PowerShot S2 IS in Linux

I have a Canon S2 IS camera. It is a mid-level camera which I am happy with. In my resent family migration to full throttle Linux this past month; I have been the only one to have fired up XP one time to access pictures from this camera. Back in Fedora Core 6 and I think even up to resent kernel updates, I was able to mount my camera. The PowerShot S2 is not a mass storage device so you can’t just mount it to get the pictures. Instead it uses the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP).

Evidently hotplug has been pretty much replaced by udev in modern Linux distros now. Up to now I only heard the term udev but had no idea old or new it was nor what it did. Once upon a time Linux used a static list of devices under /dev. Today everyone is connecting and disconnecting devices with USB, Firewire, and Bluetooth and static /dev alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. Dynamic udev to the rescue!

Wikipedia excerpt:

udev is the device manager for the Linux 2.6 kernel series. Its primary function is managing device nodes in /dev. It is the successor of devfs and hotplug, which means that it handles the /dev directory and all user space actions when adding/removing devices, including firmware load.

Who the fdisk?

Found another cool time saver tip. For me I find myself looking for partition mount points. So I usually do:

fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4982.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 523 4096575 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 524 778 2048287+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 779 4982 33768630 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 779 909 1052226 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 910 4982 32716341 8e Linux LVM

I would do this for all drives, or if I didn’t know what device, I could run through the alphabet. Most recently I was searching for a USB thumb drive I just plugged in. So here is my time saver tip just learned today:

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 523 4096575 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 524 778 2048287+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 779 4982 33768630 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 779 909 1052226 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 910 4982 32716341 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdb: 30.0 GB, 30000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3647 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 3647 29294496 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdc: 20.4 GB, 20409532416 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 39546 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 1 39546 19931152+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdd: 22.5 GB, 22527590400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2738 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 * 1 2738 21992953+ 8e Linux LVM

Looky looky, all my drives that make up my boxtop backup server. Will have to post the pic of that here soon.

SORBS Bites Me Back

Last weekend I finally got around to putting my latest major hardware purchase into production. I got one of these SolidLogic GS-L02 Fanless Mini-ITX Systems. I called in my order to have it customized with the same hardware they used in one of their earlier firewalls with two nics and m0n0wall. I ordered mine without m0n0wall installed and added a 300GB hard drive instead of their flash disk. If I would have done more research, I would have found that only a i586 kernel could be installed with this vio processor. Hence no 2.6.x kernel. Not a problem as I was planning to install SmoothWall Express 2.0 which uses a 2.4.x kernel. It’s a sweet system using low power and the only sound is the hard drive motor and disk writes. One advantage of this system is it’s lack of tempting buttons to push by kids. That came with a problem however. Doing a ‘halt’, ‘shutdown’ or ‘reboot’ would power it down for good. Applying the power does not bring it back up. I had to open it up and short a couple pins to get it back on. After forgetting this a few times I went out and got a very tiny push button switch from RadioShack and mounted it under the AC jack. So I digress.

The move to a new firewall means a different nic/mac address to my ISP therefore I get a different dynamic IP address. My personal domain is hosted by another ISP but I have full control of setting it up for email and web services. I use it as my default SMTP but have to use a different port than the normal SMTP 25 as my ISP filters them to keep people from abusing and being abused by spammers.

My current email server runs Postfix, SpamAssassin, and MailScanner with ClamAV. (I’m lazy, forgive me for not linking all those.) I have tuned my MailScanner setting to check for spammers against SORBS-DNSBL, SBL+XBL, and ORDB-RBL lists. Lately I have tightened the grip by calling email spam if the sender is listed on even one of these lists. Low graded spam is forwarded to me and high spam gets dumped into another account I use for Bayesian filter training in Thunderbird. Missed spam can also get tagged and a cron-job picks it back up later in the day to train SpamAssassin’s Bayesian filter.

I installed the firewall last weekend and all is running well and smooth. Then on Monday my wife emails several people and I get a copy assuming I was one of the recipients not thinking much of it. Then on Thursday she emails directly to someone and I notice it tagged as Spam. My first thought is that I caused this by over training with some of the latest ‘pump-n-dump’ spam designed to poison Bayes filters. So I quickly retrain SpamAssassin and have her try again but it comes to me again as spam.

So what could it be? The only thing I did was change the firewall. I later discovered the current IP I was assigned was listed on SORBS and possibly other RBL lists. I assumed my previous IP was listed too so this wasn’t my initial conclusion of being the problem but the old IP was not listed. My initial thought for fixing this was to re-write the headers in order to get mail out but I needed to step one square back and understand that it was my server rejecting even tho I use SMTPAUTH to avoid relay rejection. To fix this problem I had to add my IP to the spam.whitelist.rules that MailScanner reads.

In conclusion: My email server started rejecting my own email due to the change of my connecting IP address which is listed in the SORBS database. This was resolved by adding my IP to the MailScanner whitelist.

Vaio Wrestling

I somehow got “voluntwisted” into fixing a coworkers Sony laptop. Well okay maybe it was my own doing. I love to recover data from presumed dead hard drives. His had been dead and powered up for so long, I presumed it was toast like so many laptop drives usually are. Much to my surprise it was mountable using an old Live Knoppix disk. So I simply plugged in my USB drive and with MC I did mass copies to it. Since it was a bad disk it did take about 8 hours to move about 2GB of data (music and pictures).

So next the coworker produced a replacement drive. One dilemma though… he didn’t have his recovery CD’s since he just moved here and having a tough time finding anything really. So I thought I’d try using my home Dell PC. OEM CD’s tend to require you to use their own hardware to do the installs so my XP Home disk would have to be installed using my PC. Ordered a laptop to IDE converter from RadioShack online; as they don’t carry them in the stores. All is well. Got that installed and next I plopped it back in the Sony. No go. CRAP! It’s an AMD. I used an Intel PC not to mention possible disk parameter differences. Back to the drawing board.

Now the coworker produces the CD’s! Well actually he produced them before I put the drive back in the laptop, but I already had finished the install with all the updates and transferred his data in at that point. They would be handy I’m sure.

So I booted up with the Vaio System Recovery Utility CD and get some dll sys file error. Doing a little research on the exact code I find other related pointing at the RAM. Others had simply re-socketed it but that did not fix my problem. I have an old copy of W2KPro so I stuck that on in hopes to prove the drive was ok and the CD drive was working fine. I attempted to copy the Recovery CD’s to the drive and it failed to read. So the disk is bad? I put the laptop drive back in my Dell PC and boot with the Recovery CD and it read fine but soon failed with a “blue screen of death”. Most likely because it wasn’t Sony hardware. Back to the drawing board again.

So I have a faulty CD drive, Original Sony Recovery disks, and no way to get it going.

Next I used the Live Gparted CD and smacked it clean. I created a small 2GB FAT32 partition and the rest NTFS. Using my USB DVD drive I copied the Recovery disks to the FAT partition and set it with a boot flag. Tried to boot but it complains it can’t find a bootable OS. CRAP! Something I’m missing about the way CD’s are bootable I’m sure. BTW, this is new enough P4 but can’t boot from USB. I have since re-partitioned and re-formatted using Gparted and re-installed W2KPro and find that it fails to boot on the first reboot after installing to the Gparted NTFS. So make a mental note of this. BTW letting the installer do the format (which takes a good hour or two!) proves the Gparted NTFS is not perfect.

So what is next? Running out of options. I found a retail version (I believe) XP Home CD but doubt it’s English. I guess I need to call Sony to see what they have to offer.

The Match is Over

This afternoon I went in search of speaking to a Sony support tech. and found they have chat support. The first guy read my request and promptly forwarded it on to another. Then the java based chat seemed to wig out on me so I had to kill Firefox and try again. This time I got a third guy and I noticed the exact same canned greeting and responses. Even the reply to some questions seemed robotic. Saying “no I don’t have the laptop with me” prompted a “Sorry about that” response.

My goal in talking with them was to find out if there was an alternative to using the boot CD. Hoping maybe there was a floppy alternate. Also to find out if the non working CD required the hidden Sony partition or not. None of which I believe the techs understood. This is a bit goofy too: the hours are from 8am to 3am EST. Why not just be 24/7?

This evening I couldn’t help but to try booting the OEM disk again to no avail. I guess if anything just to record the exact error messages this time. One think the tech mentioned; and pissed me off about was his suggestion to “purchase” the CD’s. As if I didn’t already tell him I have the CD’s already. But this got me to think “maybe I’ll just recreate them”. Using Linux of course and ‘dd if=/dev/cdrom of=vaio-cd1.iso’. Then burn the iso to CD-R. BINGO! That did the trick but not without a last jab back at me. I didn’t have to create all CD’s; just the first one. After finishing the installation, the reboot fails to just a black screen and a blinking cursor. No error or drive activity. Then I remember there was an option to do it custom or more advanced options method. After peeking at the partitioning using Gparted, I noticed the same scheme I previously set possibly untouched. So the second install I chose the custom method which let me choose partition size control and this time I stuck it to the mat.

Stranger Here

Yes it has been weighing on me that I have not posted is a long while. Thoughts of even giving it up came to mind. I think it is the thought of needing to fill in the gap in a huge effort to catch up. That is just not going to happen tho.

I have been trying to get a raise the past couple months. Seems I may have met my challenge in proving my worthiness. Also just that thought of having to prove myself may not be the point and that my boss may have a different idea of what I am worth to him. IMHO, he doesn’t reward based on your efforts but by your loyalty and social status. May be a sad mis-diagnosis of a fellow Christian… I know. However I will not stand down without a stiff answer. Seems as if business has kept us from meeting since my initial inquiry. That and the lack of courage and preparedness. So I suck!

I’m hoping that we will once and forever lose Made2Manage. The latest stunt is a stiff price for doing our customization. Somewhere about $67k and the kicker is the no liability warranty sticker to go with it! For just a bit more… $87k we can go with a much better IMO, ERP package called Abas. This includes our training, customization, setup, installation, and product. This is a German company and has thoroughly impressed me. Problem is I found this company without much effort. This may be bad based on the lack of research into other companies. My search was narrowed by Linux requirements tho. The next bet was an OpenSource project, but I just didn’t want to back it. If I had a team of supporters here in the office it would be different.

Serving at the church has been picking up too! I am now a “Small Group Connector” who finds a group for individuals looking for Community Groups or Men’s Breakfast/Mentoring groups and such. I also have been helping out with a ToolBox project with the church website. Won’t be helping too much with this as they insist on using Microsoft products. So they are mostly interested in my direction I guess. The other thing is I have been meeting with two mentors quite regularly. Doing some workgroup type studies including some memory verse practice. I also have been helping out with Wednesday evening 4th grader classes. Tonight I have them by myself as the main teacher is out of town. I’m hopping next year I will have my own class. I like the 4th grade too. Not interested in moving up with my class. Still seeking an answer from the Lord on what to do about helping out with Summer Camp next month. It is looking more and more in favor tho!

I have been working on my old hard drive once again. I had been playing with some new partitioning tools from various CDs and ended up using the old standby fdisk for Linux. The trouble had been creating the same partitioning scheme I had written down at the time it was working. I have since figured out how to do this but also figured out a more damaging concept that may be the last straw… c/h/s. Cylinder/Heads/Sectors geometry. Seems I even documented this in the working stage before I doused it. What I wrote down was not the manufacture geometry shown on this drive. So I assume the geometry was changed about three times in the midst of all this. Testing on the documented and recommended geometries didn’t work. What doesn’t work is that I can’t mount the drive. It won’t recognize the system file type. This has not been formatted since either so there may be some extra levels I just don’t comprehend about it needing it. IMO that would be the last straw… in a sense wiping the drive.

This week I have tightened the noose on the spammers. I have been building a blacklisted.rules file that is now up to about 200 IPs and networks that have been blacklisted. With the rampant viruses and spyware out, this is a difficult task. Mutation through the networks seems to be never ending.

3 More Days

Our church sent out requests for ppl interested in meeting with new members to help direct them into community groups. It turned out that I was talking with our receptionist about getting into a group of singles, even to just look around outside her church. She is such a nice gal that I think she needs a companion and I suggested finding one at a church rather the bar scene. So I mentioned it to the gal in an email in response to her email request from the church. She emailed me back promptly to inform me about the resources on the church website that I already knew of. Yesterday she calls me here at work and wants to meet with me to find my commitment level and to plan out this people broker deal. It is so ironic about this and the men’s mentoring ministry needing people brokers as well.

I plan to meet at the church this afternoon. I like to plan a visit with the IT ppl there after such meetings. Seems as if I do quite often! I entertained Keven the IT guy with a change in the audio streaming of the sermons online. Currently they are RealAudio and hosted off site. So he uses a ram file to redirect to it thus making it confusing for the average user to try downloading them for later user or even for burning to CD. So I suggested using mp3 or ogg formats. Of course we would keep the ra files until we get good stats in to gauge their usage. I’m hoping this works out because I so desperately want to be helping out with something computer related for the church.

What have I been up to all week? Let’s see… Friday I got the PC installed at the bosses house in the evening. Had to run to pick up my daughter from a birthday party then back to the bosses house again to finish up. She enjoyed running around their house with me. Yes running! They weren’t home so we got to have a little fun. Monday I got two more Linksys WMP11 cards and a surge protector for the bosses house. Then back out there to install the protector and also took some cable tamer tubes to cover the gaudy wires under the desks. Before going out there me and my friend Scott met at another friends new office for his Mac business. I referred him to my bosses wife as she is interested in getting a Mac. Also spent some time at another friends computer business. Looking to buy a couple Athalon PCs from him. So I was out of the office most of the day Monday. Spring fever I suppose. Tuesday I stayed put in my office just tinkering around with odds and ends cleaning up a bit. Today I have been doing about the same and making plans to upgrade our payroll system just getting familiar with the major jump in the version. Gotta play it safe you know.

Got my MySQL Cookbook in today! There were two extra surprises in the box too. Linux Server Hacks and Running Linux 4th Edition. I ordered Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell for my brother last week online. This shipment was for placing a banner ad on our local LUG site for OReilly books. So I have a couple extra books to hand out at the next LUG meeting I guess!

More Hodge Podge Topics

Not a good start this morning. Didn’t even finish shaving this morning before my computer trouble found me! Kassie had trouble booting up the home PC. We have a Dell 2350 with a 15″ flat panel and a add in NIC and add in graphics card. Sometimes that on-board stuff is just crap! The on-board video couldn’t handle high end colors and resolution even in Windows. The on-board NIC kept freaking out in Linux causing me to restart the network to repair. All that got very tiring. So I looked at the Windows updates manually last night and saw a video driver was available. Installed and reboot… into Linux then and wrote yesterdays post and shutdown for the evening. So this morning as Kassie boots up, Windows sat at a black screen. I remove the driver in safe mode but upon entering normal mode again it reinstalled and instantly brought the PC to a crawl. 10 to 8AM and I just couldn’t wait to fix it. So no games for the kids today. However Linux is running just fine. Kassie hadn’t been in her profile for quite some time now. But I did see she had done some emailings. So this evening maybe I can get to that turtle and rip out the hotfix. If not then I’ll have to just reinstall the other drivers once again to override it.

Today at work… The banner ad cleanup seems to be working fair. Nobody has come complaining to me yet. I have seen a few blank spots on pages where the ad should have been but some of these folks need about a week to figure that something was wrong.

Looks like I’m going to get bumped down to #9 in the Gallery forum. Paour is firing off messages like a mad man! He has just released a major release for the Gallery Remote and of course, the trouble tickets come roaring in. I haven’t been in that arena for a bit. My last glitches were proven to be too much for me to debug with him.

I got on an online chat panel with Linksys this afternoon. Trying to troubleshoot the dang wireless access point. This gal didn’t provide a lick of knowledge on the the topic. All she could offer is restart the AP. Or can you ping it? I ended up changing it to use no WEP and it works. I did find that the authentication method had to be set to “both” as in open and (I assume) shared. Seems setting it to either one of those would not work. In that event of turning off WEP I had to re-enter the new keys and noticed key one was different. I should have known. Some how it was buggered up and that was probably it. But as usual around here… nothing ever goes without something else breaking. The QC dept. PC now connects to the secure AP but not after a reboot. So in attempts to go back to the insecure AP I can not get it to connect there at all now. I wrote a note to leave the PC powered one with it working on the secure network. Another priority job to tackle I guess.

The boss is leaving again tomorrow so I need to sync up his “My Documents”. This proves to be a slow and tedious task. I tried using rsync but then I would need to mount both PC’s and that proved to be another stumbling block. Cant seem to mount the damn XP laptop! I’m sure I had this idea once before, but I don’t recall what part I stumbled on. Transferring via MS Networking between XP and 2000 also proves to be tedious. Seems MS had a patch that screwed up network performance.

I just might not get to the home PC. I have church this evening and then a mens mentoring meeting afterword. That should be odd. Guys can’t do much before the comfort level increases. I have a feeling the place will be packed with guys who want to mentor rather be mentored. Well we all need some level of mentoring… it’s just a matter of pride I guess.

Who’s DOSing Me Now?

Finally getting around to posting today. Was meaning to do all kinds of things the past couple days but time keeps slipping by.

Loading up my usual tabs in Mozilla, I noticed my family photo gallery site was running rather slow. Then I notice that there was 8 guests on the site! My poor little server! The load was rather low tho around 0.37 at times. It was my upload on the cable modem that was the bottleneck. Turns out that some web forum was on to a couple of my photos of the World Trade Center and Baghdad. They were not my photos for sure… I had run into them while carousing through someone’s FTP site. One is 14MB and the other is 16MB. The density of the 14MB photo of the WTC is rather packed. It takes a good CPU to process this size of image. So this forum post was mostly about how their computers either gulped it up or died in the process. Some did complain about how slow it was not really knowing it was from a cable modem. They wrote it off to all of them hitting at once. There was easier ways of finding who the referrence was but I just noticed a ref when I was tailing the access log. So I jumped on their forum and posted a question as to “where the heck did you find these photos?” The poster responded that he noticed it from another forum. They were all rather nice folks… a DSL forum from the UK. The easier less fun way I found the original forum was form the httprefs log from the PostNuke CMS I use. This turns out less posts but more hits. Actually I should recalculate. The second forum seemed to pop in with several different ref pages so I would have to say today’s did make a bigger presence. The first forum hits came yesterday. I didn’t even notice. The fun part was that I discover that the guy who posted the original post yesterday happens to live here in Billings! Now I did show this at our last LUG meeting in January or maybe December. This guy had a birthday on January 14th turning 18. I only know one guy who could have been there but it seemed rather strange from the quality of his posts. Seemed to be Windows type questions and this guy is a hard core Linux guy. So I hesitate to place my bets on him. Will have to update later.

This same guy showed us a cool thing to do with SAMBA clients; smbclient -M . I was going to email him to ask what that was but another friend I had been talking with for most of the day via ysm (ICQ) informed me. What this does after executing the command is lets you type a message then ctrl-d to end and send to a Windows PC. So I popped one off to our receptionist and said “I know what you did last summer!” She immediately ran over knowing it was me since it does say who it was from. She thought it was pretty funny. So I sent the same to our backup receptionist only I added “All your bases are belong to us!” She didn’t respond much to that. However after I confessed, our receptionist remembered that phrase when they both started work there. I sent a couple test faxes to our main fax machine via fax software. The former receptionist seemed a little frazzled so I didn’t want to freak them out too bad. Anyway the receptionist caught onto it and I fessed up to that. So now they probably think I’m really some kind of hack prankster.

Earlier in the day I had been bouncing back and forth between a few projects that for the life of me don’t know what kept me going back and forth. I was troubleshooting that Quickbooks deal and trying to get the wireless connection on the secure AP working. Also trying to get this Orinoco antennae converted to use a SMA connector. I first needed to figure which of the hundreds of connectors I needed. Not sure that will be too easy since I’m sure it will require a special order and some way to crimp it. I think I’ll just get another Linksys card. They seem to have bigger antennae. The Quickbooks deal may be at an end sadly. The install to my bosses laptop failed too. So this means the data is messed up. So unless I can get it wittled down to something like the last 6 months of data, I don’t know if I can help much. However I did find that a new CD for his broken 2003 version could be replaced for $20. I also found some error logs that showed more detail about what errors were repaired during the upgrade. None however show failed attempts to fix the data. Like most of the day went, this paragraph is depicting how I bounced around so much. The wireless AP WEP I had been using before was incomplete. I am male! It was right in from of me when I wrote it down the first time. The dang thing was word wrapped! Who would ever think they would word wrap a 26 double digit form box screen? Linksys.

Well it seems another new virus hit today. Got the first couple form the Boulder LUG list then later they started coming into the company system. Our scanner calls it Worm.YoursID but Symantec calls it by several names W32.Beagle.B@mm mainly. This one seems rather wicked for forging addresses like I have ever seen so not sure what it’s purpose is yet. My guess is that this one was poorly written because they have less random points. You can ban about 4 domains and a handful of known attachments.

Getting Back to Normal

Life is getting back to normal. Had a great weekend. Most ppl might not think it was so great. But knowing how good it had been, my family is getting back to its better days again! I do need to get out of my dead-beat Sundays. The past few weeks I have neglected to shower, shave, or brush my teeth on Sundays. Just hanging around the house in my pj’s or previous days clothing. Total laziness! Of course the kids get that way too, but they do that even on the weekdays.

Worked on a friends PC Saturday most of the day. Didn’t need the bootleg Quickbooks CD after all. Turns out his 2004 CD is a full version. I thought this might be an easy one and just uninstall, clean up the directory and reinstall a fresh copy. He did have a working 2003 version on another PC and I got his backed up data restored into this so he at least has that as his backup. There was some bad data integrity found and fixed. I also attempted to condense the data that stretched back to 1998 or so! That was the kicker that took most of the day. But even with the fixed data 2004 wold not work. So I need to do some online forum chatting to find another solution. I also plan to barrow another XP box to test on. Seems he may have had some Windows updates needing to be done as well. However he being on dial-up left me setting it up and leaving for the day.

The bosses 21″ CRT monitor started making strange flickering a couple times this morning. Turns out we got his PC in December of 2000. I think it just went out of warranty. It had an extended warranty even. So a replacement is looking like $450-500. So I talked him into getting a flat panel and putting his PC upright on the floor. Suggesting a 17″ for about $430-450 he opted for a 19″ at $680! Sometimes I think he just waits for others to suggest getting things fixed or upgraded before he does something for himself. He has this old crappy cheap office chair and the arms were all broken up. He finally went out to get a new one and it turned out something was wrong with it. So he returned it and our purchaser ordered a replacement arm for the chair. I assume it was free as they probably send this stuff out as missing parts all the time. So he still has this crappy chair! Don’t know how he does things at home. I think his wife must handle all that kind of detail. It wouldn’t fly with her! Maybe this is a humbling part I need to learn.

Bresnan came with the new cable modem. So I had to run over and get the server refreshed with this. The guy that set it up said he was able to register it with them. But he seemed to insist that I needed to reboot. After I couldn’t get my Linux server to connect outside I humoured him and restarted the server. Still not connecting. By this time another tech came and had me point the browser to their modem and I went through their registration process and all was well. So I’m guessing that there might be some time-out issue that occurs after registering you need to have a connection process happen. Although I have no idea what he did while I was driving over. So now I have USA Digitals cable modem and called their corp. office up to check for any history on them ever replacing our modem. Turns out this is the third modem they have ever registered for us. Now I just hope they will be honest about identifying one of those other two MAC addresses as not theirs. I don’t think we need one anyway, but I just don’t like being ripped off any more. The lesson learned now is that you either be present at all times of tech services or write down all your serial numbers when you purchase these types of equipment. After a couple calls back and forth with USA Digital, we have come to a conclusion! It seems that modem models ending in “R” are retail models. It just so happens that the one we have does have the “R”. A call back later and they concede it must be ours then. Hey at least they had been pretty honest the whole time and not trying to be evil. They probably now have a task at hand to get a db going on their units vs. customer units.

Spent the afternoon creating DNS records for several known big ad trackers such as doubleclick.net and fastclick.net. The zones I have created now point to the machines themselves. By that I mean they point to themselves instead of the real site. Seems to be working. Will have to make sure no error logs are filling up somewhere tho later tomorrow.

The True Meaning of Friday the 13th

Our ISP OneEighty Communications has had major problems with their service since yesterday. When I called, they seemed to have an idea of what it might be and were on it. Today they had no clue yet. I was going to be bummed if I couldn’t post today! Anyway they seem to have it under control now just before noon. Almost seems faster than before too.

Now the QC wireless isn’t connecting properly. I’m thinking it might be an incompatibility issue. Looking into the driver/firmware versions. So It can still connect to the farther but open AP.

First thing this morning at work I had two users with no connection to the AS-400. I used to see this once in a while and just had to recreate their profile for the connection. Luckily I didn’t forget to try that and it worked fine for both. Seems to have been sparked by some administrative duties my coworker was performing to eliminate extra sessions that were laying around. Will have to keep that in mind next time it happens.

Got the dual VCR/DVD unit set up at home now. Haven’t tested any media out yet but was just configuring it for channels and date/time. Seems that it can get the date/time automatically via broadcast from local channels. It didn’t set over night so I just set it manually this morning.

Put the UPS in-line. Seems that one of my plugs on the wall is a little loose and the battery kept kicking in so I moved it to the bottom plug and all is well. Must be a short. Also played with the Seagate tape drive. I recalled working on it once before. Seems that it fails to turn the tape. The only tape motion is by the rubber wheels tugging it but who knows. I’m going to check if they might repair it for a descent price. They are worth about $150. Who knows, maybe I’ll buy it from the company for my home server.

Wow the USA Digital techs came already this morning to pick up their antennae. I think they planned to take their modem as well but I got the manager trained well to call me about everything. I told them to hold off taking it because I wanted to investigate the possibility that they may have taken ours during one of many service calls.