Because my server had become a bit of a mess on the inside (4 SATA drives), I bought an IcyBox IB-553SK to at least fit 3 of the drives neatly into the 2 5.25" bays that the server box has.
This looks a lot better now.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Put an IcyBox into my server
Because my server had become a bit of a mess on the inside (4 SATA drives), I bought an IcyBox IB-553SK to at least fit 3 of the drives neatly into the 2 5.25" bays that the server box has.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Installing Kubuntu/Ubuntu 9.04 on an Acer Aspire 3000
Yesterday, I installed Kunbuntu 9.04 on a family member's Acer Aspire 3000 laptop; my family member was fed up with Windows constantly crashing and being slow.
Things worked out-of-the-box, except for two small things:
1. The display colors were garbled.
2. The wireless network card did not work.
Both were easily solved though:
1. Edit /etc/modules, and add a line containing "sisfb"
2. sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
Reboot, é voila, everything works!
Things worked out-of-the-box, except for two small things:
1. The display colors were garbled.
2. The wireless network card did not work.
Both were easily solved though:
1. Edit /etc/modules, and add a line containing "sisfb"
2. sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
Reboot, é voila, everything works!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Recovering from a bricked Netgear EVA8000 in Linux
I have done dozen of firmware upgrades on many devices over the years. Despite all the warnings about bricked devices, nothing bad ever happened to me when flashing firmware. That is, until I bricked my Netgear EVA8000 media player on its upgrade to firmware 2.1.83 this weekend...
The unit would indicate that it was applying the upgrade, advance to about 70% completion, and then just switched off on me. Any attempt to switch it back on afterwards failed.
Fortunately, Netgear has a recovery procedure for this type of event, and a HOWTO is here. This should work out-of-the-box on Windows, but my laptop runs only Ubuntu.
No problem though: I managed to unbrick the unit from Ubuntu, like so:
The unit would indicate that it was applying the upgrade, advance to about 70% completion, and then just switched off on me. Any attempt to switch it back on afterwards failed.
Fortunately, Netgear has a recovery procedure for this type of event, and a HOWTO is here. This should work out-of-the-box on Windows, but my laptop runs only Ubuntu.
No problem though: I managed to unbrick the unit from Ubuntu, like so:
- Pull the power plug on your EVA8000
- Download the recovery tool from here, as indicated on the HOWTO page.
- Install a TFTP server on your computer. I used the tftpd-hpa package:
- sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa
- sudo vim /etc/default/tftpd-hpa
- change the "no" field after the line starting with "daemon" to "yes".
- sudo /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa restart
- Unzip the recovery zip file, and copy the eva-recovery-image.bin file to the TFTP server's root directory:
- unzip eva8000_recovery_tool_2_0_159_uk.zip
- sudo cp eva-recovery-image.bin /var/lib/tftpboot
- Change the IP address of your computer:
- sudo ifconfig eth0 10.23.23.200
- While depressing the EVA8000's reset switch, stick its power cord back in. The unit will download the recovery file. After about 4 minutes, it reboots and all is fine.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Building a fast low-power home server
In my home, I have a need for a fast NAS box that, while not in use, uses as little power as possible. My requirements are basically:
* 1 TB of harddisk space, mirrored (RAID-1).
* Fast NFS (possibly SMB) throughput (think >= 50 MByte/s).
* Always on: The server will run Tor, and should be reachable 24/7.
* Silent when not in use: Harddisks should be powered down when not in use.
* Economical when not in use: I am aiming for 10 W when not in use.
* Open and flexible: Should run a normal commodity OS (say: Ubuntu server), and write data to disk in an open format (so that, should be motherboard crash, I can connect the disk to another Linux system and read it).
The Qnap TS-209 Pro that I bought last year does not really fit the bill; Qnap cheaped out on the CPU, and put a Geode 800 (500 MHz) in, which results in the server being CPU bound at a NFS read/write rate of ~22/15 MByte/s.
The new system will be based on the very economical (let reasonably fast) VIA C7 line of CPUs. The mainboard (which comes as a package with a NanoBGA 1.8 GHz C7 on it) is a VIA EPIA SN-18000G. This mainboard has a low power usage when not in use, yet is reasonably fast. A really nice touch on this mainboard is that one can actually put a CF card in a slot on the bottom; I'll be using a CF card here to boot my system from, so that I can spin down the harddisks when not in use, but more on that in a later post.
Anyway, this is the hardware list:
* Mainboard/CPU: VIA EPIA SN-18000G w/ 1.8 MHz NanoBGA C7.
* 2 x 1 GB DDR2/PC5300 RAM.
* A Kingston Elite Pro 16 GB CF Card (SLC, for reliability).
* 2 x 1 TB WD10EADS "Caviar Green" hard drives.
The harddrives are notable for the fact that they have a < 3 W power usage when idle, and a ~0.4 W power usage when spun down.
I'll be assembling my system tonight... More info (including actual power-usage measurements) is on its way.
* 1 TB of harddisk space, mirrored (RAID-1).
* Fast NFS (possibly SMB) throughput (think >= 50 MByte/s).
* Always on: The server will run Tor, and should be reachable 24/7.
* Silent when not in use: Harddisks should be powered down when not in use.
* Economical when not in use: I am aiming for 10 W when not in use.
* Open and flexible: Should run a normal commodity OS (say: Ubuntu server), and write data to disk in an open format (so that, should be motherboard crash, I can connect the disk to another Linux system and read it).
The Qnap TS-209 Pro that I bought last year does not really fit the bill; Qnap cheaped out on the CPU, and put a Geode 800 (500 MHz) in, which results in the server being CPU bound at a NFS read/write rate of ~22/15 MByte/s.
The new system will be based on the very economical (let reasonably fast) VIA C7 line of CPUs. The mainboard (which comes as a package with a NanoBGA 1.8 GHz C7 on it) is a VIA EPIA SN-18000G. This mainboard has a low power usage when not in use, yet is reasonably fast. A really nice touch on this mainboard is that one can actually put a CF card in a slot on the bottom; I'll be using a CF card here to boot my system from, so that I can spin down the harddisks when not in use, but more on that in a later post.
Anyway, this is the hardware list:
* Mainboard/CPU: VIA EPIA SN-18000G w/ 1.8 MHz NanoBGA C7.
* 2 x 1 GB DDR2/PC5300 RAM.
* A Kingston Elite Pro 16 GB CF Card (SLC, for reliability).
* 2 x 1 TB WD10EADS "Caviar Green" hard drives.
The harddrives are notable for the fact that they have a < 3 W power usage when idle, and a ~0.4 W power usage when spun down.
I'll be assembling my system tonight... More info (including actual power-usage measurements) is on its way.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
IPv6 on OpenWRT (with SixXS)
As I wanted to be part of the IPv6 net at home, I registered at http://www.sixxs.net and applied for a tunnel. And what do you know: They had a PoP in the very city where I live (Zurich). The next step (after my tunnel was enabled), was to enable IPv6 on my Linksys WRT54G v2.2 running OpenWRT Kamikaze.
There are some guides on setting up IPv6 on OpenWRT (e.g., http://wiki.openwrt.org/IPv6_howto ), but they leave out some important details. The guides advise you to install:
ipkg install kmod-ipv6
ipkg install radvd
ipkg install ip
ipkg install kmod-ip6tables
ipkg install ip6tables
ipkg install aiccu
However, in order to have things work properly over a SIT tunnel (which is what SixXS uses), you need to install three additional packages:
ipkg install kmod-iptunnel4
ipkg install kmod-tun
ipkg install kmod-sit
After installing these, and getting you SixXS tunnel confirmation mail, edit /etc/aiccu.conf but do not set the server's IP address in this file; AICCU will figure that out for you.
A simple AICCU should now do the trick, and indeed:
root@:~# ping6 -c 4 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.l.google.com (2001:4860:0:1001::68): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=0 ttl=55 time=54.3 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=1 ttl=55 time=52.9 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=2 ttl=55 time=56.0 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=3 ttl=55 time=54.8 ms
There are some guides on setting up IPv6 on OpenWRT (e.g., http://wiki.openwrt.org/IPv6_howto ), but they leave out some important details. The guides advise you to install:
ipkg install kmod-ipv6
ipkg install radvd
ipkg install ip
ipkg install kmod-ip6tables
ipkg install ip6tables
ipkg install aiccu
However, in order to have things work properly over a SIT tunnel (which is what SixXS uses), you need to install three additional packages:
ipkg install kmod-iptunnel4
ipkg install kmod-tun
ipkg install kmod-sit
After installing these, and getting you SixXS tunnel confirmation mail, edit /etc/aiccu.conf but do not set the server's IP address in this file; AICCU will figure that out for you.
A simple AICCU should now do the trick, and indeed:
root@
PING ipv6.l.google.com (2001:4860:0:1001::68): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=0 ttl=55 time=54.3 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=1 ttl=55 time=52.9 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=2 ttl=55 time=56.0 ms
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp6_seq=3 ttl=55 time=54.8 ms
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Google Gears on Ubuntu 7.x
When trying to install Google Gears on Firefox on Ubuntu 7.x, I failed miserably; The Firefox add-on manager would claim to install Gears, but after a Firefox restart, gears would still not be installed.
Fortunately, I was not the only one having this problem, and the others facing this problem already found a solution. Details can be found, e.g., here.
A quick summary of the problem and the solution: the problem is that Gears uses a C++ library that is not installed by default on Ubuntu 7.x. The solution is easy though, run
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
to install the missing library, restart Firefox, revisit gears.google.com, and off you go!
Fortunately, I was not the only one having this problem, and the others facing this problem already found a solution. Details can be found, e.g., here.
A quick summary of the problem and the solution: the problem is that Gears uses a C++ library that is not installed by default on Ubuntu 7.x. The solution is easy though, run
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
to install the missing library, restart Firefox, revisit gears.google.com, and off you go!
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Garmin GPSMap 60Cx and EGNOS - Finale
After two earlier posts on the trouble I had with getting EGNOS to work on the Garmin GPSMap 60Cx, it seems that the trouble are now solved because of Garmin's latest GPS-chipset firmware upgrade.
As of February 18, 2008, the 3.60 firmware is available for the GPSMap 60Cx itself. This update changes some small maps things unrelated to EGNOS. There also is an update for the GPS Chipset type G, and it seems that this update did the trick for EGNOS. I now routinely get good SBAS signals on either Garmin channel 33, 37, or 39. The smallest EPE I have seen so far is 3 m -- a little more than I expected, but this might have been caused by a poor constellation.
The attached image show a nice 4-m EPE under some tree cover at an old fortress near Lake Zurich.
Thanks, Garmin!
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