since September 2003. The sector was in the bitmap of a reiser filesystem (via lvm) that did not want to mount for this reason. I started a complete reiserfsck on it as a last resort to get that sector rewritten. After 39 hours the complete filesystem check was done, that sector rewritten (and at that time remapped by the drive). The /scratch volume is available again, but I'll buy a new disk for it anyway, to avoid going through this several times.
2007-04-04 (#)
I always thought the network performance of Linux was great, but in testing the new ftp archive server at work I found out that was wrong. Hitting it with apachebench for massive downloads of the same .iso file resulted in kernel messages about dropped tcp connections. With a simple google search on "TCP: drop open request from" I found a page with Linux network performance tuning tips. Those tips improved things: iso images flew out at wirespeed (gigabit). Lots of concurrent requests for a small file are still an issue, those stuck at somewhere above 1600 hits/second, way below wirespeed. It will do for the moment ;)
2007-02-20 (#)
Sometimes Debian makes me go "aaaargh" a bit. When I visited Paris and wanted Internet access, I found out the pairing between my phone and the laptop had gone bad (all errors). Trying to delete the pairing and setting it up again gave a problem: there is no working bluetooth-pin application at the moment. Due to the dbus package being in transition, an attempt to install bluez-pin results in bluez-utils being removed (which means there is no bluetooth stack left running to authenticate in the first place). Google-fu to the rescue: Impossible to do pairing in Kubuntu shows that ubuntu users have the same problem and Dan V posted a solution how to build the command-line passkey-agent from the bluez-utils sources and use that to get a pairing again. I'm not the only one frustrated, debian bug 382269 shows more frustrated users.
2006-08-12 (#)
The harddisk in my laptop went bad, leading to the state where it did not want to recognize the disk at all. But I wanted my carefully built Linux install copied. The old freezer trick helped: the disk was readable again. It just confused the SMART data: 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 43 (Lifetime Min/Max 65530/65).
2006-08-04 (#)
Using wpa_supplicant it should also be possible to log in to 802.1x secured (wireless) networks. The library network at work uses this but only documents usage with windows and macos X. I decided to give it a try and after some fiddling I had a working setup: Solis-air access under Linux.
2006-04-02 (#)
I'm trying to reinstall windows 98 on one of my fathers oldest computers (a Pentium-75 with 96 Mb memory). This turned out to be more of a 'fight' than usual. The first harddisk has 2 partitions and uses PowerQuest Bootmagic to help them boot. I wanted to make an extra copy of the data on the DOS partition, so I wanted to boot the PLD rescue CD. Which shows up as bootable when this system boots, and then it skips this option and still boots from harddisk. Another bootable CD boots ok. The PLD rescue CD has an image of a floppy that can boot anything using Smart Bootmanager. So I start finding a floppy that is usable enough to boot that image. After several tries that works. I find out that the default settings of the PLD rescue CD don't work on a machine with slightly less than 96 Mb mem (yes, an old computer), correct bootoption: la. So, finally I was able to make a copy of the DOS partition. Next bit: trying to convince the windows 98 setup to only play with the windows 98 partition. It really wants to install on the entire first disk (yes, the monopoly position behaviour we know Microsoft for) but I fixed that by changing the partition type of the DOS partition to 'non-FS data' (type 0xda) using the fdisk tool on the pld-linux cd. And.. succes.
2006-01-25 (#)
I updated the Dell Latitude C640 laptop and linux page with the bits I used to get the Nokia 6630 working for at least obex filetransfer over bluetooth. It took a lot of hacking and trying to get this to work.
2005-11-28 (#)
Kudos to the PLD Rescue CD that helped me recover a non-booting Debian server easy (saturday morning, half an hour before the network at our booth at the computer fair had to work!).
2005-09-28 (#)
Ok, some compiling of Linux 2.4.31, pcmcia-cs 3.2.8 and orinoco 0.13e+patch later, it's running now, with working usbserial and wireless scanning. Updated the Dell Latitude C640 laptop and Linux page with the latest info.
2005-09-23 (#)
Uit nl.comp.os.linux.netwerken.. iemand die 'even' een hosting bedrijf wil beginnen om miljonair te worden en nog even wat tips nodig heeft hoe je zoiets eigenlijk moet beheren. Google groups: Toegang tot je server aan hosting gebruikers. Sterkte ermee! ;)
2005-06-02 (#)
Had another go at finding the ideal combination of drivers and patches for my laptop and wireless network scanning, and got it fixed. Documented it right away, getting the orinoco 0.13e drivers to work on the dell latitude c640 laptop.
2005-05-28 (#)
A nice article (ok, it's ment to be in humor, but it makes valid points) on Windows is rapidly approaching desktop usability. There are points that sound like articles of windows users reviewing Linux (hardware support problems), but there is also the valid point of the ease of adding software through package management compared to the hoops the windows user has to jump through.
2005-05-13 (#)
The iRiver ifp-795 arrived. It has everything you would expect from an mp3 player and some more (including options like timed radio recordings). By default, it only supports its own protocol for filetransfer (but there are linux drivers for this ifp protocol). I installed the UMS (USB mass storage) version of the latest firmware. I can now mount it using the usb-storage driver, so I can rsync stuff to it. The user-interface takes a bit getting used to, but the basic functions (play music!) are simple. It can also record from line-in or built-in microphone, I will experiment with that. I filled it with nice podcasts, and I listen to them.
2000-07-31 (#)
Helper script to play live shoutcast streams under Unix webbrowsers with xmms
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