Two posts in one week, what’s going on?!!?
I’m trying to whittle down that to do list, and here’s one of the relatively high priority ones: getting the video out on the media pc working.
This is a cellphone video of the output I get using the official ATI drivers under ubuntu 8.04:
I remember something similar when I first set it up using windows xp, but the drivers auto configured and got it all working. The same can’t be said for Ubuntu.
Anyone have an idea for a solution?
Now that life has calmed down a bit, it’s time for an update. I know it’s been a long time, but I have been busy and school has been sucking out my energy.
Adrien is now sleeping through the night, actually, he started doing that about a month and a half ago. We’re lucky with babies that way. He still likes to cry a lot though, and doesn’t sleep much during the day.
Brayden had his appointment with the neurosurgeon earlier this week and it seems everything is fine with his head (it’s just big).
I’ve been working 12 hour days for the past two weeks getting our engineering project finished, which we submitted on Wednesday. You can see the pdf at our svn repository (http://zigbeemeshnetwork.googlecode.com, or directly at http://zigbeemeshnetwork.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Documents/Final%20Report.pdf). It isn’t what I would consider my best work. We had a lot of other deadlines this week, including another report that the professor decided to change last minute to be due at the same time on the same day, so I couldn’t spend as much time on it as I wanted. It isn’t as cohesive as I would like it to be and I’m sure there are some points missing.
I’ve also compiled a bit of a to do list for things I want to do in the next days/weeks/months/years(?). Here’s what I’ve got, in no particular order:
Actually, contrary to what I said about no particular order, the last point is probably the most important, so if you’re in the market for a new grad with a Bachelor’s of Engineering, check out my resumé on the sidebar or contact me to find out what I can do for you or your company.
Rogers decided they’d fix the E911 bug (null pointer exception when a 911 call is placed while gps is enabled) at the end of january instead of back in september when it was discovered. To ‘encourage’ people to run their update, they’ve disabled data on any HTC dream or magic that doesn’t have this update installed.
The problem with the update is it uses a more recent version of the SPL, fixing the bug that allowed you to get root access to your phone. Also, Rogers is dropping support for the Dream in the near future and won’t be providing any new software updates. There is some speculation that they chose to upgrade the SPL to lock out custom ROMs and thus push people to buy a newer phone. There may be some solutions to root the new update now, but you can avoid the whole mess by upgrading the radio on your own.
I followed a combination of the guides at http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.ph…to_CyanogenMod and http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.ph…rs_Dream_Radio (I had already rooted my phone, but was running a custom ROM based off the stock Rogers one).
I performed the radio upgrade yesterday around 3:30pm, when I got up this morning at 7:30 my data was back.
Another option is to call up their tech support and ask for a ‘network refresh’. I haven’t tried this, lots of people have and said it works, but Rogers seems to be getting wise to the plan and is telling their tech support not to do them anymore.
What does rooting your phone get you? Wifi/bluetooth/usb tethering, ability to save your applications to your sd card instead of the internal flash memory, ability to install applications directly from the sd card, access to the paid marketplace in Canada (I’m told, we can’t get paid apps by default in Canada), and much much more. Just search the marketplace for ‘root’ and you’ll see all the apps that require root access.
About two months ago, my video card died. Its capacitors had burst, directly or indirectly related to a power surge we had earlier in the day.
We heard a crack down the street and the power went out momentarily. While it looked stormy, there was no flash. We later believe it was related to some work that Hydro Ottawa was doing on the line (might have shorted a couple of cables). My dad and I spent the next three days trying to figure out why my computer wasn’t getting any video. After replacing the video card and power supply with no results, we brought it in to Canada Computers down the street to have them look at it.
Turns out the video card they sold us was dead. Oh well, at least they looked at my computer for free.
In case you’ve never seen it happen, the following is a picture of the old video card (EVGA 7600GS I think) with some burst capacitors.
Video Card Burst Capacitors
Just a quick comment as to how easy it was to upgrade from Ubuntu Server 8.04 to 8.10.
Just following the instructions at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/upgrade-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron-server-to-ubuntu-810-intrepid-ibex.html and a couple of hours of installing/removing packages was all it took, and kept all the old settings as well!
School’s starting again tomorrow, and I’m eager to get started on my fourth year engineering project. I’ll post more details once our proposal is complete and our ideas are solidified.
It’s been a while since I did an update here. I still haven’t put up my eqemu server since I updated to ubuntu server. I’ve been keeping my source, maps, quests, and database up to date, but have been slacking off on setting up the login server. Since KLS released the source of their login server, I haven’t gotten around to setting it up properly or even figuring out why it fails to load the included crypto library (if you know, please, tell me). I considered using the public eqemu login server, but I would like control over my users table and not force people to make an account with eqemulator.net before using my server.
But I’m still planning on setting up a server in the next month or two (or whenever I get my login server running).
Part of my desire to host this server myself is to learn a bit more about linux security. While reading through the sshd-config man page, I noticed the ‘Banner’ directive.
If Banner is declared, the ssh daemon sends the contents of the file pointed to by Banner as a message to the client before they put in their password. I’m not sure why, but where I would normally receive 10-50 brute force breakin attempts a day from 1-3 IP addresses, I have only received a total of ~ 20 from two IP addresses in the past 6 days. The banner message is simply a warning that login attempts are being logged, so maybe it’s keeping away amateurs or unautomated attackers, or perhaps the automated programs that do these break-ins don’t know how to handle a banner message. Who knows.
I also manually use iptables to block IPs that try these brute force attacks, so that might have something to do with it, but I’ve never seen a repeat attempt from the same IP before I’ve gotten around to blocking them.
Either way, it’s not hard at all to set up, and if it stops some attackers, it’s probably a worthwhile thing to do.
edit: From suggestions by Eremius at Graffe’s, I have installed DenyHosts. It doesn’t react instantly, but works very well and doesn’t require any intervention on my part (except when it blocked my IP, I had to log in physically to add it to hosts.allow). I would highly suggest it to anyone who wants to manage a server, along with running ssh on a non-standard port.
So it turns out that Ubuntu server 9.04 doesn’t support SDHC cards in card readers yet, so I have (down) upgraded again, to 8.04. EQEmu still has issues compiling on this, which will be fixed when I get some time to work on it.
Also, I haven’t opened up the relevant ports for the mail server yet until I make sure everything is secure.
Just a note about the website and server, I just switched over to Ubuntu Server a few days ago and I’m still getting everything set up. EQEmu will still be down for another day or two.