Brian's Blog

]> Brian's Blog http://rignesnet.tzo.com Random Thoughts and Comments en-us Brian 2007-11-28T16:32:39-05:00 http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-11-29T15_45_51.html A Geeky Christmas Tree 2006-11-29T15:45:51-05:00 Brian Work, Fun Stuff

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]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-10-14T21_28_34.html Closer to Certification Tests 2006-10-14T21:28:34-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work "MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exams 70-292 and 70-296): Upgrading Your Certification to Microsoft Windows Server 2003" book. I've posted multiple times on my dislike for it so I won't go into it again. I'm just hoping that it gave me some good info that I can possibly recall during an exam. I believe it presented all the pertinent data, it just was very light on the review questions and even lighter on answer explanations. In other words, I need some reinforcement to bring up my confidence before I pay money to take a test. For this I'm falling back on the Exam Cram 2 series, which I had used as review material in the past. The nice thing about these books is there are about 10 questions at the end of each chapter with an answer key that gives the right answer along with an explanation on why the answer is correct. Additionally, it explains why the other answers are wrong. And the two 50 question practice exams in the back are very useful for figuring out what your weaknesses are.

Hopefully I'll be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel soon as get these exams out of my way. I'll only take them when I feel I'm ready and not a day sooner. No sense in giving my money to Microsoft for nothing.]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-09-03T23_32_42.html What To Study For? WSUS or SUS? 2006-09-03T23:32:42-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work
The problem is that I've hit the section regarding the Manage software update infrastructure objective in the 70-292 exam in which it talkes in the book about Microsoft's Software Update Services (SUS). Well, SUS has since been replaced with Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) and in fact all support for SUS will stop at the end of the year. It will literally stop working forcing everyone to use WSUS. That's not a big deal, but What the hell am I supposed to study for?!

I've checked the Microsoft Press section for the book I'm using for an errata which doesn't seem to exist so it seems they haven't updated their text. Or perhaps they just don't care to update it? I've searched on various forums only to get the impression that they are still testing for SUS, but that's just an impression and nothing I could take as a solid answer. So, at this point, assuming they are going to test me on something that won't work in a few months I went to download the older version of SUS only to be redirected to a download for WSUS.

At this point I have no solid answers on what I am going to be tested for. And if it is still SUS then I have no way of actually using it before the exam forcing me to simply read, look at screen shots, and hope I don't get to many questions on it. Or, if the test is on WSUS then I have no official study material to prep for this thing. Which means I'll just have to grab a white paper, install it, and hope I accidentally teach myself the specific bits they are going to test me on.

I find this utterly ridiculous. If they want to test me on old unsupported technology then that's their stupid decision. I'd much rather spend my time learning something I'll actually use at work. Ultimately, I really don't care one way or another what they test me on so long as I know what the hell I need to learn. I just want to get the exams over with so I can get back to learning more stimulating things (aka something not Microsoft).]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-08-06T09_31_50.html More Drive Failures 2006-08-06T09:31:50-05:00 Brian Work
I wonder if they will deliver the drive correctly this time or if I'l have to wait 13 hours for my 4 hour drive delivery again?]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-08-04T17_25_07.html Failed HP Drives 2006-08-04T17:25:07-05:00 Brian Work
Anyway, it turned out that HP (or whoever they had deliver the drive) delivered it to "someplace" and they really didn't know where that was exactly. But the did have a signature from some person with the last name of "Lersh". No one of that name works here, or in the building next to us. Great.

Now HP is sending two more drives along with an engineer to make sure they get here. The crappy thing is I need to stick around until they come. I could probably leave and have him call my mobile but I don't want to take a chance at missing him.

All around it's been a bad week. But this just annoys me. If someone hadn't messed up I'd have an array with just one failed drive which is a heck of a lot better than the state it is currently in.

I know this isn't the most interesting post ever but other geeks who read this will understand I'm sure.

Anyway, time to wait for my drives and hope drive number 3 doesn't fail before the new ones get here. At the rate they've been dieing I'm a bit nervous.]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2006-04-14T21_54_41.html A Warm Welcome Back 2006-04-14T21:54:41-05:00 Brian Work
Next week I'll be the only IT guy in the house though which should be interesting since I'm still getting caught up on the systems. It shouldn't be to bad though.

On an unrelated note I just got notice that my repaired iAudio has shipped! I should see it hopefully next week.

]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2005-12-28T20_05_44.html Christmas Present from Choice One 2005-12-28T20:05:44-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work, Miscellaneous
My extra fun was on Dec 23rd just before the holiday weekend. I was thinking it was going to be a nice easy day. I was scheduled to install a new PC for someone around 10AM but instead was redirected to one of our largest customers, a multi-branch local bank. There really isn't much to the story to be told really but keep in mind that even though it's short it was highly stress inducing.

The problem specifically was that every branch was cut off from the main branch. Meaning they could not access any of their files located on the server there. Nor could their database function without the links being up 100%. The odd thing though was that I could access the Internet, ping all the servers across the VPN for all the other branches, and even PCAnywhere to them. What I couldn't do was access a SMB share or see anything other than local LAN systems in the browse list. It would have made 100% perfect sense if I couldn't ping, PCAnywhere, etc but this seemed to target just SMB related things. We had a case open with Microsoft support recently for an issue that was close enough that I could get help without started a new case so I called them up and we checked out the server. It turned out that, for some odd reason, ports 135, 139, and 445 were being blocked and it appeared that Windows wasn't the culprit this time. More detective work showed me that this was the case at all branches that used Choice One as their managed VPN provider but thing were perfectly fine at branches that didn't use Choice One. The next step was clear, and that was to call Choice One up and see what the heck was going on.

Once I slogged through the menus and got an actual person (located in the USA no less!) he didn't see anything wrong, no open tickets, no troubles reported, and no notes related to recent security related changes. Still, I had already proven that I couldn't telnet to any of the SMB related ports, and Windows looked OK so I asked him to check the ports instead of trusting the account notes. Besides, if the OS was the problem we would likely have had local problems as well and been only limited to effected servers. He opened up the ports and in a flash things were working as before.

It turns out that over the past few months Choice One had been closing off the SMB related ports for their clients on externally accessible addresses to combat the spread of viruses. It seems someone took it upon him/herself to close off these ports on the banks VPN stopping it on the internal side and then didn't make any notes in the case related to it. And in doing so managed in a few moments to bring every branch to a halt.

Really, it was such a simple problem at the root of it all, but it took on the order of 5 hours to pin point he problem, get it fixed and then tested. All the while having the manager freaking out and thinking it was some how our fault. Anyway, at least it worked out. The bank was up by the end of the day and it wasn't caused by anything we or anyone at the bank did wrong. Even so, thanks goes to Choice One for poor documentation, lack of procedure, and inducing a mountain of stress just prior to a holiday due to some individuals incompetence.]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2005-10-26T20_59_32.html Thinkpad T30 - Hotswap, and Software Suspend 2005-10-26T20:59:32-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work

Well, it wasn't exactly easy but it built on what I learned messing with ACPI as I talk about in my last post. First of all, there really isn't any specific documentation for Slackware when it comes to suspend to disk that I could find. But, I found some info on Gentoo, Debian, and Fedora which was useful. Now it turns out that in the 2.6.13 kernel (and possible older ones I don't know) that there is already a suspend to disk feature right under power management in your menuconfig. I gave that a shot and lets just say it doesn't play well with my Thinkpad. Basically I can suspend it but it never comes back. It tries to resume but then locks.

Some more research pointed me to a project called Software Suspend 2 for Linux that actually works. Basically it consists of a kernel patch for the vanilla 2.6.13 kernel and a hibernate script. Both the patch and the support scripts are super easy to install. The documentation and the FAQ are really nice on their site. Once you compile the kernel with suspend2 enabled you can either suspend to a file or to swap space. To resume you just add an option to your lilo.conf or your grub menu.lst file to tell the kernel where you expect a suspend file or partition. Then all you have to do it type hibernate and it will suspend to disk. They even have a tip on how to setup sudo so you can hibernate without being root which lets you use it in something like Klaptop to hibernate the system when the batter gets critically low.

This is all well and good but I want to set this up so that it will hibernate when i close the lid of the laptop regardless of if I'm in KDE or at the console. Oh, and make sure not to use the hibernate function of Klaptop with suspend2. It corrupted my drive so bad I had to reinstall. I'm thinking it may have been something I did wrong in the hibernate.conf file but since I'm not planning on using klaptop to take care of the lid I didn't look into it.

Anyway, I figured acpid would be the way to go to catch the lid button event and have it run hibernate for me. Watching /var/log/acpid gave me a event called "button/lid LID 00000080 00000001" but I found out the hard way that it actually counts up such that the last bit of it changes. Pressing the button counts as an event as well as releasing it. So I couldn't just check for the entire thing. Also, I needed to make it only suspend on every other event. Otherwise it would suspend on the lid button press and would then suspend again right after the resume when it would get the lid button release. The suspend2 FAQ had the answer. Here is what worked for me:

event=button[/]lid LID.*[13579bdf]$
action=/usr/local/sbin/hibernate

I just stuck that in a file in the /etc/acpid/events directory along with my other events and issued a /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid restart and now the laptop suspends to disk perfectly every time I close the lid. As a point of interest I initially made the event expression to be event=button[/]lid LID.*[02468ace]$ which had the odd effect of only suspending the system when opened the lid.

One word of advice, if you try to set this up manually like I did rather than relying on your distro to set it up for you then do it on a test system. It seems that once you get it tweaked and working it works fine, but one mess up while learning it can irreversibly corrupt your file system. On, and one other thing of to note, read the section of the How to Avoid Data Loss section of the HOWTO if you mount a Windows partition to avoid killing your fat vfat or msdos partitions.

The other thing I did that was much easier than figuring out all this ACPI and suspend to disk stuff was figure out how to hot swap my drive bay so I can switch between my floppy and my CD-ROM without having to reboot. The utility to use is called Khotswap that sits in your system tray in KDE. The author also has a Gnome applet for it and it has a command line only version of itself just called hotswap and an X generic one called xhotswap.

So, at this point I'm well on my way to getting the foundation of the laptop done in Slackware enough to start thinking of setting up the rest to use for day to day work. I know, I could have used another distro and had much of this stuff work right out of the box. I hear Ubuntu is very good at this. But if I did that where would the challenge be and what would I learn in the process?]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2005-10-23T19_05_42.html ACPI and Speedstep with Linux on my Thinkpad 2005-10-23T19:05:42-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work
The laptop in question is an IBM Thinkpad T30 and according to Google it is well supported in Linux (mostly). I went and installed Slackware 10.2 and most everything worked right out of the box like sound, wireless LAN, and APM. APM worked fine except that I didn't see any support for the Thinkpad buttons and saw that the kernel had a module just for Thinkpads in ACPI. Rather than figure out just what modules I needed to modprobe in I just compiled the things right into the kernel since I can't think of any time I'd not want them there. That worked well, the sleep button worked and when I closed the laptop lid the system went to sleep.

I did notice though that when I was on batter i was only getting about 40 minutes of run time when I was getting about 1.5 hours in Windows. So then it was onto learning how to throttle the CPU speed. Now, this was a pain in the rump. I had the modules I needed loaded and no matter what I did Klaptop wouldn't change the CPU speed when going from between battery and AC. I even compiled all the modules directly into the kernel to see if it helped. No go. I could change the speed manually but not automatically.

It turns out that after some research I learned that this model only supports two speeds of CPU. One at 1.8GHz and the other at 1.2GHz. Klaptop wanted to throttle based on percentage. For some odd reason I could set the percentage manually and it seemed to make a difference in performance but it just wouldn't do it automatically.

So, as far as CPU frequency throttling it can be by a userspace program or by the kernel itself. Klaptop is a userspace program and since that wasn't working I decided to try out letting the kernel do it. I compiled in speedstep-ich and the ondemand governor. The idea is that the ondemand Governor will watch your current CPU needs and adjust the speed accordingly. To get this working all you have to do is make sure the ondemend module and the speedstep module is loaded (or compiled into the kernel) and then

echo -n
ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

and supposedly it will "just work". For some reason when I echo ondemand into scaling_governor it doesn't take and just stays as userspace. I haven't put much effort into figuring out the why since I'm a bit tired of playing with this. I did figure out that I could manually echo either 1200000 or 1800000 into /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed and it would work. But how to make it do this automatically?

All I did was kept and eye on /var/log/acpid with tail -f and unplugged the AC adapter and plugged it back in a few times. In my case every time I plugged in the adapter it generated an ACPI event called "ac_adapter AC 00000080 00000001" and when I unplugged it a "ac_adapter AC 00000080 00000000" event was generated. All I had to do was create two scripts in /etc/acpi. One of the scripts I called on_battery.sh and it contains:

# Sets the CPU to 1.2 GHz when on battery
#
echo -n 1200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
#
# Set Hard Drive sleep to 5 minutes
hdparm -S 60 /dev/hda

And the other one called ac_cpu.sh contains:

# Sets the CPU to 1.8 GHz when on wall AC
#
echo -n 1800000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
#
# Set hard drive sleep time to 20 minutes
hdparm -S 240 /dev/hda

I made them executable then went into /etc/acpi/events and created two new files to catch and then run the script to make the CPU frequency change. The two files can be called pretty much anything as far as I can tell as long as they aren't hidden files. I called one ac_cpu and the other onbattery_cpu. ac_cpu contains:

event=ac_adapter AC 00000080 00000001
action=/etc/acpi/ac_cpu.sh

and onbattery_cpu contains:

event=ac_adapter AC 00000080 00000000
action=/etc/acpi/onbattery_cpu.sh

Finally I had to restart acpid with /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid restart and it worked! Now I can get about 1.5 hours out of a full charge instead of 30-45 minutes. And I can put other commands into the scripts to do other things when the state changes. You can see I already have hdparm to tweak my sleep times.]]> http://rignesnet.tzo.com/archives/2005-10-20T19_01_08.html Moving Forward getting Linux on the Laptop 2005-10-20T19:01:08-05:00 Brian Computers and Technology, Work
This brings up one big question though. What distro to try first?

]]>