Since then there have been several different spin offs and IMHO, better ones out there. For the last several years I’ve been running DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G (The same one that I originally put OpenWRT on, fried, and then fixed). I found myself need to extend my wireless network, but not in the normal since of wireless. I need to turn a switch into a wireless client so I could have a hard wired connection on the other end.

I started searching for a new router, one that would last me a while, and more importantly. One I could hack. The short of a very long process for me, I settled on a ASUS RT-N16. This thing is loaded, 32MB of storage, 128MB of ram, and480 Mhz processor. It supports B, G and N. Pretty nifty. I got it, fired it up. And spent just enough time in the Asus firmware to load up DD-WRT.

I took my old Linksys and converted it into a wireless client. So no, it is just one huge switch. What I have is the wireless portion of it is just like the wireless in a laptop, and it connects to my router. Then all the ports on the back are just like a normal switch. I can now plug my desktop computers in my office up to it, and they are all on my network. It’s a pretty slick setup.

The connection between the Linksys router (now switch) and the Asus router is a bit flaky at times. And this is because of a multitude of reasons. The biggest being the number of walls the signal has to travel through. But I am working on fixing that one (moving the Asus router out of the bedroom one day). The other problem is the DD-WRT firmware on the Asus router. The router requires a beta release of DD-WRT running the 2.6 kernel. Older versions used the 2.4 kernel. But to support a wider ranger or routers (including this Asus) they had to use the 2.6 Kernel. There are still some bugs, and some things are quite working like they are suppose to, but that is why it is a beta release.

Overall, I am very happy with everything. As long as I can resist the temptation of tinkering with them. The connection remains really stable.

MySQL allows you set to set the character-set and collation to utf-8. To my understanding this will allow you to store UTF-8 data in your database. This makes it really nice when you have users copying and pasting data into your CMS. It will store the special double-quotes, trademark symbols, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. No big deal to backup up, right? Well I did an export within PHPMyAdmin and using the mysqldump utility. Neither one worked, and I was pissed. And actually so was the client because I didn’t catch it before we launched the site. So last night I was frantically searching Google as fast as I could (notice I wasn’t searching the web, I was searching Google – that should make an interesting blog post for another time). And I eventually found my answer. It had to do with the mediums inbetween the export and import to support utf-8 characters – Great.

So without having to use a 3rd party app, or write some code, I was able to figure out how to do it with myqldump. Instead of using the greater than symbol to redirect the output into a file, mysqldump has a switch -r to use to redirect output into a file. They say to use it on Windows machines, so I kind of felt dirty for using in the linux command line :/ But I did, and guess what, an import using virtualmin on the production server and everything worked, the data came across cleanly.

From the brief reading that I did, using the power of output redirection at the unix command line can break UTF-8 encoding. I guess it kind of makes sense if the server or terminal you are using doesn’t support it. But it isn’t something I would really think about.

Just for those wondering what I ended up doing. I normally do a mysqldump like

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name > mydump.sql

This time around, i just had to change it to

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name -r mydump.sql

So simple I could throw up.

Fast forward a few years, and now I am finding myself provide the patches and helping with some minor development. It is crazy , but how such a small task, can really make you feel good. When you find that patch, that bug, or provide a feature that wasn’t already there.

I think that is what drives a lot of people with Open Source. It isn’t that the software is free, and some it isn’t even the principles behind it, it is simply the enjoyment of working on something and helping out towards something that is bigger then you.

There are a lot of blogs and articles out there about SVN and NFS. You can search google and easily find a lot of information about them. But I never found anybody that felt like they found a definitive answer.

In my case I kept getting an error about not being able to find and available lock, the error looks something like svn: Can't get exclusive lock on file '/repo/db/write-lock': No locks available It turns out it is actually pretty easy to fix. And for those that don’t want to read further, all you have to do is add the nolock option to your nfs mount. My fstab entry now looks like this192.168.1.154:/volume1/svn /media/svn nfs rw,nfsvers=3,nolock 0 0. That’s all I use, and now my svn is working over nfs, safely I might add.

For those looking for a bit more explanation (which is what I couldn’t find). SVN dev’s prefer you not to use the Berkeley DB over NFS. So make sure you are running a new enough SVN so it uses the FSFS backend not the BDB. The next, it is my understanding that SVN uses file locks to protect the files during checkout and checkin, to prevent them from being over written. NFS uses NLM locking and it is used so that all clients of that nfs export no about the file lock. Apparently subversion is compatible with this locking mechanism. Adding the nolock option to the mount point as the client uses a more basic locking mechanism that only provides protection only form programs running on that machine.

What does all this mean, it means I am able to mount my svn share on a nfs export, but only that one machine can really access this export to guarantee consistency in our repository. You do lose some of the benefits of it being over an NFS share, you couldn’t do any type of load balancing over multiple SVN frontend servers, but it does allow our NAS to hold our repository and puts me one step closer to consolidating our storage.

While I didn’t provide a new answer, I am providing the reasoning behind the answer as I can see it. Something I couldn’t find out there on the Internet.

I’m not lying, I promise. Adobe has announced an x86_64 version of their adobe flash player. I unistalled that latest 10.0 32bit version along with nspluginwrapper, and downloaded the v10 alpha. The install was a simple copying it into ~/.mozilla/pugins, and it works.

Two initial findings I have, are dropdown menus are now popping up in front of the flash banner, instead of behind. Which is amazingly great. And the second is cpu usage. So far, listening to pandora is quite a bit lower, probalby b/c it was going through nspluginwrapper, but I notice about 4 – 5% difference in CPU. Can’t wait to check out more flash streams that I’ve noticed cause some high cpu load.

For links to download and a chance to read up a bit about the release, check out the SWF Penguin’s blog (one of the developers for linux flash)

Browsing the web today, I found two nice tools for managing AD in Linux. First up is adtool. The home page is at http://gp2x.org/adtool/. This is a tool that lets you manage the objects in active directory without having to know too much knowledge of LDAP. You will have to know a bit about the layout in Active Directory, but you don’t have to worry about having to write your LDAP queries. This small little app lets you list out directories, modify attributes, reset passwords and more.

Next up is a package released by the ZenOSS group, they use it with their monitoring suite, and it is a WMI client. Again CLI only, but works great. I found it over at http://felimwhiteley.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/wmi-calls-from-linux/ and the package can be downloaded from http://dev.zenoss.org/svn/trunk/inst/externallibs/. It seems to be a python script with very little documentation. Based on the blog post, the syntax isn’t much different then that of the wmi client for windows.

Between these two tools, you could decently manage basic task from linux, and even write some nice scripts to do more. While these two tools won’t Network and System Administrators of Windows Domains out of a window enviroment all day, it will help those who still prefer Linux as the day-to-day machine.

Finally I got my synaptics drivers to work properly. With the new HAL, you are able to have it hotplug your input devices into X, this means they don’t need to be listed in X. I tested this out on my laptop a few months ago, and it worked. Only problem is I couldn’t pass along the variables for my synaptics touchpad. Well, after months of waiting and research, I finally got it figured out.

I created the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptic-options.fdi, which, in Gentoo, are the user added hal policies, system installed are in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/. I then added the following into that file


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>


This turns on SHMConfig which allows synclient and gsynaptics to change synaptic settings on the fly. Sadly, in between noticing this taking effect I had moved to a few pre-release applications to get the 3d r500 accelleration with ati drivers. Below are a few application and versions I am running


[ebuild R ] sys-apps/hal-0.5.11-r1
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.4.99.906
[ebuild R ] x11-drivers/synaptics-0.14.6-r4


Also note, i just notice xf86-input-synaptic-0.15* has been added to the portage tree for the 1.5 prerelease, need to check this out.

I’ve been using WICD for the past week, and I think I like it better then Network Manager. It focuses on connecting your network interfaces to networks and does it right. IT doesn’t have the ability for VPN’s or anything else, it is merely I frontend to wpa-supplicant and iwconfig. I have had zero issues with connecting to wireless networks. It is actually connecting to them better then Network Manager was. My connections are stable, and I can switch between my wired network and my wireless without problems. (I had problems with NM b/c when I plug into a wired network, the BIOS throws the kill switch to the wireless radio, NM had problems finding it again after this).

The connection times are very quick, most of the time I am connected to my wireless before my gnome interface loads. It has a service that has to run, so it might even be connecting to it earlier then that … which would be very cool.

There is one issue though. When I first boot up my and if I have an ethernet cable plugged in, the WICD tray panel fails to load. And I am not sure why, I’d imagine though it might be loosely related to the same reason it won’t “auto connect” to the wired network when the cable is plugged in.

Besides that small issue, it WICD runs in a smaller footprint, has a better interface, and provides a stable Internet connection using the proven standards and tools already out there.

I finally left the fglrx closed sourced drivers and loaded up the ati drivers from the git repo. These code in git includes the ability for 3d acceleration for the r500 chips. I have an x1300 in my laptop, which I believe is a r515. So naturally I my curiosity won and I had to give them a go.

I found Phoronix post detailing how to install ati on gentoo, Ended up only unmasking the git ebuilds for the packages listed in the 2nd or 3rd post. I didn’t install the x11-drm packages b/c I am now running 2.6.26 kernel which includes these. Install was quick, and after the reboot I found my first problem, Compiz wouldn’t run .. shit. I disabled compiz from running at startup and just used plain metacity, and everything seems to work, 2d works just find and was pretty snappy. So this was a good port. I checked dmesg, and found drm was loaded just fine. I then checked glxinfo and found that I didn’t have direct rendering.

After playing around some more I found a out something very weird. 3D rendering did work, but only once, after it ran the first time, it will fail to work again. I can run glxinfo once and see Directing Rendering: Yes, or I can run glxgears just once. But after that I can’t an error about not being about to find rgb glx visual’s. Exact errors from glxinfo and glxgears are as follow

% glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual

visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x23 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x24 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x25 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x26 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x27 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x28 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x29 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2a 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2b 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2c 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2d 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2e 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2f 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x30 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x31 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x32 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x64 32 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None

% glxgears
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual

So it seems I got a bit more work to do, I might be needing a few more packages that are considered “stable” in gentoo yet

So, it’s only a proof on concept I did in about 15 minutes before going to be, but I thought I would go ahead and show it off. Please critic.

Or you can Download the XCF and play with it yourself.

The 92.1 Image came from Neo on Flickr and the Tux logo com from wikinews

EDIT :: Some have ask in other places what 92.1 KTFW is, they is a local Country Radio station. http://countrylegends921.com/