An alternative layout

I can't sleep... so I spent more time with an alternative layout.

Here is the layout:

The visible parts: The main station, mountain track, freight and servicing area

The hidden parts: Mainly the ramps and the hidden station

The theme is a station at the end of a dual-track main line coming from East. At the south-west end of the station, the two single track lines split: One line takes a gentle slope down and escapes out of sight to the hidden station. The track is hidden behind the dam of the other line climbing a 1:40 grade along the north side (to get over the station tracks on the east side), swings around a mountain on a gentle 1:30 downgrade and disappears in a tunnel to reappear again as part of the two-track main line (I had to cheat somewhere to close the loop).

Note the track loop built into the freight area north of the station building. The freight area has a depot and loading ramp, as well as a judicious amount of uncouplers. Nearby is the main station building with platforms for travellers. There will be a few additional buildings, and a road that crosses under the tracks to the south. There might be enough clearance between the tracks on the north side to let the road continue, but there is a lot of track in the way, so I'd likely just let the road end at the station. The city that belongs to the station is not included in the layout and located to the south-west where we (sadly) need to leave space for the operator.

At the south-east side of the station a small locomotive maintainance and service area is ready to refuel engines with coal, sand, and whatever else is needed. This is also the home of the yard engine. In order to get from the maintenance area to the freight facility the yard engine needs to zig-zag accross the main line.

On the mountain in the south-east is the scene of a small village in southern Germany, complete with church and houses. In general, the landscaping and style of the buildings would be as found in the North Black Forest in southern Germany. The village has a small stop with station building on the mountain line that is served by the occasional "Schienenbus".

The inside of the mountain houses a helix that brings one track of the main line down to the hidden station. Because of clearance requirements and how the track ended up, the lower level is 19cm below the station level. In general I'm working with 11cm clearance between track levels. The track in the helix has a grade of 1:40, more than I wanted but there is just not enough space. Even though it's not consistently marked this way the lower level is of course completely invisible from the top.

The hidden station is accessed via the helix, as well as the single-track line mentioned earlier which gently slopes down mostly hidden from sight along the edge of the layout. The hidden station is built around another loop of track that works opposite from the surface one, so depending on the direction they are traveling, trains can change direction using the loops without the need to back up. The hidden station can hold 4 trains of moderate length.

The area in the lower left corner (south-east) is for the operator and guests. It measures roughly 120 by 60 centimeters. Just enough space for the controls and a stool.

The one thing I really like about this layout is that a lot of track is visible (contrary to my crazy digging action mentioned earlier), there's good opportunity for landscaping and watching trains as they go by. This is also a good play layout with the two reversing loops, the station, maintenance and freight facilities.

title company

We signed all the papers for the new house today. 90 minutes of initials, and signing your name. After 30 minutes, my signatures looked like a wild jungle of crooked lines.
The final stack of paperwork is 1 inch thick. All that's left to do is deposit a cashiers check with our down payment and out of pocket expenses by next Wednesday 3pm and escrow will close Friday.

Curiously, I'm not that excited. The whole morning has been quite anti-climactic. Loan docs arrived late and were revised again halfway through the sitting for clerical errors. I was a bit tired and annoyed.

I think it will be different by the time we move in. I'm really looking forward to taking over the house, painting (ok, not as much), moving in, unpacking, decorating, deciding what goes where, doing small repairs, ... and living there.

But first I'm taking off for a week in Seattle again. The next week the new roof will be installed. This will be fun. The HOA architecture committee conditionally approved the reroof, but I need to provide a sample of the material, and they are holding the approval until we legally own the house. Yay. More red tape...

Model train, IKEA coffee table and the best woman of them all

The best woman of them all suggested a while ago to build a small model train inside a coffee table in the living room, once we do have a living room that is big enough to do that. I am continously surprised by the ideas she comes up with.

I started considering how to do this. Magiker seems to be a good choice. Not too expensive, glass top, sufficient space between glass and shelf to do something interesting. 65x125cm useable space is too small for HO, even for a simple loop. But it's big enough for a small N scale layout. The sides need to be closed off, painted to match the rest of the table, to keep out hands of curious children. The best woman of them all requested I also properly landscape the inside of the table (well, duh of course). So far, so good.

Today, we talked about it again, and the best woman of them all was yearning for a desert setup instead. Sand, small stones, and cacti under glass. Similar to what we've seen a few years ago in a hotel lobby in Los Cabos. "How about doing both?", I blurted out. She looked at me. Smiled. And said, "... that's a great idea. Let's do that!"

I'm just happy to be married to the best woman of them all.

HO Layout in a small room

In our new house we have a small storage room that I'm planning to convert to my train room (and also run the server computers there). The room is 167x283cm. Enough space to set up a new layout of our Maerklin HO trains, but it's all very, very tight. I discovered a free track layout tool XTrkCad from sillub.com that works on Linux (and Windows, too). It's definitely dated by today's standards and compared to currnent tools available for Windows, but gets basic planning job done.

The theme I'd like to build is a small station at a double-track mainline with some side-tracks and engine maintenance facilities and a single track spur line that goes steep into the mountains. At the end of that line is a small rural station with a little freight and passenger traffic. I also definitely want a hidden storage area for trains. To make things a bit more interesting I figured I set the station at a 15% angle diagonally accross the available space.

The problems start with the fact that a 180 degree curve double-track is 105cm wide, so that leaves at most 55 cm on the side of the layout for the operator that does need to fit into the room as well.
In order to avoid too steep grades, I don't want to go above 1:40 on the main line (i.e.4 cm elevation gain on 1 m of track). That means my grades need to be at least 250cm long to get 10-11cm clearance. That is almost the full length of the room. Taken together it became clear very quickly that I need to pay very close attention to grades and clearances along the track, as well as use every centimeter of track I can get for elevation gain. This is going to be one heck of a mountainous layout.

The railroad builders of the railroads accross the Alps or the Sierra Nevada must have felt similarly...

Homeowners Association and Architectural Review

Oh the joy of Homeowners Associations (also know as "HOA"). They keep the appearance of the neighborhood uniform, no-one can endlessy repair cars on the sidewalk, deal with neighborhood complaints, enforce the rules and can do a good job of maintaining property values. They also maintain common facilities or landscaping. I really enjoy the pool, mature trees and landscaped grounds around our townhouse.
HOA's also can be a pain to work with if you are doing something a bit out of the ordinary. And you have to follow the architectural review process if you are making any changes to the outside appearance of the house that are visible either from the street, or from any of your neighbor's lots.

The association we are moving into seems to be particularly anal about enforcing their rules. On the other hand the neighborhood looks really good.

I will need to deal with the architectural review committee very soon, as we want to have the roof on the new house replaced before we move in, as well as install solar power as soon as is practical.

How much do you like YOUR realtor?

Talking to friends (and experiencing it ourselves), people are seldomly 100% happy with their agent. There is just too much at stake and you are obsessing over details that are important to you. Your agent might have slightly different priorities than you. In a perfect world, your agent is picking up on the vibe and delivers what you want.

Most full-time agents are probably sufficiently experienced and well-versed in the legal details involved with buying a house. Still, personal chemistry is really important, but how do you find the agent that is perfect for you?

Invite several agents and have them present their plan on how they would market your house, why you should choose them, and what they think are comparable homes to yours. The main objective here is not what they say, but how you feel about them as a person. Do they come across as slick or slimy? Honest or personable? Genuinely concerned about your priorities? You will work with those folks very closely for a few months, so listen to your gut. Listen closely. Clarify things that don't make sense to you.

There is a vast difference between an agent that says "I can sell your home!" and one that says "What is important to you?" Some agents are very aggressive how they market your home, some take a more laid-back approach. Some do an open house for you every weekend, others see them as a waste of time.

Bottom-line: Make sure you are compatible. If you are having a really good conversation over the proposal and the numbers end up in just about the right ball-park, you're in the right place.

What about commissions?

Clearly understand how the seller/buyer agent commissions work. Look at both the overall commission, but also the split between buying and selling agent. Apparently, it's customary to pay 3% to each agent, but I haven't met an agent here that actually proposed the full 6% of the sales price. The highest commission I ran accross while putting my house on the market was 5% (2% for selling agent, 3% for buying agent). This can vary dramatically from location to location. In some areas a 2.5% split is common. Sometimes selling agents take a very small commission for themselves, and pay 2.5-3% to a buying agent, resulting in a lower overall commission for you.

Jump Sky High!

Terrible picture quality, but this was fun!



Jump Sky High! is basically a warehouse filled with trampolines.




We also played Extreme Dodgeball on trampolines. My team lost. Lessons learned: Don't try to catch the ball unless you are sure you are going to hold it. It's not sufficient to dodge balls. You also need to hit players on the other team.

We are in contract!

Paying a little bit more than I expected, but we are in contract. Whee!
The transaction ended up with an agent doing dual-agency. A bit strange. I felt that, while the agent tried to be as impartial as possible, he did seem to favor the seller a bit. The warnings are true. Either way, I feel we paid a fair price for the house, even though, of course, I would have preferred to pay less.

I got bids from various roofing companies. Composite asphalt shingles are not as expensive as I feared (and we have a very simple roof, too). All bids came in clearly under $9000. But boy, so many new words to learn (gables, eves, ridge, valleys, ...), venting approaches to consider (eve venting, ridge venting, eye brow vents, and how that all compares to the pre-existing gable vents), material options to look at (do I care what color my roof is going to be? I never really thought about that. Grey, I guess...).

We'll get the new roof installed after close of escrow, probably in June.

The financing is making its way past the underwriters, I need to start looking for home insurance.

Meanwhile we are getting our house ready to go on the market. Richard is giving us good guidance and advice. New carpet will be installed next week downstairs. We're hoping we have everything ready, so we can go on the market by the end of next week. Hordes of unwashed buyers will run down the place, we will have multiple offers in the first 24 hours, ... oh wait, the boom times are over. Average time on the market these days is about 45 days. Houses either sell in the first 3-4 weeks, or it takes 3 months. There seem to be very few inbetween. I'm hoping we are in the first group. If everything looks good, the house is priced right, we should be. However, we'll know it only once we are on the market. Oh, the joy.

SpamAssassin not doing remote checks

I rebuilt chef a while ago, including a new version of SpamAssassin. The amount of spam I got immediately shot up to a level where less than 20% of spam was filtered. ok, I didn't train SA, and I'd like to implement per user training rules.

However, I did notice that spamd is not doing any remote checks. At all. zilch. The Wiki has the answer close to the bottom.

apt-get install libnet-dns-perl

For filtering by country see the country relay plugin.

fiber-cement tiles yield big surprise

We're moving ahead with our home buying adventure. Yesterday we had the house inspection in the new place. Three guys came out to look for termites, and do the property and roof inspections. Termite guy found minor infestation, no big deal. property inspector had some issues with how some of the electrical installation was done (the breaker box looked pretty chaotic to me), "this needs a complete relabeling job". Some circuit breakers where off, or only connected to one (!) wire. Very odd. Throughout the house he found little odd-jobs with the wiring, missing junction boxes in various places, cables that were just tied together with insulation tape, ...

However, the roofer dropped the bomb. "The roof is made of a material which is known to be defective. your tiles are warping, and I won't even give you an expected remaining life for the roof in my report." Ouch! Big surprise for all of us.

The roof is made from fiber-cement tile panels, which 15 years ago was advertised as a very high-quality roof. The shingles are made from a mixture of cement and cellulose fiber (i.e. paper), and are then coated to make them waterproof. Turns out this is a really bad idea, as the sun will burn off the coating over time. This became a huge issue ~10 years ago, lots of companies that made this material went out of business or even went bankrupt over this. Class Action lawsuits, settlements, you name it. There is one company left that apparently still pays out settlement money, ~25 cent on the dollar. Brand name is "Cemwood".

We're getting estimates for how much a new roof is going to cost. Those guys will be able to tell us which brand-name material was used and whether there is any hope to get settlement money. Of course we will use this in our price negotiations... We were contemplating whether a new roof is needed, before we install the solar power system. That question is now resolved.

And we are getting an inspection of the chimneys. The house has one gas- and one wood-burning fireplace, so I want to be sure there are no surprises in the chimneys, too.

We got a pony!

After many moons we did indeed get a pony!

Buying a house without an agent

Scary thought: Navigate the process of home buying without the help of an professional agent.

Turns out this isn't as scary as it sounds. Let's review what a buyer agent does for you to earn his (typical) 3 percent of the deal:

- Tour houses for sale with you

This seems to be by far the most time intensive, but also least skilled work in this set. When we bought our current home, our agent found homes we might like, arranged tours to show them, and accompanied Patricia (or me). We saw 40+ houses that way until we found the one we liked and eventually bought.

- Help write an offer and determine a fair price

The price question is probably the trickiest of the bunch. There is no regulation for home prices, aside from gut feeling, "what the market is doing", previous sales of comparable houses in the area, and some additional fudge factor. It's easy to spend too much, or not ask enough and leave money on the table. A good agent knows the neighborhood you want to buy in, knows of recent sales, and in what condition those houses where. A really good agent can find out how much horse trading happened during escrow and what concessions where made by the sellers during closing. The official sales price does not break out e.g. an allowance for old carpet.
A good agent helps write a compelling offer, with proper contingencies and makes sure the document is sound. In general, any conditions not in the offer can't be added to the sales contract later on.

- Negotiate with the selling agent

If an offer is accepted right away, you are probably paying too much. The offer/counter-offer game is common in real estate transactions. The agent helps getting the most for your money.

- Help with the closing and escrow process

The escrow process is full of stuff you need to take care of. Inspections, property records, dealing with the bank (well, that you have to do yourself, no matter what). And lots of signatures on closing day.


Pheww. That's a lot of stuff, and if you ask any agent they are going to tell you many more things an agent does for you.

Also, very often the agent doesn't actually get all of the money from their cut, they need to split with their brokerage firm. The difference between a $750,000 and $700,000 purchase in Silicon Valley translates to $200-$300 or less difference in take home pay for the agent on a commission north of $4,000. Assuming a sale value of $750,000, 1% real commission (after broker fees and expenses), and 40% taxes for the agent. 6% is over $40,000 for this transaction. Lots of money for me.


Here's my view:

- Tour houses for sale

Hmmm, I know my neighborhood. I want to upgrade within my neighborhood and don't want to move elsewhere. Patricia and I are going to pretty much every open house in the area, so we actually do know what's on the market, and in what condition the houses are.

- Knowing the right price to put into the offer

Houses are typically listed on the local MLS (mlslistings.com in the Bay Area). Some information is hard to get to if you are not a realtor. Additionally, most sites don't include history about previous purchases. For our area southsanjose.com has some good information. A bigger database, but not as up to date is the information at domania.com. They also offer an automated home valuation tool. From my experiments, that tools seems to come out a bit low. zillow.com has a cool UI, but tends to be a bit high with their prices.

Bottom-line, go with your gut and get as much information has you can. BTW, asking prices of homes currently for sale can be some guidance since in theory sellers would do the same research with their agents. But, in reality the exact asking price seems to be more the result of what the seller wants and their specific circumstances of the sale (sell fast, can wait, contingencies, etc.)

- Negotiate

I can do that. Some people feel uncomfortable with that.

- Closing and escrow process

A lot of that is boiler plate. You need to make sure all details are taken care of. Get a lawyer familiar with real estate transactions for the paper work, and make absolutely sure all inspections are done properly. The bank is going to ask for them as well in many cases.

Overall, not too scary if you are willing to do the leg work.

Update (2007/05/04):

Of course, I'm not the only one who came up with this idea. This blog entry gives some nice background and similar reasoning. fool.com has a nice section on home buying as well. Sponsored aptly by LendingTree. A quick overview of contract content is here.

transfering a domain from register.com

My main domain is up for renewal. 5 Years ago I spent 70 bucks or so with register.com for registration fees.

Since register.com still is charging a whopping $35 a year (down to ~$16/yr if you register for 7 or more years), I was looking for alternatives. My other domains are registered with GoDaddy.com, who are still not the cheapest but reasonable. I start the transfer process, get half a dozen emails to my domain contacts from GoDaddy, but don't hear anything from register.com. This morning I search through their site, and there is literally no mention of how to transfer a domain away from register.com (surprise). Eventually, I find the FAQ entry to obtain the "Auth Code". I need to call them. ok.

*ring*
*ring*
[cheery voice] "Hello, can I interest you in our content services?"
- No
"ok, how can I help you today"
- need auth code for domain transfer
[voice even cheerier] "ok, I put you right through"

*ring*
*ring*
[guy voice] "What is your domain name"
- I tell him. We go through the secrect question game.
[guy voice getting cheerier] "ok, how can I help you with your domain"
- auth code for transfer, please
"why are we talking about this?"
[I start to hate cheery guy]
- you guys charge $35, GoDaddy way less than $10. simple, no?
"we offer premium support, sure, there is a premium in price for that"
- I never called you guys for support
[Damn, how hard can it be to need support for a frigging domain?]
"I totally understand that. We don't want to loose you." [sure, I'm not costing them anything]
"I can offer you a substantial discount from our published prices. How about $35 for 5 years?"
[I'm speechless for a second. What are they thinking? I'm annoyed. This is a slightly better deal than what I'm getting at GoDaddy. However, I hate these bait tactics.]
- please just give me auth code
[so he does]
"but remember, you can always still accept this offer and GoDaddy will need to refund the money you already paid for the transfer, since they didn't actually provide the service." More heavy sales blurb follows.
- yeah, yeah, thank you

I hang up. I'm annoying and amazed at the same time. ... So, wait, I could call GoDaddy now and ask for the same price, otherwise I move all my domains to register.com. Now that would be fun, if that's how the game is played... hmmmmm...

Whee!

Interestingly, after NOT specifying Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE" the TV out on the new FX6200 card now works properly. TV out seems even a bit more crisp than with the old FX5200 card.

The channel switching problem when trying to record shows persists. I can watch live TV just fine, but all scheduled records fail with the error I posted yesterday.

I rerun myth-setup, delete all encoder cards and made sure that MPEG (PVR-500) is selected, then re-run mythfilldatabase --do-channel-upgrade. Now it works properly. I guess, 0.20 added a few fields to the capture cards that needed to be populated by mythtv-setup, even though it was all set up from 0.19 already.

No spontaneous shutdown for 24 hours. Replacing the video card really seemed to help. That's good enough for today. I'll worry about LIRC and ndiswrapper on the weekend.

grumpy powers down spontaneously

After I determined that the FX5200 in grumpy was bad, I swapped in an older Matrox card. I'm not sure if that's related, but Grumpy would not stay up for more than a few hours. It would just shutdown, similar to entering hibernate mode, particularly when I'm not doing anything on the system at that time. The problem is that I also can't wake it up, unless I hold the power button for 30 seconds or so. Only then I can power up again. and of course, I don't want it to shut down in the first place.

At first I suspected heat problems in the cpu. I tried cpuburn, within seconds got the cpu up to more than 90C until the kernel spew out temperature warning messages to the log and entered moduled frequency, i.e. ramps down the CPU frequency to reduce the heat. No such log entries exist from other shutdowns, so I don't think that's my problem.
When grumpy shut down again on me, I swapped in a new FX6200 card with TV out that I picked up today. So far it hasn't shut down on me. We'll see. If it's still up and running when I come home tomorrow I decalre victory and blame some interaction of the Matrox card with the motherboard. I'm not sold yet.

On a related note:
When I boot with the new card I get console output, so he physical connection to the TV works. However, as soon as X is enabled, the TV screen goes black. X is running because I can her the KDE login music, I just can't see anything. Frustrating.

grumpy very grumpy

The 300GB Maxtor drive now really had issues (heat?). On top of that the video card in grumpy died (heat?). At first it looked like the CPU was toast, since the box didn't even beep anymore. I got an Asus board with Celeron CPU. Should have gotten a P4, since the Celerons apparently don't support SpeedStep (though Linux seems to think otherwise). /proc/acpi is not terribly well populated on this board.

I had lots of trouble with getting 2.6.18-4 to cooperate. ndiswrapper is a no-go so far. nor is lirc. module-assistant is really cool.

I added www.debian-multimedia.org to my apt sources and spent most of last night watching apt getting dependencies, while at the same time copying the movie and media files from the old disk to the new 500GB disk I bought recently. No issues whatsoever with that disk yet, while the 300GB disk is was throwing CRC errors left and right. bad IDE cable? I'll test that later.

mythtv 0.20 now finally works with kernel 2.6.18-4-686 and ivtv 0.10.1. I cheated with the ivtv install and compiled straight from source, since the drivers are not available via m-a.

I fiddled with schema update issues a lot (basically reversing each failed update until the step no longer complained). After the update the channel line-up was a mess. I couldn't get recordings to work properly. They failed with

2007-03-20 22:45:51.701 TVRec(1): Changing from None to RecordingOnly
2007-03-20 22:45:51.718 TVRec(1): HW Tuner: 1->1
2007-03-20 22:45:51.798 Channel(/dev/video0): SetInputAndFormat() failed
2007-03-20 22:45:51.799 TVRec(1) Error: Failed to set channel to 3. Reverting to kState_None
2007-03-20 22:45:51.800 TVRec(1): Changing from RecordingOnly to None
2007-03-20 22:45:51.809 Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Scheherezade": channel 1001 on cardid 1, sourceid 1
2007-03-20 22:45:51.827 scheduler: Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Scheherezade": channel 1001 on cardid 1, sourceid 1

wiping out all channels, running mythfilldatabase --refresh-today --do-channel-updates seems to have helped. At least I got a recording going now. on channel 40. However, I still can't record from channel 2. Will try again tomorrow. I suspect the table wants the channel frequencies.

To prevent very nasty video distortion when watching or recording channels that air in HD, I switched the recording profile from 480x480 as originally recommended by mythtv to full-size 720x480. No more distortions when watching TV, I hope the same is true for recordings.

Sound was not a problem to my surprise.

The setup is a mess right now: No video card with Video-out support, so I have my computer screen in the living room. Bah.

I failed over the system to the 500GB disk using the find / cpio trick I mentioned earlier in this blog.

The End of Internet Radio? - Copyright Royalty Board is going nuts again

Bill Goldsmith from Radio Paradise my very favorite Internet Radio station
wrote about the latest attempts to put Internet Radio out of business. The royalty payments set by the Copyright Roalty Board are flat out ridiculous. Pay per performance (ie. for every single listener) is a flawed model. Internet stations get penalized twice compared to over-the-air stations, they not only pay for the additional bandwidth consumed, but also pay more royalties the more successful they are. Just because you can exactly measure how many people actually listen on the Internet shouldn't give anyone a blank check to cash in on that, especially not the greedy music companies represented by the RIAA and SoundExchange.

Successful stations like Radio Paradise with 1000's of concurrent listeners easily make it above the low bar of 159,140 "aggregate tuning hours" per month in less than a day even though they are a non-profit radio station. The CRB seems to be under the impression that "non-profit" is code for "not successful".

The analysis on the same page is even more chilling. While Radio Paradise is listener-supported and, I happily pay a contribution regularly, many other Internet radio stations are not. The analysis suggests that an ad supported radio station would have to pay royalties roughly equal to 100% of their revenues.

While I agree with Bill's gloom assessment of the situation I certainly hope there is a way for Internet Radio to survive, and be it by a crutch similar to the agreement negotiated in 2002 mentioned in Bill's post. Meanwhile, Congress needs to get their act together and reign in this craziness.

Success ... I think.

Phew. I spent a long time last night copying data off the old chef. One particularly annoying wrinkle was that after the parity rewrite, chef came up with unlean filesystems, and mounted them read-only. Including /. That meant, no logs could be written, and general unhappiness, which prevented remote logins. copying stuff out of chef via scp yielded a question every ~3.5 minutes, that the "host key of new-chef is unknown, is that ok"? In my 1am haze I dutifully typed yes every 3-4 minutes for an hour until the transfer was done.

This morning I thought about this more and figured that the only reason why it's asking repeatedly was that it couldn't write the host key to /root/.ssh/known_hosts and therefore when the ssh re-keys, it had to ask me again. Chef was still up this morning with read-only file systems and I still had to copy off 20GB of data, I didn't want to type yes all the time. I can't fsck the root filesystem while it's mounted read-only, and I was a bit concerned that chef might not come up again, when rebooting, so I mounted memory file systems over /root and /tmp:

mount_mfs swap /root
mount_mfs swap /tmp

The first parameter is just for the mount command to get some disk parameters, usually the special device of the swap partition on a local disk. Using "swap" forces mount_mfs to use a generic default. Useful for systems with no local disk.

I got all data transfered, decommissioned the old chef in the afternoon, and replaced the Athlon 900 motherboard and the two 160GB with a VIA M10000 board, 512MB of memory, and a 300GB disk. The disk is set up as one half of a raid1 mirror, so when I upgrade grumpy to use a 500GB disk as planned, I can use the 300GB in chef. Provided that disk passes a full-blown offline self-test via smartctl and a 8h stress test using multiple bonnie++ instances. The 500GB disk is going to get the same stress test before I put it in grumpy.

One immediately obvious benefit of the new chef is that it feels fast when using it with IMAP. A modern 1GHz CPU easily smokes a 5+ year old 900MHz Athlon. The memory is 4 times faster, too. And the whole system is quieter (mainly because the CPU fan on the Athlon was showing its age).

There's still lots of work left to do. I added features to Chef in small installments over 2+ years. But the basics (smtp, imap, web) are working reasonably well, so for now I'm happy enough with this that I'm going to watch some TV now.

chef bit the dust

While copying data off chef, OpenBSD panicked in the file system code and gave me a "map corrupted" error. That's not good I guess...

I got the family web site and my mail off in time, but I don't have high hopes for the rest of the data. Chef is currently undergoing another one of those wonderful 4 hourlong parity rewrite sessions.

In the meantime, I'm rebuilding all the needed functionality on the new chef.

Rebuilding Chef

Chef is old and needs a rebuild, and it's raid volume has issues. I chose to rebuild Chef with Debian stable. Chef is a server and as such I don't want much updates for it. Since it's no longer doubling as my firewall, I'm more comfortable with this as well. I trust Linux software raid more than RaidFrame.

tasks:
postfix - DONE
spamassassin (spamd.conf) - DONE, looks good
apache2 (tested, data transfered) - DONE
dovecot (installed, configured) - DONE
apcupsd (not started)
mrtg (installed, unconfigured)
nagios (not started)
snmpd (installe, configured, running) - DONE
smbd/nmbd - DONE
nfs exports - DONE
raid (one half of mirror installed until I migrate mythtv to 500GB)
webalizer (not started)
sensors (started, missing drivers)

Bad jpegs

In the last few months when we browse photos on babybaer which mounts a volume from chef over NFS, we occasionally get odd effects that appear to be errors in the jpeg encoding, as if a small piece of data is missing, resulting in a color offset in a part of the image and slightly offset image after the error. Like this:



chef has been logging an error "nfsd send error 55" for the longest time, with no apparent ill effects. Is this maybe related and we only noticed it now? Are things getting worse?

A Google search revealed no answers to where the error on chef is coming from in the first place. It means out of buffer space, but I couldn't find any hints *why* that might be happening.
All I could find are complaints from other people that run Linux clients against OpenBSD servers, about that error filling up the logs. It also appears to happen on NetBSD, which would make sense, given how much code is shared between NetBSD and OpenBSD. Increasing NMBCLUSTERS might help a bit, but no definitive solution. Turning off CBQ might help, but I don't run CBQ (or any firewalling) on chef anymore. Someone suggested bad interaction with cheapo RealTek cards (hey, look at that chef is using a RealTek card). I switched to another interface (dc0), let's see if it makes a difference. Of course, I have no way of knowing for sure any time soon, since the error happens only when browsing 100's of jpegs over NFS.

Update:
I took a look at the timestamps of the nfsd error 55 messages and noticed they don't line up with when we see bad images. Today there was only one error logged this morning, but Patricia got a couple bad images this afternoon. Lovely. This doesn't help.

Update:
At this time I'm not even sure how to quantify the problem. Let's see if this is an issue with Linux NFS to OpenBSD, or something else. Let's generate a md5sum list of a large body of data (my jpegs) straight from disk on chef and via NFS on babybaer.

Update:
This is really easy in Linux:
find . | grep -i jpg$ | xargs -iD md5sum "D" > md5-linux

And really weird in OpenBSD (mostly because the output of md5 is so convoluted):
find . | grep -i jpg$ | xargs -iD md5 "D" | awk -F '[)(=]' '{print $4 $3 $2}' > md5-openbsd

awk seems to be doing some fancy buffering (?) when piping output to another program (like sed) or just a file. I just don't get any output whatsoever. Hmmm.

...

oh great, while experimenting with that, chef decided to say Goodbye and hung itself. No reaction on console. Just hangs. That sucks.

Ctrl-Alt-Esc doesn't work. But Shift-PgUp/PgDn does. Surprise. The box is not on the network, not echoing characters. *sigh* Looks like another power cycle. Bah.

Update:
Rebooted chef last night. I reproduced the jpeg problem again this afternoon on two images, so it's not a RealTek nic driver issue. There are no logs on chef indicating an error, nor on babybaer. It looks like random data corruption, but that doesn't make sense. ... Wait. There is a smart raw read error on chef, followed by ecc_hardware corrected. Could this be related? Rebooting Babybaer to rule out impact of local file system cache.

Update:
Nope. The root of the problem is on chef. I reproduced bad jpeg copies by simply cp'ing a directory of jpegs and running md5sum on the files. One recent directory (02-25) seems to be particularly suspectible to this problem. Of 8 files I copied in several attempts up to 7 had different md5sums. I hexdumped a few files and the differences are always on 4kbyte page boundaries (4kByte, 12kByte).
That seems to indicate either a file system problem (but the filesystem checks clean), or a RAIDframe volume problem, maybe due to issues with the underlying disk sectors (possible), a memory problem (but then I would expect to see more random failures), or a CPU problem (ditto).
I'm still uncomfortable with the raw read error/ecc corrected counters reported by smartd.

Hillary Clinton

So, I just attended an event with Hillary Clinton. Interesting. When I walked over to the building, the motorcade was already parked outside. Police, large SUVs, quiet men in black jackets, just like in the movies. When I got inside it was *packed*. I actually got lucky and managed to get in before they closed the the doors due to overcrowding. The announcement of one of the VC technicians to keep the aisles clear and there is overflow room in one of the adjoining tech talk areas didn't convince many people to leave. We just squeezed togehther a bit more...
There were easily over a thousand people in the room.

I didn't expect Clinton to have the views she presented today on the environment and energy. As with so many polititians she's extremely convincing when in the same room and on stage. She doesn't sound fake, rather genuinely interested in making things happen.

Changing the energy policy to promote clean, green technologies, pulling all levels of government together, from federal to state down to the local level to move in the same direction: 10 years from now, she wants the country be well on the way to energy independence from fossil fuels without wrecking the economy along the way. Interestingly, she used California as the prime example what to do. While the per-capita use of energy has increased by 50% in other parts of the US, it has stayed flat in California. She attributes that to California's insistence on sticking with their state-wide incentive programs and pollution limits when the Reagan administration was dismantling whatever such programs existed on the federal level in the early 80's.

She told a nice story about how she vividly remembers after the Russians shot Sputnik into space, all Americans pulled together to create something amazing, the space program, which grew into DARPA, one of the sponsors of the Internet. Her teacher told the students, "kids the president wants you to study math and sience". She believed at the time Eisenhower actually called her teacher to tell them that. Kinda cute story. She used that as a starting point to talk about how she wants Americans to pull together and rid America from its dependence on fossil fuels, move to clean, green energy, bio-fuels, and fight global warming. She's crossing her fingers for Al Gore that he wins the Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth". This was a great section of the talk. She came accross very strong and believable.


When asked about the mess in Iraq, she called it "the height of irresponsibility" that President Bush might leave the Iraq war to his successor to sort out. "This is his war. He needs to clean it up. But if he continues to go the way he's going, I don't expect him to." She strongly advocates pulling troops out of the sectarian civil war that is now engulfing the country, and setting up a regional conference involving all neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to make sure they do their part to stabilize the country. She has a very active role in the senate to reign in Bush's war and "force him to do the right thing. To at least send in troops with all the supplies and material they need to be able to fight this war".
One interesting remark was about how silly it is not to talk to your enemies. Throughout the cold war, both republican and democratic presidents talked to the Russians, to learn, to get intelligence and to understand. "you don't make peace with your friends, you don't have to. In order to make peace you have to talk to the people with different views, with ideas that are the exact opposite of yours."

By the way, it will be interesting to see how she's going to pull people to her side who claim she is unelectable next year. She went through pains to paint herself as an inclusive person, that brings people together, using her home state New York (with a blue New York city, and a very red upstate New York) as example. I'd be curious to know how much of the 68% of New Yorkers that reelecred her last year, actually live in upstate New York.

Clinton made several remarks about universal health-care and how electronic record keeping can lower the costs substantially. I'm a little ambivalent about this, seeing how easy it is to abuse that kind of data and how often backup tapes get lost, laptops stolen, and knowing how many providers and companies allow confidential employee or patient data to travel around on standard laptops in the open. Extending electronic record keeping to local doctors who definitely don't have the resources locally to do a job right, that even banks screw up occasionally, makes me shiver. Her presentation on this topic was a bit ... thin.
The general idea of moving away from the company sponsored health plan system, towards something that many european countries have already developed, sounds like a good idea to me, though.

Finally, she was talking about how important education is. How education starts with the parents. In the family. Then extends out to schools. I'm a big believer in getting parents involved in school. If you know what's going on and are aware, it's much easier to help your children to be successful. Clinton's specific ideas on this topic (while it appears close to her heart) didn't excite me, though. "Make school hours more flexible, because they are inconvenient for working parents. Give kids online access to advanced courses, potentially not offered at their school."
Eh, I don't know, call me old-fashioned, but I think bringing excellent teachers into schools, recognize what they do every day, and paying them a decent salary would go a long way, along with giving them the tools and means to be the most effective. This won't happen overnight even in the most favorable environments, but you have to start somewhere.

Overall, a high-profile politician with charisma, and some decent ideas. Seeing Barack Obama next would be great. Maybe they pull this off some time this year.

more grumpy upgrade notes

issues:
- kernel 2.6.18-3 doesn't boot (neither 686 nor k7 variety) - FIXED
- ivtv not installed, no firmware - FIXED
- database schema upgrade fails - FIXED
- playback works, but no sound - FIXED
- mythvideo doesn't work (no mplayer?) - FIXED
- no scheduled recordings show up, but they are in the database - FIXED
- no automatic login for mythtv - FIXED
- lirc/remote control doesn't work (missing kernel modules)
- wireless doesn't work
- mythgames no games
- no nvidia-settings - FIXED
- no ntpd - FIXED
- no mouse in X
- no mrtg set up
- most myth recordings fail
- no sound in live tv and recordings



kernel issues:
2.6.18-3 only boots with acpi=off on grumpy. worked fine in 2.6.15. wth?


installing ivtv:
use 0.8.2, follow Debian instructions at http://ivtvdriver.org. Use pvr_1.18.21.22254_inf.zip from http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page=FirmwareVersions.
Later downloaded pvr_1.18.21.22302_inf.zip and tried that, in order to check out audio problems.


importing old database:
can't update schema version beyond 1156 because of duplicate column cmd_repeat in tabl diseqc_tree. alter table diseqc_tree drop column cmd_repeat
restart mythtv-backend.
FIXED


nvidia-settings:
apt-get install nvidia-settings
but it doesn't seem to do anything useful.


ntpd:
apt-get install ntp-server
FIXED


mythvideo:
apt-get install mplayer win32codecs
FIXED


sound:
plenty of comments in howto, nothing seems to help. probably some silly interaction somewhere.
go back to basics:
- turn off artsd in KDE, turn off all KDE sounds
- test with aplay - works fine
- test with mplayer - works
- mythvideo with mplayer - sound works
- myth playback still has no sound
- after a reboot, audio works properly in myth playback as well. huh, odd.
FIXED


scheduled recordings:
- after upgrade no channel lineups were bound to /dev/video0 and /dev/video1. ran mythtv-setup paged through all pages, corrected as needed. upcoming recordings is populated now, and also shows properly in mythwelcome.
FIXED

lirc:
- complains about missing kernel modules
- module-assistant complains the lirc-modules-source is not properly installed, but dpkg -l lirc-modules-source shows all is good, can't find any lirc modules in /lib/modules tree
still unresolved


automatic login:
I'm using gdm. gdmsetup doesn't get me to log in the mythtv user automatically. Annoying. Here's the config snippet in /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf that makes it all work properly:

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=mythtv

TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=mythtv
TimedLoginDelay=5
LocalNoPasswordUsers=mythtv

auto-login FIXED.


wireless:
rebuild ndiswrapper with module-assistant, add configs to /etc/network/interfaces.
manual verification using iwconfig. ifconfig wlan0 up. dhclient wlan0.

interface comes up, but throughput is unbearably slow.


myth recordings fail:
trying to record random shows fails with

2007-02-10 21:33:47.805 Reschedule requested for id 110.
2007-02-10 21:33:51.259 Scheduled 310 items in 3.5 = 0.10 match + 3.35 place
2007-02-10 21:33:51.287 scheduler: Scheduled items: Scheduled 310 items in 3.5 = 0.10 match + 3.35 place
2007-02-10 21:33:51.431 TVRec(2): Changing from None to RecordingOnly
2007-02-10 21:33:51.449 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2
2007-02-10 21:33:51.525 Channel(/dev/video1): SetInputAndFormat() failed
2007-02-10 21:33:51.526 TVRec(2) Error: Failed to set channel to 3. Reverting to kState_None
2007-02-10 21:33:51.527 TVRec(2): Changing from RecordingOnly to None
2007-02-10 21:33:51.554 Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Burned": channel 1002 on cardid 2, sourceid 1
2007-02-10 21:33:51.580 scheduler: Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Burned": channel 1002 on cardid 2, sourceid 1


some random shows are actually recording. *sigh*

[3 hours later]

ok. I give up. I can't solve the following right now:
- jittery video recording (suspect: ivtv 0.8)
- no sound when recording (suspect: ivtv? mixer?)
- intermittent inability to change channels for recording resulting in failed recordings (suspect: mythtv/ivtv api v2 interaction)

Looks like 2.6.18 with ivtv 0.8.2 is just not stable enough, but closed captioning works...
2.6.16/2.6.17 are actively discouraged since there is ongoing integration with ivtv at the time. Which brings me back to ivtv 0.4 and 2.6.15 and I'm running out of time.

To make matters worse, the Seagate replacement disk I bought, threw DMA errors multiple times tonight. I replaced the 300GB Maxtor disk back into Grumpy. At least I thoroughly removed dust from the case.

Bootstrapping Grumpy

The 300GB Maxtor disk in Grumpy is giving me grief. Has trouble booting, very slow performance. Most certainly a case for the warranty department.
I'm concerned Grumpy won't boot anymore when I cycle power, and I certainly don't feel like loosing my MythTV recordings...

I'm re-building Grumpy from the ground up on a new harddrive. I hope my notes from the last year in this blog will be useful.

I started out with the Debian netboot install. Sarge netboot.tar.gz unpacked into chef:/tftpboot, add new host entry in gw:/etc/dhcpd.conf with next-server 192.168.200.10. Works like a charm. In order to get a picture after booting on this VIA M10000 board, I need to pass the vga option to the kernel.

I want to leave the option open of adding another hard drive later and build a RAID1 from the video and movie files. In the Debian installer I manually reconfigured the partitions to use (ext3, swap, RAID), then configured RAID1 with only one member partition. I'm not using LVM here, this is a very straightforward setup. The large partition will be used for video and movie files, the root partition will hold everything else.

And again, I'm impressed by the ease of this network-based installation. Debian rocks.

First thing after the installation and completing base-config, I switch APT's sources to testing, so that I get a recent kernel (in this case I'm going to 2.6.18-3).

surprise: A base Debian install has no ssh...

On to rescuing media files... oha, I forgot how much data 300GB is. This will take a while.

Automatic wakeup for Grumpy

This had me puzzled for the longest time (see my musings from last summer).

Today I decided not only to finally run some backups of Chef, but also to make Grumpy (my MythTV box) shut down after it's done recording. I stumbled over mythwelcome a very slick new feature in MythTV 0.19. It's a welcome screen for mythfrontend (similar to what I wanted to write), and additionally has a few additional features (like automatically turn on the system during some specified period, e.g. in the evening when I'm most likely to watch TV).

A few months ago I collected all the necessary data for nvram-wakeup to set the NVRAM alaram in the BIOS. I got mythwelcome configured just fine following the instructions in the Wiki. It seems to work, but I still don't like messing with the nvram directly. Finally, I saw some notes in the ACPI_Wakeup section of the Wiki about how "some finicky BIOSes reset the RTC alarm when the time gets written". Guess what, every Linux distribution syncs the system time to the hardware clock on shutdown. I have a finicky BIOS!

As susggested in the Wiki, I modified /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh to on shutdown read out /proc/acpi/alarm, save the system time, then write back the alarm time. Lo and behold it worked on the first try.

Here are my final configuration settings for this:

I'm using mythwelcome and have it configured to call /usr/local/bin/myth-set-acpi-wakeup in the nvram-wakeup command line:

#!/bin/bash

# set wakeup time via ACPI alarm
#

logger "wakeup: got command line $0 $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6"

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
  echo "usage: $0 --settime "
  echo "must be in seconds since epoch"
  logger "no wakeup time given"
  exit 1
fi

# This is a crazy hack
# The problem is that mythwelcome is passing us the timestamp
# in localtime not adjusted for UTC, but date is using the
# base of UTC, so we need to adjust back to PST.
# TODO(bbeck): Daylight savings time is probably going to bite me on this, I should set 
# the BIOS clock to UTC.
seconds=$2
utctime=`date -d "1970-01-01 $seconds sec" +"%Y-%m-%d %T"`
time=`date -d "$utctime -0000" +"%Y-%m-%d %T"`
# end of hack

logger "setting wakeup time to $time."

echo "$time" > /proc/acpi/alarm

result=`cat /proc/acpi/alarm`

if [ "$time" == "$result" ]; then
  logger "wakeup time set properly"
else
  logger "wakeup time not set (got $result)"
fi

The nvram-wakeup command is set to myth-grub-poweroff:

#!/bin/sh

echo "savedefault --default=4 --once" | grub

which triggers grub config 4 in my menu.lst on the next boot:

title           PowerOff
savedefault     --default=0
cat             /boot/grub/default
halt

reboot and poweroff commands are set to

/sbin/reboot and /sbin/poweroff, respectively

Shutdown/Wakeup options in mythtv-setup are configured as follows:

Block shutdown before client is connected is checked.

Idle timeout: 60s

Max. wait for recording: 30m (I'm recording several shows that are 30 minutes apart. No point to shut down in between)

Startup before rec: 180s

Wakeup time format: yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss

Set wakeuptime command: mythshutdown --setwakeup $time

Server halt command: sudo mythshutdown --shutdown

Pre-shutdown check command: mythshutdown --check

Automated shutdown on power failure - Trial by fire

I installed apcupsd last year. I tested it through to see that all power states are properly recognized, but never did a full power down test to make sure that the system shuts down when battery power runs low. Today we lost power for over 1 1/2 hours and it worked just perfectly:

Jan 19 07:00:02 chef syslogd: restart
Jan 19 14:11:34 chef apcupsd[26943]: Power failure.
Jan 19 14:11:40 chef apcupsd[26943]: Running on UPS batteries.
Jan 19 15:11:21 chef apcupsd[26943]: Battery charge below low limit.
Jan 19 15:11:21 chef apcupsd[26943]: Initiating system shutdown!
Jan 19 15:11:21 chef apcupsd[26943]: User logins prohibited
Jan 19 15:11:21 chef apcupsd[26943]: Attempting to kill the UPS power!
Jan 19 15:11:24 chef syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Jan 19 15:34:48 chef syslogd: restart
Jan 19 15:34:48 chef /bsd: OpenBSD 3.8-stable (RAID) #1: Thu Apr 20 21:55:59 PDT 2006
Jan 19 15:34:48 chef /bsd:     root@chef.lostentry.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/RAID

Battery started running low after an hour, and apcupsd initiated a clean system shutdown. When the power returned the server rebooted just fine and went merrily on its way. Neat.

Lake Washington, Kirkland

Christmas 2006

Merry Christmas!

Rain, Wind, Storm ... No Power

I'm in Seattle this week. The rain comes and goes as usual for this time of the year.

Yesterday afternoon a major storm hit the Northwest. At 5pm we decided to shut down the servers and network in the office, since we had ongoing brownouts and briefly lost power. Outside, the wind was howling around the building, the rain blowing accross the street horizontally. Windows were rattling. Lake Washington had a good surf going, you could see it even from the office. Most of the employees went home.

We took off to drive to a co-worker's house in Bellevue. The office parking lot was flooded, the garage was flooded, and the street gutters were full of water. The normally 15 minute drive to Bellevue took us over an hour on the side-streets. Multiple stop lights were out and cars waiting their turn all over the place. Very orderly though, I must say. Once we got there we had good food and lots of fun. I tried playing Tennis on the Wii as well as a few other games.

Here's a picture of a flodded garage. It's hard to see, but water depth was about 1 foot.

11:30pm

I got back to the apartment with light rain and a decent amount of wind. I planned to be in the office early to bring up the infrastructure back up once the storm has blown over. It was supposed to peak at 2am.

5:00am

Well, yeah... I got a call from the local helpdesk manager not to bother. I notice the power is out in my apartment. "The power is out in 90% of western Washington." Oh... Well then, I'm going back to sleep now.

6:00am

"The office building is dead. 3 feet of water in the lower level of the garage" Guess it's unlikely I'm going to work today. I'll see when and where I can find some coffee and breakfast. In an hour I'll call Patricia to find out what's going on at Sea-Tac, and if my flight this afternoon is still on.

8:00am

Power still out. I take a shower in the dark bathroom. The water is lukewarm. I consider myself lucky. After some consideration and looking out of the window, I decide to pack my stuff and get it down to the car. No point hanging out in the apartment with no power or heat. I want some coffee.
The trip down the pitchblack stairwell with no windows was ... interesting. Good thing the display of my cell phone is this bright.

9:00am

Still no power. I stopped by the office to found the building locked with a couple employees outside chatting. The lower level of the garage is still flooded. They are pumping the water out, only making slow progress. I don't envy the owners of the few cars left in there.

The guy stocking our mini-kitchens left some danish and cranberry cake outside the lobby doors. Good. Still craving a coffee. It starts raining again. "All the power is out in the city of Kirkland", a police officer who was checking on one of the local banks tells me. Bellevue may have power, I'm told, so I decide to make my way down I-405 towards the airport.

The floating bridge accross Lake Washington is still closed. They closed it last night before the brunt of the storm came in, since it's unsafe to cross with heavy winds. Which means all the traffic headed to Seattle has to go down to I-90 and across Mercer Island. I'm in the middle of that traffic. Crap.

10:30am

I tried taking side-streets looking for some coffee place and to bypass the mess on I-405. Success for the latter, but still no coffee. Eventually I get south of I-90, make it via Factoria and Coalcreek Parkway back to I-405 and out to the airport.

11:30am

I got to the airport early enough to catch an earlier flight back to San Jose. Phew. Looking forward to see Patricia and the kids.

Lessons learned:

• Don't expect to be able to get back into the office building the next morning. Take the stuff you might need.
  
• Carry a flashlight. I'll get one of those little keychain lights. Way better than nothing.
  
• Listen to the news and traffic reports. Find one of those AM news channels. I got a pretty good picture on what's going on. They advised to avoid I-405 between Bellevue and I-90. I should have taken I-405 north to I-5 and on to the airport through Seattle.
  
• Always carry some cash. Most ATMs and credit card pay stations don't work without utility power.
  

Sunday, December 17th:

Power was restored to the office this morning. As I'm writing this there are still over 200,000 people without power in western Washington. Down from over a million Friday morning. I'm just reminded again how much we depend on and are used to the conveniences of modern live. Electricity, clean water, garbage pickup. This was a weather event, people could prepare at least a little bit. However, I'm living in earthquake country. Those things happen without warning. We better get our earthquake kit back together (we had to throw everything out after a rat hit the jackpot and got into the storage box...).

Lucky snapshot

Taken late September in Santa Cruz. Union Pacific freight train returning from the cement plant in Davenport..

UP 916 (GP38) is leading UP 1351 (GP40-2, ex-DRGW) crossing Bay St in Santa Cruz.

Got a transformer

... and the "Krokodil" no longer requires a 9V battery.

cleaning track...

Amazing how grimy old track can be. Yuck. I used a dry scotch brite cloth to wipe off all the dust, oxidation and dirt from these old brass rails. First with the green side to scrape off the big stuff, then with the yellow side to wipe off any leftovers. low and behold, it worked on the first try.

I cleand four straight pieces of track and within minutes the old "Krokodil" was going up and down the track powered by a 9V block battery held right against the rails. HO track is just wide enough for the connectors of the battery to fit.

This worked so well, I cleaned a dozen curves and set up a little oval on the table. After a few rounds of sputtering the track was clean enough that the locomotive was running around in circles just fine. Exciting!

Model railroading...

So, over the weekend I had a good conversation about model railroading (and railroading in general), which made my heart ache with the thought of the really nice Maerklin layout we have at my parents place back in Germany. I pulled out the only electric train stuff I have in the house here, the "FischerTechnik Bauspielbahn", a Fleischmann track based trainset my father bought for me and my brother a long, long, long time ago. I must have played with this the last time maybe 20 years ago. To my surprise the one motor left in the two locomotives is still working just fine, including the familiar whining sound it always had. No idea what happened to the other motor.

Just the rails ... oh boy. Brass track. No conductivity at all. Zip. I learn from a Google search that brass track is the worst. Lots of oxidation of the non-conducting kind. ok, looks like in order to make this work, I'll have to clean the track ... somehow.

Reading up on cleaning blocks, and various other methods serious railroaders recommend is ... pretty cool. Doesn't really apply to my situation, though. Heck, this is not even a real layout or anything. Either way, I'll give this cleaning idea a shot on a few pieces of track. Just for fun.

Audiotron and smb server on different subnet

What a pain.

The Audiotron appears to be unable to work with a WINS server. There is no way to specify one in the Web UI. I tried various approaches to get this work:

• force global browse master on gw by running the Samba nmbd server with the appropriate smb.conf file (Audiotron finds the browse master on gw, but apparently ignores the information about hosts in other subnets)
  
• limit and eventually turn off the firewall rules dropping packets between the wired and wireless portions of my network (I do have holes for smb traffic, but it doesn't matter. I can get to //chef/media just fine using smbclient via wireless)
  
• redirect 137/138/139 tcp/udp from gw to chef (doesn't work because of heavy use of broadcasts in the smb protocol)
  
• Allow remote hosts in the Audiotron WebUI (no visible effect)
  
• Hardcode the specific share name \\chef\media in the Audiotron WebUI (no visible effect)
  
• make heavy use of tcpdump on all systems involved (except the Audiotron which is a closed box)
  
• search Google (and this blog is among the first 20 hits when I search for [audiotron browse master]...)
  
• make sure all the passwords are right for the media user, both in the Audiotron and on chef (checked)
  
• confirmed using nmblookup that I can't see chef, when browsing the wireless broadcast domain (duh, of course not. It's a separate /24.)
  
• The Audiotron aborts browsing the subnet, if it can't find a running smbd on gw (how annoying)
  

In some cases chef shows up in the Audiotron log with "No IP reply". The Turtle Beach docs are fairly unhelpful on this whole thing.

Since WINS is not supported by the Audiotron and hardcoding paths on the Audiotron doesn't seem to have any effect, I'm thinking about bringing the songs closer to the Audiotron: Mount the media partition via NFS from Chef on gw, then export the NFS mount from gw via Samba to the wireless side.

How ugly.

I searched more and found a note in the Audiotron FAQ that the Audiotron does indeed support WINS, but the server information has to come from DHCP. The option for isc-dhcpd is netbios-name-servers in dhcp.conf. That might work. I'll try that when we are back from shopping. It's Black Friday after all.

...

Finally! It's working.

Serving netbios-name-servers via dhcp didn't seem to have any visible effect.
The magic config options that made it work were "dns proxy = yes" and "wins proxy = yes"in smb.conf on gw. Then I went into manual configuration mode on the Audiotron and set it explicitly to get the music from \\chef\media.
Samba on chef was not configured to use the WINS nmbd on gw, so nmbd didn't serve IP information for chef, even though it served the name as part of the list when queried.

So, in the end, as usual, it was operator error. I could have saved myself quite some pain by configuring chef as WINS client of gw, or run a WINS server on chef outright and serve chef's IP as WINS server to the Audiotron via dhcp. Actually, that's not a bad idea, I'd rather not have smbd/nmbd running on gw...
Not tonight, though, now that Patricia is happily listening to music served by this crazy infrastructure.

So, here's what I'm going to try next:
- run WINS server on chef
- serve chef as netbios-name-server in dhcpd.conf for the audiotron
- turn off nmbd and smbd on gw
- Verify I can still listen to music...

Update:
The Audiotron appears to ignore the dhcp option netbios-name-servers. With only nmbd running on gw, being the WINS server, and the Audiotron manually set to go to \\chef\media, it finds my songs just fine. Good enough for me.

A curious note:
When the Audiotron tries to resolve a remote name it queries first for "A? CHEF.", it gets a NXDomain in my network. Then it uses the fully qualified domain name "A? chef.domain.comm". Not a typo, it actually appears to append an 'm' to the query. I couldn't find the source of the extra 'm'. Even reset the Audiotron to factory defaults and started over, still queries an extra 'm'.

There ... now it happened

It's my own fault. I connected the serial console of my Net-4801 to chef, started minicom and ... nothing happened. A fatal "Send Break" later, minicom is no longer responding and the userland on chef is dead. No idea _why_ that happened, but it coincided with the break on the serial port. Thankfully, chef's kernel dutifully continued to route traffic, so I could search Google, and openbsd.org, but to no avail. In the end I power-cycled chef and am now waiting for the raid check to complete. *sigh*

On the positive side, my Internet connection is now running through the NET-4801. mail and web will continue to be handled by chef for the time being (once it comes back up), but basic Internet access as well as my private domain server and key-protected ssh are working already. My prep-work from early October paid off. Another 1.5 hours to go until chef is back online. I'm going to bed, but set the alarm early, so I can fix email before Patricia gets up.

Things left to do for chef:
- ifconfig to .10
- connect LAN cable
- reconfigure syslog to use -u and accept syslog from gw
- test mail connectivity (local and remote)
- test web connectivity (local and remote, both sites)

Update:
I also had to add the rdr entries for PF to redirect web/mail connections to chef. Then, my website didn't work anymore from the inside, because the redirect is applied only on traffic that enters gw on the outside interface, so I changed the internal DNS views to resolve my websites straight to chef, instead of going through gw.
Testing the configuration from my workstation at work, it worked right away for web access, but for the heck of it I couldn't get a SMTP connnection going. Everything looked right on my end. Actually, I used the same config options for web as for mail. While thinking about this, I noticed a mail coming in. Huh? ... I remembered we block outbound SMTP from workstations at work. Alright, all good.

pvr500 and composite input

I'd really like to access DVDs through the MythTV interface, as well as be able to hook up my camcorder and convert analog video to MPEG2 streams. My TV has only one composite input and that's taken by MythTV, so the DVD thing is mostly for convenience. The catch? It doesn't seem to work.

I got the closest today. After scouring Google and reading lots and lots of different How-tos the most promising approach for getting the DVD player/camcorder hooked up was to define a new video source, bind it to the composite input, manually define a channel and off we go. Uhm, yeah. Not quite. The new channel (1001 - DVD) shows up in the channel selection. However, when I do select it, apparently MythTV tries to use the tuner to select it, which doesn't work. Either, the channel doesn't switch, and I continue to see Fox and then roll over to channel 82, or depending on which approach I tried, the channel switches and I won't get out of this mode anymore, and only got a black screen. Even [ESC] didn't work anymore. Couldn't tell whether the front-end or the back-end hung.

What's more frustrating is that even with ivtvctl -p, I can't seem to switch inputs on the PVR500. It does work, however, if I don't start mythbackend at all on boot. I'm suspecting an issue between MythTV, the ivtv driver, and the PVR500 card.


I'm using Linux 2.6.15 with ivtv 0.4.4. Looks like I'm going to sync grumpy to the latest Debian testing, 2.6.18 and ivtv 0.7 (or so). And then rebuild the nvidia driver, and take care of other mayhem that might ensue. I'm hoping this will also fix the problems we have with closed captioning (VBI).

kde kamera DOES support disconnecting and reconnecting the camera

... it's just not obvious.

I use KDE's kio_kamera to download my photos from our Canon Rebel Digital SLR. Whenever I connect the camera a new USB address gets allocated and we end up with a URL like this:

camera://Canon EOS 300D (normal mode)@[usb:001,006]/

The camera icon on the desktop eventually takes me to camera:/, which is an overview page of configured devices. When I plug in the camera, this page always comes up with links to the usb address when the camera was first plugged in that day (usually usb:001,004), so I can't just click through. Annoying. More annoying is that many pages under camera:/ are cached, so it appears to be working until I get to the actual images folders and then get "port not found".

Solution:
In the camera:/ location, refresh the page, then continue. Simple as that. Now, if I could get kio_kamera to do this for me...

ATX power supplies

I admit I'm behind the times with PC hardware. That comes with being a bottom feeder. I usually buy technology only when it gets close to be thrown out of the stores. I like special offers, particularly clearances. So, yes, most of my stuff here is on the outdated end. But it's cheap, some of it even free.

So, last weekend when I bought a power supply to replace the rather old power supply in chef, I went for a half-way decent, but relatively cheap power supply from CoolerMaster (400W, reg. $39.90, onsale for $27.50). If only I had paid more attention to the labels.

ATX12V 2.01 actually means not only serial ATA power connectors and this extra 4pin 12V connector for the CPU (which I don't need since I don't have those). It also means that instead of 20 pins the ATX mainboard connector now has 24 pins, apparently to satisfy the power needs of PCI Express (which I don't have either).

The ca. 2001 motherboard in chef has a 20pin connector, and yes the pinout of the lower 20 pins is all backwards compatible to the old socket. However, in their infinite wisdom the Acorp motherboard designers placed a couple capacitors right next to the mainboard power connector. Exactly in the spot where the extra 4 pins would hang over. Ugh.

It's not too bad, though. I was eyeing to upgrade my Linux rackmount upstairs with something more modern anyways (the mainboard of that computer currently does duty in my MythTV box). Might as well keep the new power supply, and move the power supply from the rackmount into Tatjana's computer for now.

Update (Nov 21):
I ended up buying an adapter cable at Central Computer that translates the 24pin ATX powersupply connect to a 20pin connect as needed by my motherboard. The old power supply from chef is going to move to Tatjana's computer. We are not using that computer nearly as often...

Exploding capacitors

Thursday Patricia calls me with a very alarmed voice, "Hey, it stinks as if something's burning, and there was a loud pop from the computer cabinet". Hmmm, that doesn't sound good. We shut down all the computers in the cabinet until I come home.


Once the kids are in bed, I unrack the firewall machine, open it up, and yes, there is some smell, but not really bad. While I'm looking at the firewall machine, Tatjana's computer turns itself on spontaneously, a loud pop, and electric smell starts to fill the air. "That must be what Patricia meant when she called me."


Nothing out of the ordinary when I open the case, aside from the smell. However, when I open the power supply, the first thing I see are a two capacitor shells sitting oddly in the corner. Also note, how the leftmost capacitor is starting to bend the pressure relief top upwards.


"What is that furry stuff anyways?". The content of the capacitors. Look at the blast marks on the metal heatsink in the background, and the nicely blackend resistor.


As the capacitor on the right blew up it must have hit something in the powersupply (probably the metal heatsink), which dented the top quite a bit.

Soekris NET4801-60

Having a firewall, mail server, file server, web server, ... all on the same box is just a bad idea. Every sysadmin knows that. I run my firewall on OpenBSD which makes me feel better, but not comfortable. OpenBSD's software RAID (RAIDframe) scares me every time the machine crashes (which happens seldomly, actually only once so far, but that's another story), or loses power (which used to happen more often. Thanks to my UPS that's no longer an issue). I like my firewall to run OpenBSD, but I just don't need yet another computer sucking up power in my living room.

When a co-worker was looking for some more people to join in a bulk-oder for Soekris NET4801 boxes I got in. A few weeks later it was on my desk. Nice box, metal case, AMD Geode 266, 256MB main memory. I have a 1GB CF card (specs as displayed by comBIOS: "SAMSUNG CF/ATA LBA Xlt 1012-32-63 1020 Mbyte"), and a 256MB CF card ("Hitachi XXM2.3.0 LBA 695-15-48 250 Mbyte"). Originally, I wanted to run even my Web server from the Soekris box, but then realized that the photo collection on the Web site alone eats up 3.2GB already. Whoops. Oh well, don't have that much storage, so I put the 1GB CF card into our Canon Rebel Digital SLR, and use the 256MB card for the soekris box.

I replaced FreeBSD on Sneezy with the latest OpenBSD built (and will upgrade again, come 4.0 in November) and started to investigate flashdist.sh, a snazzy shell script that builds an OpenBSD distribution on flash media. Oh, I need a flash reader? ... Our Nikon Coolpix 2100 shows up as a regular flash media when plugged in to USB:

umass0 at uhub0 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0
umass0: NIKON NIKON DSC E2100, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 2
umass0: using SCSI over Bulk-Only
scsibus1 at umass0: 2 targets
sd0 at scsibus1 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI2 0/direct removable
sd0: 244MB, 244 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sec, 500400 sec total

ok. that was easy.

I built a NET4801 kernel with the config from the flashdist archive and ran

flashdist.sh sd0 flashsmall.txt bsd-4801 /tmp/openbsd39/ bsd-4801 /tmp/openbsd39/

disklabel comes back with:

Total size of media: 500400 sectors (256204800 bytes)
Bytes/Sector: 512
Sectors/Track: 48
Sectors/Cylinder: 720
Tracks/Cylinder (heads): 15
Cylinders: 695

Once everything is on the flash, I reboot the Soekris box and it just works. Nice.

Now on to configuring things they way I actually want them.

distflash.sh pulls the default configurations from a staging area on Sneezy. For now I'm configuring stuff directly on the Soekris box, now affectionately named "gw". Once I'm done I'm planning to run a find accross the whole file system looking for files that are newer than today 18:07, and save all my changes back to the staging area on sneezy.

Here's the service split between gw and chef:

gw:

• three ethernet legs - working
  
• PF - working
  
• dhcpd - working
  
• named - working
  
• sshd - working
  
• ntpd - done, not thoroughly tested yet
  
• smb service to wireless network - working (see the long story)
  
• httpd - redirect working
  
• email proxy - redirect working
  
• apcupsd - not done (stays on chef for now)
  
• snmpd - not done (not critical)
  
• sensorsd - not done (not critical)
  

chef:

• email - postfix (working)
  
• email - dovecot (working, to be replaced with courier)
  
• email - spamassassin (working)
  
• email - squirrelmail (won't fix)
  
• media files - nfs (working)
  
• media files - smb (working)
  
• httpd - apache (working)
  
• httpd - authenticated proxying to grumpy/mythweb (not done, not critical)
  
• HD stats - smartd (working)
  
• network monitoring - mrtg (working, needs gw added)
  
• monitoring - nagios (not done, not critical)
  

I my current setup the music files on chef are exported via smb both to the wireless and the wired LAN, so I actually don't have to worry about anything. In the new setup chef is only connected to the wired LAN. smb broadcasts from the Audiotron won't be sufficient to find chef. This link at O'Reilly seems to indicate that I need to run Samba as a wins server. However, funny enough, right now when the Audiotron probes the network for music files, it will show babybaer which is only connected to the wired network. Why is that? I suspect chef is browse master and responds with the host lists for both the wired and wireless segments, so I either need a WINS server on chef, and point the Audiotron at that, or, if the Audiotron doesn't support WINS, run a smbd on gw and force it to try to acquire browse master.

OpenBSD, bind, NAT & aliased IPs

Yay for routing and NAT. Not.

I'm using RollerNet for my secondary DNS. Works quite nicely most of the time, but hey it's free. The DNS logs at rollernet showed

zone goodcoffee.net/IN: refused notify from non-master: 216.27.180.188#14688

Hmmm, yeah, ns.goodcoffee.net is on 216.27.180.215, which is an alias on my outside interface. I'm not serving requests on .188. ok, so bind just hands the notify to the OS, which does its thing and sends out the notify via the default route. Only, that happens to not be the master in the bind config at RollerNet.

I like my setup, so let's just reverse the assignment of IP and alias. Long story short, PF doesn't allow NAT on an aliased IP. I couldn't get it to rewrite outbound traffic for the RollerNet name servers to come from .215. Nor could I convince bind to use .215.

After some fussing with configs and options, I eventually changed the bind config to listen on .188, and changed RollerNet to take .188 as the master. Since that looks ugly in the config, I'm migrating the DNS entry for ns.goodcoffee.net from .215 to .188. Along the way I fixed bind and PF configs to use the new ns2.rollernet.us IP.

Hah, ns1.rollernet.us apparently didn't notice the change in the configuration yet. It's still refusing notifies from .188, while ns2.rollernet.us already happily serves the updated zone. I'll wait some time before I stop serving DNS on .215.

Update:
ns1.rollernet.us came around to update as well 15 minutes later. All is good now.

Surprising Effects

grumpy and wireless

Having much more success with the WG111T now on grumpy. I attached it to the supplied cable and left it on the TV cabinet, instead of connecting straight to the PC. Transferred several hundred MB of movie files with no issues whatsoever. I get about 830kByte/s (7MBit/s) actual throughput on wlan0 when copying files via scp. Not great, but perfectly sufficient for the occasional file transfer and daily program guide updates.


Some fun with ARP and routing

grumpy has eth0 on my internal network, and wlan0 on the WG111T. My wireless LAN is a separate leg off the firewall. Originally, it was an open WLAN with its own IP space, DHCP, etc. I set this up this way so that others can use my connection if they are within reach. However, with all the multimedia equipment now on the WLAN (and the Linux drivers supporting encryption), I turned on WEP. Not perfect security, I know, not even close, but better than nothing. But I disgress...

So, when grumpy has wlan0 enabled, I can ping grumpy.wlan from the wired network iff I ifdown eth0.
Looks like either the kernel on grumpy sees the directly attached network and tries to reply to ICMP requests originating on the wired LAN via eth0, even though they were sent to wlan0 via the firewall. This happens even when the cable is disconnected, resulting in an (incomplete) ARP entry. So, in order to access grumpy from the wired LAN, eth0 needs to be ifdown when the cable is disconnected.
However, I want it up if the cable is connected. Now, how do I do that?
...
ifplugd to the rescue. It's very straight-forward, easy to configure. It detects when the network cable is plugged in and configures and unconfigures eth0 accordingly.
The catch?
MythTV is configured to use the IP address of eth0 for the backend server. If I unconfigure the interface, mythfrontend is getting *very* unhappy. *sigh*
Let's use 127.0.0.1 for now...

Update:
After leaving grumpy running overnight in this config, wlan0 was dead _again_ this morning. rmmod ehci_hcd . Let's see if it's really the ehci module causing issues. Of course, that drops the transfer rate to a measly 230kByte/s.

Update:
grumpy has been running for two weeks with no wireless drops. So it really is the ehci_hcd kernel module giving me grief. I wonder if going to kernel 2.6.17 would help, but ah, the pain of rebuilding all the drivers for the TV cards. otoh, going to ivtv 0.6.x might fix closed captioning support. Hmmmm.

grumpy gets a bigger hard drive

I started grumpy with a 120G drive I had laying around, figuring this will last for a while. As I quickly discovered, not so. Particularly, when I wanted to keep a few movies around. Also, the ShiftTV pieces started to eat up space quickly.

So, I finally got a whopping 300GB disk at Fry's. Special offer, 80 bucks. Not too bad. Here's how I transfered the system to the new disk:

• partition the new disk like the old one, just bigger /opt (where I keep the movies)


• initialize the file systems (mke2fs -j /dev/hdc1, mkfs.jfs /dev/hdc6, mkswap /dev/hdc5) and mount them under /mnt/


• Use cpio to transfer the files from the root file system: find / -xdev -print0 | cpio -pa0V /mnt/hdc1


• Use a plain cp to copy the video files (which cpio doesn't like due to huge file sizes): cp -av /opt/* /mnt/hdc6/


• Install grub: grub-install --root-directory:/mnt/hdc1 /dev/hdc
  

ok, the latter didn't work ("/dev/hdc does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"). wtf? after searching quite a bit I ended up editing /mnt/hdc1/boot/grub/devices.map. adding

(hd1) /dev/hdc

finally, that worked. and I can boot from that drive when it is hda.

ACPI wakeup and grumpy

Going to sleep and waking up works great from MythTV. With a few gotchas:

• if the frontend is running, the backend doesn't shut down the system.
  
• echoing into /proc/acpi/alarm reliably starts the system... at midnight. The BIOS seems to completely ignore the time I set.
  

Once the frontend is not running, it's not trivial to bring it up again (particularly for my family). I'm running a window manager, in order to be able to use MythVideo properly. Otherwise, this would be simple (mythfrontend exits, gpm comes up again). I need a little app that just loops forever, accepts a key stroke to bring up the frontend, and when it exists, loops back.
Maybe even include some automated shut-down counter off the mythtv logs somehow. Hmmm, there's a little project to start playing with Ruby... or learn about window programming in Python.

The latter is more nasty. I guess, I have to check out nvram, or play with some wake-on-lan solution, but that would require that the wireless network connection worked properly.

But first, it's time to haul the trash from our recent kitchen remodel to the landfill.

Update (a few days later):
I suck. Had a typo in the script filename given to MythTV. sudo executed with no error, even though it couldn't find the script, so the shutdown proceeded without setting a new wakeup time. I'm still puzzled why grumpy wakes up at midnight.

video editing on Linux

I had quite some success with Cinelerra when editing my videos. So far, I always captured into MJPEG using the excellent MJPEGtools package using mencoder, video4linux and my old capture card. Now that I have this neat hardware MPEG2 encoder in my MythTV box, the whole process should become substantially less painful (at least there shouldn't be that many options to remember ... not that I remembered them, that's what scripting is for... but I disgress).

Cinelerra kinda forked into a community release. There is much more (better?) documentation linked off that site as well as the main page. Even unofficial Ubuntu packages exist now. Don't really feel like trying to compile this from svn myself. (Hmmm, maybe I should. Just for fun. No, wait... :-)

sigh
Babybaer (the most powerful computer in the house) is still on Ubuntu Hoary (and the Cinelerra packages are for Breezy and Dapper only. Time for a reinstall with Dapper. It's a good idea anyways.

It's HOT!!!!

40C at a private weather station off Santa Teresa. We topped out at 37C on our patio. Now, at 9:00pm, it is still 33C outside. The air conditioning was running all day, getting the first floor down to "only" 29C. Franziska is a very unhappy baby today.
Upstairs it's as hot as outside, now point to open the windows and create some "Durchzug". I placed a fan over the AC duct in Pascal's room to get more cold air and some movement into that room.

Not even the pool is refreshing. Some idiot turned up the heat and the water feels almost as warm as a whirl pool. Aparently, some "old lady" complained...

huh? usb 4-4: USB disconnect?

Now, what is this nonsense?
The WG111T apparently disconnected from the USB bus and played dead. No reaction when trying to tickle it with unplug - re-plugin. Whoops, trying to rmmod ndiswrapper results in hung shell. Oh, and the logs have DHCPDISCOVER entries since 6am, so the software works, but there seems to be no reaction on the hardware interface.

The USB stick is near the exhaust of the fan cooling my PVR500 card. Maybe getting too hot? I put it on a cable and place it on top of the TV cabinet. No dice. The device still disconnects after a while. Strange. Maybe heat related? The device gets more than handwarm when turned on for a while.

Some people report this is an interaction with the ehci_usb USB2.0 driver and using uhci-usb works more reliably. yeah, well, and much, much slower. Grrrrrm.

"micro" earthquake

20:55: Bernhard retires to the "Stille Oertchen" with a newspaper.

20:56: Bernhard gets a good kick in the behind and the water tank behind him squeaks ominously.

20:58: No-one else in the house felt it (they sat on cushioned couches or the stairs). Bernhard looks at event nc51172604. Neat. Even links to Google Maps. Zoom in! The epicenter was about 4 miles from my house.

That's what a magnitude 2.9 feels like...

ndiswrapper and WG111T

Follow instructions for Debian in wiki off ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net using module-assistant.

# module-assistant auto-install ndiswrapper
# unzip wg111t_1_2.zip

This is the 1.2 driver version off the NetGear Website, which supposedly works with ndiswrapper.

# ndiswrapper -i netwg11t.inf
# ndiswrapper -i athfmwdl.inf
# ndiswrapper -l
Installed drivers:
athfmwdl                driver installed, hardware present
netwg11t                driver installed
# dmesg | tail
ndiswrapper: driver netwg11t (NETGEAR,01/07/2005,1.0.1.1007) loaded
wlan0: vendor: ''
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:14:6c:5e:76:af using driver netwg11t, 1385:4250.F.conf
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP; TKIP with WPA; AES/CCMP with WPA
# ndiswrapper -m
Adding "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper

Hmmm, so far, so good. Let's see if this works. Continuing at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/DebianNoCompiles.

# apt-get install wireless-tools
# iwconfig
[...]
wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"LostLostEntry"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:F8:8B:26
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:0/100  Signal level:-68 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
# dhclient wlan0
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.201.1
DHCPREQUEST on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.201.1
bound to 192.168.201.112 -- renewal in 21600 seconds

Excellent. That was easy. Now on to configuring WEP. That will be good enough for my purposes
since the wireless network is on a separate leg off my firewall.

iwconfig wlan0 essid ...
iwconfig wlan0 enc ...

Change the AP WEP config and voila, everything working. Very nice.

I didn't expect this to be THAT easy. And I tried this only because Best Buy wouldn't take the WG111T back (over 30 days since purchase... grrr).

XvMC

randomly browsing ...

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC

pxe booting lisa

more from the "making ancient hardware work department". Lisa is an old Compaq Deskpro, which faithfully served as my firewall machine for a few years. I want to install Debian 3.1 on that machine. Since it doesn't have a CD drive (and hooking one up resulted in a freaked out isolinux error), I try pxe booting this thing.
This system has an Intel EtherExpress with UNDI PXE-1.0, which dutifully gives me the wonderful error "No filename received". LIAR!

tcpdump -s 560 -vv not host 192.168.200.1

20:32:59.021883 IP (tos 0x0, ttl  20, id 2, offset 0, flags [none], length: 576) 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e, length: 548, xid:0xba19b05e, secs:1792, flags: [Broadcast] (0x8000)
          Client Ethernet Address: 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e
          Vendor-rfc1048:
            DHCP:DISCOVER
            PR:SM+DG+VC+VO+BF+T128+T129+T130+T131+T132+T133+T134+T135
            MSZ:1260
            GUID:0.165.28.236.157.227.180.211.17.162.226.146.14.228.177.124.15
            ARCH:0
            NDI:1.2.1
            VC:"PXEClient:Arch:00000:UNDI:002001"
20:32:59.022502 IP (tos 0x10, ttl  16, id 0, offset 0, flags [none], length: 328) sneezy.lostentry.org.bootps > 255.255.255.255.bootpc: [udp sum ok] BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length: 300, xid:0xba19b05e, secs:1792, flags: [Broadcast] (0x8000)
          Your IP: 192.168.200.24
          Server IP: sneezy.lostentry.org
          Client Ethernet Address: 00:d0:b7:19:b0:5e
          file "/tftpboot/pxelinux.0"
          Vendor-rfc1048:
            DHCP:OFFER
            SID:sneezy.lostentry.org
            LT:600
            SM:255.255.255.0
            DG:chef.lostentry.org

There you have it. It's right there.

After banging my head at this for a little while, I try an option suggested in the pxelinux docs:

option vendor-class-identifier "PXEClient";

Sure enough, suddenly this thing is much more cooperative in the tcpdump. It picks up the IP address, and tries to connect to sneezy:4011. I need a pxe server daemon.

cd /usr/ports/net/pxe
make
make install

(I love the FreeBSD ports collection...)

A while later I'm still sitting here scratching my head. The pxe daemon seems to be working and sending config data back to lisa, but nothing appears to be happening. looks like as if it doesn't understand what the daemon is talking about, or it doesn't receive the response.

...

ok. I give up. Where are the floppy images...