L10 Systems

Major losses

2011-10-14T08:20:00.000-04:00

It's been a bad week for tech. First, Steve Jobs and now Dennis Ritchie. The former made a huge difference in making technology relevant to everyone. The latter was instrumental in making make that possible. RIP.

Cu > BT

2011-09-23T15:51:00.000-04:00

This is awesome: BT worth less than the scrap value of the copper it owns. Technology marches on.

Mount an ISO in Windows 7

2011-09-02T06:05:00.000-04:00

I needed to mount a .ISO image to run an installer. I'd used Virtual Clone Drive in the past and it worked fine. I'd read good things about Pismo File Mount Audit Package and it worked very well for me. The explorer extension is nice and I like that it puts the mounted drive in a folder instead of a separate drive by default and has a command line option.

Netflix on Nook

2011-09-01T06:33:00.000-04:00

A little bit of searching, a .apk download and voila! We have Netflix running on the Nook. I tested it out last night on an episode of Mad Men and it worked perfectly. I'm continually impressed by the flexibility of the NC.

Adobe Flash on Nook

2011-08-30T07:19:00.002-04:00

Last night, I tried to install Adobe Flash on my CM7 Nook but when I selected it in the Android Marketplace, there was no option to download. After some searching, I found that it might have something to do with the screen density settings. For some historical reasons that aren't clear to me, the screen density on CM7 for the Nook is set to 161.

Following this thread, I downloaded the LCD Density app and set it to 160 and hit restart all. When everything restarted, I cleared the application data for Android Market and I was able to download and install Flash 10.3. It seems to work fine on the sites that I tested. Neato.

Installing CM7 on SD Card

2011-08-29T08:23:00.000-04:00

Although I had rooted my Nook Color a long time ago, I wanted to try something different so I installed CM7 on an SD card and loaded it into my Nook yesterday. Long story short: it works. I haven't had much of a chance to do much with it, but I was pretty impressed in the hour or two I did play with it last night. I did have a chance to install the Nook app and it does work quite well.

I followed the well written instructions by Ana Mardoll for the most part except since I already rooted it, I wanted to revert back to the stock firmware before doing anything else. To do that, I followed the well written instructions at The Unlockr.

Although the instructions were well written, it did take a few tries to get everything to come together. My SanDisk 16 GB Class 2 microSDHC card was disliked by the process. People recommend class 4 cards for the Nook and I now understand why.

Test Drive

2011-08-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

The Amazon Appstore has a cool feature called Test Drive that I just noticed. This allows you to preview the app you are interested in in your browser. Very useful when trying to get a feel for a new app.

NixNote

2011-08-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of Evernote and use it pretty consistently to take notes so that I can remember what it is that I'm doing.

One thing that is lacking is a native Linux client. However, there is a solution: NixNote (nee Nevernote). The 64-bit RPM installed easily on openSUSE 11.4 and seems to work reasonably well in some limited testing. I'll give it a more through test run over the next few days and see how it goes.

NAS

2011-08-24T16:01:00.001-04:00

Although my ReadyNAS systems have been great (very reliable and easy to manage), I'm going with a Synology rs411 as my new NAS system at the data center. The RS411 was a bit less expensive than the ReadyNAS 2100 and had a couple of features that look interesting (back up to S3 being one of them). Since the reviews were positive, I decided to take a chance. I'll know more when receive it later this week.

EDIT: Received the system on Thursday and plan on installing tomorrow. More to follow.

Installing Google Talk Plugin on openSUSE 11.4

2011-08-23T15:09:00.000-04:00

I ran into a strange problem today when trying to install the Google Talk Plugin. I opened up Gmail and tried to call a phone from the page. This showed the usual call dialog and prompted me to download and install the plug-in.

From the plug-in page, I selected the RPM for openSUSE 64-bit and let it run. After entering my password, it said the installation was completed successfully. Selecting call a phone from the Gmail page prompted me to download the plugin again. Hmmm...

I quit Firefox and restarted it with the same result. I restarted the system and it was not in about:plugins. I got it to finally work by going to YaST Software Management and removing the plugin. I then stopped Firefox and reinstalled it from YaST. That did the trick and it is working now.

Earthquake!!!

2011-08-23T14:10:00.000-04:00

I was working at my computer and I heard some rattling around the house. I walked out to the front windows to see who was jackhammering in the street. Turns out we had a little quake in the Commonwealth.

Age

2011-08-21T19:00:00.000-04:00

The release of AoE Online brings back some good memories. The original AoE took up a lot of my time back in the day.

TT

2011-08-20T15:37:00.000-04:00

Did my time trial ride up Roanoke Mountain from the Walnut Street bridge yesterday. It took me 38:07 - my new personal best. It was a great day for a ride.

Android development with Eclipse

2011-08-20T12:49:00.002-04:00

After installing Eclipse 3.7 Indigo, I wanted to do some Android development. The instructions on how to do so on the Android developer site are quite good and if you just follow along, you should be all set.

During installation of the ADT Plugin, I ran into an error about requiring org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui. To fix, I extrapolated from some information I found in a FAQ about the Google Plugin:

Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo)

Select Help > Install New Software...
Click the link for Available Software Sites.
Ensure there is an update site named Indigo. If this is not present, click Add... and enter http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo for the Location.
Now go through the installation steps; Eclipse should download and install the plugin's dependencies.

Be sure to change the .bashrc file to make sure that that the platform-tools are in your PATH and then you are all set to develop for Android on openSUSE 11.4.

Backup fun-n-games

2011-08-19T18:28:00.000-04:00

I run Citrix XenServer in our data center for virtualization. In general, I'm pleased with it but have run into a big problem with the way space is not reclaimed during snapshots. It seems that when a snapshot is deleted, all of the space is not freed up when are using iSCSI storage. This is a big problem because you eventually run out of disk space and can't create any more snapshots to backup.

I've tried following the Citrix solution to reclaim space, but it doesn't seem to work. The results are always something like:

coalesce-leaf -u 36b672b6-302e-0b2a-84f1-9b74f00f88f7
VDI to consider: e9915854-773a-4c22-a873-5697a5561add
VDI to consider: 47e9730d-66d1-4e04-94fa-c64f43c8de27
Processing VDIs: ['e9915854-773a-4c22-a873-5697a5561add', '47e9730d-66d1-4e04-94fa-c64f43c8de27']
Finishing regular GC/coalesce work for SR 209f ('iSCSI nearline disk1')...
Failed:

I've managed to clear up about 200GB of space by running the coalesce-leaf command and deleting out some VMs that I don't need any more. Plan B is to move everything off of that iSCSI unit and move it back in. Not fun, but I think that's going to have to happen over the weekend if the backups don't run tonight.

NAS fun-n-games

2011-08-18T13:53:00.017-04:00

We have a couple of ReadyNAS 1100 units in our data center. They have been very reliable and easy to support for the 3 or so years we have had them.

The only issue is that we have used up all of the disk space. Part of the appeal of the ReadyNAS products is that they use something called XRAID which allows you to expand the space by adding new drives. The process is simple: you add larger hard drives one at a time allowing the RAID to resync each time and once you have replaced all of the drives you have a bunch of new capacity. Pretty slick.

I checked the hardware compatibility list and bought some 2TB WD WD20EADS drives on the list to replace the 1TB drives we have. However, I should have read the fine print. There is a flaw with those drives that causes them to eat themselves pretty quickly because they put the heads to sleep to save energy (green, right?) every 8 seconds but then have to wake immediately back up to do work. This results in high load cycle counts and early disk death.

There is a fix: you can use a little tool called WDIDLE3 to set idle time to a longer interval. I went through the process on the WD20EADS using an old system I had and it seems to have worked for all of the drives. Now, I just need to figure out a way to test them without putting them back in the NAS...

VirtualBox bridged network to wlan0

2011-08-17T13:30:00.001-04:00

I needed to connect a Windows XP VM in VirtualBox 4.0.12 to a PPTP network. To do that, you have to use bridged networking (NAT won't work). The problem was, when I switched to bridged mode while on my wireless network, the network in the VM stopped working. The virtual network card said it was connected, but it couldn't get a DHCP address or anything.

Since it worked fine when I was connected to eth0 on the host, I figured it had to have something to do with the configuration of the wlan0 connection.After a bunch of searching, I found some references to enabling promiscuous mode on the wireless card (sounds naughty, but actually has to do with accepting packets not specifically addressed to it).

The fix seemed simple. At the command prompt:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 promisc

To make sure it took, I checked the log with:

tail /var/log/messages 

and found

device wlan0 entered promiscuous mode

After that, I was able to use bridged mode in the VM for a minute or two but it switched back off. Looking into it a bit further, I noticed the following in the logs:

vboxnet0: no IPv6 routers present

I remembered something from the VirtualBox documentation about IPv6 not being supported on Linux (yes, I read the docs). So, I went into YaST and disabled IPv6 in
Network Settings. Although YaST claimed the system needed a restart, everything seemed OK after the network restarted. In any event, I can now connect to the PPTP network from my VM.