Luke Sheldrick's Blog » IT / Tech

GlobalSAN Fail

Luke Sheldrick — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:02:15 +0000

I bought a MacMini the other day to replace my old nettop at home. Until I get the new storage for it, I figured I’d quickly setup a LUN on my NAS for it. It seems OS X, even Lion, still doesn’t include an iSCSI initiator (wtf, really?). Anyway the typical freebie that you’d use on Leopard/Snow Leopard was GlobalSAN’s free initiator. However seems that as of version 5, it’s not a freebie.

I gave it a try, and went through their process (read giving them my details twice – once to download, then again to get a trial key)… tried it out, and didn’t rate it. So using their provided uninstall script I see the below:

WTF is that all about? Their uninstaller is trying to delet / . .. /sbin ..etc, someone really hasn’t QA’ed their code.

Have emailed them to see what they say about it. Poor show.

KVM + KSM = Big Bag of Win

Luke Sheldrick — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:45:09 +0000

I bought a HP Microserver a few months ago, to expand my media storage at home. HP had a promotion where you’d buy the server, and they’d give you £100 cash back. Not bad considering you can pick them up online for around £220. £29 for 8GB of DDR3 for it, and it’s quite an ample home server. I bought four 3TB disks, and have them in Raid-5 for the main storage, and I also have an E-Sata disk shelf with four more 2TB disks, also in Raid-5. The main storage array gives me around 8TB of usable storage, and the other around 5.5TB, so I have quite a bit at home to be getting on with.

A colleague at work today pointed out that HP had extended the offer until the end of September, so I thought I would pick up another one. My reasoning is they’re bloody cheap for what they are, and it’ll make HA testing in my lab a lot easier, with two identical machines.

However I decided to see actually how loaded the server was with what I run on it. The tasks that usually run on it backups of my various colos, streaming to the AppleTVs at home, transcoding up to 8 channels via the DVB cards, and downloading various media online. Well, basically, it isn’t breaking a sweat.

It’s currently running Ubuntu Server 11.04, which has pretty good support for KVM, so decided to spin up a few VMs to see how it handled it. I wasn’t overly optimistic, as AMD Turion™ II processor, which is basically designed for netbooks. However after spinning up a another Ubuntu Server instance, the server seemed to have no issue with this at all.

At that point I decided to clone the VM a couple of times, and then spin them all up to load test. 4 clones later, they all booted fine, and the box carried on with no real issues. I showed another colleague at work, and he’d asked how it would cope with Windows guests. The reason he was interested is he has just completed his MSITP qualification, and had quite a bit of difficulty running all the required server instances using his laptop and VMWare Workstation.

This evening I installed a base install of XP, and cloned that 4 times. Again, no real issues, so I decided to give every host 1G of memory (the server only has 8GB total), and see how KSM got on with the VMs. At the moment, it’s still scanning through memory pages, however it’s been running for around 20 minutes, and it’s already reclaimed 2.5GB of memory. No doubt given it some more time, it’s going to reclaim even more.

To say I am impressed by the Microserver, and KVM + KSM would be an understatement.Think I’ll setup a HA cluster when I get the other server, and see how that compares the likes of ESX.

Below just the quick setup I was playing with this evening.

The Kindle and I

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:30:53 +0000

I’m well late for this party, but having recently got an Amazon Kindle, and I have to say, I am very, very impressed with it.

Sure, it doesn’t play movies, it has a laughable web browser, and the audio play back is awful. However for what it was designed for, reading books, it is simply the best device I have used.

I’d previously tried to read paper books, using iBooks no the iPad, Android Tables, Phones, and my iPhone, nothing really felt right. I went on a long weekend to Tenerife a few weeks back, and wanted to try out a few books I’d been recommended. Previously I hand’t really been a ‘bookworm’, sure I read tons every day, but usually they’re technical books, RSS, Blogs… that kind of thing, but not novels or that kind of thing; even rarer to read it from cover to cover.

So I picked up a wifi Kindle, for £90, ordered a few books on the store, charged the thing up, and shoved it in my bag. Whilst sitting by the pool, I started to read ‘A Million Little Pieces’ a book a good friend had recommended. The first thing I noted was the eInk screen, and how easy it was to read in the bright sunlight – something no other device I have can be said about. The second was how comfortable it was to read with it. The buttons are exactly where they need to be on both sides, and the Kinda is very light, lighter than most books, so holding it for any length of time isn’t an issue.

The things that are clearly awesome about it:

The price – It’s really rather cheap in comparison to my normal gadgets.
Ease of use – It’s so simple, even Mother can get on with it.
Ease of buying – The system Amazon has built around buying eBooks is so simple. I can request a sample of a book, read the first chapter, and if I like it, at the end of the first chapter, I have a buy button; that’s it, I then have the book.
Screen – The eInk display is really rather impressive. The only downfall to it is the lack of backlight, so as soon as it’s not overly light where you are, you can’t see the thing. They do have a case with integrated night light. This also works quite well, as it uses the power from the device for power.
Weight/Shape/Controls – They are all very well designed.
Battery – Two weeks of use, and I still haven’t charged it.

The things that aren’t so awesome:

Screensavers – They’re awful. I had to jailbreak the device, to get rid of them.
Cases – To get a backlight, I bought the official case – they’re not cheap.
VAT – not an Amazon or a Kindle issue – but in the UK, you still get charged VAT (20%) for eBooks. So eBooks are more expensive than paper books – CRAZY!

One thing I really wish I had done now in reflection is to buy the 3G model. The only reason I’d want that is the page sync. I’ve found that the Kindle app for Android is surprisingly very good. I use it on my ZTE Blade, which has an AMOLED screen. Putting the background to black and text to white, doesn’t use a lot of battery at all on the Blade, and being able to turn page by using the volume switch, makes it quite a good device to use when I don’t have my kindle on me. The only issue with this is, I need to remember to turn the kindle wi-fi on and sync the pages back to Amazon – if I’d bought the 3G model, this would just do it for me.

I’ve tried the Kindle app on the iPad, and whilst it’s all there, I just don’t find the iPad that great for reading for any length of time, the lack of a ‘turn page button’ and it’s slightly too heavy. It is however neat to have a synced copy of all my books on all the devices… just in case.

Unsecured Call?

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:04:10 +0000

“The Cellular network you are using is not encrypted. This call can be intercepted by unauthorized listeners”

Running the first iOS 5 beta on my iPhone 4. Got this come up when I received a call this afternoon.

Apple looking to put in end-to-end encryption of calls?

Motorola Xoom

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 08 May 2011 19:12:38 +0000

Last week, a colleague at work bought a Motorola Xoom, I had a quick play in the office and was very impressed.

I’d previously owned the original iPad, however had grown quite bored of it’s lack of customisation ability. I found my self using it less and less, and eventually sold it, luckily just before the iPad2 was announced. I’ve been an advocate of Apple kit for quite some time, having owned every iPhone since they have come out, however last week whilst I was waiting for my number to port over to Three UK, I was using my ZTE Blade (running Cyanogen 7), and was really surprised how much it had come on from when I had last properly played.

So when I had a quick go on the Xoom, I was quite impressed. Being the impulsive gadget lover, I went after work to buy one. At the moment they’re only available on the high street from Carphone Warehouse, on a 24 month data contract. Unfortunately I managed to get a parking ticket as I was being slightly optimistic that I would only be in the shop for two minutes, however it was more like forty.

The only tablet I have used before is the original iPad, running iOS 4.3, so my opinion and comparisons are limited. I’ve used the Galaxy Tab, but not in any great detail.

The Xoom is the first tablet to be released to the mass market running Google’s Android operating system, 3.0 aka Honeycomb. The Xoom has all the usual features you would expect from the tablets on the market today, these include front and rear cameras, 3G, wifi, bluetooth, HDMI output, 1G DDR2 and based on the Nvidia Tegra 2, which is a 1GHz dual core processor.

The first impressions of Honeycomb are very impressive. It’s been well designed for use on the tablet platform and feels very smooth. However after a bit more use, my opinion has changed somewhat.

What I like

Honeycomb is a big improvement over v2.x of Android, on a tablet.
In comparison to iOS, the ability to customise Android is far superior. Widgets, shortcuts, themes, application integration, all are much superior.
The inbuilt browser is very fast, and well presented. Has all the features I would expect.
The aspect ratio at 1280×800 (wide-screen) works really well, and the screen is almost as responsive as Apple’s multi touch sensor.

What I didn’t like

The device has the Tegra 2 chipset. A dual-core processor, which supports up to 720p. However no video player is included in the OS. Many of the ones I tried from the market, either didn’t work, or didn’t fully utilise the GPU, so getting the full 720p didn’t work.
Honeycomb crashes quite a bit, having to force apps to close and settings windows quite often.
The device has a micro-usb port for connectivity, however doesn’t charge from this. Instead they use a proprietary connector to their custom power brick. This in my opinion sucks. I have a Micro, a Mini and an Apple charger, by my bed, in my bag, on my various desks, and by the couch. Having one of these chargers just is a big draw back for me.
The speakers are on the back of the device. That’s a bit of a design flaw to start with, however even worse, is they’re right where I hold the device, so even worse.
The device seems heavy in the hand. The original iPad was 1.6lbs for the 3G model, which is the same as the Xoom. However in comparison the the iPad2, which is 1.33lbs, so seems much heavier.
At launch flash wasn’t supported. Something iOS has come under fire for, and something the Android lovers have always commented on. This should have been there at release.
The Micro-SD card isn’t supported as yet. I’m not quite sure how you can release a product without full support of the hardware provided.
The Micro-SD card is on the same adapter and slot as the SIM card, so when it is supported, to swap the card over, you’ll also need to power down, as the SIM isn’t hot-swappable.
There are very few apps designed for honeycomb and even less for the tegra2. This is to be expected, as they’re both only just out.
Accessories for the device are very limited. When the iPad came out, this was exactly the same, however I very much doubt they’ll be quite as much choice.

There is one more annoyance, but that is neither to do with the device or the OS. Why mobile providers feel the need to sit proxies in front of their customers, which resample images to almost unviewable versions is beyond me. Sure you may save a few KBs, but really? The device is supposed to be use as a consumer device, however if I look at flickr I want to see a decent quality version of the photo, not some re-sampled crap version.

Overall, it’s an ok device, but it isn’t amazing. Honeycomb I expect will be really very good once it has some more time to mature. The overall experience of the device is it just hasn’t had the thought and attention into how it will be used. A few small changes could have really changed this. Honeycomb feels like an initial beta release. In my opinion it’s not quite there, in both stability and support (of other apps). Given time, I honestly thing I would prefer Honeycomb to iOS on the tablet, it just needs to mature somewhat.

I’ll be exercising my 14 day cancellation period tomorrow, and taking the device back.

Eye-Fi Pro X2

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:29:33 +0000

Last year I bought an Eye-Fi Pro X2, as a neat addition to my photography kit. It boasts a 8GB Class6 SD card, with integrated geolocation and a wifi uploading. Quite neat I thought.

I went for the Pro model as it supported RAW uploading, but was quickly disappointed by the limits of the card.

Geolocation – I’m not sure why I was expecting more, but this is only using so-called ‘wifi-location’. This is fine in the city, but quite often the reason I want to geotag my photos is because I am in the middle of no where, this wont work there.
Geolocation – To get your photos geotagged they have to be first uploaded to their servers. I can kind of understand this, as card it’s self doesn’t have enough grunt to process the current wifi macs it can see, and properly geotag them. However these seen macs are stored in the image, so when it is uploaded to the eye-fi servers, they can do the lookup to the database, and assign the correct geotags. Why their app cannot do this, is beyond me. It seems completely stupid to upload 8GB of images, to have them tagged, to download them again, to process. 16GB of transfer, for what would probably be <1Mb if they did this the logical way.
RAW – Whilst the RAWs will be uploaded, they wont be geotagged. When I contacted eye-fi, they state that there is no standard for the EXIF location tags for RAW. This certainly wasn’t mentioned on the box/site/anywhere.
Upload to open and public networks – The X2 range come with this service for free for a year. This seemed perfectly fine to me, a lifetime of free uploads would be good, but probably not sustainable. However, it didn’t actually include the access to public networks, i.e. BTOpenzone, The Cloud..etc this only enabled the card to join these networks once you had setup your card with one of the premium accounts that you’d need to pay for separately. Again, this certainly wasn’t mentioned beforehand.

This was all a bit annoying, but not the end of the world. I still used the card, paired it to my MiFi from three. As I have 15GB allowance, uploading wasn’t an issue. I had setup selective sync, so it would only upload photos I ‘protected’. This worked quite well, often when I was at expos, I could be uploading the photos to eye-fi, then using their mobile optimised website, select where I wanted to share the photos too. Giving an almost instant upload to the web, throughout the day. When I got home, the eye-fi agent had downloaded all the files, so I could process them further if I wanted. All quite neat.

I then had a card corrupt totally, not readable in a number of machines (running Windows, Linux or OSX), and none of my cameras. Their RMA process was awful to be honest. Weeks to get a response via email, then a huge delay when thye had received my card back. It seemed they only stated to respond timely when I mentioned them on twitter.

Since then, on my D3o0s, I have set it up to put the jpgs to the eye-fi card, and raws to the CF card. As I don’t use raw on the eye-fi, this works well for me. I in effect have a raid-1 setup, so if a card corrupts, I have the images on the other card.

The other day I saw that eye-fi had launched a new product, the Mobile X2, which allowed direct uploading directly to an iOS or Android device. This is something the hacker community have had for a while, but finally supported by eye-fi is cool. They said they would be upgrading the firmware on the current X2 range to implement this feature.

Today I opened the eye-fi manager on my mac, and it indeed said it had an update. It then listed direct mode as a feature for my card, but that required a firmware upgrade too, great. Or not, it listed the firmware it needed as being the current firmware, so failed every time. Looking on their forums a few people here and here. It seems their PR department had been working overtime, and all marketing shouldn’t have gone out yet. Oh dear.

Anyways, reading further into it, I could upgrade my card manually upgrade the firmware by unregistering it and registering it again, losing my settings. Not something I’m overly fussed about. So once I had done that, I downloaded the iOS application, to find out, the new one isn’t on the store yet. I guess this might be what they’re waiting for.

The android app had been, so I grabbed my ZTE Blade, and installed. The card now shows it’s self a wireless access point, so the app connects the phone to that AP, and that’s then how the card uploads to the phone. Took a few snaps and indeed, they were uploaded to the phone.

However, now the phone is connected to the eye-fi, it itself now cannot get to the outside world. On Android, if you have a wireless connection, it drops it’s connection over the cellular. Naturally the eye-fi card doesn’t have an internet connection, so now both devices are isolated. Also an interesting thing, you can edit the setting on the card, from the phone, but only if you have an internet connection, which naturally now is broken.

As far as I can see, I cannot change this behaviour in android, so looks totally broken.

It’s such a shame when companies hype a product so much, but when it comes to the crunch, it really doesn’t live up to the promises.

10.6.7 + Aperture 3 + Final Cut Express 3 = fail

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:35:07 +0000

Yesterday, my flatmate looked like he was going to pull all of his hair out. He was on the phone to Apple, who kept fobbing him off. So I thought I’d be nice and help out.

Problem

He had bought Aperture 3 from the Mac AppStore, and was working fine. The 10.6.7 update came out, and he’d updated to that too. Still all fine. He’d then bought and installed Final Cut Express 3. After this Aperture panic’s when it opens with something like
Library not loaded: /Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/PluginManager Referenced from: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture Reason: no suitable image found. Did find: /Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/PluginManager: no matching architecture in universal wrapper

Attempted fixes

He’d tried un-installing and re-installing both Final Cut Express, and Aperture in all sorts of combinations. Nothing was working. He then called Apple who pointed him towards this article. However that was for 10.6.6, and he was now on 10.6.7, so couldn’t apply that update.

I took a look, and indeed with any combinations of re-installing, and even re-applying the 10.6.7 update didn’t fix the issue.

Looking at various forums, such as the Apple discussion forums, there were plenty of people having the issue. Reading those, and various blog entries, there were a number of suggestions, from applying the 10.6.6 update, to re-installing OSX (yeah, sure that would probably fix it, but not the best approach), there was even a suggestion to run Aperture in 32bit mode. Nothing worked.

My Fix

So I decided to give up on the forums and t’internets, and try my own method of tracking down the issue. I got my MacBookAir, and took a manual backup with TimeMachine (which backs up to my Solaris SAN). This meant I had a clean backup, if anything went wrong. I am also at patch level 10.6.7. I had a look in /Library/Frameworks and I had the folder PluginManager.framework.

I installed Aperture 3, and all worked. Folder was still there. I then proceeded to install Final Cut Express, and when the installer had finished the folder had been deleted. Wasn’t in the trash or anything. Interesting.

This naturally broke Aperture, as it did on my flatmate’s MBP. Just to see if I could resolve this, in a more methodical fashion, I un-installed Aperture and Final Cut, and then re-applied the 10.6.7 update. Still PluginManager.framework was missing.

I had a good copy of PluginManager.framework so decided to install Aperture and Final Cut, then copy PluginManager.framework back to /Library/Frameworks. After this everything worked as expected.

My flatemate doesn’t have any backups, so I scp’ed my PluginManager.framework folder to his MBP, and indeed, all worked.

Solution

So ignore the forums, they’re just going to have you running around in circles.

Restore PluginManager.framework from your backups, after installing Aperture and Final Cut Express.

If you’ve not installed Final Cut Express yet, make sure you take a copy of PluginManager.framework.

If you’ve already installed, and don’t take backups. Then well, that’s just silly. If you want a copy of my PluginManager.framework folder, leave a comment, and I’ll get a copy over to you. In my tests, going from a MBA, to a MBP, it all worked fine. Not 100% sure if it will work on say a MacPro or iMac, but I would have thought it would, OSX isn’t _that_ much different between machines, except for drivers.

Hope this helps someone else out there.

Hack the Government!

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:49:49 +0000

So I’ve been pretty busy for the last month or so, and was actually looking forward to doing nothing at all. However a friend had mentioned the ‘National Hack the Government Day’ hosted by Rewired State, so I thought why the hell not.

Basically, they get a bunch of dev types, a bunch of data, and let them do what they want with it. I was entrigued, and said I’d pop along, take some photos and do a bit of networking. However when I got there, I thought I may as well try and hack something up, I could simply not put it forward for presentation if I majorly failed.

I’m by far a coder by trade, but can usually get from A to B, sometimes via X, Y and Z. I wont go into the detail about what I hacked up, you can see my presentation here.

There were some really awesome projects hacked up, especially considering the limited time everyone had. The presentations were all very good. Lots were still coding right up until they were on stage.

After the presentations, and awards given out it was off to the pub to celebrate Rewired State’s second birthday. There was even an amazing Gin and Tonic cake. Was a really good day, and met quite a lot of people I know online, from different parts of the industry.

Below are some of the photos I took, there are loads more here.

Apple TV 2 & XBMC

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 23:55:18 +0000

I was browsing around the Covent Garden Apple store the other day, as I needed to get a new SuperDrive for my MacBook Air (MBA), as I’d cleverly managed to throw my other one out when I was having a clear out the other day.

I’d always been interested in the new Apple TV (ATV) , but never got one, as I have XBMC setup at home. On a nettop in the bedroom connected to my LCD, and actually on an original Xbox in the front room, so didn’t see the need. A few friends have total Apple houses (iMacs, Macbooks, iPads, iPhones, TVs, you name it, they have it)… they’re all very nice and all, but I never really felt the need to have the ATV.

Until, in the pub the other evening, a friend at work mentioned he’d bought one, odd I thought as he’s not the usual Apple fanboy. He explained that he’d bought one, jailbroken it, and installed XBMC.

I’d been battling with the Nvidia ION drivers on my nettop, so HD content wasn’t perfect. So when I was shopping, the impulse in me took over, and one was bought.

Jailbreaking was fun. Seas0nPass doesn’t work if you have FileVault turned on, which I do. Creating a new user on the MBA, and making the IPSW on that user (without FileVault enabled). Then the way the ATV is constructed makes it somewhat difficult to plug the HDMI and MicroUSB cable in at the same time. On reflection, I think this is on purpose, as you don’t really need to. I was then getting 1602 errors in iTunes when restoring the custom IPSW, later turns out, you can’t have the power and USB connected. Restoring with just the USB cable connected did the trick. Seas0npass is currently tethered only, so anytime I power off the ATV, I have to connect to the Mac. Not a huge issue, as don’t plan on turning off too often, and have set it not to power off.

Once jailbroken with seas0npass, installing XBMC was easy, and setup in a few minutes. Have it playing full HD content from my NAS. The remote, optical out, and HDMI resolution alll work flawlessly.

The other nice feature is AirPlay, so I can stream the media from my MBA or iPhone 4. I would have been able to from my iPad too, but I sold that as hadn’t used it a single time since getting the MBA.

Overall am really impressed with the ATV2, for the price of it, it’s a stunning piece of kit.

MythTV – Stuck Queue

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:06:07 +0000

I use DHCP at home, as most do, for convenience. Last week I changed the router at home to one compatible with DD-WRT as I was setting IPv6 up at home (something I should blog about later). When I set it up, until I migrated the old DHCP config over, everything on the LAN that had static DHCP allocations went a bit crazy. Once that was resolved everything went back to normal… or so I thought.

However I’d noticed that MythTV wasn’t recording anything. When looking through it had listed all of it’s encoders as remote and “currently not connected”, interesting I thought. It looked like somewhere along the line that box had got 192.168.5.6 instead of 192.168.5.5. So it didn’t think it was, well it’s self. Changing the DHCP assignments quickly resolved this.

A week later I noticed whilst programs had been recording, they were all sitting queued in Job Queue. Restarting the backend process nor did restarting the box. So I had a quick look on it’s DB and noticed the recordings were showing as remote, not local as they should be. Delving a bit further I noticed that it was listing the recordings as being recorded on “sidekick.oob.an0key.net” instead of “sidekick”. I’d set the domain on the router, and it was happily distributing via DHCP.

So to resolve my issue, I changed the hostname manually, back to sidekick.

To do this on ubuntu is pretty simple, edit
/etc/hostname
with the desired hostname and then
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh restart
However I was now stuck, with all the recordings showing as being recorded on the ‘remote’ host. The only way to fix this would be to edit the database manually. This is where it the less adventurous may want to stop.

So log on to your MySQL instance, it’ll prompt for MySQL’s root password.
sidekick:~# mysql -p -u root
Use mythtv’s database named mythconverg in my setup.
use mythconverg;
Then print the structure and contents of the jobqueue table.
select * from jobqueue;
This is what I was presented with.
mysql> select * from jobqueue; +-----+--------+---------------------+---------------------+------+------+-------+--------+---------------------+-------------------------+------+-------------------------+---------------------+ | id | chanid | starttime | inserttime | type | cmds | flags | status | statustime | hostname | args | comment | schedruntime | +-----+--------+---------------------+---------------------+------+------+-------+--------+---------------------+-------------------------+------+-------------------------+---------------------+ | 284 | 1001 | 2011-02-03 17:11:00 | 2011-02-03 17:15:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 272 | 2011-02-03 17:15:53 | sidekick | | Successfully Completed. | 2011-02-03 17:15:01 | | 283 | 1004 | 2011-02-02 22:00:00 | 2011-02-02 23:05:00 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-02 23:05:00 | | 282 | 1001 | 2011-02-02 21:00:00 | 2011-02-02 22:00:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-02 22:00:01 | | 279 | 1007 | 2011-02-01 21:00:00 | 2011-02-01 22:00:01 | 256 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2011-02-03 17:25:24 | sidekick.oob.an0key.net | | | 2011-02-01 22:00:01 |
So I can see the that the job ran fine that came in after I changed the hostname. So what I decided to try is to update the hostname, and also the scheduledtime too as it was in the past.
mysql> update jobqueue set -> status=1,hostname="sidekick",comment="",schedruntime="2011-02-03 17:30:01" where status=1;
So this will update the hostname and schedruntime for anything with status 1 (which means queued). I ran that and restarted mythtv-backend, and all the queue was then worked though.

Job done. Hopefully this may help someone else in a sticky position.

Why BT are a bag-of-fail

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:43:23 +0000

So BT, arguably the UKs biggest ISP/telco, in my opinion are a complete bag of fail. Now I guess writing this means, that I’ll probably never work for them, but hey, who would want to?

I’ve dealt with BT whilst working at $dayjob-1, and the incompetence I saw there, was shocking to say the least. That I can deal with, I got paid to deal with it, but when it’s in my time it’s a different story.

BT or rather BTOpenzone serve a huge amount of establishments with their Wifi ‘Cloud’ offering. Most places like Starbucks, if you have a registered account with them, will happily let you use it for free.

However before you can do this, you need to go through the authentication process with BT. This basically hijacks any DNS request you send, and redirects you to a the auth page. That’s kind of ok, for most users.

However most times when I use it, it’s a complete failure.

They use port 8443 for SSL, instead of the standard 443. This can play havock with local firewalls.
The certificate they use for www.btopenzone.com is not valid for that domain, so most browsers will flag a massive security warning.
Their DNS often is broken.
If it is working, the webserver you try to connect to, isn’t running (connection refused).

The last two are especially annoying, like today, in Starbucks (Whitechappel Road). I switch the macbook on, join their wifi, get an IP and DGW, then any page I go to, should redirect me to their auth page. However seems it is slightly broken, as normal.

So this is telling me that Safari cannot connect to the server. This can be a bit vague, so you need to dig a bit deeper. Open up your terminal and try to simulate what the browser is doing.

So you telnet to www.btopenzone.com on port 8443. You get a connection refused. This means that from my macbook, I got over their network, right to the end server, which is saying ‘Hey, that port is open, but I don’t have anything running on it’.

I’ve no idea what is on the backend of btopenzone.com however looking at the DNS resolution:
Luke-Sheldricks-Mac-4:~ luke$ dig www.btopenzone.com ; DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> www.btopenzone.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15147 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.btopenzone.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.btopenzone.com. 17378 IN A 217.41.225.106

It’s only returning a single IP, which could be the IP of a load balancer, and then a number of servers behind that IP. However I wouldn’t expect all of them to fail.

With the helpful tool nmap, we can see:

PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 80/tcp open http SunONE WebServer 6.1 442/tcp open ssl/http SunONE WebServer 6.1 443/tcp open ssl/http SunONE WebServer 6.1 8443/tcp open ssl/http Apache Tomcat/Coyote JSP engine 1.1

So using an old Solaris 8 server (the current version is 10) to run their authentication services. Can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surpised if there is only one server back there. The amount of times I’ve seen this, really does go to show how under speced their ‘solution is’. I look after massive solutions in $dayjob, and this kind of thing would never happen, and if it did, certainly wouldn’t for long.

To sum up: BT you suck.

My ‘cloud’ IM setup

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:00:19 +0000

For a long time now, I’ve had a number of different applications I use to connect to various different IM (instant messaging) mediums, such as Irssi for IRC, Pidgin for Jabber/MSN/etc on my desktops/laptops and usually BeeJive on my iPhone when I’m out and about.

This has all ‘kinda’ worked, it hasn’t been the most elegant of solutions, but it did do what I need it to. Until you add something like the iPad to the mix.

The problem I had, was I’d be signed on to say MSN on my MacBook, and then decide I’ve worked enough for the day, so sign off. Then whilst watching TV in the evening, want to send a message to someone, who only uses MSN, so grab my iPad and sign on via BeeJive. Well that kind of works, except, if I forget to sign off BeeJive, it keeps me online on their ‘cloud’, so I can connect back at any time via the iPad, only the iPad though.

If someone was to send me a message when the client is closed on the iPad, sure it sends a push message to it, but no other device. If I go out, and I know someone has sent me a message, I can’t connect to it via BeeJive on the iPhone, as it doesn’t keep them in sync. Same as if I wanted to log in with the MacBook, I can’t see what that message was.

So I decided this doesn’t work how I want and need it to. So I set about designing my own solution. The aim was to set something up running on my infrastructure, at little or no cost (not always easy when you add any iOS devices in the mix), and reliable.

What I came up with, works really well for me, so thought I’d document what I put together.

The server components run on a machine that is always on, the is the core of the solution. The underlying OS I used is a Fedora 14 box (so Fedora rawhide – the development branch). The packages I’ve used are widely available on pretty much every Linux distribution, ports (OS X, *BSD), so the OS here, really doesn’t make much of a difference.

Server side:
Irssi – a cross platform IRC client.
ZNC – a cross platform IRC bouncer.
BitlBee – a cross platform IM gateway for IRC.

Client side:
Colloquy Mobile – iOS IRC client – use this on the iPad and iPhone.
Adium (Beta) – OS X IM client – use the beta version as it supports IRC.
Pidgin – a cross platform IM client – use this on any Windows or Linux machines i happen to be on.

Again the client side really doesn’t matter, just as long as you have something you can connect to an IRC server with, it should be all good.

The setup uses BitlBee to connect to MSN, G-Talk, Jabber, Facebook chat, and pretty much any other IM network you’d want to connect into. BitlBee presents it’s self as a IRC server, and you contact list is all shown as a room. When you chat to someone you do so as you would traditionally. That part worked a treat.

At first I just had Irssi running with the proxy module enabled, this allows you to reconnect into your Irssi session, with a local client, and ‘pose’ as remote session. This worked well, so I just left Irssi running in a remote screen session, then when I wanted to connect in and chat, I would just open say Pidgin locally, and it would connect to all the rooms the Irssi session had.

This was fine, however, Irssi on it’s own doesn’t support playback. What I mean here is, if someone had sent me a DM, Irssi would have it, but when I logged in with Pidgin, Irssi wouldn’t send me a copy of that message, it only forwards new messages. For these kind of features, I’d need to employ a bouncer, not the thuggish type that stand outside nightclubs, but an IRC bouncer.

I tried a few, but settled with ZNC. I should point out here, that when using ZNC, there isn’t really any need to use Irssi in the equation any more, I just kept it as have a few custom scripts, and all my historic logs are there, so decided to keep it.

ZNC will connect to all your favourite IRC networks, keep you online, and when you connect to it with your client, it will replay all the conversations and DMs you missed since you last connected in. this was exactly the functionality I was looking for.

There are also a host of other cool things you can do with ZNC, so I have mine configured to set me away everywhere 5 minutes after my client disconnects. Also if you team colloquy mobile up with ZNC, you can have it push message your iPhone or iPad if you’re mentioned in a chat, or if someone sends you a DM, I have mine set to only do this if there are no other clients connected, else when I’m at computer having a conversation, both my iPhone and iPad have a bit of a push message spasm. This push message function was exactly what I was looking for to replace BeeJive, except this pushes it to all my devices, not just the one that has my account singed in.. neat I thought.

This my no means is the simplest way to set up your MSN, but for if you want all the prerequisites I did, it really works.

The server topology may be a bit complex so have (for my sins) put together a diagram of how it’s set out, along with a few screenshots.

Any questions, please feel free to ask.

Web interface and more from your Huawei E5830 (Three MiFi)

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:02:04 +0000

Last year I bought a Three MiFi aka the Huawei E5830. The small box of magic has a 3G sim and a battery. It’s basically a wireless router. What this allows you to do is to ‘share’ the 3G connection to 5 wireless devices, as well as an additional one via usb.

So when I’m out, it’s great. If I need to use my netbook, laptop, iPod Touch, or my iPhone or Blackberry if their connection is poor, I can just switch on my MiFi, and as long as there is a decent Three data signal, I’m good to go. It’s a lot more flexible than just having a 3G dongle or using the inbuilt 3G modem on my laptop and netbooks, as I can share it with a number of devices at once, effortlessly.

The problem with it, is it comes with some poorly written software which is windows only app to configure the device, which can only be used when the MiFi is connected via USB. Not ideal? Well no not really. Quite often I’ll let someone I’m with leach off it, and want to set the password to something easy to share, and turn mac filtering off. This is often when I’m out and about, and I only have one windows machine, which is my work laptop, which I’m not in the habit of keeping with me. Also the interface gives no stats as to how much data I’ve used, or any logging.

So I was looking around the interwebs the other night, as I thought there must be a way around this. The previous wireless router (albeit not battery powered but still made by huawei) I had, did have a web interface at least. Turns out there are a number of different firmwares available if you’re a bit brave, which unlock the good stuff.

First of all have a read of the flashing guide here. The process is pretty straight forward if you follow the instructions. There are two versions of the firmware available out there, one by another network, which brands with their branding, which I wasn’t a fan of. There is also the official firmware (not from three though) which is what I used, and so far am quite happy with. You can get that from here.

Make sure you follow the flashing guide, and if like mine if you flash b0rks half way through and your device then doesn’t turn on, not all is lost. Follow the guide again, and keep trying. For best results use XP. However if you’re going to use Vista/7, then ensure you run the exe as administrator, else it will get half way through the flash, then b0rk, leaving you with a MiFi that wont boot.

Once you’ve updated the firmware it should reboot, and the come back as normal. I noticed that it seemed to turn on a lot faster Also turning on 3G/Data and Wireless seems a lot quicker too. The standard Three utility will still work as before, just connect via USB. However now you’ll have web access to the Mifi, with all the goodies unlocked. So go to 192.168.x.1 where x is the subnet you set, default is 1 (so 192.168.1.1). You’ll get a login screen, the username is admin, as is the password.Then you can go in to all the advanced features. You also get a bandwidth usage which is really nice to have if you’re always running out.

You can also change the config quite a bit, which is awesome. Two things that used to annoy me, that I had to turn it on, then turn wifi on, and then 3G, it should just do it all when I turn it on. Now I can set this… WIN.

Also noticed that it has a mobile (well looks iPod/iPhone friendly) gui too. Point safari to the same IP and you get

So a lot more usable, and I can say goodbye to being stuck to Windows for it. Good luck, let me know how you got on.

Windows 7 RC1, Boot Camp & VMware Fusion – No Networking

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:29:11 +0000

Last week when I was at a festival, my macbook unfortunately ran totally out of space, and there wasn’t much I could delete. With almost 20 gigs of SD cards, the only thing that could really take the chop was my XP boot camp partition.

Cut a long story short, I’ve now got a much bigger drive (500 GB) for my macbook. Along with the release of Windows 7 RC1 being released I thought I’d give it a try with boot camp.

Installing is pretty easy, burn the Microsoft ISO to a DVD, and follow the normal guide. I detest the fact that I need to burn another CD, or use my OS X Install DVD (which I can never find) to get the boot camp drivers. If like me you’d like to download them, I’ve given a link below to where you may find them. I just put them on a usb stick.

Once installed, pretty much everything works under boot camp, the only thing I found that didn’t play was the ‘Reboot into OS X’ I get an error. This isn’t a huge problem, as you can just hold the alt key on boot up to select OS X or Windows.

Once I got all that working, I then wanted to get the same build / partition under VMware fusion. Reading a few guides, the best way is to follow the normal guide for XP, but change it so the guest is set to Windows 2008 Server. Again, all working pretty well once you install VMware Tools.

The only problem that I did have, is there was no networking for the guest. The NIC just showed as Ethernet Controller. Nothing seemed to get this NIC working, tried manually installing the drivers from the VMWare tools cd, copying from another Windows 7 guest.

The only thing that seemed to fix it, was to shutdown the guest, and add a second NIC, and boot back up. Windows 7 RC1, installs this NIC with no problems at all, and all is working. Intererstingly, it still wont play with the original one. None the less, it’s all working through it’s second, new NIC, so I am happy with that.

Useful links

Synergy

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:41:49 +0000

A friend told me of a magical cross platform application, which I’ve been using for a while, thought I’d share. Synergy;

“Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). ”

The picture above shows my very small desk, sporting 2x 22 Samsungs, and my Dell D420. Under the desk is an old HP desktop powering the two monitors (and soon to be 9′ touch screen above them, when I get the drivers setup). I rarely use the D420 these days, as I use my MacBook or Advent 4213 notebook when out and about, so didn’t mind giving it up to the desk.

I can use the keyboard and mouse on the laptop, to control both it, and the bigger screens. The neat thing is, with the config setup correctly, I can just move the mouse upwards and the pointer magically moves to the other screen, and the keyboard then controls that computer too. A few other neat options are to have a shared clipboard, and to activate the screensaver/lock screen across all computers with each other.

So on my tiny desk, I can fit in quite a lot of screen real estate. As for using the laptop as a primary keyboard, I started to do this at work when the hotdesk keyboards started to freak me out, and using the laptop keyboard is actually quite nice to use.

Have tested Synergy with os x, and all worked pretty flawlessly there too. Not had a chance to test under windows just yet, as rarely use it these days, but from what I’ve read it all works fine.

Vodafun

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:31:26 +0000

So I am meeting a friend for coffee and lunch today, unfortunately she’s running a bit late, so decided to grab a frappacino and be one of those geeks in Starbucks with their laptop/netbooks out.

I’m in the process of swapping out the wireless card in my netbook (for osx86) so don’t have any drivers or modules setup in the OS’s at the moment.

Luckily though, I do have a vodafone data sim, and the 4213 has an inbuilt 3G modem.

Here comes the fun part, the data tariff is on Vodafone business, so you would think they’d be slightly reliable… erm nope.

Every month, without fail, they mess up the billing. Apparently my Direct Debit fails, it doesn’t. A few ways I know, is it’s gone through a couple of times, so we know that it’s got the correct details. The other being when a DD does bounce, my Bank arse rape me on charges. Third being, there is always funds to cover all my DD’s.

Now vodafail, are funny people, because you know how I said it’s a data card, well how do they try to contact you… by txt message. That’s a big clever idea.

I can sort of see the idea, in that their app for windows, does have a sms function, but I would at least have thought an email may be a better option? or even both. However, I don’t use windows, instead my netbook is running Fedora 10, and NetworkManager doesn’t support sms… FAIL

The best one is when I do look at the missed call txt’s, from their sales drones. WTF? do they talk binary? no, well don’t call a datacard then!

Bah, alas, I phone them up, and go through the usual crap of, could we take your mobile number (No, I don’t know it, I never have, and have no intention of, it’s a datacard.) Can I have the account number, it’s on your bill (No, it’s a datacard, I use it when I am out and about, I don’t carry a copy of all my bills with me)… so we eventually get there, and they say to switch my PHONE off and on… FAIL.

Alas I am mobile again, thanks to the friendly folk at vodafail.

Hmm, the contract runs out next month, who should I move to?

How to break as much as possible with just one stone

Luke Sheldrick — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 02:08:20 +0000

This is an admittance of failure, by one party, me. Today was working on a load of issues at work, and lost access to my home IM server. This usually means network manager on my laptop has dropped the VPN, and just need to redial.

However today, slightly different, in that my VPN GW had fallen over. Luckily this is a virtual machine on one of my servers in London, so just have to reset the guest via VMWare. Unfortunately, this is on one my older servers, still running VMWare Server 1.x, and also for added fun, I can only access the Host via the VPN, seeing the problem here?

Well I do have a ‘backdoor’. Anyways I digress, whilst I was resetting the guest, I thought I’d take a look at what snapshots I had for it.

After clicking the second button, I quickly remembered, VMWare Server 1.x, only has one snapshot. Oh dear, within a blink it was restoring to the previous snapshot, with no way to stop it.

Checking further, this snap shot was old, very old, about 3 months old. So it booted back up. Here comes the second fail. The server in question, happens to be the master, of my MySQL servers, so decided to quickly replicate it’s self, wiping all the new data from the other nodes. Is also my primary NS, so replicated those too. It also does a shit load of other things, that I wont go into, but that broke lots too.

Alas, shouldn’t be a problem though, as I have a four hourly rsync of the configs taken, and replicated off site. Here comes the third and forth fail. 3) the MySQL dumps, appear to have stopped working, looks like there was a regression in one of the scripts. 4) I’d been working on the offsite nas a few months back, and didn’t want the rotation of backups to occur whilst I was doing the work. You guessed it, I forgot to switch it back on. Fuck!

These are all my own fault, I have no way to deny. I spend most of my working day fixing other people’s silly mistakes like this, and setting up systems / procedures so this doesn’t EVER happen, you’d think I’d actually tick a few things off my personal to do list, huh?

Nevermind, managed to fix it all in the end, well mostly… fail fail fail fail fail

Windows Update – Hang on Reboot?

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:46:52 +0000

Do your server(s) hang when they reboot after windows updates are applied? A lot of mine seem to, and usually it’s becuase one process gets stuck when it receives the kill signal… usually the windows update process.. If the server is in a remote location, can be a complete arse. There is a quick and dirty way to get around this.

Rather than rebooting as normal, or pressing the reboot now button on windows update, open up a command prompt (Windows > Start > Run > type cmd) and type the following:

shutdown -r -f -t 1

As shown below;

The syntax is as follows;
shutdown == runs the shutdown process / app
-r == reboot
-f == force apps to close (so the process that gets stuck, gets forced to close)
-t 1 == time to delay before rebooting, in seconds. I choose 1, as I don’t want to wait around, pick whatever suits you.

Happy patching.

Using MSN via Pidgin / Adium / Finch?

Luke Sheldrick — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:15:32 +0000

You may have noticed that you cannot connect today. This appears to be because Microsoft are blocking the protocol that libpurple uses. This has been blogged on the Adium Blog, however no fix other than using another client is spoken about.

I personally use Finch, which is a curses version of the widely used Pidgin. There is another method of getting both of these to connect to the MSN network, by using MSN-Pecan. This will fix the problem for now, and get you back online. They provide a deb, or exe for Debian or Windows users, but there doesn’t seem to be an RPM for Redhat / Fedora users, and at the time of checking wasn’t in the repositories. There is however source code available.

For Windows users; install using the exe.

For Debian / Ubuntu users; either install using the deb, or ‘apt-get install msn-pecan’

For Fedora / Redhat users; you’re going to need to install from source. If you’re not sure how try the below;

wget http://msn-pecan.googlecode.com/files/msn-pecan-0.0.17.tar.bz2
tar xvf msn-pecan-0.0.17.tar.bz2
cd msn-pecan-0.0.17/
make
sudo make install

Once you’ve completed the install steps, you need to change your account details in Pidgin or Finch. You need to edit your MSN account from using the MSN protocol to use WLM (WLM has now been added, because you installed MSN-Pecan). See screenshots below.

Originally;

Changed to use WLM;

Should keep ya’ll chatting until Microsoft stop being wankers, or libpurple is updated.

Where am I?

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:56:40 +0000

Have been playing with my iPhone this evening, looking at what’s new, and I must say am really quiet impressed with some of the software coming out. VLC Remote, is especially well welcomed, simple but effective.

I was thinking of getting a GPS plotter / tracker, as carrying a PDA + Bluetooth Receiver, is slightly annoying. Cue, iPhone, which does more for me everyday.

There is a cool app called InstaMapper which will plot / track where you are, and even though I have a first gen iPhone, does very well considering, it doesn’t have GPS. Then using their API’s can add it to facebook / here should I wish. Example below…

Also found (via jailbroken / cydia) an app called Backgrounder, so you can run processes, in standby, which the nice folk at Apple don’t like. Very impressed.

Native VNC Server – VMWare Server

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:55:45 +0000

Randomly discovered a nice feature of VMWare products, the in-built VNC Server. I quick look at their KB reveals http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1246 as being listed for GSX server, however happily works for me on VMWare Server 2.0 (Haven’t tried on 1.0, just yet, but will do later).

Quite simple really, edit the Guest’s VMX file in question and add the following [changing to suite your needs] to the bottom of the file.

RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = “TRUE”

The below are optional, but recommended.
RemoteDisplay.vnc.port = “5900″
RemoteDisplay.vnc.password = “vncpassword”

With the 5900, change the 00, to whatever you please, if you have multiple guests running for example. The 00, will become vnc screen ’0′ and 01, would become ’1′….etc

Quite a nice feature, so I don’t have to [1] Use a vnc server on each of the guests + firewall rules for them [2] I don’t have to run fusion on my mac, to boot an XP guest, just becuase there isn’t a plugin for OSX + VMWare Console [for 2.0 :@ not that I know of anyways, please shout if you know of one though]

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Luke Sheldrick — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:13:11 +0000

If you’re getting the above errors, when you try to run a .sh or similar [I've seen it with perl scripts too] this is will be due to the file being in dos [windows] format, and probably written in notepad or similar.

If you need to get this into unix format, it can be pretty painless, just run the command

dos2unix filename

dos2unix should be available under most releases of linux. Happy coding.

iPhone firmware 2.2 jailbroken

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:05:23 +0000

Didn’t take the dev team long to update their pwnagetool for use with 2.2. It’s always a pleasure to re-install all your apps, and set your phone up how you like it

Although this time, I was quite looking forward to it, as my phone had got a serious bloated gut from all the apps, so time to start a fresh

No network unlock for the 3G iPhone as yet, although they do tease that it’s coming very soon

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/61060174/the-man-from-delmonte-he-say-yes

Jabberishious

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:21:00 +0000

It’s been something that is on my every growing to do / look at list, and finally got around to setting it up, my own shinny jabber server. I already use jabber in a number of ways [work IM, gtalk, to name a few] but wanted to set one up on my own domain. The only drawback I could see is that the jabber protocol will use the A record of the domain/sub domain, so had to tweak my dns slightly.

I opted for OpenFire, as of all the servers I looked at, it seemed the best one for me. Relatively easy setup via rpm, then a bit of config, to get it to play with my domain, rather than the domain / rDNS of the server it’s hosted on. Then had a bit of a snafu with the firewall I use on the particular server [apf], but just by coincidence it cropped up at that time.

So the server is all up and running now, at least for chatting, I am currently playing with a few perl scripts to integrate with a few systems I am playing with. I’ve just got it to play with Nagios, so I get alerts via Jabber too, which is quiet cool.

Feel free to add / message luke[@]sheldrick.co.uk without the []

Page2RSS – Create an RSS feed for any web page

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:28:49 +0000

Just found this little gem. For sites that don’t publish RSS feeds, but you want to keep an eye on, Page2RSS, will add the page to their database, and scan it regularly for you. When any changes are detected, it’ll publish it to a unique rss feed.

Page2RSS – Create an RSS feed for any web page.

This coupled with something like notify.me if you’re watching a page for something you want to know about by the minute, i.e. if amazon have a stock of wii’s or sometime similar. notify.me will notify you via IM [jabber, msn..etc] email, or sms, both very useful.

Vlan trunking on VMWare Server (1.x 2.x)… Continued

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:09:16 +0000

Thought I’d write a quick update, as I had received a comment to my previous post regarding vlan trunking on VMWare Server.

The comment “Hi, Luke
How it does works in VMWare Server 2.0. on the Web Admin interface it doesn’t appear on network list, only physical NICs ”

Well to be honest off hand I couldn’t remember, I always downgrade / use 1.x, as I can’t stand the web interface. However re-installed it back in the lab. At first glance, you can’t add interfaces to the host via the web gui, which blows.

Anyways, running “Managed Virtual Networks”, gives you back the original interface:

Then adding in the interfaces, including the BAS #* (For broadcom individual interfaces / vlans).

Then a quick network refresh in the gui, and all the NIC’s, including the virtual vlan nics, show in the gui

Now back to 1.0.7

VMware Server 2.0 installation error – boche.net – VMware Virtualization Evangelist

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:19:57 +0000

Just tried to re-install VMWare Server 2.0 on one of my lab machines, and keep getting “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation“. The below blog shows how to correct, on a non domain server.

VMware Server 2.0 installation error – boche.net – VMware Virtualization Evangelist.

For a server on a domain, you’ll need to do this on the DC, naturally.

Vlan trunking on VMWare Server (1.x 2.x)

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:22:52 +0000

Someone was telling me the other day how they’d setup vlan trunking on the linux server, using the 802.1q kernel module, and then binding the ‘virtual’ interfaces to the vmnet’s. This wasn’t something I’d thought about before, as I’d gone a different route (sticking a few 4 port nics) in my servers, which also meant I didn’t have the bandwidth limitation. However this was all on a linux server, so is pretty straight forward.

I was rather bored on the grave yard shift last night, and needed an extra vlan on my lab vmhost at home, so set off to see how easy it is to do under Windows 2003, which my vmhost is currently built as. My lab server in question is a HP xw6000, so comes with the Broadcom NetXtreme chipset. Looking around they have a suite you can install, BACS (Broadcom Advance Control Suite). This allows you to setup virtual interfaces, which the OS (and VMWare) just see as being an additional nic.

So all I needed to do is setup the switch port as a trunk, on my Cisco C2948 in the lab, add the vlans I wanted to BACS, and then assign the new nics to a vmnet. All is working quiet well.

Also tried it on a Intel PRO nic, with equally pleasing results. A few pic’s below:

Got google’d

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:05:38 +0000

Not in the habbit of google’ing myself, but worrying, 21,100 names match my rather uncommon name…. eek!

“Results 1 – 10 of about 21,100 for luke sheldrick. 0.29 seconds

luke sheldrick – Google Search.”

This’ll probably make it 21,101

Trains get better :)

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:10:32 +0000

Just catching up on my mountain of RSS, saw this on the reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/30/faraday_train_windows. It would seem the train operator that runs my daily commute train is embrasing the 21st century by blocking wifi / mobile transmissions, by coating the windows with reflective film.

This is in an attempt to make the quiet zones, quiet. One word…. FAIL. The noise in these carriages is usually a screaming 6month old, or some 13 year old chav, playing eminem, out of their tinny Nokia music player… I hardly thing cutting the business world off from their crackberrys is going to do much.

Also interestingly they don’t mention that they will cut off their ‘in-train wi-fi’ which is run by t-mobile, using their ‘cloud’.

Luke Sheldrick's Blog » IT / Tech

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