Andy Harding's Blog

Failing Router and a FreeBSD Success

Andy Harding — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:37:32 +0000

The last few days have been quite interesting. I finally managed to get a GUI running on FreeBSD and also I have found I am now able to mount an NFS partition on my FreeNAS box. This had stopped working a while a go after upgrading FreeNAS, or so I thought. The switch section of my ADSL router finally gave up the ghost recently, so I switched back to am ADSL modem and separate switch unit. Not sure why I thought to try it but I tried mounting the NFSdrive and hey presto! it worked. Previously I thoght it mught be an version issue, but now I suspect that it was a problem with the switch part of the ol ADSL router, causing a bad time out during the NFS mount .

Upgrading Ubuntu

Andy Harding — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:45:24 +0000

Have just upgraded my proxy server vm (Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 lts.) The idea is to ultimately bring it up to 10.04 lts.

Change jaunty to karmic in /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Upgrades, Upgrades

Andy Harding — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:14:18 +0000

Well, yet again a Thunderbird upgrade has caused Lightning to stop working. Again it’s an issue with 64-bit. After some hunting I found the relevant 64-bit thunderbird 3.1 compatible xpi and one for gmail calendar link at
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b2/contrib/linux-x86_64. Now I need to update the gmail IMAP provider as well.

Upgrades, upgrades, upgrades!

Andy Harding — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:51:39 +0000

I recently did an upgrade using YAST, upgrading applications that had a newer version available. It’s something I like to do, probably about once a week and usually works well, but this last time Thunderbird was upgraded to 3.0.1 (from 3.0) and Lightning, the calendar app, stopped working and at the moment, there is no 64-bit compatible update for it.

This highlights an issue for applications that have community written add ons. Updates to these take a little longer to filter through to the consumer/user. But, when you come to rely on an application and its’ add on(s), when they break it becomes somewhat frustrating.

I like using Thunderbird and the calendar add-on is very useful, and I have come to rely on it. When this happen before, I installed Sunbird as a backup, but prefer the integration of mail and calendar applications. Another advantage of using Thunderbird, is that it is cross platform. There are Windows, Mac OS/X and (open/free/net)BSD versions.

This breakage is frustrating and annoying. Not only for the temporary lost of calendaring, but also because this may affect the view of open source software. Upgrades should not cause parts of the package to stop working, especially after a relatively minor upgrade. Going from version 2 to version 3 is one thing, but going from 3.0 to 3.0.1 surely should not cause problems!

Virtualisation failure with latest Linux kernel

Andy Harding — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:21:13 +0000

After successfully upgrading openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2, I found that VMWare server no longer worked. There are some suggestions on patching on the web, but none of them seems to work for my system.

The problem is with the latest kernel versions: 2.6.3x. VMWare Player is supposed to work with the latest versions, but the initial setup fails.

Virual box worked initially, but will only run 32-bit guest on my (4 year old) main system. Most, if not all of my virtual machines are 64-bit.

However, Xen works fine! But then, that’s actually based on the linux kernel.

I have a number of VM’s in vmdk (VMWare) format, as things were, I nolonger had access to them.

However, after a kernel upgrade (a minor one), vmware player now works.

I found this frustrating, and annoying. I have been using VMWare server for some time, but although free, is proprietary and commercial considerations may well be the core of the issue, with VMWare concentrating on their commercial products first. Now that VMWare Player 3.0 allows you to create new VM’s, I can use it instead of VMWare server. But XEN worked with the new kernel and is Open Source and for me there are a few issues with the interface and with proprietary video drivers.

So next major O/S upgrade, I need to check these pieces of software work before upgrading the main O/S, after all, the do require fundamental access to the kernel.

openSUSE 11.2

Andy Harding — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:19:15 +0000

For just over a week now, I have been openSUSE 11.2. This was a distro upgrade from 11.1. It was practiced twice (overkill perhaps) on two partitions on my main PC that had 11.1 installed.

The updgrades went very smoothly, the only issue was when I came to the last, and my main system. Thunderbird was upgraded to 3.0b4 which stopped lightning from working. Eventually I went back to Thunderbird 2 to restore the calender.

Effectively, this upgrade went as smooth as when I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.04 about a month ago. But that was done through the graphical package manger, where as with openSUSE, I chose to use the command line and zypper.

Laptop Wireless Success

Andy Harding — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:39:09 +0000

This week I have finally managed to get an ancient Compaq Armada Laptop working wirelessly using WPA. It had worked on WEP, but I wanted something more secure. Originally it had been running DSL (Damn Small Linux) which allowed a WEP connection, but getting WPA to work was much more of a problem.

After having install Puppy Linux on an old HP Brio, and being quite satisfied with that, I decided to install Puppy Linux 2.4.1 on the laptop. This allowed me to get wireless networking working on it using WPA with little effort.

Now, I can have the Test scores updated automatically in the lounge, while listening to Test Match Special on the radio (that’s on long wave!)

Hello world!

Andy Harding — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:11:31 +0000

The blogosphere now awaits! Oh! If only I could think of something erudite and pithy to say!