Finally finshed

Today my partner and I finally finished the big cabling job we've been working on for one of my clients every weekend this month. The only things left to do today was punch down a couple jacks near a new piece of equipment, install a switch and a couple of hubs, and patch all the connections through from the patch panel to the core switch. I also installed their email and file server in their new locations.

Afterwards we grabbed lunch and he installed a new doorbell for me and fixed a fouled up flourescent light in my kitchen. Doing anything with AC power gives me the heebie-jeebies. It's good to be friends with an electrician. :-)

It's alive!

Finally, Bagend has arisen from the grave. I pulled it out of the crawlspace last night (no fun, there) and since I'd covered it in a Hefty bag, it actually wasn't all full of spiderwebs.

First order of business was to gut the case. Out came the power supply. Out came the motherboard tray. I decided to keep the 3Com NIC to see if it was still good, which turned out to be fortunate. I also kept the 32x CD-ROM drive, although I pulled it out of the case. There was no floppy to salvage, it having already been removed. Aside from the case itself, the only parts I reused were the 3Com NIC and the case fan. The mobo, RAM, CPU and old PS went into the trash.

Putting all the new components together took about an hour since I was taking it slow. Aside from the components obtained from NewEgg, I also installed a 52x CD-ROM drive which came out of my MIL's PC when I installed a CD-RW drive for her earlier this year. So, Bagend has two optical drives but no floppy drive. (I need to do something about that hole in the front of the case.)

It didn't boot up on my first try. After some head scratching, I realized that I'd connected the power switch to the mobo headers one pin off. Once I moved the connector over the box fired right up.

I did a little bit of tweaking in the BIOS, then rebooted, popped in the SUSE 9.0 Professional DVD, and commenced the install.

Installing SUSE from DVD beats the pants off using CDs. Instead of periodic disc swapping, once you're ready to actually install everything you click OK and it goes. I didn't time it but it took about a half hour to finish the installation. I didn't do a full-boat install but I did add a good amount of stuff to SUSE's default selection of software. WTH, I've got the disk space.

Speaking of which, I partitioned the drive with 512 MB swap, 30 GB for /, and the remained as /home. On a desktop or laptop I don't see the need for fancy partitioning schemes, but having /home on its own partion facilitates backups and allows you to reformat /, but leave your data instact, if you do an upgrade. I used SUSE's default filesystem -- ReiserFS.

It's a good thing that I didn't chuck the old 3Com NIC. For some reason during the install, SUSE didn't recognize my new mobo's onboard Realtek-based NIC. Without the old NIC I wouldn't have got the box online.

By the time I was finished it was around 2200, my normal weeknight bedtime. I didn't want to go to sleep just yet, so I putzed around by installing the latest releases of Firebird and Thunderbird. Since I'm no longer using Mozilla Composer regularly, I may stick with the individual apps, rather than the Mozilla suite.

Tonight I'm going to try to fine tune the X config and restore all my data. I'm also going to see if I can get the onboard NIC working, as I'd like to take out the 3Com for use as a spare. Aside from the NIC issue I'm pleased with the box, which is a heckuva lot faster than Gondor was with the same OS.

No Jury Duty

I checked Montgomery County's website for jury duty, and I don't have to report to the court house tomorrow. I would like to serve on a jury, but with my background as an attorney I doubt I would get past voire dire. So, I'm glad that I don't have to waste my time by showing up and then being told to go home.

The Secret Weapon

This is one of the best blog entries I've read in quite some time.

Well, for that matter the whole method and practice of Governance in the United States is a mystery to the people of the world. I get quiet exasperated trying to explain "separation of powers', 'federal vs. state powers' and 'constitutional law'. The idea that our system of government is designed to ensure that it doesnt work very well, is simply beyond them. When I explain that the "Bill Of Rights" does not in fact give you any rights, but actually limits the powers of government, that all rights are believed to be yours to begin with and that most of what the constitution does is limit, form and shape government, and that it does not actually say in any explicit language " you have this right or that one". It does tell every one "government can go this far and no further" on a number of subjects.

It gets better. Read the rest here.

WLAN Update

I got my client's WLAN up and running with WEP, but only the 64-bit flavor.

We first disabled Windows Wireless Zero Configuration and then tried 128-bit WEP. No joy. Her PC could associate with the WAP as before, but not pull an IP. We tried renewing the IP and disabling and reenabling the wireless NIC to no avail. It flat out would not talk to the network. So, as a last resort I we setup 64-bit WEP, she got an IP, and we verified Internet connectivity.

Very strange and incredibily annoying.

Still, between basic encryption and MAC filtering, IMO their LAN is reasonably secure.

Home Network Update

I got Rivendell swapped out for Gondor last night, after moving Judith's docs over to the newer PC. It didn't go completely smoothly, however.

Several of Judith's documents were created in MS Works 6.0, although she's been using Word for the past couple of years. I wanted her to have access to the old files in case she needs them, so I installed Works on Gondor. Big mistake.

Following the post-install reboot I discovered that Works was interfering with AVG Antivirus, preventing a core DLL from loading. This left the box without virus protection, an unacceptable state of affairs. So, I reinstalled AVG, which didn't fix it.

At this point I decided to remove Works. Judith no longer uses it and the older files hadn't been accessed in a couple of years, so if she ever does need them we can temporarily install Works, then use it to save the files in .doc format, and then wipe it off the box again. In the menatime, she's got OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which should serve her needs well.

The Works-vs.-AVG fiasco is puzzling. Both programs peacefully coexisted on Rivendell, although under Windows 98SE. For some reason, they don't on XP. Go figure.

I never did get to start reviving Bagend last night. By the time I was done with Gondor is was about 2100 and I was pooped. I plan to work on it tonight though, especially since my NEC DVD burner and AMD Athlon CPU showed up yesterday.

RSS in Thunderbird

I upgraded Thunderbird on my laptop to the latest version, 0.8. A new feature is a built-in RSS/XML site feed reader. It's pretty slick, although it's not totally intuitive to setup.

You first need to go and create a new account in Tbird, via Tools > Account Settings > Add New Account. Choose "RSS News and Blogs" as the account type. This will create the basic site feed reader account. You then need to go into the account properties and subscribe to the feeds by adding their URLs. You can find out a feed's URL usually by clicking on an "XML" or "RSS" icon on a page in your browser. Then paste the URL into the RSS reader subscription box.

Blogger uses Atomz, rather than RSS, but Tbird reads this kind of feed just fine. The URL to subscribe to this site is http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

I'll need to add a link to this in the sidebar.

Gondor reborn

I got XP Pro installed on Gondor last night, then added SP2, ran Windows Update, and even installed some apps before calling it a day. I'm going to see if I can switch Judith over to OpenOffice.org, so I installed that instead of MS Office. I still find it annoying that on that hardware, XP runs faster than KDE on SUSE. KDE has simply become bloated, although it remains my desktop environment of choice.

Since Judith doesn't use POP or IMAP for her email -- she's content with Yahoo! mail -- I installed Firefox rather than the full Mozilla suite. I also installed the Noia theme, which is pretty slick looking. This morning I upgraded Firefox on my work laptop to the latest version and installed the Crystalfox theme, which I like even better. It's quite KDEish. I may install it on Gondor later. (I'm using Firefox today at work since I can't get to my mail server -- see previous post -- and just need a browser.)

Tonight I'll swap out Rivendell for Gondor after I move Judith's files and bookmarks over. Then I can hopefully turn my attention to reviving Bagend. Even if my new CPU and DVD drive don't arrive, I can gut the case of the old, fried components, install the new poer supply, RAM, video card, and motherboard.

Linksys SPI

The implementation of stateful packet inspection on the Linksys BEFSR11 router I use at home leaves something to be desired. I turned it on last night, and discovered when I came into the office this morning that I can no longer login to mail.building-tux.com remotely. After a bit of googling, I discovered that the main effect of enabling SPI on this box is to turn off port forwarding.

Crap. Linksys could have documented this.

Oh well, since mail.building-tux.com hosts my personal email there's no real harm done in my case. Of course, this could be a big problem in a different environment. I'll disable SPI when I get home and watch as the flood of pent up spam crashes in.

Parts is parts

I got most of the parts that I ordered for my "new" PC from NewEgg today. The Athlon CPU and the NEC DVD+/-RW drive are still in transit, though. So, after unpacking the other components I installed the Netgear FS108 Ethernet switch, replacing my old 10 meg hub.

The Netgear switch is a nice little unit with a metal case and feels very solid. It uses a wall wart power supply which helps keeps down the size of the switch itself. One thing that impressed me is that unlike typical consumer grade networking equipment, this box has a connector on the back for a separate electrical ground.

After getting the new switch installed I finished backing up my data on Gondor. Last night, I'd made copies of my documents folder to my laptop. Tonight I added my dotfiles -- .kde, .gftp., and .mozilla. Then I burned the same files to a CD, so that I have two backups.

And so, Gondor is currently being reborn as a Windows XP machine for Judith. As I write this, the hard disk is almost finished being reformatted. I plan to get XP Pro installed tonight and maybe SP2. I'll load the apps she needs tomorrow, migrate over her data from Rivendell, and swap towers.

Slackware-current

Slacktop -- my old Dell Latitude CPi P2/366 is now running Slackware-current, as the result of me running "swaret --upgrade -a" yesterday afternoon. I didn't have the chance to try it out before leaving the office yesterday, so I fired up the box early this morning.

I had to do some tweaking to get X to run. I issued "startx" and the XOrg server started to launch, but died with an error that it couldn't find the "keyboard" driver. I took a look in /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa and saw that the keyboard driver in that file was listed as "kbd," so I changed /etc/X11xorg.conf (the working config file) to match, and X worked.

The system upgrade included an updated to KDE 3.3.1, which I wanted to take a look at. It's very nice, although slow on this hardware.

Swaret isn't perfect but it's a pretty darn good tool for package management on Slackware. If you run Slack you should definitely give it a try.

Wireless LAN Headaches II

Well, I just got off the phone with the client for whom I installed the WLAN on Saturday. After dinking around in the WAP for a little while, I disabled WEP encryption. As soon as I did that and they reassociated with the WAP they were able to get online and to see each other's PCs in My Network Places.

WTF?!?

MAC filtering is enabled on the WAP so their WLAN is not wide open, but I'd prefer to have multiple layers of security. I'm going to do some more research and then try 64 bit WEP and/or WPA. (WPA is supposed to be an improvement on WEP, although not much. I didn't enable it initially because I'm familiar with WEP.)

I have to wonder if this is some soft of stupid XP Home-ism.

Wireless networking headaches

This morning I setup a wireless LAN at a 3-person law firm in Delaware. Initial setup was pretty straightforward, but it's not what I consider to be fully functional. I could use some input here.

The network consists of three PCs, two eMachines boxes and one Dell, all running XP Home (they had these boxes before they called me). Each PC has a Netgear WG311T wireless NIC which was installed according to the manufacturer's directions. There is also a Netgear WG302 wireless access point. The intented use of the LAN is to share a cable modem connection and allow file and printer sharing among the three users.

The Ethernet interface of the WAP has the IP 10.1.10.2/255.255.255.0. The first eMachines box is 10.1.10.10, the Dell is .11, and the second eMachines box is .12 The WAP and all three PCs are pointed to 10.1.10.1 for their gateway, which will be installed Monday.

Each PC is able to associate with the WAP and signal strength is excellent. All PCs are setup in the same Windows workgroup. No firewalls are running. NetBIOS over TCP/IP is enabled.

I was able to login and configure the WAP by connecting my laptop to its Ethernet port.

Problems:

1. None of the PCs can ping each other or the WAP.
2. The PCs cannot see each other in My Network Places, except that the Dell can see eMachines box #1, although not access its shared folders.
3. With my laptop connected to the WAP's Ethernet port, I can ping the WAP but none of the other PCs. Nor can any of the other PCs ping my laptop.
4. The wireless PCs cannot pull up the WAP's login page in a browser.

WTF? Will this not work until a hub/switch is connected to the WAP's Ethernet port?

Testing, testing

Over the course of this week I've been testing a new rev of firmware for our SMC 8013 gateways. These are the combination cable modem/router units that we use for our commercial customers. The updated firmware is supposed to fix some bugs found in earlier versions.

When we first testied on Tuesday and found that the DMZ feature was broken. There were a couple of other minor issues. So, back to SMC it went.

We got another rev yesterday afternoon and began testing once more. Things seemed to be going well. The problems we identified earlier this week were fixed. However, I discovered that the right kind of misconfiguration of the VPN termination feature can crash the box, with the only way to recover it is to use the factory reset button located on the back of the unit. Doing so returns the box to the default configuration. At this time we aren't enabling the VPN feature for most of our customers, although there are a few who are using it. So, we need to get it fixed before rolling it out.

On second thought, I won't upgrade the laptop

I posted the other day about possibly upgrading my Compaq Presario 710US. Upon further reflection, I decide it made more sense to replace Gondor, the trusty P3/733 that I built in 2000, and which remains my desktop PC at home.

Gondor will wind up replacing Rivendell, an ancient P2/300, as Judith's PC. I bought Rivendell from ASL way back in May of 1998. It came as a dual boot system with Red Hat 5.1 and Windows NT4 Workstation. The only major changes I've made to it in that time are doubling the RAM to 256 MB, adding an SMC wireless NIC, and redoing it as a Win98SE box for Judith (she wanted to run something or other than wouldn't work on NT4 or W2K). Hardware-wise, it's been solid as a rock, but it's really long in the tooth. I can redo Gondor with XP and it'll be fine for Judith's use -- web, email, light word processing. She ought to be able to get at least two more years from it.

Replacing Gondor as my main box will be a resurrected Bagend. It was originally built in 1999 as a P3/450. After I decided to host mail for building-tux.com onsite, it became my mail and fileserver running e-Smith. Then, about two years ago, it got zapped in a power surge which blew the motherboard and who knows what else. I was able to shift the hard disk into a scavenged Compaq Deskpro, do a little reconfiguration, and get mail.building-tux.com back up and running, and that's how it's been ever since. In the meantime, the rest of Bagend has been stuffed in my crawlspace.

I intend to pull Bagend out and strip out the motherboard and power supply. The floppy and CD-ROM drive may still be good, along with a case fan. Once it's gutted, the following components which I ordered tonight from Newegg are going in:

• Asus A7N8X-X Socket-A motherboard.
• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ "Barton" core CPU.
• Antec SL400 power supply.
• Asus Radeon 9200SE 128 MB video card.
• NEC 8x Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW drive.
• Maxtor 80 GB ATA-133 hard disk.
• 512 MB of Crucial PC3200 DDR RAM (one stick).

The OS will be SUSE Linux Professional, 9.1 for now, to be upgraded to 9.2 when it comes out in November.

If for some reason Bagend's case is not usable, I'll gut Rivendell instead and use it.

This is far from a high end system but it'll be a huge improvement over what I've got now, and should last me several years. I mainly use my desktop for web, email, remote system administration, and light use of OpenOffice.org. I should be able to run DOOM3 on it, though. :-)

While I was ordering the computer parts, I tacked on a Netgear FS108 8-port 10/100 switch to upgrade the core of my LAN. The LANMaster T12 10 meg hub I have is solid, but slow.

Now I know who to vote for. :-)

Democrats are tolerant (?)

I work at a Bush campaign office in SE PA and the stealing and destruction of signs here is so rampant that at least 6 out of 10 people that walk in our office are there to complain about and replace stolen signs. One family member of a staffer that is in a local union reported that at their last meeting they were each given Kerry signs and required to bring back and equal number of Bush signs.

From a thread on AR15.com.

It sure would explain why I see relatively few signs in Montgomery Country, which is very Republican.

Sounds like the "climate of fear" that Instapundit has mentioned several times recently.

And people think W is stupid?

More words of wisdom from President Numbnuts:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you the question about—this is going to cause some trouble with people—but as an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the War, insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?

CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.

Holy shit. WTF??? This is one of the most retarded things I've ever read. OF COURSE The Revolution would not have been necessary if Parliament and King George III had been more "sensitive" to the colonists' grievances. And if I was Catholic I could theoretically be the Pope.

Earth to Jimmy ... PARLIAMENT AND GEORGE III WEREN'T INTERESTED IN THE RIGHTS OF THE COLONISTS. As events really occurred (as opposed to Carter's fantasy), The Revolution was needed in order to protect the colonists' rights as Englishmen. The end result was that to protect those rights, it became...

necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them....

(Go read the whole Declaration of Independence here.)

As for "as free as Canada and India and Australia[?]" With all due respect to the residents of these countries, they all have far more socialist goverments than the US. By its very nature socialism is inimical to liberty. Socialist wealth redistribution schemes always require that the government take liberties from their subjects in order to accomplish their goals. Government power is the flip side of individual liberty. Nor do any of these countries have a Bill of Rights comparable with that of the US, which recognizes preexisting human rights not subject to the whims of society.

Finally, he's no historian if he thinks that The Revolution was our bloodiest conflict. It wasn't even close. Total number of American combat casualties in The Revolution was a bit less than 11,000. In the Civil War/War of Northern Aggression, Union combat casualties stood at about 635,000, plus about 335,000 for the CSA. In World War I we suffered around 320K casualties, with over one million in WW2. (Stats here.)

Mr. Carter, please go back to your peanut farm and STFU.

John Stewart on "Crossfire"

I'm not a John Stewart or "The Daily Show" fan, but Mr. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was something else. There's a transcript here. He really ripped into "Crossfire" in particular, and the major media in general, about the disservice they do to America with the way they cover politics.

Busy, busy, busy

Pardon the lack of posting around here since Friday. I've been busy.

On Saturday my partner and I wrapped up the big network cabling job that I previously mentioned. It's a total of 17 LAN drops, 17 4-line telephone drops, 4 single phone line drops, and one run of some coax for CATV. One multiline phone and one Ethernet drop need to be terminated, but we need to wait until a large piece of equipment is delivered. My client will be moving into the new office on October 30th, and we may need to wait until then to complete those two lines.

Yesterday I stayed home and watched Amanda and Alexandra, while Judith went out to take a break. G-d bless her, I don't know how she does it every day after school with both little ones. I couldn't. By dinner time last night I was fried.

Speaking of last night, I watched part one of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on SciFi. Part two is on tonight. Farscape was definitely one of the best science fiction shows ever to appear on TV and it's a shame it got cancelled. It's cool that they went ahead and made a little mini-series. I'd like to see the show revived.

This morning I had a meeting to go over a couple of DNS-related things over in Moorestown. It was the first time I'd been in Moorestown since I transferred to my new job three months ago, and it was nice to see some of my former coworkers. While over there I also did some research in response to a request from my boss's boss, with respect to definitions and expected ratification dates for various 802.11 wireless networking standards. I bailed out of there at about 1445 to make sure I'd beat rush hour traffic on the PA Turnpike.