So I recently moved my router from a 32 bit machine to an Amd64 machine, and switched from 32 bit ubuntu to 64 bit ubuntu.

One of the glitches I came across was that upnpd couldn’t register the root device.  I tracked the problem down to a bug with the upnp 1.4 library on x86_64.  I got pupnp-1.6.6 and compiled, installed, recompiled linux-igd, reinstalled that, and everything worked fine.

Hope this helps someone

So I decided to set my work VPN up as a demand-dial connection on my newly-virtualized PDC at home.  I ran into some bugs getting it set up to work for my whole network, so here’s what I did.

1. Set up the routing and remote access role on the PDC.  This can be done from the “Manage your Server” thing. This part’s pretty easy — just check all the options when you set it up.
2. Create a new interface from the  Routing and Remote Access MMC Snap-in.  Set it up as a demand-dial interface and configure it via the wizard.
3. Ping an IP on your remote network from the PDC to make sure it can dial on demand.
4. On the routing->general part of the snap-in, add a new routing protocol, and choose NAT.
5. Move down to the routing->NAT part and add an interface.  Add the VPN interface from step 2 and set it up as the public internet facing interface.  This will make it masquerade the traffic.
6. Ping your VPN network from a machine on your network other than the PDC.

Should work fine.

So I left the servers at full load (read: uptime 1.00/1.00/1.00 for the single logical cpu box I have) all night and this morning the room was a whopping ONE DEGREE hotter than the guest bedroom next to it.  Both rooms are the same size, left shut all the time, and have the registers closed.

This is in stark comparison to the +8 degrees it was before in there.

So I finally finished setting up my new virtual server platform — I took my old desktop (3.2 GHz AMD Athlon64, 1.2GB RAM, SATA1 disks) and put ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it and VMWare Virtual Server…

This shit is fucking awesome.  Once I set up the routing stuff on it, I’ll have gone from 4 boxes generating heat in my office at home to a single box that handles all my server needs.

W00t!  Even have my PDC virtualized.

So Apple *finally* fixed my laptop.  Correctly.  Under warranty.  Only took disrupting my schedule for a total of 4 days.  Here’s what happened:

Awhile ago, my MBP keyboard had a few keys stop responding.  I’ll not get into how it happened, but let’s just say it wasn’t a manufacturer defect.  I took the topcase off, took the keyboard out, disassembled, and cleaned everything with rubbing alcohol and canned air where appropriate.  I put the thing back together, still doesn’t work.  At this point I’m sure the keyboard’s PCB is shot, so I take it into the Apple store (which requires a genius bar appointment).  They look at it, give me the “yup, it’s busted”, and they order parts for me.

That Saturday, I got a voicemail from them telling me my parts were in, and I made, yet another, after work “genius” bar appointment.  They tell me that I can drop my laptop off at that point and be without it all night.  To those of you that know me, that is simply unacceptable.  I can’t be without my laptop all night.  So after enough arguing they assure me that if I bring it in the next day at 10 when they open, they can take care of it, same day.  Fortunately, that fell on the same day my Mom was getting her new TV delivered, so I was taking half the day off anyway.  Again, not too bad.

The next day, I drop it off at 10am, and they tell me it should take a few hours and they’d call me.  Why this is, I have no idea, since I can disassemble and reassemble the laptop in 20 minutes flat, a “trained” technician should be able to do it as fast or faster.  Anyway, 12 rolls around and I can’t reach the techs at the Apple store to get my laptop status, so I go to work.  I call them before I leave work, and they tell me it’s been done since something like 11.  Nice, guys.  I pick it up on the way home, check it out at the store, everything *seems* just fine, so I leave the store quasi-happy.

I get it home that night and find the ambient light sensor that controls they keyboard backlight and screen brightness doesn’t work properly.  It flashes in a pattern that is great if you’re hammered, but bad if you want to get work done.  I turn off the backlight and set the screen to fixed brightness.  Done.  The backlight isn’t a feature I use often anyway, and is something I decide to address later.  Next thing I notice is that the touchpad button doesn’t work as well as it used to…particularly when dragging.  It would interrupt and cancel my drag.  Again, something I can live with since I usually tap-drag with the touchpad anyway.

Finally, a few days later, I realize that my battery life *sucks*.  The computer will just shut down when it thinks the battery is at 20 percent.  This was the last straw for me.  I scheduled a “genius bar” appointment for this Monday and took it in.  For once, Apple did something correctly, and just gave me a new battery on the spot.  That battery works fine now.  I walked them through all the other issues I was having, and they just *happened* to have the parts on-hand to fix it.  So I set it up to get fixed Tuesday.  They were to replace the keyboard, topcase, and ambient light sensor.  I left the laptop and went to work.

Tuesday after work I pick my laptop up and notice the repair order and the final repair order are different; the latter is missing the AL sensor.  I ask why, and they tell me that the light sensor was fine, it was just installed improperly last time.   Hmm.

Everything appears to work fine now.  I’ve yet to diff the system profiler pre/post output to see what they changed, but so far, so good.

I hope I never have to deal with this again.

So this all started because I thought my router was broken…the next post I write will detail my issues.

So after about 4 years of consistently good service I made the decision to retire my router. It was a 666MHz Dell Optiplex L series…nice little box, but a little slow for what I need it for these days. It went from running Windows 2000 Advanced Server to Windows Server 2003 to Fedora Core 1 to Gentoo to Fedora Core 5 in it’s life, and now it’s time to upgrade. I noticed that Tor was using 80 percent of the CPU, and lately my network uses the Tor circuit…*alot*.

I replaced it with a more-or-less new Dell Optiplex GX270 with a 2.8 GHz P4 HT and popped Fedora Core 7 on it. Restored all my scripts, updated my /etc/iftab and everything was up and running within the span of one night after work. I did however lose most of my old warez collection, my experimental MySQL databases and my SVN repo (though everything in there has the latest copy on either my home or work boxes) in the move because of an fsck gone wrong.

Other than that everything went smoothly…I’m still setting up the new router’s more advanced services, but everything is going good now that there’s a faster box in the closet.

So my #2 machine at work runs Fedora Core 6. I recently upgraded the card in it, and the nVidia driver refused to install, because it couldn’t find an include, linux/config.h. This include file was removed by Fedora for Core 6; it’s use is deprecated anyway by the kernel maintainers, so nVidia should go back and update their legacy drivers or something.

I did some googling, and the correct solution here is to extract the package, and modify a file, like so:

su
mv /path/to/nvidia/driver/that/you/downloaded/b4/u/did/su .
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0.version-pkg1.run -x
cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0.version-pkg1/usr/src/nv
vi nv-linux.h
[replace #include with #include ]
cd ../../../..
./nvidia-installer

And that’s all there is to it. Now edit your xorg.conf if you need to.