Lenny and I won the Grass Roots Racing Moraine Adventure Dash! I will write more about it here as I get time.
There is a writeup by the race organizers and the Tribune Review, and there is a video on the Tribune Review website. Kathleen took a lot of pictures (ask me for a link) and served as an excellent support crew. Somebody named Tom Prigg also made a video.
I recently acquired a LinkSys WRT54G router, which is cool because LinkSys open-sourced the firmware and built these things with some pretty hefty hardware so with some aftermarket firmware this should be a sweet router. My serial number starts with CDF7, which both wikipedia and dd-wrt tell me means I have a revision 2.2 WRT54G.
I downloaded version 23, service pack 2 of the DD-WRT firmware. I decided to actually read the notes, which suggested that I first upgrade to the “mini generic” edition of DD-WRT and then, if everything works, upgrade to the “standard” version of DD-WRT from there. I did as I was told, using Firefox from my Apple laptop to install the “mini generic” version of DD-WRT. This worked great. I then tried to perform the further upgrade to the standard DD-WRT, and I kept getting “connection reset” errors in my browser. After a few of these, I decided to try Safari instead of Firefox, and things just worked.
I intend to setup a fancy home network where the DHCP server in the router actually gives my machines (one of which is a fancy HP laster printer with an ethernet port) names. I’ll probably update this post once I’ve done so.
backupninja has been the subject of several of my postings over the years. I finally decided to use it to automatically backup some MySQL databases (i.e., this blog) instead of running a mysqldump manually whenever I think of it (not too often). I did `aptitude install backupninja` and then used `ninjahelper` to tell it to dump all MySQL databases.
I ran into one glitch during a test run where backupninja produced:
Backupninja failed with the following error:
== fatal errors from /etc/backup.d/20.mysql
== Fatal: Can’t find config file in /root/.my.cnf
My esteemed colleague Mr. Parno pointed out that removing “user=root” from /etc/backup.d/20.mysql does the trick.
I am trying to be a good open-source software proponent, thus I’ve been using OOo Calc for my spreadsheeting needs instead of Excel. Sadly, I’m giving up on it. The problem is not a lack of features, rather, without explanation, OOo Calc will suddenly use 100% CPU for intervals measuring in the tens of seconds, at which time it is totally unresponsive. To my amazement, this has not resulted in any crashes. Still, it is unacceptable. I hope this is a known issue and will be resolved soon.
Today I registered bigleadpipes.com, bigleadpipes.net, and bigleadpipes.org with 1&1 Internet for $5.99 each per year. I modified the DNS settings to return the IP address of my CMU machine, and it’s already working! Now, to do something interesting with them…
I was wondering if anybody had ever created one of these, and today I took a look around. Somebody has!
Go up one level on the same page and there are other useful Folding utilities.
HowToForge.com has a nice howto for setting up Xen 3.1.0 using Debian Etch as both the host and guest system.
This literally just worked, it was very nice. However, the configuration in the howto assumes a paravirtualized guest. I have a machine which has hardware support for virtualization, and I want to enable HVM support. This page at Dartmouth describes the configuration of a Debian HVM guest in Xen 3.0.4. I had to change a few things to get everything working with Xen 3.1.0.
The first error arose when trying to connect a console to the HVM guest. I did an `xm list` and saw my ‘edgy’ domain running happily:
$ xm list
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 1720 2 r—– 50.9
edgy 5 263 1 r—– 337.4
Now I tried to connect a console:
$ xm console 5
xenconsole: Could not read tty from store: No such file or directory
I googled for that error message and saw that a lot of people have experienced it, and I found absolutely nothing that was helpful. In fact, I still don’t know how to connect a console to an HVM guest. Maybe it’s impossible, who knows?
What I was able to do is use VNC. The options mentioned on the Dartmouth page (vnc-listen and vncpasswd) are in the file /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp, and not in /etc/xen/xen-config.sxp. Maybe it was just a typo, but the one with the ‘d’ is the correct file.
One of the comments on the original HowToForge.com page suggested the following:
1. if you wan’t the VNC/SDL feature with HVM you need the following packages: libjpeg62-dev, libvncserver-dev, libsdl1.2-dev
2. you need to set the following var: ‘export XENFB_TOOLS=y’ in Config.mk before building Xen.
3. for hvmloader, you need the package bcc or it will just not compile.
As I type this I have a VNC client window exported via `ssh -X` from dom0 happily churning through the Debian install process. I don’t need X for the work I’m doing, so I probably won’t update this again.
I do a fair amount of debugging via serial port, and I usually use minicom as a terminal, where all the debug output gets dumped. Sometimes, however, I want to run experiments and just log the output. This is an area where minicom struggles.
I am now using a program called interceptty which can sit between a real or fake serial port and an application. I’m using it to redirect serial port data to a local network socket, and then using netcat to log the data to a file. Interceptty can log the data itself, but it is designed around logging binary data, and I am actually in a situation where most of what comes through is displayable ASCII.
interceptty -s ‘ispeed 115200 ospeed 115200′ -o interceptty.raw.log /dev/ttyS1 @localhost:6666
netcat localhost 6666 | tee -a serial_ascii.txt
I just ordered 5 more books to read, which is a horrible idea considering I have an upcoming thesis proposal, paper deadline, and camera-ready deadline. I ordered:
“The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” by Alan Cooper
“The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” by Marc Levinson
“The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World” by A. J. Jacobs
“The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works–and How It’s Transforming the American Economy” by Charles Fishman
“Skyscraper” by Robert Byrne
