Archive for August, 2005

Update on E450 environmental monitoring

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Those who’ve read my blog before might remember that I’m working with a Linux kernel developer to help him write a driver for the environmental monitoring features of the Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 server.

We’ve come a huge distance and Eric said yesterday that we’re approaching being able to release the code for further testing once it’s been cleaned-up a bit. At the moment we can dynamically set fan speeds depending on the temperature – this was the most important and time-consuming feature to implement. Without this driver the fans run at full speed which is a real noise; now the machine probably isn’t any louder than the average desktop machine. We can also tell when fans have failed, determine how many PSUs are fitted and hopefully soon determine their status as well. Eventually we’ll also be able to determine when disks have failed and set the disk LEDs and front panel LEDs appropriately as well as respond to the various keyswitch positions.
This may not sound like much, but when you consider that there was no documentation available from Sun and everything had to be reverse-engineered, it’s a huge task. This has been a work in progress for nearly 3 months so far.

There was however nearly a casualty… my machine. At one point Eric had been poking at it via SSH and had inadvertently stopped all the fans. About an hour later I discovered that the machine was very, very hot and creating that all-too-familiar smell of electrical burning…
Amazingly the machine survived and was up and running a few minutes later – I had to turn it on again to get the fans going. As it was working and had passed a full diagnostic, I wasn’t too concerned about it. However the other day I took the case off and saw how the plastic air-flow guides fitted around each CPU had melted onto their respective heatsinks. Bear in mind that these are designed to withstand temperatures of 70°C and above. I took some photos of the mess today, as I removed the air-flow guides completely. Unfortunately this now means that the cooling isn’t as efficient as it was designed to be and the CPUs are running hotter than they otherwise would, but hopefully I can get some replacements.

I’m very happy with how things are progressing and with any luck I’ll soon be able to put my server into production use using the new driver.

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Posted in linux | 4 Comments »

Whinging about wireless

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

It never ceases to amaze me how long it can still take to get something as simple as a wireless card working under Linux. Today I got a super-cheap Safecom SWLC-54108 54Mbit card to replace my old Netgear MA401 11Mbit card, which plugs-and-plays in Linux. The new card, predictably, wasn’t quite so easy to get going. In fact, it took 5 hours of messing about. That’s right: 5 hours to get a wireless network card working.

The card is based on the acx111 chipset which is supported by the acx100 driver. I’ll go through the steps I took to get it working under Kubuntu Breezy (should be the same process for other distros too), to hopefully save someone else 5 hours of their life. This process should also apply to the PCI & USB versions of the card.

The first step is to download a CVS snapshot of the acx100 driver. But don’t get the latest one, as this won’t work. After lots of trial-and-error I got the card working reliably using the 20050810 snapshot (others may work, but I haven’t tried them).
This now needs to be compiled – follow the instructions in the README for building-out-of-tree (or in-tree if you prefer, but out-of-tree is easier), ensuring you have your kernel headers or source available. If you’re building in-tree do modules_install else copy the modules (everything .ko) into your kernel modules directory tree – maybe /lib/modules/2.6.xx/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/. Don’t follow the instructions for doing modules_install if you’re building out-of-tree – it doesn’t put them in the right place.
When the driver is loaded, it has to upload firmware into the card to make it work (I’d sure like to meet whoever decided doing this was a good idea). You’ll need to get the firmware package. But don’t use the latest firmware (acx_111_2.3.1.31) as this doesn’t work… you need to use acx111_1.2.1.34 – copy the files from this directory into wherever hotplug keeps it’s firmware in your distro ([K]Ubuntu keeps it in /lib/hotplug/firmware/).

That’s it. Now you just need to configure the card using your distro’s network config tool, or by manually editing the appropriate file. I found that the card wouldn’t work unless I specified the channel and mode for some reason, but YMMV.

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Posted in linux | 8 Comments »

My new toy

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

UTStarcom F1000I’ve recently bought myself a new toy: a wi-fi SIP VoIP handset. I’ve been using SIPGate for about 6 months and am very grateful for the cheap calls (UK landlines for 1.19ppm, mobiles for 14.90ppm, international dead cheap). All I used to have when I was at Uni was my mobile, which apart from being unreliable and generally crap (thanks 3) is also expensive even though I get free line rental (UK landlines for 10ppm, mobiles for 25ppm, international not worth thinking about). The phone I’ve got is a UTStarcom F1000 and overall I’m very impressed with it. As it uses standard wireless LAN, it’s not dependant on any particular base station. Whether I’m at home or Uni I can just switch it on and it’ll log onto the local wireless network. I quickly discovered that the coverage in my town is very good too – very nice of all those people to leave their wireless networks unencrypted and without MAC restrictions – I can only assume they’re being public-spirited :-)

SIPGate also provide all users with a standard landline number, with a choice of any area code in the country. So wherever I take my phone, as long as I’ve got a usable wireless network I can make cheap calls and have a UK landline number. Very cool.

The phone has a standby time of about 4 days, which is perfectly adequate. It supports all the features of SIP including STUN. It wasn’t terribly cheap though, coming in at about £130. The cheapest place to get it if you’re in the UK is sipgate.de – you’ll have to register with them (for free) before they let your order it though.

It does however require a hack to make the battery last more than 24 hours. This is as follows:

  1. Turn the phone off
  2. Hold 1, 9 and the red button for 3 seconds
  3. Wait for the ‘Func No’ prompt
  4. Enter 10 and press the green button
  5. Enter 1 and press the green button
  6. Hold the red button to turn the phone off
  7. Charge the battery then enjoy how long it lasts

Instructions are also available in German and Spanish.

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Posted in Technology, internet | 28 Comments »

ThinkFree Office

Saturday, August 13th, 2005

Since I started writing professionally, I’ve been added to various PR companies’ press mailing lists and often get sent products I didn’t ask for or e-mails announcing things I don’t care about. Today, I got an e-mail about ThinkFree Office, including a press download link and license key. The e-mail assured me that "ThinkFree was a finalist of best desktop award.". So I thought I’d give it a blast and install the Linux version (it’s also available for Windows and Mac).

ThinkFree Office in all its gloryUpon running the installer I immediately got an “Unpacking JRE” message, which always makes me think “Uh oh, this thing’s written in Java” – always a warning sign. After demanding my license key and presenting a long and threatening End User License Agreement, it installed itself.
So I started it up and immediately found that all the menus were corrupted, making it very difficult to actually do anything. After playing around with it, I also discovered that it was very slow: click on new to start a new document and it takes a good 3-5 seconds to actually do it (OpenOffice is instant). It can open MS Word documents (this is it’s native format, in fact), but this takes a good 5-10 seconds also (again, OpenOffice does this instantly). There is also a PDF export function which, you guessed it, is also slow and takes about 5-10 seconds (yet again, OpenOffice does it instantly). My machine is not exactly lacking in power either – it’s an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ with a gig of RAM.

On the plus side, it does do a slightly better job of opening especially troublesome MS Word documents (ones with frames and the like) than OpenOffice, but it’s not a massive improvement. By now I was wondering what the developers charge for this slow, buggy piece of software. $49.95 it seems. I’m still trying to figure out what you get for your money, since OpenOffice can do everything it does for free…

That’s my initial impression of ThinkFree Office anyhow (I’m not sure where the ‘Free’ part of the name comes in by the way – what with long EULAs and license keys, I can’t see any freedom). I’ll do a proper write-up for Micro Mart sometime soon, as long as the editor is up for it.

No doubt the PR agency are now running to erase me from their mailing list…

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Posted in linux | 2 Comments »