Oliver Hansen » Technology

Net Neutrality Depicted In A Photo

Oliver — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:13:31 +0000

Sometimes a picture does say it all. I could easily see this happening if we don’t stand up for net neutrality!

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Skype Cuts Out With 100 Percent Processor Usage

Oliver — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 23:39:04 +0000

About few weeks ago I was having a recurring problem with Skype. I would be talking just fine and then every minute or every couple minutes I suddenly could not hear the person on the other end. I could tell when it was happening because it would literally be silence, not even background noise. The silence would only last about 3-5 seconds and then I could hear the person again. It was quite frustrating though because the person I was speaking to could not tell when it happened so they would have to repeat their words quite often for me.

I tried downloading the latest version of Skype, reinstalling and even downloaded the beta to see if it was a bug that had been fixed. Finally I watched the Task Manager and noticed that the processor would reach 100 percent every time the audio cut out. Now that I had some correlation I wondered what could cause this. Because my laptop also felt warm I decided maybe it was overheating. I had been foolishly setting my laptop on my bed because it was late when I was talking (that’s what 15 or 16 time zones away will do to you) and the vents were being blocked by the soft blanket. Everyone should know this and even I knew it and had warned friends in the past to place the laptop on a solid surface to keep the airflow underneath moving. I guess I had used it without issue on the bed several times and forgot my own advice. Setting the laptop on a hardcover book on top of my bed so the airflow is still going did the trick.

I am really only posting this because I searched for a while to find a solution to the problem and never found one online. If anyone else is having this issue, try getting some more airflow to your computers vents. It just may be as simple as that.

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Recovering My FreeBSD NAS Server From A Hard Drive Failure

Oliver — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 04:49:04 +0000

The Signs I Ignored

I was out of town on work for a few weeks and when I came back I noticed a loud click from my server occasionally. It wasn’t constant and I figured it was just something annoying with the fan so I didn’t think much of it.

The Moment It Happened

I decided I should make sure all the applications I installed from the ports on FreeBSD were up to date so I found a program that would do it for me. It took a while but I had it going remotely most of the day while I was at work. Some time in the afternoon my session was disconnected from the server. I tried to reconnect and I couldn’t access it. When I arrived home, I turned on the monitor to find a single blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. I don’t normally have a keyboard attached to the server because I just SSH into it. I decided to just shut off the power to the server and restart it. When it restarted it booted up to a point and then I got a message similar to this

/mnt/usr: bad dir ino 16392 AT OFFSET 512: MANGLED ENTRY
panic: ufs_dirbad: bad dir

It would only reboot after this message so I decided I was screwed.

The Search and Solution

I turned to Google of course and found a page for the panic ufs_dirbad problem. Good. At least I can get a hint of what the problem is.

What I Tried

When rebooting the server S.M.A.R.T. told me that my hard drive was bad. Fortunately it’s not the hard drive with my data on it (which is a link)','caption', 'Redundant Array of Independant Disks' );">RAID array anyway) but just the drive with the system and programs installed. The one that was being used during the upgrade process. I decided to boot up with my FreeBSD install CD and go to the FixIt mode which presents a command prompt with some basic tools. I used fsck as suggested on that ever helpful blog and found it actually repaired a few things on the drive. After rebooting again I was finally able to log in but SAMBA wasn’t starting and there were some files still seeming to be missing or corrupt. Well, I wasn’t going to bother trying to repair the installation on a bad hard disk anyways so I thought why not take an image of it!

A little more research brought me to some simple instructions on using dd to image a drive. I booted to FixIt again and ran dd to copy an image to my external USB hard drive. It took quite a while but in the morning it was finished! I checked to make sure the file was there, shut down, went out and got another hard drive, installed it then tried to mount the USB hard drive again. That’s when it decided not to come up. My only guess is that I didn’t unmount it and the drive data was corrupted when I shut down the computer. Normally on shutdown, everything is unmounted but maybe when running in FixIt that doesn’t happen. I’m not really sure.

What Worked

My next chance was to just reinstall FreeBSD. Did it a few months ago so I might as well refresh my memory! Installation wasn’t too bad. At least I knew what programs I needed or didn’t need this time. So I installed the programs and then followed my own tutorial on installing the drivers for my link)','caption', 'Redundant Array of Independant Disks' );">RAID card which I had just posted a few days before on OpenSourceCommunity.org. Got the link)','caption', 'Redundant Array of Independant Disks' );">RAID array loaded up and then figured out how to configure SAMBA without the use of the web gui which I used last time. So everything is back up and running now! Tonight I’ll run dd again to get an image of my working install so I’ll be prepared next time.

I just love the fact that almost every problem you have, someone else has had it and you can at least get some clues to the solution online. Thanks to the people who wrote these articles, I was able to get my server up and running again in a couple days and learn a little more about FreeBSD as well.

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Australian Youths Get Revenge on Stupid Automated Speed Trap

Oliver — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:19:59 +0000

http://www.davesdaily.com/pictures/908-mischievous-aussies.htm
Niiiiiiiice! Personally, I hate the idea of automated speeding mechanisms. Unless they know it is YOU driving the car, how can they send the ticket?

Digg It

Oh, and I don’t care if it’s an urban legend or not — just the thought of it makes me happy.

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SatayTube — My Favorite WordPress Plugin

Oliver — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:30:03 +0000

I like to embed videos in my blog sometimes. It’s so much nicer than making someone leave your site on a link. Especially with a preview image, they are much more likely to watch than to just skip by. When I moved to WordPress from my old site that used Joomla! I spent a while looking for a plugin to embed videos into a post. I found several but none that would do it in an accessible way. I knew about Flash Satay and could modify the embed tags that youtube and others give you but I thought there must be an easier way. Satay Tube allows you to just paste in the URL from one of many video sharing sites and it will convert the embedded code to be accessible and still play in all the popular browsers! It’s that simple! SatayTube allows you to embed videos in your blog and still stay accessible!

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Get Rid of All The Annoying Things About Windows Live Messenger

Oliver — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:18:25 +0000

I’ve begrudgingly put up with MSN Messenger and now Windows Live Messenger as they’ve progressed and gained ads plus other add ons I don’t even care to use. I use it to chat and occasionally video chat. I rarely play games and when I’ve tried they haven’t been that much fun or I’m prompted to buy them. All those other tabs — I don’t even know what they do!

I remembered reading over on Nordquist Blog about a patch that removed the ads. I searched and found that it is called the Mess Patch and it does way more than just remove ads. In fact, they try to persuade you that the ads are crucial to Live Messenger remaining free before you remove them. You can remove the Live Messenger logos, ad photos next to your contact names on the contact list, remove the photos from the pop up alert, remove emoticons from your contact’s names and many more options. If it’s annoyed you, you can probably turn it off with the Mess Patch.

There are few places to get it but for the latest Windows Live Messenger Beta 8.5 build you can find it here. Check that your version matches by going to File -> About because the patch is specific to your version of Messenger.

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Should I Get More Certifications?

Oliver — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:02:00 +0000

I was just thinking about this today. I had motivation to go all the way towards an MCSE earlier but got stuck when studying for 291. I know some people are just good at taking tests but I like to have something to apply it to for me to really learn it. I don’t have a server at work to just play with — even though I can build one, I don’t have the chance to really build out a lot of clients and try things with different users. I learned a fair amount from MeasureUp practice tests but not enough to try the test. Then I started working more shows and just wanted to relax when in the office.

Some people have been taking the Vista certifications and maybe I should try one now that I’m a little more familiar with it. The only annoying thing is that I guess you need to know about the new programs that come with Vista. Applications like Mail, Calendar and some others I think. Since I use Outlook and the MS Office Suite at work I don’t have any clue about those other programs.

Another idea is getting some non-Microsoft certifications. Security+ and Network+ come to mind as those are areas I’m interested in. I also hear that the Security+ can be used as an elective on the MCSE track. My friend Christian is thinking about Security+ so I may do it with him. Security is something very important these days of course, so having a paper that says I know something about it could help.

Just getting my thoughts out there. I’ll be busy on show site for all of July of course so no test taking during that time period.

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Absurd Piracy Claims

Oliver — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:08:32 +0000

From Slashdot — http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/17/009218

Full article about the retarded claims of the MPAA industry. These people really don’t understand their customers at all….

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Internet Content Filtering Survey

Oliver — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:24:43 +0000

Please take this Software Filters and Content Rating Survey that my friend Eddy is doing for school. He’s a great guy and this is his last big school project. He needs around 400 respondents so every little bit helps!

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Woman Chases Down Her Identity Theif

Oliver — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:21:30 +0000

I would be furious! Actually seeing the person that made your life hell? Too bad the sentence handed down was so weak.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/15/1220215