Luke Sheldrick's Blog » IT / Tech

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’.

Finch, Putty, AGGHHH

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:50:30 +0000

Just a very quick one. 99% of the time, I use a linux desktop or laptop (usually fedora) both at work and at home. I use Finch to house all my IM accounts, as I can’t be bothered to set it up on every machine, so I just leave it on one of my servers, in a screen session.

Anyways, I’ve found when I use Putty, it never renders it correctly. Now for the 1% of the time I use Windows & Putty, it can sometimes be most annoying trying to work out what people are talking about in a screen of random characters.

Anyways a very simple fix is to change the encoding. To do this:

In putty open the options, or the new session window, then select Windows > Translation, and change the chatacter set to UTF-8.

Enjoy

Fell of the waggen

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:59:03 +0000

Well not really, but the whole giving up drinking and shaving until November fell through. Nevermind, the hangover’s were worth it.. not

You know, I always have a load of shit, I think I should blog about, but when I get 5 to actually sit down and type something up, I’ve either forgot about it, or well think it does indeed sound shit so forget about it.

Friday saw a few drinks after work, which led to 2 bars, 2 clubs and ending up losing a wad in the casino…. this is when you realise that first shot was a bad, very bad idea. Nevermind, had a good night [what I can remember of it anyways].

Spent the weekend working, and starting to play with Gentoo. I’m sure I’ll rant more about that all later. Today found an absolutely brilliant tool, that I had kinda been looking for a while. I run a couple of servers, that run Windows 2003, and VMWare Server 1.0.7, mostly just as R&D machines. I could look into setting up a nice ESX cluster, but I just haven’t got around to it. Also on the list to look play with is Xen and KVM. KVM especially looks quite interesting, just been bought out by RedHat, and boasts that it can run more on your hardware than VMWare can.

Anyways I digress, what I currently do is pretty bad in way of backing up my VM Guests, in that I will every now and again, turn one off, copy it’s directory on the host, switch it back on, and move that copy offsite. Whilst it works, and is better than nothing, it’s not really ideal as it causes an outage when I do it. I know with Windows Shadow Copy it can copy/mirror drives [including any locked files] but what I wanted to be able to do was the odd locked file, i.e. the vmdk that’s locked. Bring in hobocopy. Does exactly what I was looking for, you can tell it a source and destination file or directory, and it will use the Microsoft Shadow service, and mirror it for you, complete, and intact. Perfect! it even has the functionality to do incrimental backups using a state file. Wouldn’t work for VMWare files, as it would just see the file as being changed, even though only 1meg of the 100GB file has changed, it would still copy the whole flat file. Baring that, an excellent tool. Now just to setup a schdule to make a mirror, and rsync it offsite, and a nice enterprise offsite backup, for nothing

Tonight I went out with a few friends, to The Royal Albert Hall, to see cocknbullkid when my friend told me about it, I kinda didn’t believe it, but yes it was true. Very good artist, even if the sound levels were a bit off, and the set seemed a bit short, really enjoyed it. Then off to soho for a coffee. Was a bit weird walking around soho sober, looks totally different to when you’ve had 10 double black russians Just for proof, picture below of the comp’ed ticket I / we managed to blag at the door

New home

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:03:46 +0000

In addition to moving my dns, to my self hosted infrastructure, I am also moving quite a few things away from hosting on Windows.

I eventually want to get rid of my Exchange 2007 server, as to be honest it is so much of a resource hog, and for a small user implementation, it’s far too OTT. I need to find a suitable alternative to sync all my devices with however (Laptop(s), iPhone, various Windows Mobiles) I am sure there is something out there that will do the job.

As for this blog, it was hosted on a Windows 2003 Server, the same one as the Exchange server, where performance isn’t great. So now it’s hosted on one of my Linux (Fedora) servers. I am quite happy with the transition, other than a lot of the asp back ends, now have to be re-written in perl or something similar… effort.

I am not too sure if it’s performance has been improved… let me know

Four Figures, and a lot of drink

Luke Sheldrick — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:16:12 +0000

This week saw the demise, of my not-drinking-until-november mission. I stayed at my brother Paul’s house, and we went to play poker at The Loose Cannon poker club. Was quite a cool game, and didn’t do too bad, but as usual came I lost when I got on to higher tables, as the tournament went on.

Paul and I decided the night was young, and after a few drinks decided to have a few drinks at The Empire casino. This is where the night went bad / good. I always take a set amount with me when I go to a casino, say £100. An amount, that I can have a good evening, a few drinks, and not too bothered about if I don’t have it when I leave. It’s still cheaper than going clubbing.

Well this night, I was on a winning streak, and it seemed the more I drank, the more I won. The logic doesn’t work, but the sums did. I must have had a few too many double Black Russians, as I don’t really remember much of the night / morning.

Getting back to my brothers at 6am, having to leave at 6.30am, was not cool. A taxi across London, 12 hours of shaking and mumbling later, I managed to get through the day. I stayed at my brothers again, and happily he filled in the missing gaps of my memory from the night before. ops.

I was going to be really good, and put the money to good use…. meh eBay got me, and have bought a few 22′ Samsung LCD’s, which match my TV. Then decided I needed a refresh on my home dev machines, so bought some Dual Xeon servers, as my current dev setup could do with beefing up.

Never mind, all good. This coming week, I will not be turning another year older. I think I am going to hide away and ignore the fact, there are no birthdays to look forward to now, so it’s all just pointless.

A bit of cloud, and a bit of DNS…

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:04:48 +0000

Yesterday, when I was playing with Starbucks, and enjoying the sun whilst walking around St Katherine’s dock, I remembered I hadn’t actually taken my new camera out of the box (other than to switch it on, go ‘ooh’).

So today I decided to take it along to work, and spend an hour or so, in the afternoon testing it out. Well that plan was out of the window it seemed this morning. Super fog for most of the day. Hmm so much for summer, aye?

: Tower Bridge (Hiding)

Above is a picture from just outside my office, of Tower Bridge, hmm nice sunny day

Also been playing with DNS today. Just one of the things, on my huge list of todo’s, learn BIND. Not the most interesting things to know, but still, quite useful. Also annoyed by the fact that my registra for my personal domain (this one) gives you a maximum of 5 entries, per account. So if you had 5 domains, you can only have 5 A/MX/CNAME/NS/TXT…etc records between them. 1and1 Suck! Avoid at all costs. Also they refuse to change their TTL’s to anything but 1 day. Also not too useful, especially if you’re like me, and like to play quite a bit.

Anyways, so the idea was to have 3 name servers, one in London, one in Essex, and one in Paris. All authoritive, one being the master, with two automatically updating slaves. Getting the servers and zone files over to it was pretty straight forward, there were a few things, I clearly hadn’t read the RFC’s in clear enough detail about. I knew a root record had to be an A record. However I didn’t know that if you have a sub-domain, i.e. luke.sheldrick.co.uk and you have anything else, i.e. MX’s on that sub-domain, that too had to be an A record, rather than a CNAME.

Once I’d patched the slaves, allowing axfr’s (Didn’t realise for slaves, I had to stipulate allow-tranfer to be none, as BIND’s default is allow-transfer to any, it was time to migrate.

The only thing I was slightly worried about was an0key.net is this zone, would be hosting it’s own NS’s. So normally when you do a DNS lookup, you DNS client will ask one of the root servers, where to go, it will then (depending on you domain, i.e. .com will go to the gtld’s. .co.uk will go to nominet), and then they will hand you off to your registra’s name servers, who will give you the records.

As the name servers, of an0key.net will be ns0/1/2.an0key.net, when the gtlds, hand over, your client will ask say ns0.an0key.net what address www.an0key.net has, but to get to ns0.an0key.net it has to know it’s ip, so you end up in a loop.

This is where you setup what is know as a “Glue” record, whereby the gtlds, will kindly hold the A records of my ns0/1/2.an0key.net. There is a pretty good write up on wikipedia on how it all works.

If you’re reading this, then it’s safe to say that, my DNS servers haven’t packed up yet, or haven’t been poisened. If however this site, is now paypal, and you’ve got to give me your credit card, pin number, D.O.B, bra size…etc then pitty you!

Rotten Apple – Part 2

Luke Sheldrick — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:14:42 +0000

Again let down by Apple. They cocked up the first repair (see previous blog) but apparently the part would be in on Tuesday, fixed, they’d call me and couriered to me for Wednesday. Well today is Wednesday, no call, no laptop, no biscuit.

Called up the store, and they said they would look into it and get it repaired. Hmm would they have repaired it if I hadn’t called? me thinks not, even though apparently a ‘Second Repair’ has priority. Later this afternoon, the store called me back, saying it had been fixed, would need to be tested tomorrow, and then shipped out, for delivery that evening. When I asked the ‘Genius’ to check the address, he correctly identified it was my work address, and couldn’t see a problem of it being delivered in the evening. Anyways.

He also said the squeaky hinge problem was not covered under the warranty, and there would be a charge normally, but as I asked for this to be repaired at the same time as the back being fixed, they would do it for free. Hmm this is interesting, as I have never mentioned a squeaky hinge, didn’t know it had one to be honest.

I am thinking these ‘Genius’s would fail an interview for McDonalds at this rate.

Saga continues… maybe on Monday they will launch a Genius v2 rather than a 3g iPhone… that would be nice

Pidgin + Facebook = Genius

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:27:39 +0000

Does facebook chat really annoy you? Well it does me, however is quite conveinant, as I rarely add people to my IM accounts, i.e. MSN, however facebook has the majority on it.

There is now an addon for the popular cross platform IM program Pidgin, which lets you sign on using your facebook account, and adds in your contacts from facebook. The advantage of this is, you can chat like you would say for msn contact, i.e. notifications.

As pidgin uses the libpurple plugin this should also work for other clients such as Adium for Mac OS X.

The simple addon is available at Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

So far I am finding it super useful, no longer do I need to add people to my other accounts The only bug I have found is that if I have it open, and then go on facebook, it hides all my facebook contacts. I have however logged a bug which should hopefully address this.

Blog Fixed

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:31:38 +0000

Fixed the problem with Internet Expolorer, by making a bit of a cut and shut version of the CSS provided with this theme.

The theme originally came with the ability for the user to select which background they wanted. Whilst I liked the look of the theme, I didn’t like this addition, so I stripped most of it out of the scripts. The backend scripts are still there should I want to use it later.

With me messing around with the scripts, I assume this is what broke IE being able to render properly. A few tweaks and we’re rolling again.

Whilst I was at it I tweaked the side bar a bit too

and finally I remembered for a while I quite liked the look the cool date stamp that is present in the ‘Fleshy’ theme, so stripped that bit out too. Think it works quite well, but need to start off blog entries with text, as looks a bit odd if I put a picture in first.

Thats enough, I _should_ go to bed, but sooo not tired

BadIE

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:08:38 +0000

Bad IE grrr.

Noticed someone looking at my blog the other day in Internet Explorer, and it seems it renders it completely all over the place.

As I rarely use windows these days, I hadn’t noticed the theme b0rking it’s self. Grrr, going to have to see if I can find the culprit (or just change to a theme that does work).

Works fine in any other browser on an OS it seems barring Internet Explorer.

Grrrrrrr

Rotten Apple

Luke Sheldrick — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:53:11 +0000

Pft. I retract my last blog entry regarding my MacBook.

You know I said it would be fixed next day, well the Apple Store called me this morning saying that it had been repaired, only 4 days late. I thought well, wasn’t really a huge problem.

Got up a couple of hours early (am on the night-shift at the moment, so sleep during the day), and thought I would take a detor on the drive to work, via Bluewater.

Got to the store, and had to wait about 15 minutes for someone to ackowledge I was there (the two people in the Genius bar were clearly too busy with their iPhones). Anyways a nice lady genius took my details, and presented me with my ‘fixed’ MacBook.

Well fixed, as in half-fixed. They had only changed half the case, so I still had cracks all over the bottom half. When I pointed this out, the genius said they had just carried out what I asked for. When I said all I said was here is my mac, fix it please, I didn’t specifiy what part of the case. I also pointed out that it said on the repair receipt to replace all panels. Grrrr, see seems quite nice about it all, but still the point is they cocked up.

She said she would need to take it back in for a 2nd repair, but they didn’t have the parts in stock, and don’t get a delivery until Tuesday. woop!

Naturally not happy at this point, as it’s quite a drive their from my house, and it’s always pissed me off that I bought the mac online, yet they don’t seem to offer any ‘mail’ support.

I had a word with one of the managers, and she said she could get it couriered back to me, once it had been repaired. Still super-chuffed off, such a waste of my time. GRRR

Crack-Book

Luke Sheldrick — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:06:03 +0000

Literately, my macbook has seen better days, as it has cracked around the seems. I just accepted it as one of those things. Until a little bird told me that he had his fixed, by just taking into the Apple store, and booking a repair.

Apparently they even do it if your macbook is out of warrenty. woop!

Took mine into the BlueWater store today,

and will be ready and shiny tomorrow! Fucking A.

This being similar to my problem:

Wait is almost over?

Luke Sheldrick — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:12:56 +0000

Was out shopping today, and noticed that the Carphone Warehouse had a new poster. Stating that the wait is almost over, for the iPhone, and the date being Friday 9th (June?) hmm around the same time as the WDDC.

The HP laptop was a sticker on the wall, for carphone warehouse, touting their free laptop / broadband office.

Luke Sheldrick's Blog » IT / Tech

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

Related Posts (auto generated)

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

Useful links

Related Posts (auto generated)

Synergy

Related Posts (auto generated)

Vodafun

Related Posts (auto generated)

How to break as much as possible with just one stone

Related Posts (auto generated)

Windows Update – Hang on Reboot?

Related Posts (auto generated)

Using MSN via Pidgin / Adium / Finch?

Related Posts (auto generated)

Where am I?

Related Posts (auto generated)

Native VNC Server – VMWare Server

Related Posts (auto generated)

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

Related Posts (auto generated)

iPhone firmware 2.2 jailbroken

Related Posts (auto generated)

Jabberishious

Related Posts (auto generated)

Page2RSS – Create an RSS feed for any web page

Related Posts (auto generated)

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

Related Posts (auto generated)

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

Related Posts (auto generated)

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

Related Posts (auto generated)

Got google’d

Related Posts (auto generated)

Trains get better :)

Related Posts (auto generated)

Finch, Putty, AGGHHH

Related Posts (auto generated)

Fell of the waggen

Related Posts (auto generated)

New home

Related Posts (auto generated)

Four Figures, and a lot of drink

Related Posts (auto generated)

A bit of cloud, and a bit of DNS…

Related Posts (auto generated)

Rotten Apple – Part 2

Related Posts (auto generated)

Pidgin + Facebook = Genius

Related Posts (auto generated)

Blog Fixed

Related Posts (auto generated)

BadIE

Related Posts (auto generated)

Rotten Apple

Related Posts (auto generated)

Crack-Book

Related Posts (auto generated)

Wait is almost over?

Related Posts (auto generated)