Oliver Hansen

I just installed Linux mint KDE CE on my desktop computer. I love it! It’s great and looks brilliant with the advanced desktop effects that my laptop couldn’t produce last time. Well there was one thing that I remembered from last time. It’s really more of an annoyance than anything but when booting up you see a message that says

The solution was found by clem on the linux mint forum. Apparently

A grub on a separate /boot partition cannot access /etc. Known bug.

but because if it is changed it will not work if /boot is on the same partition there is no default fix for it right now. As mentioned in the post, the solution is “in menu.lst change /etc/grub/message.mint to /grub/message.mint”. Have fun!

I think I just found my new router. I’ve been thinking of getting a new one because I have problems with my current one. I’m really not sure if it’s the router or my laptop but I wanted to get a new one anyways that I could put some of the open source firmware on. Something like Tomatoe or DD-WRT… but which router to get? Linksys has been crippling their WRT54G router with less flash memory which means it doesn’t have enough space to load the popular firmwares. Whether this was intentional is open to interpretation I guess but what is definitely intentional is Netgear releasing a router specifically to be modified by whatever Open Source firmware you want!

It looks like they’ve had some packaging issues with the wrong router being sent from some suppliers but it seems they are working on it so I will soon be purchasing one of these WGR614L routers.

I’ve been using VMware Player at work to run Groundwork which is a pretty neat network monitoring system — but more on that in another post. So one thing that was getting annoying was the guest OS (the one running on the virtual-ized system) had been losing time. I didn’t check how often but in the course of an hour it would be off by about 20 minutes at least. I knew of the vmware-tools package that was supposed to help the virtual OS run a little better and thought that would help it get the time as well. I also thought the tools were already installed but wasn’t sure. I tried looking in the Add/Remove programs but didn’t find it so I decided to move to the command line.

$ locate vmware

was enough to list quite a few files which was encouraging. I eventually found the vmware-tools in /usr/bin directory. I then ran the vmware-toolbox program and the first option I saw was “Time synchronization”. Exactly what I wanted. Now when i receive alerts about the network, the time will actually be correct. And my OCD is satiated as well.

I’ve been a bit bad about uploading photos lately and I’ll tell you why. After I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I found I couldn’t upload anything while using Linux. I tried on my work laptop which runs Vista and it worked just fine so I used that for the photos of my mom’s fence. Now that I have a new job I don’t have a work laptop at the moment so that’s not possible.

Now I had read about issues with the new Wordpress 2.5 gallery upload feature that now uses Flash. Most of those issues seemed to be caused by permissions and plugins though; server-side issues. My problems are not at the server as a Windows based computer seems to work just fine. At home I am still running Linux Mint which I have run since about December. I updated to the latest Flash 10 build and I still had the same issue. (more…)

I just modded my second xbox which I got from my cousin. I gave it a static IP, put it on the network and everything looked good from the xbox side. Then I tried to FTP to it to load on some programs. Could not connect. I tried to ping and this is what I got:

icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

Hmmm, I’d seen this before but couldn’t remember why. I searched online and found references to the routing table being configured incorrectly. I played around with mine but just ended up messing things up because it was already looking good. So then I took the same network cable and plugged it back into my first xbox which I have been using for months now. I could ping it. Plug it back into the second and it can get to the internet to download new skins for the dashboard. Hmmm what is the problem? I SSHed into one of my servers and pinged it from there successfully. Something between my laptop and the xbox.

I finally started looking at some of the settings on my wireless access point to see if something in there could possibly be messing me up. After trying some settings that I really didn’t expect to work I blindly clicked my way into the page that restricts computers on the network. I’d completely forgotten about it. See — I used to have this access point acting as my router so I had it restrict people from being on my network by MAC address. This meant that if a friend came over I would have to enter their MAC address before they could gain access. The thinking is even if they got past my wireless security code, the access point would not let them access the network because their MAC address did not match one on the list. Just one more step to throw off casual wireless snoopers.

When I moved to using IPCop for my router I just turned off the routing features of the access point and used it for a simple access point to the rest of my network from my laptop. The only thing is any computer that I want to connect to via wireless now has to be added to the MAC address filter. Since the access point is not between any of the computers on the network but mine it won’t affect any non-wireless computers (i.e. my servers) but will still affect me. Sometimes it’s the little things you forget.

I do end up learning something from these things. This time I decided to fire up tcpdump to see what was happening when my computer asked the network for the address I knew existed. It still took me a while but now I am not afraid to use tcpdump again for any future problems.