Monday, January 30th, 2012
So… I have Comcast cable Internet service at home, and a Motorola SB6120 cable modem that I own myself. I’m not sure if it is Comcast, the modem, the combination of the two, or something else altogether… but, every now and then, the modem goes into a funk and the Internet stops working, and the only way to fix it is to power-cycle the modem.
This doesn’t happen terribly often, maybe once a month or so. (Occasionally it will happen, say, twice in one week and thus cause me to think about it a little more.) Power-cycling the modem is not a big deal, but I do access stuff that I have at home remotely, so if the connection dies while I am at work or away someplace, I can’t fix it until I return home.
It would be great if there was a way for a computer at the house to, say, periodically check and see if the Internet is working and if it is not, somehow reset the modem. So, I did some searching on the topic, and… it turns out that it is possible to do this, and in fact, it is pretty simple.
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Tags: Comcast
Posted in Networking | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
For this article, I am assuming that you are comfortable getting around Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular, and are familar with the ins and outs of disk partitioning. I will be describing the steps that I took to make this happen, but not going into too much detail for each individual step. See the bottom of this post for some useful links if you’d like to read up on the topic first. Note that it is very possible to lose your partitions when doing this sort of work so proceed carefully and do not blame me if something goes awry.
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Tags: GPT, Linux, Ubuntu, UEFI
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Just looking for the driver? Click here.
So… In the not-so-distant past, my smart-ish phone, a Palm Treo 650, kicked the bucket. Not having the budget or desire to pick up a newer smartphone, I ran off to eBay and picked up an unlocked Nokia 2320. I plopped in my SIM card and I was back in business.
Now, the Nokia 2320 doesn’t really have any connectivity options. It has no Bluetooth, no infrared, or anything like that. Nonetheless, I am still interested in being able to transfer data to and from the phone (without using MMS). Then, maybe I’d be able to do things like transfer photos to assign to the contacts in my address book, back up my address book in case the phone breaks or gets lost, add a custom ringtone, and so on. The phone does have a data port, which seems like it would be an option, if only I had the right cable.
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Tags: CA-50, Nokia 2320
Posted in Hardware | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 29th, 2011
I upgraded a couple of machines to Ubuntu 11.04, and after the reboot, they just booted up to a grub prompt. Like this (except an older version of grub reported):
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Tags: Ubuntu
Posted in Software | 36 Comments »
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
This is an error message that pops up when trying to do an operation using OpenSSL running on Windows. It appears, best as I can gather, that the path to OpenSSL’s config file is hard-coded into the executable, and it won’t be able to find it if it is not in the expected place. In this case, I was using the copy of OpenSSL bundled with the Windows version of the Apache web server, but I imagine the error message may show up with other Windows distributions of OpenSSL as well.
The solution is to add an environment variable, OPENSSL_CONF, and set it to the complete path to an OpenSSL config file. (In this case, again, it is located in Apache’s conf directory.) Then, restart your command prompt instance and all should be good.
Tags: Apache, OpenSSL
Posted in Software | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
So, I have a nearly 3-year-old Inspiron 1720 laptop from Dell that serves as my main PC. This machine still has a couple of years of service left in it.
I run VMware at work all day and of course I would want to have plenty of system memory to avoid hard disk paging activity under this high memory load. According to Dell, the maximum memory capacity of this machine is 4 GB (2 GB in each of two slots). However, others have discovered that 6 GB works fine in the machine, so there is no problem installing a 4 GB module along with a 2 GB module. However, installing two 4 GB modules for a total of 8 GB does not work, as there is a bug in the BIOS that will keep the machine from booting.
I decided that 4 GB is not enough for my workload so I went for the upgrade to 6 GB. It worked fine. However, I wonder, to you lose any performance by going to 6 GB? Of course, in this configuration you have a mismatched pair of RAM modules. Does stuff like dual-channel access still work?
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Tags: Dell Hardware, Memory
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
I’ve been having an issue where my physical ethernet interface would disappear from the choices of interfaces to bridge to in VMware Workstation for Windows whenever I hibernate my machine. This is a little annoying, as I have a VM that I would like attached to the physical network.
The easy solution to this problem is to open up the virtual network editor and click on the “Restore Defaults” button. This reinstalls the VMware network components and sets everything back up like it would be if your install was brand new. However, it’s annoying to have to do this every time I power up the machine.
continuum over at the VMware Communities message boards pointed me towards the solution — restarting the hidden “vmnetbridge” service also does the trick. However, again, it’s annoying to have to do this every time the machine is powered on.
I tried writing a batch file to restart the service and scheduling that to execute at power on but I couldn’t find an appropriate trigger to have the Windows task scheduler execute it.
So, I wrote a system service in C# that hangs out in the background and restarts the vmnetbridge service whenever the machine wakes up from hibernate or sleep. This handles the problem brilliantly — no effort required after the service is installed, but the VMware “Bridge” interface keeps working as expected. You can download it from its new project page, here.
Tags: VMware, VMware Workstation
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
This is a problem I noticed many months ago, but did not seriously look in to until just now.
I like to use the monthly Mozilla Foxkeh desktop wallpaper. Right now, I have the January 2011 wallpaper — this nice, large, lossless PNG. (By the way, the word that he is in the progress of writing is “火狐”, which literally means “fire fox.” How cool!)
Anyway, I noticed that there is crappy compression on the image shown on my desktop, particularly around the numbers that make of the calendar. This has been occurring in the wallpapers for past months as well. If I open up the PNG (that I told Windows to use!!) and zoom way in, the image is crystal clear. But on the desktop, it is junk. Take a look, I zoomed in on the “2011″ at the top-left of the calendar. On the left is the data from the PNG as viewed in any decent graphics application, and on the right is what appears on my desktop.
Yuck!
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Tags: Image Compression, PNG, Windows 7
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Nowadays, most local area networks have a DHCP server running on them. This is, of course, how hosts on the network are assigned their IP address and other stuff they need to know (router address, DNS servers, etc.).
The DHCP server has a pool of addresses that it is allowed to hand out to clients, and it will often hand out these addresses sequentially. In some cases, the address chosen for a particular client may be based on some sort of hash function on the client’s MAC address (so that the client will always be assigned the same address, unless there is a hash collision).
Of course, sometimes it’s nice to assign a particular device on your network a specific IP address (a “static” or “fixed” IP address). This way, you will always know without any doubt what the IP address or your printer or file server or whatever is. Of course, you can just set the address manually on the device, taking care to place it outside of the DHCP pool.
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Tags: DHCP, Ubuntu Server
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
In VMware Workstation, I’ve been getting this error for a while when I tried to start up a VM using the “Bridged” network interface.
Cannot open file “C:\ProgramData\VMware\dndlogs\dndlog.conf”: The system cannot find the path specified.
The network bridge on device VMnet0 is temporarily down because the bridged Ethernet interface is down. The virtual machine may not be able to communicate with the host or with other machines on your network.
Not too big a deal, usually using the NAT interface works just fine, but it does prevent other machines on the network from talking to the VM which is sometimes a handy feature to have.
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Tags: VMware, VMware Workstation
Posted in Software | 3 Comments »
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