September 29, 2010

September 29, 2010 – 6:08 pm

Some updates on the new vpn-router build. Alot of work spent, but in the end, its the same cutoff just under 8 hours. In fact, its much more dynamic now – sometimes 1 hours, sometimes 6 hours, but never more than 8 hours. Some research shows that the vpnc client can not “re-key” when the vpn concentrators ask for it, so they all stop at 8 hours or less. With that in mind, I just killed the new box, and went back to the old one. It was fine, so no need to mess with it. I’ll probably use the unused box now for Untangle, the standalone network filtering tool that traps all kinds of stuff.

Also found out something interesting tonite. I’ve been messing with my old HP dv9208nr laptop again. Right now its running win7 on it. It was originally taken out of service because wireless stopped working. That was on vista64. I loaded win7 hoping for some better drivers, but no luck there. In fact, alot of HP’s tools (advisor, update, etc) wont work at all. Some will work if I change compatibility mode to vistaSP2 on all the binaries, but what a headache. But the interesting thing is this – after I add, THEN REMOVE some HP software, the wireless comes up. So as an example, I added wireless assistant, rebooted – still no wireless, no surprise there. Remove the HP wireless assistant, and upon reboot – wireless is up and working. Reboot, and its gone again though. But adding and REMOVING AGAIN, of the wireless assistant (or quick touch buttons, or any other of the myriad of hp software) and its back again. Its surely no fix, but I do find it interesting. I’d love to know what the hp software does upon de-install, that causes the wireless card to be recognized again.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

September 26, 2010

September 26, 2010 – 11:55 pm

Lots of work over the last few days.

  • Much of it was spent trying to build a new “vpn-router” box. I built the current one a few years ago, and its very stable and works well – but it seems to close connections after 7.5 hours. For my point to point stuff – that’s a real hassle because it often drops the link in the middle of something I’m doing. So I wanted to update everything and build a more modern version, on a faster box, hopefully stopping that. Well, its built after many many hours, and testing is under way on the timeouts. The old was a white box PII 450Mhz, 128Mb RAM, dual 4.3 Gb IDE drives, running knoppix 5.0.1. The new one is a Compaq Deskpro En, 1Ghz, 320Mb RAM, 9.1 Gb drive, running knoppix 6.2.1. Since these are just “routers”, they can be older hardware … obviously. But a big change somewhere along the line in knoppix was with the system startup scripts. The 5.0.1 used the familiar sysv-init style scripts like many other unix’s that I grew up with – using the /etc/rcX.d/SXXstartup type scripts. But in newer knoppix, startup scripts are done in /etc/rc.local instead, and work in all run levels – so that was a little different. Otherwise Im still sing the same apps as I used on the old knoppix. So, let the testing commence.
  • Another change was that I put the dv9925nr into service this weekend. That’s the kitchen laptop and is the one I just put the new motherboard in, and got the drive for. So that’s now online and working. That free’s up the dv9207us for another task. That one will be interesting.

Lastly a new unix workstation in my office – and just like at work, I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 on this one. I’ve gotten to like that release so its getting another try. Besides, my sony vaio that I’ve been using for many years now was getting a bit slow to be my daily driver. So that was moved downstairs into the server room, and now sits on the desk down there. So at least I have a nice multi-workspace, multi-window client machine down there near all the servers – its way better than putty on the AthlonXP3 box

Posted in Linux Laptops | No Comments »

September 7, 2010

September 7, 2010 – 6:02 am

Shutdown vmQmail and vmISP since both have had replacement servers online now for just about a year now. If there are no issues for the next 2 days, they’ll stay down permanently.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

November 25, 2009

November 25, 2009 – 8:49 pm

Today I resurrected a build from last year, an Open Network Registrar instance in hopes of finding a better dns engine than what I am using right now. However, it seems too weak for me. Its very basic, and still has flaws that have not been resolved in a couple years – so I dont think its gonna cut it for me. Also migrated my Tracks appliance. Lastly, setup a new instance for a DNS manager appliance by 4psa.com. I’ll be testing that out to see if its better than what I have at this point. I like the front end for it – alot, but I’ll have to see about the licensing for it.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 11, 2008

December 11, 2008 – 9:47 pm

Upgrade my WordPress installs from v2.3.3 to the new version 2.7.  Much better admin interface and features – though the public facing site part is no different at all.

So the upgrade was easy as could be.  Their documentation is very good.  It was a matter of doing the phpMyAdmin db backup as described by them, a tar backup of my wordpress directory, copy of the old config.php file, remove the wp-admin and wp-includes directories, extract new tar file with new release, edit config, and login.  Honestly it was about as easy as anyone could hope for.  Whole upgrade is less than 5 minutes.  So three sites down, three to go.

I’ll probably put a formal wiki page together for this, so that I’ll remember how I did this upgrade, when it comes time to upgrade again.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

July 31, 2008

July 31, 2008 – 7:14 pm

Found a great site that I had not previously known about, to create the virtual machines for use in VMWare Player. The site is called Easy VMX and its a very slick web interface that allows the creation of these files. Then the free VMWare Player will just run it like it was built normally in any other VMWare product. Of course now all the VMWare software is free, one way or another, even down to ESXi now, but this is still useful/good information to know about.

Also added a bunch of great new Firefox 3.0 add-on’s today :

Thats it. Note that these work in Flock too, not just for Firefox even though their pages dont say anything about Flock (or other FireFox derivatives).

Update 2011-04-22, this really should be its own entry, but I’m so used to searching for this July 31 entry that I don’t want multi steps. But Firefox 4 has dropped the keyboard shortcut for F6 to take you to the address bar. This fixes that :

Update 2011-06-17, again, should be its own entry, but much easier for me to update this post. Two new addon’s today :

Update 2011-09-04, again, should be its own entry, but much easier for me to update this post. Two new addon’s today :

Update 2011-10-17, now in its own entry and also part of a new dedicated category for these :

Update 2013-04-20, adding the ability to turn off flash :

Update 2014-05-19, adding ability to manage tables :

Update 2014-05-30, adding ability to show time-stamp on GMail :

Update 2014-11-28, adding more memory management information :

Update 2015-03-17, adding some checkbox mangers :

Update 2017-02-14, adding memory tab checker :

Posted in Firefox Plugins | No Comments »

July 6, 2008

July 6, 2008 – 3:15 pm

Original post from July 2 was removed, and recreated today.   Also setup option that I don’t allow anonymous comments anymore.  Im tired of dealing with the spammers. So here’s the original July 2 posting :
—-

Going absolutely crazy lately, trying to boot knoppix on my daily driver, athlonxp workstation. Its running XP, SP1, and works great for most things. Its got a ton of stuff on it, so I need to preserve it all.  Problem is, few years back when I installed it, I setup the C:\ drive as FAT32 to allow me to do repairs if needed. At that time, I had gone through a lot of repairs using Knoppix to boot and fix issues – and NTFS write-ability wasn’t yet present. So the safe bet was FAT32. However, I need to upgrade to SP2 on this box, so that I can load AVG8.0 but there isn’t enough free space on the drive. And I cant compress, because its FAT32, not NTFS and that feature isn’t present in FAT32. So before I do the FAT32->NTFS conversion, I want to have a backup copy of the C:\ partition – otherwise I risk losing everything.

Long story short, after MANY MANY repeated attempts at booting knoppix, it just kept hanging on the “looking for Knoppix on /dev/hdc” line, and never progressed. Older releases (like 3.2) would fail with the message about cant find filesystem – but newer ones (like 5.3.1) just hang on the /dev/hdc line. I tried DSL, Puppy, Knoppix, and others – and all did the same thing. I tried booting USB, but my BIOS doesnt support it. I tried command line parameters in all combinations of : nodma, noagp, noapic, nolapic, acpi=off, pci=bios, pnpbios=off, all-generic-ide, irqpoll, vga, and others. None of them worked. What
finally got me booted, was unplugging my second DVD writer. I have 2 of them in this machine. Im not using cable select, and have master/slave jumper-ed properly, but it just wouldn’t work with both drives. So unplugged one, booted from the other, backed up my drive, and am finally moving on …

So after doing all that, many posts online recommended defrag before convert.   So I went to do my defrag, and found that I didnt have enough free space – I had 7% free, but it wants 15% free. Then the cleanup began, on a drive that I had already cleaned up as much as I could. Biggest gains were by moving the “c:\windows\driver cache”, “c:\windows\help”, c:\windows\system32\dllcache” folders over to a hold area, and running the info found here and here, notably the “sfc /PURGECACHE” and “sfc /CACHESIZE=10” to limit to 10Mb going forward (instead of 300Mb+). That gave me enough room (more than 15% – actually 19%) to run my defrag, and then the convert (convert.exe c: /fs:ntfs). The defrag took about an hour, the convert about 10 minutes. All good at that point.

Then was able to successfully upgrade to SP2, add AVG8, and get the bb client tuned appropriately. So finally, I can do web browsing, file downloads, and safe Internet work again.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

June 18, 2008

June 18, 2008 – 5:50 pm

Having problems with the Lacie 1Tb NAS again.   This time it was with permissions.  Since I have 2 usernames I use regularly, call them “user-a” and “user-aa”, and I had “user-aa” already created, it wouldnt let me create the “user-a” and kept telling me it was already present.  I can only assume its doing something like a grep internally, and not properly looking for words, but instead searching for substrings – or should I say accepting substrings.  So what I had to do was to remove “user-aa”, then add “user-a” FIRST, then re-add “user-aa”.  That seemed to work.  Not sure if it will create problems later or not, but we’ll
surely find out.  Also disabled all Apple file sharing services while updating the permissions.
Also had to replace a bad video card in my vmware-dev box, which is just a whitebox pc.  It kept hanging at the boot screen after the windows logo disappears and the login box should appear.  Replacing the card resolved that issue.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

September 8, 2002

September 8, 2002 – 9:40 pm

Its been a while since I posted any updates here, but that is because I have been busy. I  have been working with a few new devices lately. I purchase the 802.11b product from LinkSys about a year and a half ago (wap11/wac11) and have  been very happy. But once I started to develop my own video-on-demand system, I wanted to use some wireless to get it down to my tv, and the 802.11b just couldnt cut it. So I got the 802.11a stuff now as well. I picked up the Linksys wpc54 and the base station for the new 5 Ghz products. They work fantastic. I am now able to play a move that was copied from a dvd that was copied to my storage array hanging of my sparc1. Then since the array has a samba share on it, my laptop can see and play it using its dvd player. I just convert that signal to tvout and play it on my big screen now. I built an html form to wrap around all my movie titles (actually a cgi script that just does an ls and parses the data), and now you can imagiine how many movies I have on demand at my fingertips all the time now. But this was also not enough for me. Since the dvd-on-demand was such a hit, I wanted the same for my cd-audio collection of 300+ cd’s. So I bought the new Linksys wireless ethernet bridge (wet11) and an AudioTron from Turtle Beach. I configured these two devices to also see a new share coming off of my sparc1 for music now. This is one of the cooles things I have ever used. I feel like my own dj, because I just pick the songs I want, any song/any
artist, and they play all day. I can even shuffle them. If I dont have the cd’s ripped to mp3’s yet, I can also get them from
Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus, or any other similar idea. This is good stuff.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Next Entries  
Paul A. Luzzi is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS). Theme by Bob
WordPress Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux