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February 28 Installing Ubuntu from PXE / Network BootI decided to get an old Toshiba laptop without CD or Floppy back up and running again. It can do USB-Floppy boot – but that is so messy. Decided to use Tosh’s BIOS support for PXE boot instead. On the Tosh you can press F12 or configure in BIOS to network boot. Network boot uses a system called PXE (Preboot EXecution Environment) which is a configured combination of DHCP and TFTP servers to publish boot images on a network. I’ve got a handful of machines running various operating systems combined with a WRT54G already running DHCP on the network. I decided use my Vista desktop on the basis of a decent keyboard and monitor to use while researching how to do it. Ubuntu Netboot Install While in the past it has been a PITA to create a network build for any Linux install, every Ubuntu build now has an equivalent netboot. Get the Ubuntu Intrepid version here…
Copy this whole directory and subdirectories. Configuring TFTP and DHCP The shortest path to get to a working DHCP and TFTP installation for Windows is probably Philippe Jounin's TFTPD32 program. I left the DHCP service running on the network router – though they’d tussle a little, only one would have a TFTP resolution. Took only a short while to setup the DHCP pool -but I ran into a wierd issue where the MAC address 46-46-3A-46-46-3A was stealing all the addresses in the pool. DHCP Server tab showed all addresses allocated to the same MAC address, and Syslog showed that it saw the booting machine’s DHCP/PXE discovery ping, but there were no addresses to assign. Unchecking “Ping Address before assignment” appeared to resolve that issue. I set the base directory to the location where I downloaded the netboot files, the rest of the settings were configured as follows:
With the allocation problem resolved the netboot process worked a charm – Ubuntu started installed. October 01 MYSQL x64 + Rails issue.Been playing around with OS/X, Ruby on Rails and recently installed Activestate Komodo - but ran into a crazy issue where mongrel choked on the 1st request. dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _mysql_init Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Expected in: dynamic lookup dyld: Symbol not found: _mysql_init Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Expected in: dynamic lookup Reading around on the web, plenty of folk had encountered the error. Lots of search hits out there. Originally found Benjamin's Post on his steps to cure the issue. (diagnosed that the bundle was built with the wrong CPU architecture) I couldn't get the ARCHFLAG environment variable to work with gem however. Turned out the problem was much simpler to solve tho'.Careful examination of the error message and the comparison with the gem directory showed a duplicate version of the mysql.bundle in: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/ Was toying with rebuilding the whole gem from scratch when I stumbled across Leonardo's blog post on the subject. Deleting this bundle restored status quo - thanks Leonardo! June 02 Installing Windows Server 2008 on Santa Rosa Macbook ProLog of installing Windows Server 2008 onto my new Macbook
Installation was surprisingly painless. Looking forward to trying to boot partition from VMWare Fusion October 31 Ladies and Gents - Check your security...While reading a Mac site about the recent Leopard launch I noticed an interesting comment - paraphrased "oddly Leopard turned off my firewall during upgrade"
I went and checked the state of my firewall too - equally oddly after upgrade my firewall was silently disabled too (this was definitely enabled prior to upgrade).
"Mac zealot" naysayers could leap in here and call it unnecessary - it call it defense in depth against possible exploits on public networks like WiFi nodes.
Bad job Apple... October 29 First Few Hours LeopardBraindump after a few hours playing around with Leopard .
October 28 Apple OutlayPrepping for my tour of Spain next week, I took another drive by the Apple store today. I wanted to buy a new MP3 player to replace the 4Gb Sansa that my daughter shanghai'd. I'd seen the new Nanos quite a few times but couldn't resist getting a new IPod Touch 16Gb instead. Naturally, the friction against buying was somewhat reduced when the checkbook was already open, so I couldn't resist the lure of a shiny Leopard case sitting on the shelves too.
Just installing Leopard on the Macbook Pro - about 1hr and 8mins to go. Getting installation started was a snap, popped the DVD, clicked install, restarted and away it went. Getting to a point where it'd show time remaining took a while, it's initial estimate was about 3hrs 20mins though this fell rapidly. More on that later.
[56mins left]
The Touch is slick - good battery life, nice screen, great web browser (though no EAP support in WiFi will be a drag at work), oh and it plays music :-) Just prepping for the daunting task of transcoding tonnes of WMA into MP3 (for ITunes sanctity). Not sure what tools I'll use for that yet - but know that it will take a few days to complete that task.
[16mins left]
I've been writing for less that 10mins, Leopard installs pretty quick - much quicker than my last upgrade install of Vista that's for sure. Apple has been very successful in selling the vision of a cohesive home environment, they've managed to pry more than $3,000 out of me so far - I'm sure there will be more in the future.
[11mins left]
I'll write more about the Leopard upgrade once I've got it up and running. October 07 1st Blog Post From OS/XBeen silent for a while with my head down doing some stuff around search, Codeplex, and the MSDN Magazine - may have something to talk about when you see me next. As the title suggests, since we last talked I bought a Macbook Pro. Yes - I know - yes - I've come to terms with it too. Using OS/X is different in many dimensions. Getting started with my Mac was incredibly quick - surfing the web on wifi within 7 minutes of opening the box. I've taken to using Apple's lightweight "Office" tools too - iWork Pages and Numbers - both tools are much cleaner, more design-oriented, and carry much less all-things-to-all-comers baggage than MSOffice. My reasons for picking up a Mac were two-fold:
The Macbook Pro is a pretty quick machine even with only 2Gb of RAM. Unlike many Microsoft Apple-owners I've resisted putting Vista on the machine. I've installed and started to use Eclipse and XCode on the Mac. I enjoy the slightly different lifestyle, though I still prefer Visual Studio 2005 in many aspects. Something readily apparent is the lack of canonical sources of information (equivalent to MSDN) in this space. On the subject of development - I've just arranged my flights and hotel for TechEd Europe 2007 in Barcelona. I'm there for the developer meeting from Nov 3rd 'til Nov 9th, and will be hovering around the MSDN booth and probably be doing a chalk and talk on MSDN Wiki and Tagging. Afterwards, with a few co-workers we're plotting to drive south to the Costa del Sol, Gibraltar, then maybe jump on the ferry to Cueta on the northern tip of Africa. April 11 *Newsflash* Old Dog Learns New TricksI've been looking for ways to cut the $20 or so each month that it costs to run my Win2K3 file/media/print server. I figured that having it on during that day is not too much of a bind, however leaving it on overnight pumping out noise and heat was a bit of a waste. Power Management is a little bit of well trodden scripting, plus a little BIOS and NIC settings voodoo. Shutting-down or hibernating the machine on a scheduled task was pretty easy. I used scheduled task to spin up a little script to call the
Noodling on waking the machine up took a little more effort. I started by looking at calling Wake-On-LAN applications from my router (DD-WRT with crond scheduler running). This seems a little complex, but luckily I chose to do the BIOS power management configuration 1st. Transpires my machine's BIOS supports wake-everyday at a particular time, a little test prove that it'd start even fully shutdown machines. With a little Wake-On-LAN magic to simplify those out-of-hours startups. (loads of WOL apps out there) I think I'm good to save 40-50% of my power consumption. Deli-cloud: March 12 MVP Summit 2007Today the I & folks from MSDN and DevDiv UE hung out at the MVP Summit in Seattle.
While the room sucked (loud air-conditioning, no projector screen, no presenter podium, no extension cables, crappy round-table layout, to name but a few points...) we had a pretty intense 2 hours of show, tell, and talk about MSDN Wiki, the MSDN Library, and Visual Studio 2005. Many familiar faces were in attendance, and despite many being jet-lagged after transcontinental travel they were very animated too! November 29 Using ADAM with ASP.NET 2.0 & ActiveDirectoryMembershipProviderI've been wrestling with Active Directory For Applications (ADAM) and the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider over the past few days for a prototype. I've been working towards getting a Trusted Credentials SSL connection from IIS Membership to ADAM as a authentication/authorization store. The path to this goal is pretty tricky - other documented attempts on the web focus on insecure connections. Also the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider documentation on how this should work is at best called "light". The steps looked like this.
So after 48hrs of debugging I could get LDP to connect to ADAM over SSL. With more detail added by work from Dan and Erlend, I walked through the remainder of the setup then ran into the message below. There was absolutely nothing on the web about this is...
I wasting a lot of time trying things. Again Event Viewer to the rescue - "ANONYMOUS LOGON" events were coming from the ADAM logins - ASP.NET wasn't impersonating the directory privileged AppPool account . By switching on ASP.NET impersonation, everything began to fire on all cylinders. Now onto using ADAM to create SPUser objects for MOSS 2007 :) Big props to Erlend Oftedal, Dan Sellers, for blazing the trail and providing such useful walkthroughs. November 26 Downloadable Movies On XBox LiveThis long weekend has seriously depleted our Netflix stack. With nothing but a bit of Jamie Oliver mockney on the DVR, we thought we'd turn to the new convenience in the house - Video Marketplace for the XBox 360. Though the service was released last week to the general public - we'd been on the marketplace beta program (one of the perks of working for MS) and enjoyed the service trial. A few things stuck out in the trial and continued into the released product:
None of these are unsolvable, but if I was in the driving seat I'd focus on pricing policy, especially a subscription plan to compete against Netflix. Anyway back to the movie - we picked "Failure to Launch", a 1.3Gb download for 360 Xbox Points, around $3. Download performance pretty good - a little over 1% per minute - we got playback ready notification at around 3mins/5%. The movie completed downloading at around the 75 minute mark - a cool 17Mb/min. I know the XBox Live Ops have been busy all weekend working out kinks in the public service - they've done a great job! Overall the movie was a little pricey (pay more for freshness), but it was super convenient. By being in the living room on the big screen it beats Amazon. By being ready within 5mins it beats Blockbuster/Netflix for instant gratification. However its still got a long way to go to beat Netflix for cost and choice. As a parting gift I also downloaded South Park, Make Love not Warcraft. Something to watch later in the week. Death Of An MP3 PlayerI've had a Creative Zen Micro MP3 player for quite a long time – it was pretty good as players go. However in the last few weeks it has developed an intermittent but worsening fault. Somewhere in the headphone socket jack, the connection to the rest of the player has worked lose taking out the audio with it. Sometimes a little wiggle or turn on the socket fixes it – other times not. What is interesting is that I'm not alone in experiencing these problems. A thread on the Creative Forums shows that 100's of other Zen owners are experiencing the same issue. I totally agree with Adam Jorden - it doesn't reflect well on Creative's products. Of course my Zen is out of warranty, it looks like the typical fixing price is $60 or so, making the device pretty much disposable. I'm sure like many others, my options look like:
I think I'll probably try option b). It sickens me to think that of this high-tech race to latest and greatest generates such a trail of waste & redundant or broken devices; packed full of rare metals and toxic chemicals. All for the sake of a 1 cent solder joint. November 23 Roaming Accounts On XBox LiveWe picked up another XBox 360 today to enable a little head to head play in the household. The company store was running a cool deal with Viva Piñata and a couple of other games. I also picked up a steering wheel though that'll be my Xmas present from Lu. Installation went ok, got an E67 error initially. After a moment of panic I calmed back down – quick search online for the error said to pull the HDD, and see if it restarts – it restarted just fine... A little jiggling with the HDD SATA connector and it restarted again just fine. I've got it wired to 17" LCD monitor through VGA. Quick raid on Radioshack found me some audio splitters to splice the audio into my PC rig. Something that is irritating though is the jarring experience of account roaming between consoles. I wanted to use the same Gamertag on both machines, so naturally I recovered my tag using the regular recovery process. I wasn't aware that doing this recovery also invalidates the profile on any other console. (This is spelled out on the XBox site – but who reads the fine manual eh?) It transpires that I'll have to wander for the rest of my days with the proprietary memory card containing my profile. What ever happened to be online – all the time… I assumed that it'd sync all consoles seamlessly since the same data is online anyway… Xbox folk oh hear this plea. October 07 Off to Wild Ginger tonight
Quote My Virtual Earth Scratch Pad August 07 Back from San DiegoJust came back from vacation in South California, weather was great - some pics over in the Photo Album. Did the usual touristy stuff like Seaworld and the Zoo, and generally hung out on the beach at Mission and La Jolla. Pics taken on my new camera, a Canon SD500 - very neat. April 13 Back From The DeadThought I'd throw over a post onto this blog now that I've got the MSN Messenger update (which makes adding blog entries so easy) Of course I've been blogging on my main blog fairly regularly though :) Somethat that I wish I could do is cross-post between both blogs - but all the time that passport stands in the way I doubt that'll happen I've just finished my tax return - I'm a happier bunny for doing that! December 27 Design Within ReachOK - yet another floor lamp has gone tits up - guess I'll reach for Design Within Reach and shell-out quite a little more for one of the cool glass and aluminium tower lights. December 25 Talking about Cold sweaty mornings.Quote Cold sweaty mornings. Ah - for one second I almost missed that 2hrs of hell in each direction - then again perhaps not ;) 60Talking about Available in the USAQuote
60 bucks for 1Gb card - wow - they were $180 only about 4months ago. |
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