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Posted by jeremy, at 2010-06-21 20:50:46

silly armitron character watches
Years ago, Thorwald got an Armitron Scooby-Do watch. The instructions, however, have been lost in the sands of time. Googling for said instructions is futile. A little common sense, however, and you'll find this link: http://www.armitron.com/docs/ArmitronLadiesDigital.pdf -- the instructions for the Ladies Digital watch -- which is what the Scooby-Do watch uses as guts. Hopefully, this link will save you the googling I have to do twice a year, when the clock changes. Silly daylight savings time.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-04-15 21:07:13

HP SIM, PSP v8.25 and my memory
I spent a few weeks testing and trying to implement full integration with HP SIM (Systems Insight Manager) and a fleet of about 650 RHEL4 and RHEL5 boxes (we didn't even try with the RHEL3 machines) at a major retailer.
Through this time, HP support first said that PSP v8.15 would work. Then, when that didn't work, we upgraded first to v8.20, then v8.25. Again, unsuccessful. We DID manage to get full SIM integration by installing the v8.30 hpsmh and smh-templates RPMs on v8.25 machines, but that's a bit of a hack.
v8.30 was the first PSP that we installed that got us proper SIM integration -- full reporting back to the SIM server and automatic dial-home capability, and integrated access to the iLO console.
(while I did this work nearly five months ago, I had to remind myself of it today, so it goes here, so I don't forget. I've yet to lose my blog, after all)

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-04-15 21:02:01

aix thinks you entered your password wrong, really.
Had a situation where a user was correctly entering their password to login to an AIX 5.3 (oslevel 5300-09 is no longer affected by this bug) box over openssh, yet was getting tagged with an unsuccessful login. The user would enter their password once, but an unsuccessful login was being declared, followed 3-4 seconds later by a successful login -- even though they didn't get reprompted.
After _much_ analysis of machines, I found the issue: On those servers that would double-attempt the login (once unsuccessfully, once successfully), someone had added the line:

UsePrivilegeSeparation no

Once I disabled that line, by prepending a # character, and reloaded the config:

kill -HUP `ps waux | grep sshd$ | grep -v grep | awk '{print $4}'`

(that command is done from memory, by the way, and is special to AIX), everything worked just fine. This goes here because I didn't find a single tip on this solution ANYWHERE that google could find.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-01-18 11:19:25

New stereo in the car
I finally got around to putting the new stereo in my 2002 Mazda Protege5. I also took pictures and explained what I did. Hopefully, this page can benefit anyone else who is looking to do the same thing.

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-12-04 07:59:57

vmware and read only filesystems
File this under "weird":
Years ago, due to some timing issues in various SCSI drivers, Linux guests running under VMware would decide that they were having hardware issues, and force their drives (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb) into read-only mode. This sort of thing makes grand sense when you're dealing with real hardware. On vmware, though, we might as well trust that the device is good. This also happened on Xen and VirtualBox, too. Basically, if the Host OS didn't respond fast enough, the guest decided that there had been a hardware failure.
RedHat fixed the issue, SuSE fixed the issue, all was well. This was back in the RHEL 4.6/5.1 era.
Except...the bug is back. I'm running into it on fully patched RHEL 4.8 and RHEL 5.4 machines. Careful digging through mailing lists suggested that adding "barrier=0" into the options for each filesystem, in /etc/fstab would fix things. Sure enough, it did. I'm happy to report that HP tech support has informed me that they're now using my solution at OTHER customers, with good success. Just goes to show -- just because a bug is fixed, doesn't mean it STAYS fixed.

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-11-16 18:21:37

joy
One of the things I'm tasked with lately is setting up netdump on RHEL4. To do this requires more than a little wizardry, particularly since docs are lacking. To netdump to a netdump server outside the local network segment, you need to put the MAC address of the client's default gateway into NETDUMPMACADDR=
You can find the MAC address of your default gateway by running the command:
arping -c1 -I "devicename" "ip of gateway".
Or:

arping -c1 $(route -n | awk '/UG/{print $2}') | awk '/reply from/{print $5}' | sed -e 's/\[//g' -e 's/\]//g'

Feel free to use that where you may. If you'd rather, you can use this two command sequence, too:
ping -c1 x.y.w.z; arp | awk '/x.y.w.z/{print $3}'

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-06-23 20:33:39

Joys of vista wireless
I recently set up WLAN for one of my clients, and everything worked great using WPA2 and my EEE904 running XP. Signal was good throughout the location, DHCP was being passed through the 802.11g access point just fine, so I pronounced it good and left.

No sooner had I gotten on a plane to head to another customer, than I got the call: "Wireless isn't working." It was the damnedest thing. I had configured the Vista64 laptop in question personally, and verified that all the WPA2 settings were correct. Once I got back on the ground and got Internet access, I punched into the Ubuntu server that handles DHCP, and could see that the server was offering leases to the proper MAC. Everything looked right.

To make a long story short, check out this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233 -- basically, Vista does DHCP just a bit differently, and unless you add the registry entries contained in the "more info" section of that document, you aren't going to get Vista working with your commodity router. Just in case that article goes away, here's the nuts-n-bolts of it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID} 

Value name: DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag
Value type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0

Doing that will square things right away.

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-10-27 23:19:39

AoE on Winders? Free?
I am VERY happy that someone has finally implemented an AoE driver for Windows over at http://winaoe.org/. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, and with disk at a bit of a premium on the server, it'll be a few weeks.
AoE is _not_ Age of Empires -- it's ATA over Ethernet. Poor man's iSCSI, if you will. I messed around with it some in the Linux3 class, back when I was teaching, and was impressed with how simple it was to set up. I'm looking forward to spinning up some AoE in the house here -- why have big drives in the windows machines when I can have hardware-like speeds out of network shares?
One thing you will want for this, however, is good ethernet hardware (like a REAL gigE card -- Intel, not that Marvell Yukon junk), and fast disk in your server.

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-10-27 22:42:33

Mr. Math
It looks like all of the glucometer checks have had a definite effect -- Thorwald's math skills are a wee bit advanced. He's pretty reliably doing single-digit multiplication now, so we've started him at Kumon schools, where he's working at adding, tracing, drawing lines and bigger addition and subtraction problems than I'd previously challenged him with.
We looked into Kumon and Mathnasium both, but Kumon came away the hands-down winner in my book. Both were run by extremely nice women with advanced educational degrees. The local Kumon school is run by a woman who received her doctorate in Theoretical Physics from the University of Tokyo. She speaks four or five languages. Mathnasium is down in Bloomington, and the proprietor has a master's degree in electrical engineering from, I believe, Mankato state.
Having talked to both proprietors and looked at some of the materials, I came away thinking Kumon was the more solid choice. I like the amount of practice they do, and I like that they have timed tests -- Thor does best when given a limited amount of time to complete a task.
His reading skills are coming together rapidly, as well. He's already picking out a lot of the "sight words" which they will require him to know at the end of the school year. He loves his half-day kindergarten class, and runs happily to the bus every day. School is a lot of fun for him, and I really have to give his teacher credit. Good teachers are hard to come by, but he has ended up with a great one.

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-09-22 18:03:57

thanks
Once again, I upgraded my server (valhalla.angelar.com). This time, I got much better hardware, including a REAL network card (Intel E1000 PCI-Express). Only thing is, when the new server booted, it wouldn't call the E1000 eth0, and it wouldn't call the cheapo, onboard Realtek 8101E eth1, like it should. It wanted the realtek to be eth3, and the Intel to be eth2.
Took me some digging, but I found that Ubuntu likes to stick MAC information in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-net_persistent_names.rules . Edited that, and changed the alias name for my devices back to what they should be. Voila, interfaces are properly named.
My request of almost all OS vendors is this: STOP HELPING ME. Alternately, put a note in the manpage!

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-06-30 08:55:04

backup
So, out there somewhere is a Linux box that I need to backup nightly. Recently, a friend asked how I did it. So, voila here is fullbackup.bash, which backs up the system to the USB drive and unmounts it when it is done. It also emails me a text file if there is an error, so I can fix it right away.
Now, the client also wanted a way to see if the backup drive had been detected when they plugged it into the headless server. So I looked up gnubeep, and made the machine play a neat little tone when the drive came online. The HDonline script runs ever twenty minutes through cron. view it here.
Nothing fancy, but maybe you can make use of it.

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-04-04 22:13:42

Garage Rebuild Status
The garage has been rebuilt. It's still in progress, but it's coming along nicely. You can read about it at garage_rebuild, and you can hear about it on April 5th, at Hacking Habitation. Wish me luck.

Posted by jeremy, at 2007-09-03 23:50:20

so long and thanks for all the fish
It's been nine months since I made an update to my blog. I've failed to note some good stuff: Thorwald is now using the Medtronic constant glucose monitoring system, and insurance is paying for it. I took a class in teaching law enforcement techniques, which was really interesting. I ripped the roof off of my garage and put on a second story (okay, that one is still in progress, and I will get pictures of the whole project up in the future). Gunnar is growing fast, so is Thor. Both boys are thriving. Work is good, though there is the threat of a strike looming. I'd love to say that I'll start blogging again. I don't know that I will. I tend to tell my stories to people I see in person, and then forget about them. When I do find free time, I tend to build things, or threaten people who are selling my Undergraduate thesis with a DMCA lawsuit. It works, too -- something about $500,000 lawsuits seems to convince people that they shouldn't be selling my lone work on serial killers. When work and family, and all my construction projects die down, then I'll write more I guess. Maybe once Thorwald has mastered some prose, I can cut him loose with doing updates. We've done some laser-lightening of moles for him, and that has worked well. Regardless, happy trails. I hope to be back.

Posted by jeremy, at 2006-12-14 18:10:00

thor went on vacation
From the way Thorwald looks in this picture, I think he's enjoying his 3-day trip to my parents' palatial ranch. From the looks of it, he really _is_ going to be a civil engineer someday.

Posted by jeremy, at 2006-11-16 10:26:56

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh
So much for HealthPartners rubber-stamping constant glucose monitoring systems. We received our letter of refusal last week. I've placed a call into their Medical Appeals Line, at 1-800-331-8643, and am told they are obligated to call me back within 1 business day. I'm looking forward to hearing from them, since their primary reason for refusal was that the sensor is not FDA-approved for Thor's age group. Interestingly, the paradigm pump itself is not FDA-approved for his age group, but they covered it without questions. I would suspect that this will give me a good argument for getting the sensors covered by Healthpartners.