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...

Automatic shutdown and power-up for grumpy

No point having another computer running in the house 24x7 if we're not recording or watching all the time. The MythTV Wiki has an entry doing this using ACPI.

I installed powersaved (which doesn't support my AMD Duron 1600, stepping 00), and acpid.

grumpy:~# powersave -S
ACPI
grumpy:~# cat /proc/acpi/alarm
2006-00-00 **:**:**
grumpy:~# echo "2006-06-10 18:00:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm
grumpy:~# cat /proc/acpi/alarm
2006-06-10 18:00:00
grumpy:~# shutdown -h now

So far so good. Let's see if this works. [Waiting for 8 minutes] Of course, that didn't work. Go into the BIOS, enable the RTC Alarm resume function, and for good measure also enable Wake-Up on RTC Alarm Interupt. Let's try again... And it didn't work with my motherboard. Darn it.

While at it, I at least added CPU temperature monitoring from the information displayed in /proc/acpi/.

WIFI & Linux

Yet another sad area in Linux hardware support is anything WIFI. This norwegian page gives a fairly gloomy, but at least current overview of what's out there. Atheros (madwifi) and Intel Centrino are the recommended hardware options. Consistent with what I hear from co-workers.

Here is an extensive list of cards that use an Atheros chipset. Sounds like the best option to me. The list at the Madwifi web site is long and appears to be reasonably up to date as well.

Update (a few weeks later):
And we learn that USB atheros devices are not supported well by the madwifi driver. Even though a Netgear WG111T has the right chipset, the USB device layer doesn't pass X through. *sigh*