Tag: JustMigrated

Should anyone ask, I am not in awe of the iPhone, yet.

Many people have been asking for my opinion of the iPhone from Apple.  Here’s my take in no particular order:

  • Touch Screen:  Unless they have invented some new protective surface, they will be doing many recalls of this phone. Where do phones live?  Next to keys in pockets.  Look at other phones with touch screens:  the P800 and 900 from Sony Ericcson sucked and always developed scratches that meant recalibration or in some cases parts of the screen became non touch sensitive.
  • No need for a keyboard:  Debatable.  I had the option of using a keyboard or no keyboard on my Sony Ericsson.  Guess what? I ended up using the keyboard.  Why? Because tactile feedback is useful.  Touch screen is cool but how many other touch screen things do we see around using them?  Not many.  You TV remote control could be a cool Philips pronto touch screen.  Why is it not?  Because in the dark it’s nice to feel what you are pressing and not to have to look down all the time.
  • Its not out yet: June.  Really?  Somehow I can’t see this phone shipping in large numbers before September.
  • Handcuffed by carriers:  And apple is working through Cingular.  What if Apple want to do something Cingular don’t like.  Sucks to be Apple.  Look at what Cingular did to the great Nokia E61.  Called it an E62 and disabled the wifi part of it.  Like it or not, the carriers still have some clout.
  • Media on the phone.  Great!  But with only 8Gb, you are not going to be carting around that much media.  Perhaps they can solve this using some intelligent syncing software that only uploads what you think you will be interested in.
  • SIP/Wifi.  You would think that if Apple was including this, they would have made some noise about it.  See note “Handcuffed by Carriers”.  Sip is cool.  Sip works.  Sip saves me LOTS of money.  No thanks, I’ll pass on the Skype phone monstrosities.

Should anyone ask, I updated mythtv to run on Ubuntu on amd64.

I decided to switch my somewhat flaky multimedia MythTV box to Ubuntu.  Since it’s in the living room I run a diskless (and therefore completely silent) AMD64 based system that connects to my backend server via it’s own VLAN on gigabit ethernet (with jumbo-frames).  The problem is that there was very little documentation about setting up Ubuntu in a diskless fashion and even less about doing it for a “foreign” architecture.  I needed an Amd64 environment, and the other PCs that I had access to were Intel 64bit or AMD32.

So I headed over to Robin’s network where he runs an AMD64 based media PC (also on Ubuntu, although needn’t be).

Should I ever have to repeat this setup, these are the commands I executed:
To grab the initial set of packages and unpack them:

debootstrap –resolve-deps –arch amd64 –include=ssh,apt,postfix,cron –verbose edgy /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
mount –bind /sys /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet/sys
mount –bind /proc /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet/proc
chroot /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet /bin/bash
vim /etc/fstab# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
10.7.12.1:/var/lib/diskless/mythtv / nfs rw,async,hard,lock,nfsvers=3,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
10.7.12.1:/home /home nfs rw,async,hard,lock,nfsvers=3,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
10.7.12.1:/home/simon/Music /home/mythtv/music nfs ro,async,hard,lock,nfsvers=3,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
10.7.12.1:/mnt/vault/video /mnt/vault/video nfs rw,async,hard,lock,nfsvers=3,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
/dev/loop/0 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
vim /etc/network/interfaces

# Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
# /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
#up ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.7.12.6
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.7.11.12.0
broadcast 10.7.12.255
gateway 10.7.12.1
mtu 9000
vim /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf

BOOT=nfs
vim /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

forcedeth
af_packet
nfs
lockd
forcedeth
af_packet
nfs
lockd

update-initramfs -u -c
apt-get clean # we don’t want to have to xfer all the left over .deb packages

exit chroot

umount /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet/proc # because we are tidy
umount /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet/sys # and don’t throw rocks
tar cvfjl /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet.tar.bz /tmp/mythbuntu-from-slomnet

rsync -e ssh … to imagilan

my menu.lst for netbooting looked like this (not the small r and wsize – this seems to be a bug in the early life of a forecedeth module loading.  Later on I ramp up the packet size and things really fly)

default MythBuntu
timeout 10
prompt 2

label MythBuntu
kernel /linux/mythbuntu/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-386
append initrd=/linux/mythbuntu/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-386 ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=10.7.11.1:/var/lib/diskless/mythtv nfsopts=nolock,tcp,wsize=2048,rsize=2048,rw acpi=force rw

reboot and “Bob’s your uncle”

Should anyone ask, I prefer my neighbours to see up-side down images.

It’s the silly season here and I noticed I had a couple more people using my wireless access points to check their email and surf the web. Since all traffic goes through a transparent proxy on my network I decided to have a little fun with the redirect_program directive in my squid.conf configuration file. I set it to:

redirect_program /home/simon/bin/redirect.pl

and then added the following to redirect.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$|=1;
$count = 0;
$pid = $$;
while () {
chomp $_;
if ($_ =~ /(.*.jpg)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.jpg", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.jpg");
system("/bin/chmod", "a+r","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.jpg");
print "http://www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.jpgn";
}
elsif ($_ =~ /(.*.gif)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.gif", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.gif");
system("/bin/chmod", "a+r", "/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.gif");
print "http://www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.gifn";
}
elsif ($_ =~ /(.*.png)/i) {
$url = $1;
system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.png", "$url");
system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.png");
system("/bin/chmod", "a+r", "/var/web/www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.png");
print "http://www.imaginator.com/squid/$pid-$count.pngn";
}
else {
print "$_n";;
}
$count++;
}

Resulting in:

and an evil laugh.

Should anyone ask, the US patent system is completely broken.

A patent is supposed to be granted when, “the solution to a problem is not obvious to a person skilled in the art and the invention involves an inventive step.” Here’s an example of just how broken the system is. Surely 6 Billion “prior-arts” can’t be wrong:

Apparatus for moistening adhesive coatings on postage material and the like which includes an enclosure having a container of liquid therein. A plunger is provided to lift an absorbant applicator from the liquid and pass the applicator through an opening in the side of the enclosure. A closure member for the opening is opened in response to the applicator movement. The applicator may be in the form of a human tongue and the closure may be in the form of a human lip.

Read the full patent on the USPTO website.

Should anyone ask, I have been reading the international dialing codes

The process of dialing a number and a telephone ringing on the other side of the world is very intersting.  To me at least.  It gets even more interesting when you think about how things like how to bill the call. The whole process is called ENUM.

I learnt some interesting things about the international country codes:

  • Antartica has no country code instead you have to dial the country code of the particular base you wish to speak with
  • The Vatican City has it’s own country code, but instead uses Rome dialing codes
  • country codes  90 to 99 used to be used for intercontinental traffic before 1960

I started reading about this because I followed a link from the E.164 page.  I like e.164 because it maps my telephone number to an ip address that can be looked up in dns.    So if you call me on my VOIP number from your VOIP provider the call is mapped to an ip addresses and never touches the PSTN.

Should anyone ask, I now have LDAP authentication working in Apache 2

It was not nice.

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Imaginator username and password"
AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative On
AuthLDAPURL ldaps://ldap.imaginator.com/dc=imaginator,dc=com?uid?sub
AuthLDAPBindDN "cn=nss,ou=auth,dc=imaginator,dc=com"
AuthLDAPBindPassword "**********"
AuthLDAPGroupAttribute memberUid
require ldap-group cn=buddycloud-corp,ou=groups,dc=imaginator,dc=com

So it sort of works. But what I would really like is for a way to authenticate on POSIX groups which have a memberUid which is something like:

memberUID: simon

Update:

AuthLDAPGroupAttributeIsDN off is the magic bit! This forces a filter on the uid rather than the full DN. LDAP as always Rocks!
rather than doing a

memberUid: cn=Simon Tennant,ou=People,dc=imaginator,dc=com

Sigh.

Should anyone ask, I am now running Apache 2

…and it was a relatively easy upgrade. I had an old and crufty Apache 1.3 that has now been migrated to a nice 2.0 configuration. Multiple SSL virtual hosts is a nice addition (although until OpenSSL is changed to include some sort of host sending outside of the ssl tunnel there will still be the problem of SSL certs not matching.

Please let me know if you find something not working correctly.