bangmoney.org - Computers

Back on the internet

nospam@example.com (Chris Lumens) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:37:25 -0500

A technician from Covad came today and hooked up he DSL connection at the new apartment. We had him hook it up in the closet since there was a block of phone equipment in there already. After working in there for a while, he informed us that we had networking cable running to all the jacks in the apartment. He called it cat5, which we soon discovered was wrong, but it was still exciting. This meant we could hook up the jacks in our bedrooms with ethernet and not have to run big long cables from the bedrooms back to the closet.

So with the DSL bridge hooked up and doing nothing, we ran off to Home Depot to buy stuff. David has done all this telco wiring junk before, so I left him as the expert in charge of getting us wired up. My task was setting up the firewall and other servers. So we bought a punch down tool and some ethernet cable ends. When we got home, he started working on hooking up the wires coming in from the jacks and making some new ethernet cables. After that, we had to make another run to Home Depot for the jacks that we forgot to get earlier. Those got hooked up fairly quickly.

Of course, nothing worked. There were no link lights on any of the jacks we tried. So the set up currently looked like this: In the closet, we had an 8 port switch. From four of the ports, we had newly made ethernet cables running to the punch down block down by the floor. From there, we had rewired the lines coming in from the various jacks and had replaced the jacks on the other end. Clearly, there's a lot that can go wrong in this setup and I had no idea where to start.

David did a bunch of website research and decided we'd wired it up right, but just didn't use the right tool to do the punching. So while we were looking for someone who had the $60 tool, we got additional advice that basically amounted to ripping all that stuff out and just terminating the lines from the bedrooms with jacks in the closet wall. Then we could just run short ethernet cables to the switch. Following so far?

David went back to Home Depot yet again for another jack. Then we made more ethernet cables and finally got all the rooms wired and tested. By this time, it was midnight and we still didn't technically have DSL since I hadn't gotten the servers set up. But now that we were done working on the wiring, I could do that. I pushed some spare metal shelves into the closet and got to work hooking up UPSes, switches, and machines. I made a big giant mess of cables but got everything up. As you can see, the web server is now back in action.

The best part of this setup is that all the computers are in a closet we can close the door to. There's no noise, no heat, and no ugly pile of electronics. The only sign that they're there is the power cable running from a nearby jack around the corner and under the door.

Beyond Inteldome

nospam@example.com (Chris Lumens) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:42:00 -0500

Several weeks ago, I bought my first new desktop computer since I cobbled one together out of parts back in 2000. Since it was the first new one in so long and I can have nice things, I went with the Quad G5. It took a little while to deal with the order placement, paying, and shipping but I finally got it last week.

Of course, being the kind of person I am, I decided I had to run Fedora on it. After all, that's the thing I work on and with all the other computers around here being Linux, I didn't want to have to deal with those multiplatform issues. Naturally, installing Linux on brand new Mac hardware is not easy.

My first problem was that the bootloader (yaboot) didn't work at all. Luckily, I happen to work with one of the upstream yaboot guys, so this wasn't too bad of a problem. The symptoms were that with our yaboot installed onto a USB key, the bootloader would crap back out to firmware immediately after loading the kernel, and with no debugging printing enabled. After a couple days of messing around, we narrowed the problem down to two firmware calls that cleared the screen. Apparently, something in our yaboot package was corrupting the memory that this call was using. Hence, back to firmware.

We tried various ways to get around that problem but eventually I got bored of not using my shiny new machine and built a new USB key image to try out at home with the screen clearing calls removed. Sure, it's ugly now, but at least it boots. Well, on to the next problem - anaconda doesn't recognize the USB keyboard and mouse. That makes it pretty hard to install, since those are the only input devices available. I agonized over that a couple days, checking out things module loading code in our images and looking at lspci output and all that. Eventually, I got the smart idea to try the USB key on the dual G5 at work. And what do you know, that exhibited the same behavior.

So it appears that booting Linux on a G5 from a USB key just nukes the input devices for later on. I don't have any information on why this is just yet, but at least I figured out the problem. This was easily gotten around by just making a new boot CD with the special yaboot binary on it.

Finally after getting the install done, I can discover the runtime problems - the kernel likes to spew debugging warnings at me (already sent a patch to the PPC kernel guys for that) and there's no sound. Unfortunately, that last one is a known problem.

Anyway, the new computer is really nice and running Linux on it hasn't presented me with any real problems yet. It's an excellent and fast machine. I'm sure that once sound is working, I can experience all the problems of no media software built for PPC Linux. But that's okay, because I'm capable of building a package or two.

Mutually Assured Destruction

nospam@example.com (Chris Lumens) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:57:00 -0500

I promise that as long as David doesn't start working on Fedora for Sparc, I will not start working on an Alpha port. Of course, if he does start doing that, I might have a hard time restraining myself from repeating six years ago and consuming what free time I have.

DSL troubles and other computer stuff

nospam@example.com (Chris Lumens) — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:32:00 -0400

I was at work on Monday when I noticed my SSH connection home kept dying. It'd be up for a few minutes then suddenly timeout and I would have to reconnect. It was aggravating as hell, but I figured it was just a problem with the DSL bridge and I'd solve it by power cycling the thing which would obviously have to wait until I got home.

So I toughed it out a few more hours, got home and power cycled it. That's the only control you've got over the box. It synced back up after a few moments but pretty soon after, I saw the "DSL" light went out and all my connections to the outside world died again. It would sync back up, stay up for several minutes, then freak out again. Repeat.

After an hour or two of this junk, I called up Speakeasy (my ISP). I'm paying entirely too much for this DSL to have such problems with it. I quickly got to a real person since their support is pretty good and explained the situation. We ran a few quick tests, he called Covad, and came up with
the answer that there's false termination somewhere on my line. This means there's a problem somewhere before the end of my 9000' loop length. He said I wouldn't hear anything back until Monday, since it was now the weekend. Great.

Saturday was especially tough. I was trying to talk to Sarah (who's currently out of the country, so AIM and email is all we've got) and it kept freaking out. My mouse almost met an unceremonious end, but narrowly avoided death. It didn't freak out too bad on Sunday at all which was kind of weird. It seemed to only be freaking out at peak times of the day.

I was a little nervous about what they would find today. I was worried they'd discover that I was now just screwed because of something the ILEC did and my only recourse would be getting their crappy special DSL. Well I got a call from Verizon followed by one from Speakeasy and it looks like they somehow magically fixed the problem. My last outage was at 11:09am which was before I got either call. So I guess I didn't really need to worry nor did I need to freak out and destroy things.

Speaking of computer junk, it's about time for some changes around here. I've got a new hard drive for ziggy and I'm thinking it's time to switch over to a new operating system on there since I have to do a reinstall too. I've been wondering whether I want to install Fedora or RHEL. I work on both. It's just a matter of what I really want to do here. I'm looking to replace monolith (my rather out of date, hot, noisy, and underpowered workstation) with something slightly newer. If that works out, I'll be sending the old monolith off to someone who can make much better use of it. I might even be able to get a new laptop from work to replace my old Vaio if I'm lucky.

And speaking of which, I am very much looking forward to next Thursday when Sarah gets back into this country and I'm able to call her again. I just need to think of enough things to do to keep me busy between now and then.

Hotplug presentation

nospam@example.com (Chris Lumens) — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Tonight, I'm giving a presentation to the Georgia Tech LUG about the Linux hotplug project. This is a subsystem in user space to take action when certain events happen in the kernel. These events usually correspond to attaching and removing pieces of hardware while the system is running. Hotplug first appeared in the 2.4 kernel but has grown larger and much more important in the 2.6 series. While I recognize the importance of this project and the difficulty of the problem, I still don't like the implementation.

hotplug presentation
Georgia Tech LUG