Running Systems

Update to 0.2. Links remain the same. At the moment I cannot host many versions (it’s mostly uncomfortable), but this might change in the future.

I have created a GUI cables installer and configurator for L2TP on Linux.

I have noticed that there is no GUI solution, so, after this has been brought up, I have done it (!!!)

I have uploaded these files here, and you are welcome to use them.

Remember – they are designed for a blank Ubuntu (currently. More distros will be supported in the future, upon request) with not much of junk installed. Also – they are designed for the simple user. Double-click and run. That’s it.

Quoting my readme file:

L2TP Cables connection in Israel (and across the world, where relevant) by Ez-Aton

—About:
This is an installer and configurator for L2TP over cables in Israel
With some luck, by running this installer, you will be able to connect
to the Internet with a dialer!

The system assumes you have little technical knowledge of Linux and you
are not expected to have any. Follow the defaults, and you should be fine.

This configuration will be cross distro in the future, meaning it will work
both on your Ubuntu, your RHEL, your Centos, Mandrake, etc. In order for me
to be able to do so, please assist by sending information on systems I am
not familiar with yet, per the appendix at the bottom.
Also, you can feel free to send me info in case the system did not work for
you (and let me know what are the differences from a default installation),
or, as always, send me money.

Visit my technical blog for updates and all kind of other technical stuff, at

http://run.tournament.org.il

OSS work is meant to be based on others work, and that I have done. I would
like to thank (and mention below) the resources for without this would not
have happened.

I hope you enjoy this dialer!

Ez

—How to use
Simply double-click on the “cables” icon on your desktop, and the system will
get you connected.
For CLI utilization: Run /usr/local/bin/cables

—Tools and resources used:
To create this package I have used the following tools and resources
makeself http://megastep.org/makeself/
xl2tpd by http://www.xelerance.com/software/xl2tpd/
xl2tpd guide for Israel Cables http://stuff.pulkes.org/l2tp/
ISP LNS list http://www.cables.org.il/cable-vpn/vpn.html
My connect/disconnect scripts from http://run.tournament.org.il

—License
This package contents are under GNUv2 license, meaning you have full permission
to modify the contents of this package, except for the binary packages included
with it, where you are binded by their respective licenses.

—My Distro/ISP is not supported!
Well, these things happen. Over 300 distros our there, and I can’t have them all.
However – you have your own distro, right? For me to add it to this package
(assuming you don’t want to do this yourself) you will have to supply me with the
following info:
* What distro, kernel and version, and how you get the distro name
(for example – on Redhat – /etc/redhat-release. On Ubuntu – /etc/lsb-release)
* The file containing the version inforamtion (see above)
* The versions available from your repositories of xl2tpd or l2tpd for older
releases, and where you can get them
* Your ISP, your ISPs LNS names/addresses
* Your country
* All other info you think relevant

—Change log
0.2 – Added ability to enter manual LNS address. Added Orange LNS. Fixed fixroute to allow both IP and hostname without problems. Fixed cables connection script to run fixroute anyhow.
0.1 – Initial release

Download it here: cables_connect.sh

If you want the scripts and sources (not for the simple user!), you can get there here: l2tp-cables

As the owner of a nice laptop running Hardy, I had a huge performance degradation when accessing USB storage devices. Speed could reach 1MB/s at most, and usually, half that speed.

The trick that solved my problem was suggested in this post, and after I have tested it, I was happy with the results.

The trick is to backup the old ehci_hcd.ko module aside, and to replace it with the one from kernel 2.6.24-19-generic. Following that action, you need to make sure this module can force load, else version mismatch whill prevent it from loading.

To do so, I have added the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options:

install ehci_hcd /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install –force ehci_hcd

This solves the force load issues.

My brother is a computer illiterate. He can use a computer for the purpose of e-mail messaging and for editing documents, spreadsheets, etc.

I have decided to “abuse” his older laptop, an IBM X31 and install Ubuntu on it. This is some sort of an experiment. I wonder how he, a simple user, can cope up with using Linux as a desktop.

I have made sure he had the following, for now:

• Ubuntu 8.04 32bit
• Firefox 3 with Adblock Plus
• Hebrew fonts, and msttfcorefonts package installed
• OpenOffice which defaults to saving in MS Office formats – doc, xls, ppt
• Skype
• VLC media player
• Hebrew layout enabled

I will let him use it for a few days, and keep my blog up to date on this. It interests me

To get your newly purchased Sierra AirCard 880E on your Ubuntu Hardy, you should follow these simple steps:

1. Make sure you have GCC on your computer: ‘sudo apt-get install gcc‘
2. Make sure you have kernel sources installed on your computer: ‘sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-19-generic‘
3. Download the driver from Sierra Wireless site
4. Extract and compile (‘make‘, ‘sudo make install‘)
5. Add to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-modem the line: ‘blacklist ehci_hcd’
6. Insert the device into the laptop. When everything is OK, you should see that a USB device is registered using ‘dmesg‘ shortly afterwards, or ‘lsusb‘
7. Configure /etc/wvdial.conf using the attached config file wvdial.conf
8. Add to /etc/ppp/peers the file wvdial

Done. To connect, you need to run ‘sudo wvdial &‘

I will add in the future a nice gksudo with a nice-looking connect/disconnect script

I was surprised at how easy it was.

You need to do the following:

1. Find your mouse’s address using ‘hcitool scan‘

2. Verify that you can pair the two devices using ‘sudo hidd –connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX‘

3. Edit /etc/default/bluetooth, uncomment the additional line with the HIDD_OPTIONS and set it to be

“–connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX –server”

4. Restart the service ‘bluetooth’

This works immediately after using the hardware button to enable/disable BT on my IBM Thinkpad. If I turn the mouse off, I need to press on the hardware button to disable/re-enable the bluetooth.

I have had a problem with my IBM X41 – ever since I have started using Ubuntu 7.10 (after a nice upgrade from 7.04), whenever the lid was closed, and reopened – the display would have flickered for a short while (while the lid is up) and then blank completely.

My (ugly) workaround was to force the computer to sleep whenever it happened. It seemed to be a workaround good enough for most cases. On some cases, the laptop would do just the same as it was placed in its docking station.

I have found an Ubuntu bug here, which seems to expose this problem too. It exposed few additional problems as well. The error message I got (through SSH, of course) when viewing the logs it said that the video card detected pipe A to be the active pipe, that it stopped using pipe B (which appeared to be the internal one) and that it decided to disable clone mode. Wow. I just lost my internal LCD. Connecting an external display, I get the whole picture working just fine, however, I cannot use the laptop like that.

After a major struggle with various i810 options, I have looked and found an option to disable Power Management. I have done so, according to the note here, and it solved all my problems in this area – for now.

Lately I have been overloaded above my capabilities. This did not prevent me from doing all kind of things, but most of them are too small to justify a real entry here, so I have decided to make a small collection of small stuff someone might need to know, in order to make it indexed in search engines. These small insights might save some time for someone. This is a noble cause.

1. Oreon is a nice overlay for Nagios, however, it is poorly documented, and some of the existing docs are in French. I have put hours on building it into a working setup, and I hope to be able to write down the process as is.

2. “Sun Java System Active Server Pages” does not support 64bit Linux installations – at least not if you’re interested in using it with your existing Apache server. Look here. Seems nothing has changed.

3. Under Ubuntu 7.10, Compiz suffers from a major memory leak when using NVidia display adapters. You can read about it in the bug page. I was able, thanks to this link, to workaround it using compiz –indirect-rendering . Does not see to cause any ill-effect on my display performance.

4. Suse 10 and wireless cards – This one is a great guide, which I would happily recommend.

5. Flushing the existing read buffer for your Linux machine (should never be done, unless you’re testing performance) can be done by running the following command:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Seems to be enough for today. Hope these tips help.

I had a rough experience upgrading Edgy to Feisy.

Hardware listing, for generations to come: Motherboard Abit IB9, including on-board IDE controller IT8211 with firmware 1.3.1.67 and no BIOS upgrade in the near future.

Nvidia 7700 with 256MB RAM on PCIe

Problems:

1. With IDE controller enabled in BIOS system hangs during startup. This is correct for the livecd as well.

2. XGL requires the flag “–use-copy” or it will show only the “white cube of death”. Performance is far from being optimal.

3. I was unable to use Xorg AIGLX, but only the generic NVIDIA interface.

4. With NVIDIA movement is slow and jittery. System is not stable, beryl tends to consume around 100% CPU, and the black-windows problem (which usually has to do with lack of video memory) is quite common.

I have downgraded to Edgy yesterday. Besides a (bug?) weird behavior with my existing software raid (the installer hung while trying to reconfigure the md device with a black box flashing fast in the left lower corner of the screen. I was able to use console but not to continue the install) which required me to backup everything and create the raid from console before the installer got to it, installation went as expected. The interesting thing is that I can say that my hardware works better, and I don’t think it has to do only with the kernel version.

I followed my past post about the post configuration required for Edgy, and it saved me some searches. However, there are several updated which I will show here:

1. Skype has a new version – 1.4 beta, which, for now, seems not to be affected by the “open sound device” hanging. This seems great. I have installed it from the dynamic package, which had dependencies. To satisfy dependencies, I used a tool I can recommend called getlibs. It installed Feisy packages on my system but it was quite OK.

2. Mplayer requires using the multiverse repository. While I thought I have opened it, it appears I was required to state it in addition manually… Added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy multiverse

3. Beryl packages for Edgy become quire rare nowadays. I had to dig some to find it. I have used the repository:
deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org edgy main
following beryl’s guide which was posted by me before, but this repository works one minute, and doesn’t on the next. When it does, though, it has what you need. I’m using the same NVidia driver as before, with XGL alright, and it’s working fast and stable. Can’t complain.

4. I have created a package for Pidgin for Edgy, version 2.0.2. This was the original reason I have upgraded to Feisty… It can be downloaded from here. Notice – this is a crude package, just for my purpose. You can use it, and you can use the “getlibs” util from above to satisfy the binary’s requirements, as I didn’t add them in. pidgin_2.0.2-1_amd64.deb

I’m a happy camper.

If it works, don’t touch it. This is one of my mottoes. I have broken this rule just yesterday when I decided that I was too lazy to install Pidgin from source, and decided I wanted it to be installed directly from deb. Unfortunately, there was no pidgin deb for Edgy. None that I was able to find.

My computer has been suggesting to be upgraded for a while now – ever since Feisty was available. I was cautious and avoided upgrading up until now. I have already installed Feisty on my laptop, on one of my servers (installed Edgy and then upgraded to Feisty with no special events), so I was somehow more at ease. This was, of course, a complete disaster.

Upgrading Edgy to Feisty went OK. Nothing really special, no external sources, nothing. After upgrade, the system failed to reboot – just hung there. It appears (and I have yet to post a bug) that my IT8212 IDE controller (which is connected to my CDROM) hangs the computer.

Not only that, but even when disabled, it appears that Feisty’s kernel has an issue with sata_iix. The issue was solved using post #59 from this bug report. Do not follow, though, this recommendation (all_generic_ide) as you will experience a noticeable performance hit.

I was able to boot my system. No CDROM, but working. I have installed NVidia drivers manually, as the restricted modules were too old. I was required to remove the nvidia entries in /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video (probably because I’ve installed restricted modules and later on removed it). Had X running, but didn’t have Beryl working. Past experience taught me that AIGLX or direct NVidia DRI are slower than XGL. Attempting to use XGL, I get the white-screen-of-death. Following this guide, I was able to setup XGL correctly, as it seems. It did not solve my white-screen-of-death, however, using –use-copy flag things worked, and seemed to be responding fast enough.

Still have to open a bug about the IT8212 device. Hope for the best.

As you can see in my previous posts, I have an NVidia card. It worked quite well while using XGL, but due to XGL’s memory consumption (it takes a lot of memory), I have decided to try for AIGLX, which is part of the X.org system.

In my previous post you can see that (and how) it was done. However, my overall experiance is that AIGLX, at least where it comes to Xorg 7.2 and NVidia (Driver 1.0-9755) is that XGL is much much faster.

The slow responses of the system during the several hours I used AIGLX (while trying somehow to increase performance) just made me go back to XGL. AIGLX is not good enough.

I’ve read several posts about it, and still, the results are undetermined. That’s why I post my own software versions here. AIGLX may perform better when using older or newer versions of NVidia’s driver, or Xorg, or whatever, but for me now – XGL does it well.