Today I did an in-place upgrade on my server from Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and it went pretty smoothly (considering I did it remotely over an SSH connection). I had to re-apply a few customizations to various config files but for the most part all of the hard work I’ve done tweaking server since initially setting it up last October was preserved. Nice work, guys!
software
Vista SP1 + ZoneAlarm = no VPN
When I wrote about my Vista woes I mentioned how ZoneAlarm would keep causing Vista’s tcpip.sys driver to BSOD, which forced me to go back to the Windows Firewall. Well, a month had gone by so I figured that I would give ZoneAlarm on Vista SP1 another try. I installed the free version (7.1.254.000) and went a whole week without a single crash! I was happy in thinking the problem had been resolved.
Then on Wednesday I needed to VPN into work to fix a problem … and couldn’t connect. At first I thought that I had just forgotten to configure ZoneAlarm’s trusted zones properly, but the settings all checked out. There was nothing in the firewall logs about any connections being blocked either.
A few Google searches later, I learned that apparently SP1 and some third-party firewalls (like ZA) have broken the VPN client in Vista. There are a lot of posts on Checkpoint’s forums and even MS TechNet about the issue, but there’s no resolution yet.
Well, no resolution except uninstalling ZoneAlarm. 🙁
So that was it … I’ve removed ZA and my VPN connection is working again. It’s back to the Windows Firewall for me until I can find a suitable replacement.
Take your apps with you
I bought a Corsair 2gb Flash Padlock last August after hearing Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte talk about it on the Security Now! podcast (episode #106). I use it primarily for shuttling files back and forth between my home and work computers (in a TrueCrypt container), but have also configured it as a bootable device so I can run the Ultimate Boot CD from it (which is handy when I’m asked by friends or family to work on their broken computers).
Some other neat things I keep on it are the portable applications from PortableApps.com. You simply download the PortableApps Suite (or the individual applications you want) and then install them onto your USB flash drive. No information is written to your local PC’s hard disk … everything is encapsulated on the flash drive. You can now plug your flash drive into any PC and run your applications without worrying about having to install them locally, or leaving any personal information (say, browsing history) behind when you’re done.
I keep the usual portable suspects on my Corsair: Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, Pidgin for instant messaging, PuTTY for SSH connections, etc. Those are all available for download and install from the PortableApps site. However, you can also add your own portable applications and have then run from the PortableApps custom start menu.
For example, I’ve added TrueCrypt, JungleDisk, Bucket Explorer, and mRemote to my personal portable utility arsenal.
Keep in mind that not every application is automagically portable: it needs to be specifically coded to not use any local PC resources (like .ini files, the registry, etc.). So you can’t just dump a program into the PortableApps directory on your flash drive and expect it to work. Do your homework (i.e., search Google) though, and you’ll find plenty of portable applications out there.
Start building your own utility belt today!
ThrEee weeks later
So it’s been three weeks since I got my Eee PC. Is the honeymoon over? Nope!
I’ve spent the past three weeks carrying (and using) the Eee almost everywhere: taking it to work, having it in the car (in case I’m somewhere with free WiFi), etc. Even now I’m kicking back on the couch watching “CSI” and using it to write this. I’ve pored over the wiki at eeeuser.com, read and posted in the forums (the community there is awesome), and spent time customizing and tweaking the Asus-installed Xandros Linux to my liking. Thus far I’ve:
- upgraded to 1gb of RAM: it took me longer to order the 1gb DDR chip than it did to actually install it (see here for a video of just how easy it is).
- customized the interface: using tools like Theeemer, Tweakeee, and EMEditor, I’ve changed the default look-and-feel to something a little slicker looking (see the screen capture at the top of this post).
- installed more applications: I’ve got TrueCrypt so I can access the encrypted volume on my thumb drive, JungleDisk to get to my files backed up with Amazon’s S3 service, and Maelstrom for a little entertainment.
- configured it for work purposes: using the PPTP Client I can VPN into the corporate network and then login to my servers with rdesktop or run applications through Citrix.
- gotten pretty good at accurately typing on the keyboard
- played around with eeecontrol: this utility lets you increase the front-side bus speed (and thus get the CPU back to its normal 900MHz speed instead of the Asus-underclocked 630MhZ). I really haven’t had a problem with the Eee’s performance so I’ve left it alone for now. I still run eeecontrol in the tray, though, so I can watch the fan speed and temp.
It wasn’t all smooth, though. I had a real problem initially getting onto my wireless home network. It turned out that the default wireless driver/script doesn’t like spaces in the WPA key. Once I removed the spaces, the Eee connected just fine (and then I had to fix the WPA key on every other wireless device on the network). After that, I still had problems connecting to the wireless at work (which also uses WPA). Switching to the madwifi driver seemed to finally help in that regard (though I still get the dreading “Pending” status now and then).
The other difficulty was getting wireless printing to my Epson AcuLaser CX11NF working. The test page would “print” according to the Eee, but nothing would happen on the printer. It took some research, but I finally got it working (see my thread on the eeeuser forum for details).
My other minor nit is with the screen size. The 800×480 resolution means sometimes having to drag windows around with the Alt-left click trick in order to see portions that won’t fit on the screen. This also means that web sites that are designed for larger resolutions (like my daughter’s WebKinz site which is all Flash) involve a lot of dragging back and forth.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with my Eee. Asus has come pretty close to a hitting a home run with the cost, form factor and out-of-the-box usability. The new 900 model adds the 9″ screen with a slightly larger footprint but at the cost of a slightly larger price tag, so the original 701 series still seems like the better deal that hits the sweet spot.
(more photos of my Eee are posted here)
Vista woes
This one’s going to be long, so grab something to drink …
About two months ago, the CompUSA near my office was a few days from closing its doors for good so some colleagues and I headed over to scope out any remaining deals. The pickings were slim at that point, but I walked out with an upgrade copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition for $80 (50% off). What the heck, I thought, we were going to start using Vista at work at some point, so why not get a head start on learning the ins and outs of the new OS? I also picked up a new ATI HD2600 Pro 256mb video card an extra gig of RAM for my PC to make sure everything would run smoothly on my older Gateway 831GM desktop PC.
To keep everything on the level, I did a clean install of Vista and then spent a few days re-installing, re-configuring, and re-copying (from the resulting Windows.Old directory) everything back to my liking. I ran into the normal issues everyone knew about in Vista (like extremely slow network copy times) but knew SP1 was just around the corner which would hopefully fix these annoyances. Unable to wait, I used the registry hack trick to grab the RC of SP1 early.
SP1 fixed a few problems, then gave me a few new ones:
- ZoneAlarm would randomly crash Vista’s tcpip.sys. I had to use the crash dump analysis tools to figure this one out because instead of blue-screening like XP, Vista would just reboot. I had to uninstall ZA and go back to the built-in Windows Firewall.
- After awaking from Sleep mode, both of my optical drives (DVD burner and DVD-ROM) would be missing. Doing some searches on the net, this seems to be a very common problem, but none of the registry hacks (like removing the Upper/LowerFilter keys) would fix it. The only remedy was to disable Sleep (one of Vista’s cooler features IMHO) and go back to the normal shutdown/boot routine.
- Every time I disconnect my iPod (connected via USB), I lose my wireless network connection. It doesn’t matter if I just unplug it, or eject it through iTunes first. I have to unplug and re-plug my USB wireless network adapter to get back on the network. The same thing happens sometimes when I unplug a USB flash drive or SD card, or CF card from the multi-card reader. Granted this could be some sort of USB controller issue in my PC, but this didn’t happen with XP!
Now recently Vista has started just freezing, and freezing solid. In XP when this would happen you could kill the explorer.exe process and start it again. But in Vista, it seems like once I get that dreaded “not responding” dialog, nothing I can do will unfreeze the system. Yesterday, I had Vista lock up four times in a row after clean reboots. It’s a disaster!
The latest problem happened tonight (which prompted this post). I was trying to dismount a TrueCrypt volume located on my 2gb Corsair Padlock USB drive and the truecrypt.exe process stopped responding. In true Vista fashion, the “end this program” option did nothing so I couldn’t get TrueCrypt to close. Then Explorer stopped responding and everything froze up again. I had no choice but to hold down the power button and hard shutdown the system like I’ve been having to do more and more recently. When the system boots again, and I log in, I can tell immediately something is wrong: there’s a “null error” dialog from Trillian on my desktop, and the JungleDisk Monitor configuration GUI opened without any settings in it. Something went wrong and I lost a large swath of configuration settings such as:
- no homepage set and all bookmarks missing in Firefox (thank god for XMarks!)
- profile gone from Thunderbird (had to restore the prefs.js file from my JungleDisk backup on Amazon AWS)
- all JungleDisk settings lost (luckily my automated backup settings were preserved)
- Trillian corruption (a .dtd file in the stixie directory was 0 bytes, but I managed to find a good backup copy)
- a corrupted UltraMon shortcut on the Start Menu
- DVD-ROM drive disappeared (even from the BIOS … this was probably a side-effect of the hard shutdown. I had to manually eject the tray to get the disc out and also switched power connectors internally to get it working again)
And that’s just what I found (and fixed) before I decided enough was enough for today. Who knows what other settings might be messed up? Ok, yes, something like this is a risk when you don’t shut down a (Windows) machine cleanly, but again, I don’t remember having problems like this with XP (at least, not recently).
I’m seriously tempted to go back to XP, but I know Vista (or at least Windows 7) is the future and I’m going to have to use it eventually. Hopefully these experiences will just make me a better troubleshooter in the future (can you tell I’m trying to put a positive spin on this?).
My Eee PC
I’ve been following Asus’ Eee PC since it was first released late last year and was finally no longer able to resist its siren call. I purchased the Galaxy Black 4G Surf, deciding that the extra $50 over the 2G Surf was worth a) double the storage capacity (4gb vs. 2gb), b) user-upgradeable RAM, and c) a slightly faster CPU (you can see the model comparisons here).
My initial observations:
- It’s tiny! The photo to the left shows the Eee on top of my Sony VAIO SZ340P. Of course, with the smaller size comes a few compromises: the 7″ screen doesn’t give you a lot of real estate and the keyboard is a bit cramped for my big hands. When at home, these problems could be solved by connecting an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but that would diminish the coolness factor of how small it is.
- It’s quiet. No moving parts except for the fan (and I haven’t heard that kick on yet).
- It’s fast (but not too fast). The 4G Surf uses a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor (but it’s underclocked to just 630 MHz!) and has 512mb of RAM. The system boots the customized Xandros Linux distro from the solid-state hard drive in just a few seconds and seems snappy enough even with a few applications open.
I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but I’ll post my observations here as I learn more about it. On my To Do List is “over”-clocking the CPU back to 900MHz, possibly upgrading to 1gb or 2gb of RAM, and possibly attempting to install Windows XP. Check back later for more!
Ubuntu Linux
I inherited an old Dell OptiPlex GX270 desktop PC from work and decided it was finally time to retire my old Linux laptop running Mandrake 10.0 and make the switch to Ubuntu. I built the box using Feisty Fawn (7.04) but a few days later Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released so I did an in-place upgrade.
It’s going to take me a while to get used to using ‘sudo’ all the time since Ubuntu doesn’t let you (or, rather, strongly discourages you) from logging in as root. But other than that, a Linux distro is a Linux distro. I do have to say, though, that so far I love apt-get! So much easier than using RPMFinder and then getting stuck in package dependency hell (Mandrake 10 might have had some sort of built-in package management, but I never used it and did things manually … that’s how we learn, right?).
My new server is running pretty much all the same things the old Mandrake laptop did: Galleon and pyTiVo for serving photos, music, and video to my TiVos, the Apache web server, NUT for UPS monitoring, Nagios for network monitoring, Gallery for my photos, and Folding@Home just for fun.
History of my Linux servers
I’ve gone through quite a few Linux “servers” as I’ve acquired new computers and relegated the older ones to more menial (but still important!) tasks. Years ago, I had been running Linux on my old 486 with only 16mb of RAM and it did the job admirably by serving up MP3s and running a small web site. I also used it to tinker with and learn UNIX, shutting down unneeded services, experimenting with secure shell (SSH), etc. When I got a new desktop PC, I decided to finally retire the 486 from service and moved Linux to the replaced Pentium II/400 with 256mb of RAM. This allowed me to run a newer distribution of MandrivaLinux (formerly known as Mandrake). Even that Pentium II box was eventually retired and scrapped for parts.
Right now, my media/file server is my wife’s old Toshiba Satellite S157. It runs Samba 3.0.24 to share files with the other PCs on my home network, and Galleon to serve MP3s to my TiVo DVRs and save recorded shows in a central location. It also runs Apache 2.2.4 for a little personal web site. Since it’s a laptop, it runs a lot quieter (and cooler!) than the Pentium II tower, which is good since it resides in the guest bedroom closet near the wireless router and cable modem. My personal uptime record for this “server” is 155 days!
ADS Tech PYRO1394DV firewire card
Since I have a digital video camera of course I want to be able to edit video on my PC. Since most digital camcorders have IEEE 1394 ports (also called Firewire (by Apple), or iLink (by Sony)), I also have a Firewire card: the inexpensive PYRO 1394DV card from ADS Tech. The PCI card provides two external (and one internal) Firewire ports, a cable to connect to your camcorder, and is bundled with Ulead’s VideoStudio SE which pretty easy to learn. Beware … you need a LOT of hard drive space to store all the digital video clips!