a n d r e a s . s c h u t z

Hi again.

My mediacenter uses an old but well sounding amplifier. A while a go the lights illuminating the front of the amplifier died. Last night I totally lost patience with the gloomy look of my dark amplifier and ordered some blue LEDs (nowadays they have to be blue, don’t they 😉 ).

My first plan was simply to exchange whatever lighted up my amp. with the LEDs.

My first plan…

Then I changed that plan.

Ever since I put my mediacenter together I have tried to figure out how to control the volume on my amp. The problem is that it has a nice, soft sliding pot. with a fat feeling and I don’t want to remove it.
I like the pre-80-ish look on it and I don’t want to ruin that either (just to hot it up a little with the blue LEDs).

I think I will try to motorize that pot… I think. And I think I will do it with a serial connection to the mediacenter… I think… If I can… the mediacenter with its remote will control the amplifier and I won’t have yet another remote on my table, and the mediacenter can fade down the volume when it shuts down… nice.. If I can.

Well, well… My first step is to exchange the broken lamps with the blue LEDs anyhow… stay tuned.

——————-

The LED operation went well… maybe to well. Those high effect LED’s really are _blue_. Well I asked for it. Blue I wanted and blue I got. Anyhow, it really shines in the dark.

From time to time my fingers start to itch. When that happens I just have to build something… now it is time again.

For a while now I have been irritating my self on those silly radio shows that I have to wake up to. And ideas of building a wake up device have started to crystallize.

Readers of my blog know how I tried to build a music workstation, and how I found out that the computer I used turned up to be to weak.
Well… I still have that computer, and the idea of a multimedia enabled alarm clock is forming.

Design idea

a 17″ LCD monitor
a mATX FS motherboard
some 500 Mb memory
a 1GHz celeron processor
a wireless KBD
a PS2 mouse pad
and a 1Gb CF card with an IDE adapter

…lets build an multimedia alarm clock!

The LCD monitor, beeing salvaged from my work, have four holes on the back. I think they are supposed to be used for a wall mount or something like that. I used them to mount a simple slimline chassis. I had it made for about 75 SKr.

I mounted the chassis on distances so that the cooling outlet from the monitor would not be blocked. I drilled holes for standard motherboard mounting distances and mounted the motherboard as in any normal computer case. I then glued plastic “rails” made from a CD case on the power supply and pushed the rails in the AGP and PCI slot connectors. Making the power supply “piggy backed” on the motherboard.
The CF-card and the IDE adapter is located under the ribbon cable. And as you can see there is plenty of room between the power supply and the MB for cooling.
Here it is, all hooked up and “ignited”. I used double CPU coolers to get enough passive cooling. The slimline case i had made also have a perforated cover that I have removed to take the photos. With the cover on, it looks almost as a commercial product. Well… a little bulkier.

As you can see, one of the problems that arises is the length of the normal cables. I yet have to get very short cables for monitor (both VGA and power) and sound. I also haven’t integrated my wireless kbd reciever. It is supposed to be mounted to the left of the CPU cooler.

I installed the latest version of SLAX and configured it heavily 🙂
The use of the “toram” cheat code is used to minimize CF wear and to make the system nice and fast.
The monitor have built in speakers that sound far better that my old clock radio and the KDE desktop is configured to be “fool proof”. Only a handful icons are used. One for gmplayer, one for juk and one for the KDE settings panel. If it is possible, the mouse pad is just temporary.

A numpad keyboard is used to make the remote control. I bought a cheap but good looking numpad and modified it with “the brain” of an old wireless keyboard. Then I remapped some of the keys in X so that i get the functions i want on board the numpad. The TAB key and the SPACE key for example. Here is a picture from the inside of the numpad.

The gutted numpad leaves just enough room for the wireless transmitter and a 3 volt battery. The transmitter is the same model as my (tucked away) wireless keyboard. So I can “sync in” a normal keyboard for maintainance.

So what can I do with my MediaClock?

* It is sharp on time because it uses NTP to correct itself
* It plays the music I want to wake up to, via USB or network
* It plays movies so that I can watch film in bed
* It is online so that I can stream news and shoutcast radio if I like
* It is a skype phone, used to communicate both in the house and like a normal phone

So are there any disadvantages? Cause there is, 17″ is to big. But it is the only left over monitor i have. If you decide to make a MediaClock, rather use a smaller monitor.

Hope I could give you some inspiration…

*** UPDATE ***
The 17″ screen is now exchanged with an 15″. That doesn’t sound to big a change, but believe me it is. MUCH nicer with that smaller monitor on my sideboard. Apart from that the media clock have served me extreamly well. It has only failed once after a power outage. For some reason it didn’t mount the music volume when it came up, so the alarm didn’t “play”. After that it have conducted well, even after several power outages.

*** UPDATE ***
Today I upgraded the system on the mediaclock to SLAX 6.1.2. I also added a script that turns on xclock at a given time interval, seven o’clock and one hour forward right now. That idea came from my wife who wanted to know the time while getting ready for the day. The media clock continues to perform very well, and by now I havent had a more reliable alarm clock on my sideboard.

My laptop needed to be renewed. More and more of our lab environment has moved into our computers, and the ability to run virtual machines on our portable platforms has made the urge for a more powerful laptop bigger.
Thus I bought a new laptop!
After browsing and cruising I settled for a HP Pavilion DV7 1095eo. My idea is to document the “quirks” here so that others can benefit from my misstakes and victories.

This is a picture of the machine.

The specs of the machine is somewhat like this:
* dual core 2.53 GHz 64 bit
* 4 Gig of ram
* 17″ display
* fingerprint reader
* wifi card
* 2 x 250 Gb HD
* web cam
* IR remote

The machine comes with VISTA HOME EDITION. Well…hey…!
After wipeing the machine clean I installed SuSE 11.0, after all I do have very good experience of SuSE linux. Bearing in mind that this is a .0 release I was quite happy that almost everything worked out of the box, but four things; sound, fingerprint reader, remote and wireless nic.

— UPDATE —
Today I got my soundcard working. After finding similar errors and the fixes to them in the UBUNTU forum. It seams that I have to give the ALSA driver ‘snd-hda-intel.ko’ the enable_msi=1 option in /etc/modprobe.d/sound file. This enables ‘Message Signaled Interrupt’ a fairly new way of ‘soft’ interrupts. Actually my first guess was interrupt problems. Without this option the sound locks in an everlasting stuttering loop and totally blocks the sound device. Only way to shut down sound is to restart the soundsystem with ‘rcalsasound restart’. This is how my /etc/modprobe.d/sound looks like after adding the option:

—————-
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1
—————-

Yast2 made it all but the option line.

One day my water filter started to leak. Strange i thought, but i tightened it, and gave the problem very little attention. Half an hour later the filter was cracked and my cellar floor full with water.

After inspecting the filter I started to suspect that it had burst from over pressure. The pump had been running all the time and it still was. Checking the gauger on the holding tank reviled that i had almost 10 Bar in my tank.
Now there was something very wrong with this. I emergency repaired the filter and connected the water hoses together again. I used the ordinary garden tap to lower the pressure and then manually switched on and off the power to my pump. No matter the pressure, the pump was engaged.

Now I was suspecting the pressure switch. And there I found the problem. The switch was stuck in the on position, no matter the pressure.

The pressure switch I have is shown above. It is pretty new and if I remember right it was one of the better when I bought it. The idea of repairing emerged.

As you can see it is very easy to unscrew the switch from the pipe. Just don’t forget to switch off the water from the holding tank and the rest of the house.

I took the plastic cover off and unscrew the switch from the pipe. As you can see there is a rubber gasket keeping the water from the mechanics/electronics. Immediately when I unscrew the switch I could see that debris had build up inside the passages inside the switch.
I unscrew the small screws holding the “wet” side in place and found that everything else looked nice and clean. Almost as new.
The part that came off looked like this. Please note the two metal parts. They are not fastened in any way and will probably fall out when you disconnect the two pieces of the switch. Any way this is how they are placed inside the switch.
Now take good care of the two metal parts, you will need them when you reassemble the switch again. Peel of the rubber gasket and voila, that is where all the dirt is hiding. In my switch I had more than 5 millimeters of chalk and debris. And it is smelly!
This is how it should look. No smelly, sticky stuff. And free passage for the water. My gasket was in very good shape, so I did not change it. If your gasket is showing wear and/or cracks, this is a very good time to change it into a new one to prevent future disasters.
And thats it! Now you can reverse the disassemble and assemble it all again. Use new sealing tape and give things an extra thought before mounting everything. Remember to be careful and exact.
And also remember that you just saved yourself one hundred bucks.

Jag läste nyss att den så kallade FRA-lagen har röstats igenom.
När jag först läste propositionen så skrattade jag, jag tyckte att argumenten för att införa lagen var så löjeväckande att det hela blev komiskt. Jag tänkte, då för ungefär ett år sedan, att det här går ju aldrig igenom. Ingen, inte ens en maktlysten politiker, kan vara beredd att föråda sitt folk och sitt lands viktigaste demokratiska mekanismer.

Tänk vad fel jag hade.

I kväll röstade en majoritet i riksdagen igenom förslaget. Visserligen en smula modifierat, men i princip samma demokratiskt vidriga förslag.

Under de senaste dagarna har vi på jobbet diskuterat lagen. Ingen där eller någon annan som jag frågat förstår heller vad den skall vara bra för. För visserligen är ju politiker i allmänhet inte särskilt (tekniskt) begåvade, men jag tycker inte att det krävs så mycket eftertanke för att förstå att hela konkarongen är väldigt tandlös.

Faktum är att jag inte kan tro att ens politiker tror, att dom kommer att fånga några brottslingar med den här lagen. Och det enda som jag gång på gång återkommer till är; vad ska dom då ha den till? Är inte den enda användningen i praktiken åsiktsregistrering?

För ingen människa kan väl med stoltheten i behåll påstå att man kommer att fånga tex. terrorister? Eller insider-brottslingar, eller ens bankrånare. Herre gud, varenda människa har väl lärt sig att koda meddelanden. Och även om jag i klartext kommunicerade med mina terroristkompisar i, låt säga England, så skulle jag väl inte göra det från mitt eget mailkonto? Än mindre från min egen dator hemma!!!

Antingen har jag missuppfattat väldigt mycket av hur brottslingar tänker, eller så har jag blivit grymt förd bakom ljuset av min egen regering. Det sistnämnda verkar nog troligast!

So I bought a new laptop.
I have been using my HP NX7010 for about three years now, and I am very pleased with it. In general I tend to think that HP make good computers.

So when datorbutiken.com sold HP computers for under 3000 SKr, I hooked on the deal.
The newcomer is a HP530, and it was never ment to replace the older NX7010. Instead it was time to give the other family members some happieness as well. The family computer, placed in the library, is used for homework, some work, surfing, banking and gaming. The one being replaced is a Compac Armada 1750. It has served well and still works fine. I have tweaked and pushed it for years now, but it never liked SuSE9. And my wife sure had a point when she was complaining about the sluggishness in open office.

I have learned that some information about HP and the 530 makes life easier. It will put down the information I know here. Maybe I can supply you with some tricks.

First you need to know that the HP530 comes with two different wireless NIC’s. One from Intel, and it works right out of the box with SuSE10. The other NIC (the one I have), is made by Broadcom. The only solution to make this NIC work is to run it under NDIS wrapper, because Broadcom has failed to write a linux driver for it. Sad!

The other thing you would like to know is even more sad. HP has started to white list hardware in BIOS!!! As stupid as it sounds, this means that your computer wont boot just because you have put an non HP branded NIC in the PCI slot. DUH! Wake up HP! Proprietary hardware have killed many companies. And as if some guys never learn, IBM has started to do the same thing. Silly, ugly and stupid if you ask me. And just to top it of with even more stupidity, they are applying white lists in BIOS upgrades. That means your computer can refuse to boot after a BIOS upgrade. Now that is something, isnt it!

Well, apart from theese sad stories (you will learn HP, wont you?) the 530 is a nice little laptop. The hardware acceleration works, but you have to manually activate it under sax2. The headphones does mute the speakers if you add “laptop” in the model tag under YAST2, hardware, sound.

Since the processor does not support freq. scaling the battery life is quite short. And that isnt made better by some bug in BIOS that does not dim the LCD after the first wake from sleepmode when you run it without power connected. That problem turns up in Vista as well.

And one last tip. Dont even bother to run Vista on it. You will have doubble the joy and speed in SuSE according to me. But what the heck… that goes for all computers!

*** UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***

Lately I have been designing different technologies for the school here on Gotland. We are, after a bunch of years, finally stitching the administrative and the educational part of Gotlands kommun together.

The project is named MERIT, and it is a fairly large IT-project for Gotlands kommun. Running over more than three years and spending more than 8M SKr it is somewhat of a monster. But it gives a new and at least for me, very welcome attitude to what IT can be used to achieve.

Aiming quite high we will try to use “bleeding edge” technology for our solutions. This include:

* MS Vista
* Zenworks 10
* Groupwise 7.5
* OES2 on SLES 10
* 802.1x
* NIM 3.5
and some other newly released stuff.

The last week I have spent some time trying to get MAC’s Leopard to play together with eDirectory 8.8 on Linux. The sad part of this is that I found nothing or very little information from the manufacturers to aid you in this. A search on google didnt render much, but finally I found theese links. Ofcourse, if anyone have better, newer or more user friendly information or workflows than theese rather ancient ones, feel free to drop a comment.

Novell cool solutions.
Novell forum.
Macenterprise.org

Hey Mac and Novell, wake up!
My search on the net gave me some old tips and tricks that had to be modernized and somewhat altered. Here I will try to give you an up to date workflow on my achievements.

The steps that have to be done roughly breaks down to:
* Expand eDirectorys schema to hold the objectclasses and attributes that Leopard needs to function.
* Import the template you need to make the attribute mapping on the Leopard client, and set it up for LDAP.
* Populate theese attributes with data that means anything to Leopard.

Lets make it a little more verbose.

Expand eDirectorys schema
This can be done in different ways, but i will describe the way I choosed. From the Macenterprise link above you can download their newest package (2004-10 … !) with info and tools. This is the best thing I have found, and it contains a pdf with information, some not so very functional ldif files and some outdated installationpackages for the MAC client. Anyhow, as I said, this is the best I have found. I downloaded and extracted it, well almost.
I am running Linux and ARK did not extract the files in a correct way. But I was able to extract the pdf and read more about how someone (the document does not say, but it sure look NOVELL-ish) in 2004 says that it should be done.
The document is very good and gives clear information of all steps. And like the document states, I extracted the ldif file applev2.ldf for UNIX since I am on a Linux machine. Then the document tells you to use a wizard in Novells ConsoleOne to update the schema with the applev2.ldf file.
That did not work for me. Every time I tried to do as perscribed, ConsoleOne shut down and died on me. Since ConsoleOne can be configured with hundreds of “snapins” and they do effect each other in an almost never ending puzzle of combinations, I decided to try other and more modern applications.
I decided on iManager. That is after all that I know the “latest and greatest” of Novells management applications. So I ran the iManager 2.7 with the 2.7 20070923 plug.-in called ImportConvertExport or simply ICE. The function is added under the “Schema – Extend schema” task under the “Roles and Tasks” tab. That looked promizing until the end when I got an error code stating error 236.
Well… Now what? In the end of the wizard-like “Extend schema” task, iManager displays the “real” ICE console command that it will run if you press “finish” on the last page. For me it looked like this:

ice -lice.log -C -a -SLDIF -f/path/to/my/applev2.ldf -DLDAP -s192.168.0.100 -p389 -dcn=admin,o=organization

I dont really know why, but I think my experience with wizards has been a little, lets say tainted, during the years as an administrator. So I decided to run this command direct from a console window just for fun! 😉

So I copied the applev2.ldf file from my SLED workstation to my SLES server and run the connamd as ROOT. Well now at least something got done. I was asked to enter the password for admin and then presented with the same errors as above.

Jaha… då har jag varit och pillrat på min moral igen. Det här med att vara förälder är verkligen ingen lätt business inte.

Jag vet att man skall ge sina barn förtroende, och tro mig det gör jag också. Men vad gör man då förtroendet inte förvaltas bra? Då det gång på gång, trots tjat och förmanade, missbrukas. Vi har haft diskussioner om hur viktigt det är att man inte bryter förtroenden, om hur viktigt det är att man sköter sina göromål. Men ibland är det som om lockelserna bara är för starka. Och visst kan lockelser vara starka, också för oss vuxna.

Nåja, så fort jag märker att förtroendet kan återskapas så lovar jag att tillåta mera.

Vad jag har gjort? Haft en nogrann genomgång av IPTABLES. *skrattar* Nej, jo, på sätt och vis. Som alla föräldrar säkerligen har märkt så har internet en oerhörd impfaktor på våra barn. TV är löjligt om man jämför. Åtminstone i min familj så är den största tidstjuven nätet.
Den där jätteviktiga matteläxan stod sig slätt mot två timmars spelande på hamsterpaj (vilket namn på en site). Och alien-filmerna på youtube är nästan oemotståndliga.
Så som dum pappa har jag lagt in tidsbegränsningar på internet. Geek som jag är så skedde det via cron-jobb på servern som adderar och raderar regler i serverns brandvägg via iptables. Och geek som jag är kan jag inte låta bli att redovisa i detalj 😉

Alla datorer i mitt fastighets-lan får sina adresser via DHCP. Och en punkt som många glömmer då det gäller DHCP är att det går att hårdstyra adresserna som delas ut via MAC-adressen. Kalla det dynamiskt tilldelad statisk adress om du vill. Således har just sonens dator en viss adress.

Sedan var det bara att googla på “tutorial iptables” för att få sig en hjärngympa i ipfiltrering. Jag skrev två script som vardera stänger och öppnar trafiken på den givna ipadressen. Det lurigaste var att placera filtret på rätt ställe så att serverns “interna” funktioner går att använda som vanligt, men inte internet.

Sedan kopplade jag dessa script till var sitt cron-jobb så att blockeringen sker kl. 12:00 och upphävs vid den tid då jag kommer hem. Enkelt? Javisst, det är därför vi har datorer!