After a few weeks of use - I can confirm my wireless works well by just starting wp-supplicant. No constant restarting and removing/radding of modules hoping to get a use-able speed. The speed can sometimes be a bit poor - but at least its use-able and doesn’t hinder unless transferring large files.
Well I must take part of my last post back - it would appear the reason Rockbox was struggling was due to some corrupt files. I would still be nice if it could handle them slightly better and not caus playlist confusion - but now I know the reason behind it at least.
The problems I have been having seem to be due to playlist corruption and nothing else. I may try another upgrade and see if this is fixed. As I am currently using small playlists this hasn’t been a real problem for the past few weeks.
Another plus point I have discovered is it plays mp2 - the same format as Radio Stations I record over dvb-t (freeview) are recorded in.
Yes once again I have to go through the pain of WPA/IPW2200/Debian/Kernel problems. Given that I have a laptop I wanted more laptop like features on my system - so I kernel upgrade was needed.
Currently using:
Kernel 2.6.14
-Wireless Extension v19.
Debian Etch + Extra apt sources
wpa_supplicant v0.4.7
Wireless-Tools version 28
The problem this time is that I needed to change some of the options for wpa_supplicant. No longer does it work with the ipw drivers but the wext drivers
/etc/default/wpasupplicant now reads:
ENABLED=1
OPTIONS=” -D wext -ddd -i eth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf”
It works for now, but a new kernel compile is needed as the laptop doesn’t powerdown on shutdown at present. So may be yet another upgrade needed to get wireless working again.
I’ve decided to give Rockbox a test on my iRiver H300.
Initial impressions are good - the GUI is more responsive and playback is good. I like the replay gain feature and the crossfade looks promising (it sometimes produces some pops/click when switching between songs of different codecs at the moment). The upgrade was easy to do, patch the current firmware (can be done using a windows gui tool under wine), upgrade as normal and then drop the files onto the machine. To upgrade rockbox you just have to replaced the files on the players hd with the newer ones - no more firmware to upgrades.
The plugins are good too, and the quality of the picture viewer seems better than the iRiver one (at least for non-optimised pics). The only thing it misses is video, but I can drop back to the normal firmware if needed.
I’m using an experimental build - so some of the bugs may be due to this
See Misticriver for the firmware
Pro
+Superfast boot up
+More info
+Skinable
+Quicker GUI
+More Options
+ReplayGain
Cons
-Some features a bit buggy
-Battery life isn’t as good (may be due to some of the options I’m using)
To summarise: I haven’t used the built in firmware for the past two weeks, so well I think its good.
Had something interesting occur it work. We were trying to free up space on the server that stores My Documents (in desperation), removing large files which were obviously not work related, and compressing some of the un-used large files that were work related. Unfortunately I forgot to hold down shift and sent a couple of items to the recycle bin. I then remembered I arrange to fix a job, about 5 mins ago - so locked my computer and dashed out to fix said job.
When I cam back Microsoft file search was still going but showing thousands of copies of one these silly name the item thing. I tried to delete them but couldn’t. Tried to open them - couldn’t. Opened the folder and the file was there, tried to open and delete said item but couldn’t. I then took a look at the location and it dawned on me.
In Microsoft infinite wisdom when you open the actual folder contain the recycle bin items, it does some background trickery and shows no matter who’s recycle bin you look at the content of you’re own (unless using commands line etc). It seems this also applies to search for files. As nearly all our users have recycle bins it had searched them (and looked in mine) found this file and shown it up, thinking that it was contained in this folder.
It had ruined my search, so I ended up emptying my recycle bin and starting the long search process again.
Wireless on Linux sucks. It seems everytime one little bit in the chain of programs, firmware and drivers changes I lose WPA capabilities. In fact currently Debian, IPW2000 and wpa_supplicent don’t work together, and apparently this happens on a number of other distributions.
I have got it working, but I used a custom 2.6.12 Kernel (the debian one doesn’t quite agree with all the stuff on my laptop), and compiled and installed ieee80211-1.0.2 from source, then compiled ipw2200-1.0.6 from source and it works! Well for now. Just in case its important the version of WPA_Supplicant I’m running is 0.4.6.
Time to see how long it lasts this time……..
(Oh and by it works means that most of the time it loads in the right order and works - sometime it loads in the wrong order so it ends up been eth2 and not eth1, other times I need to remove and re-add the ipw2200 module for things to work)
Well ok it didn’t brake them, just upset them a little bit.
It appears after someone other Hospital installed SMS to our new domain at forest level, and didn’t enter in any boundaries, nor exclude servers SMS has ended up on all of the new Citrix serves.
This wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t for the fact it’s made logon/logoff synchronise - so you have to que to login, hence some very mysterious pauses in the while process. The usuall debugging tricks didn’t help either. It took a trip to the citrix website and a search of the forums to come up with a couple of MS article on the problem (this affects plan Terminal Services servers too….)
What I have tried is to upgrade the client to the latest version and the home the dam thing to our own system so it won’t slow it down network wise (its on a neighbouring switch - one of them connects to the gig link on the other at present, on the same vlan). Plus it appears to have stopped queuing logons/logoff and just gets on with them. Either that or the client isn’t active enough. I’ll just have to keep an eye on them for when they restart.
So remember when pushing out SMS clients on big multi domained networks - define boundaries before pushing the bloody clients out - and don’t give the bugger rights to everyone in the forest if that isn’t what you want. Oh and defiantly don’t install them on servers without checking on any performance hits or operational differences it may cause.
Just got myself an MGE Pulsar Evolution 1100 UPS. Well not all features appear to be supported in Linux (although as yet I don’t have a use for them even if they did work), things are looking promising with them relasing a bunch of linux stuff (inlcuding a pakage repositry for both debian and Ubuntu, and they appear to be helping with NUT (network ups tools) Project too.
Plus its the same colour as my computer case and fits under my desk , while been pretty cheap.
The software (for the moment) does the basics and not much more. Tells you roughly how much time is left on the UPS, the status and current load + battery charge. It also shutsdown the computer - although I have yet to test if this works (might do this later in this week).
No really history as yet - but there is a script for cacti, so I have got history that way 
.
I’ve just found out how effective sa-learn is at keeping out spam emails. Over the last week or so the number of spams reaching my mailbox was starting to reach stupid levels and once more outstripping the number of real mails to the point I was missing real emails for the spam.
A little digging around my system (and a read of all them emails cron sends me which get dumped to a folder which empties it self every so often) relived that due to a permissions change on my spam folder (I delete the entire thing caus my mailsever ran out of space and I was in a hurry) sa-learn could no longer do its job. A quick (well slow - it had to process about 2000 odd emails) run of sa-learn and my spam level is back to slightly above the usual levels, and that should hopefully drop as I feed more emails into se-learn.
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