Casper's Life

Slimserver and 54G

As everyone know pulling cables around the house for networking is a blast (NOT!). I therefor got my self some wireless equipment again (used to have 11b), to power my SliMP3 (old version of Slimserver – <a href="www.slimdevices.com">www.slimdevices.com</a>) – which is not wireless.

I got a Linksys WAP54G and a WET54G, not nice looking but I was hoping that they where working… NOT!!!!!!!!

My SliMP3 was choking; strange characteres on the display drop out’s etc. the whole storie – I spend 6 hours yesterday troubleshooting the problem, and some time today. And it turned out that I had to change the networking parameters on the Slimserver:

Maximum number of TCP sockets to read per pass: 20

Maximum number of TCP sockets to write per pass: 20

Maximum number of simultaneous TCP connections to accept: 30

Maximum number of bytes of audio data to send to player in a UDP packet (SLIMP3 only): 1400

I think that the issue is solved with the last paramter. First thing is that I use WEP which adds some overhead to the package (UDP/IP frame), and there is an issue with UDP and fragmenttation, like in <i>IT DOES NOT WORK WONDERFULLY WELL</i>.

Now I can listen to music again……

Oh, if you do as I do rip all your CD’s get a slimdevice. Also another thing; get a <a href="http://www.c-note.dk/blog/exit.php?url_id=63&amp;entry_id=23" title="http://www.plextor.com" onmouseover="window.status=’http://www.plextor.com’;return true;" onmouseout="window.status=”;return true;">Plextor</a> drive they rock, and they do not have problems with the CD copy protection.

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SSH

I am very keen user of ssh, and what can frustrate me, is that I have to type passwords again and again. So after some digging around I found a solution.

Add the following to you .bash_profile
if [ ! -f $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh ]; then
ssh-agent -s > $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh
chmod o+x $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh
. $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh
# I don’t have the ssh-add myself as I don’t always need to have a password
# (don’t ask me why)
# ssh-add
else
. $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh
fi

trap "$HOME/.bash_logout" 0

And this to your .bash_logout
if [ "`ps aux | grep $UID | grep @pts | grep -v grep | wc -l | xargs printf "%d"`" -le 1 -a -f $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh ] ; then
echo "This appears to be your last login on this machine, removing agent"
ssh-add -D 2>&1 > /dev/null
ssh-agent -k 2>&1 > /dev/null
rm $HOME/.ssh-agent.sh
fi

I know that it could be done with ‘who’ but as I have usernames which are longer than 8 characters this was what I could come up with.

Happy hacking…..

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Building RPM’s

I have been used to build software from source for I don’t know how many years, actually I think since I started using Linux, which was in 1993-94 (Slackware 1).

But as I have to maintain more than one server, with the same packages on them, I have started looking into how to build <a href="rpm">rpm</a>’s. And now I’m at it why not make them yum

fedoranews.org is a good place to start if you want to build your own rpm’s. Thomas Chung have some very good tutorials on how to build rpm’s from binary distributions (which do not provide rpm’s).

Oh, year Happy New Year.

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Messenger

I don’t know when this started, but sometime back in the happy 80′es someone had this wonderfull idea that it should be possible to anoy other people when ever they wanted, actually I think it was AOL – and they sat down and wrote an application which everyone should have on their workstation, and it was a must that it was running, and they had an internet connection (permently active!!). The name of that program is AOL Messenger – yep you guessed it – I really dislike it most of the time, that is as long as I can use it to anoy other people I’m quite happy – it’s just when they interrupt me in my work it goes wrong.

Well some year later, or was it earlier (we will probably never know) someone figured out that cell phones could be used to other things than to call people (as no one had the money to talk for hours on these beasts) – you now had the option to send short messages – this was then called SMS (the last S is Service). I actually like it, the same way as I like AOL Messenger (or others of the same type), but at some point in my life I got to the point that: a) God made the woman out of a male rib (as we know he was called Adam, and she was Eve), b) Someone gave the cell phone to women (and it didn’t take long for the women to figure out that it was way to expensive to talk for hours on it – as they like to do), c) Someone invented SMS…. I really like a) and b), but c) is a big no, no.

I really like to be told that I’m needed, and so, but frankly it can get to the point where it is too much.

BTW: There is now I don’t how many diffrent implementation of Internet messaging services, even MS has one (which is know for being good for viruses), and some are used for telling you that someone would really like you to visit this website (…).

And even I depend on some of these programs, as I said I really like to anoy other people once in a while.

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ISP’s

I don’t know if you ever had this urge to contact your ISP’s support line – I have had it a few times, and mostly with quite good result. But lately I have not been that lucky.. The whole ting started friday last week, where I knew that my connection to the internet was down (no connection to my server… very bad), so I did the normal thing reset modem, reset router – and when I’m lucy I have to reenter all the whole configuration for my router (I do not know why LinkSys doesn’t provide a backup tool…). Well everything worked and off I went to a party….

Saturday, I could not figure out why I havn’t received any mail (maillists are things which creep up on you, and keeps you down), so I did my normal test, VPN in to the Work network, a SSH connection to my linux box, and then # telnet … 25 . . . . no response, nmap -vv -sT … . . . . no ports open. Ok, then play around with the settings of my router, same result…. Ok, then call the support line, they did not know about any closed ports, but they would check, I gave them my details, and yes; they have closed all my ingoing ports – why??? Oh, I had had an excessive amount of relay trafic on my line. Well NO!! (which is one thing I know about – I work with thees thing you know). So I asked if they could reopen the ports? NO!, hummmm, why wasn’t I told? Well they send me an email – to which email address? To: loginname@isp, well I never use it, and I just cleaned it out, cause: ~2000 junk mails – not their problem. But they would have someone call me the following monday morning (today).

Phone rings!

Me picks it up, and roughly the same conversation as above happens, except that I was told that it was on port 80 (what!), and I would have to fix the issue, where after they would recheck it. But couldn’t you open, and I will be able to fix in 5 minutes? No! Well, the problem was obvisuly with mod_proxy (who would know), where not so nice people can connect to port 80, and then use the local mail system to send spam. It’s fixed now (I hope), and I have asked the kind people to reopen the ingoing ports.

Just a weekend gone….. and I have learned that the Internet is full of not so nice people.

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New design

New redesigned web site.

My software is still available on <a href=”www.c-note.dk/software”>www.c-note.dk/software</a>, but I will probably release which is ready for release on forge.novell.com – I only have a limited amout of bandwidth, and I would like to use if for something else that “uploading” software.

I was reading something about weblogs sometime agoe, and after thinking about it – I decided that this is the best place in the world to let other people know about what one think, and a very good place to rant:-) And then I was looking at primates.ximian.com, and saw that they where using this system, which has a nice design, and very eary to install – so why not…..

Also I have removed alot of unusefull inforrmation – which was outdated…..

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