Computers

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Got home today to find my new BIOS chip had arrived in the mail! Quick before dinner I plugged it into the socket and booted up the server. We have liftoff!

Thanks BIOSMan!

After dinner, as I was playing with the server some more, my family says “Something’s beeping downstairs and we can’t figure out what it is.”

So I go downstairs, and sure enough, something’s beeping. It turns out that I lost a drive on my Openfiler RAID! The odd thing is that it marked the drive as degraded, then failed, then rebuilding. And now it’s rebuilding the array on the drive. But that can’t be good.

The humorous thing is that just today I setup the RAID monitoring utilities so that it would email me drive failures and the like. And sure enough, there are three messages in my mailbox, telling me about the problem.

I was setting up the partitions on another 80GB drive so that I could have a mirrored pair in my main server when I moved to new hardware, but now I may have to use this drive in the Openfiler RAID! Bah. What I’d really like to do is get four new 120GB IDE drives and use them in the Openfiler, but that’s not going to happen unless I get some windfall or something.

On another good news/bad news note, Nate gave me an RG-1000 Wireless Access Point today, free! 802.11b is good enough for me, and he showed me how to upgrade the WEP key from 64 bit to 128 bit too! (You also need the firmware image from here.)

But, alas, he had no power supply for it. I dug around at home, but I don’t really have anything suitable either. It needs 9V DC at 1.1 Amps. I have a 9.7V 500mA supply, or a big 12V supply, and looking at the circuit board, it looks like the first thing the power hits is a 5V regulator, but the regulator doesn’t have any heat sink on it and I think the difference between dropping 9V to 5V and dropping 12V to 5V might just cause a little heat issue.

So tomorrow I’ll ask Nate to dig in his closet a little deeper in the hopes that he can find the right power supply for this beast.

On the totally good news side, I got my new firewall built (but not installed yet.) It’s another Nate freebie special. 🙂

He gave me a dual Pentium Pro motherboard (an Intel PX440FX) with two 200MHz CPUs and 512MB of RAM in a 4RU rack mount case. It’s got one on-board SCSI channel, so I hooked up a pair of old 4GB SCSI drives I had (hope they don’t start failing – knock on wood), tossed in a couple of Intel 100MB NICs and away we go. It’s got one NIC on-board, so I can hang the wireless off on it’s own network (once I get a power supply) and limit it’s access to my internal network, just in case.

I built the rule set using FWBuilder. Man does that rock. I built the rules and they installed slick as a whistle. FWBuilder has all kinds of nice bells and whistles that I’ll need to explore some more, but it sure is a nice GUI for building iptables rule sets. It also supports ipfilter, OpenBSD pf and Cisco PIX and there are some people writing some interesting modules for it.

So this weekend the main server may move to it’s new box, with a new motherboard and a 3RU rack mount case (another Nate freebie special), and the new firewall may get installed. And if Nate or I can locate a power supply, I may have wireless too. We’ll have to see how ambitious I feel after eating all that turkey on Thursday.

And a big THANK YOU to Nate for all the free hardware! (I know he’s reading this, he’s one of my three regular readers. 🙂 )

WWW

I Love The Register’s Take on the US

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The Register has a story about the Walmart employee who was recently fired for answering an email about the fact that Walmart changed their greeting from “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays”.

It would appear the employee was a little too overzealous in her explaination.

We may be two peoples separated by a common language, as Shaw once suggested, but the US propensity to find teeth-grindingly literal explanations for the world around us never ceases to cause the British mirth.

The caricature of a fearful United States where every I must be dotted, and every T must be crossed, where coffee cups warn the the user of hot liquids inside, and where blogs are tattooed with incomprehensible license terms, isn’t just the stuff of myth, however. This nit-picking has become the foundation of the nation, one that pitches the established class of nit-pickers (the lawyers) against a new breed of nit-pickers (the technocrats).

Read the rest here.

Computers

Bruce Schneier on Sony’s Rootkit

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Bruce Schneier has a very good column in Wired about the Sony Rootkit.

It’s a tale of extreme hubris. Sony rolled out this incredibly invasive copy-protection scheme without ever publicly discussing its details, confident that its profits were worth modifying its customers’ computers. When its actions were first discovered, Sony offered a “fix” that didn’t remove the rootkit, just the cloaking.
…

What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn’t notice Sony’s rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn’t one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn’t notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we’re paying those companies to detect — especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich’s discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case.

Lots of stuff to think about here.

Computers

Stupid Rookie Mistake

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I made a totally stupid rookie mistake this evening.

Yesterday Nate, a co-worker, gave me one of his old servers. It’s a pretty nice box, a 3U case with a Tyan motherboard that supports dual PII/III processors.

I started playing with it this evening and discovered that it had a weird quirk. When you exited the BIOS after changing the settings, it powered off and wouldn’t turn back on until you unplugged the power supply for about 30 seconds.

Weird.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to upgrade the BIOS, so I went to Tyan’s website and downloaded the BIOS and the flash utility. I made a boot disk, booted it up and went to work. The utility even let me make a backup of the old version in case I had a problem. Nice.

Then I rebooted.

Black screen. Nothing. Dead.

Turns out that I grabbed the wrong BIOS image. The motherboard is a Tiger 100 S1832D. I managed to flash the BIOS with one meant for a Thunder 100 S1836DULAN.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

So I went to the AMI site and filled out a form hoping they can figure out what BIOS it’s supposed to be and can sell me a chip.

There is someone on eBay right now selling four of these motherboards for $50 each plus $15 shipping. Don’t really want to spend that…

Oh yay! I just found a link on the Tyan site to BIOSMan.com and ordered a new, flashed BIOS for $25 including shipping!

Man, it’s been years since the last time I had to swap a BIOS chip.

Computers

Sony issues non-apology apology

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Over on Boing Boing, they have a letter from Sony about their DRMed CDs.

It’s really a non-apology and they really downplay the issues. Big surprise.

To Our Valued Customers:

You may be aware of the recent attention given to the First4Internet XCP content protection software included on some SONY BMG CDs. We have learned that the software includes a feature that may make a user’s computer susceptible to a virus written specifically to target the software.

…

Read the rest at Boing Boing.

WWW

Tin Foil Beanie Rebuttal

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Of course it was only a matter of time before there was a rebuttal to the Tin Foil Beanie research at MIT…

A recent MIT study [1] calls into question the effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies. However, there are serious flaws in this study, not the least of which is a complete mischaracterization of the process of psychotronic mind control. I theorize that the study is, in fact, NWO propaganda designed to spread FUD against deflector beanie technology, and aluminum shielding in general, in order to disembeanie paranoids, leaving them open to mind control.

Read the rest of the paranoid rant here.

I love the phrasing… disembeanie?

Hobbies

C’était un Rendezvous

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

C’était un Rendezvous:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

It has just been remastered and released on DVD.

Update: The link to the quicktime I had is down, but there are two mirrors here (1 2)

It’s amazing. And the thing is, it looks just like a video game. As a matter of fact, I have driven at those speeds, on those streets, past those monuments and buildings virtually in Midtown Madness 3.

And man that Ferrari sounds nice.

Thanks to JWZ for this one.