Digital Mustache » linux

So Long, iTramp

brian — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:32:30 +0000

I’m sad to say that my first Mac, a 12″ iBook G4, is dead. I’ll never forget lap dances from the ol’ iTramp… It was definitely one of the best computers I have ever owned.

After taking a spill, the internal display no longer works, which some certified repair technicians tell me would probably cost one half to two thirds the price of a new MacBook. That rules out the repair option. I’m thinking about getting a cheap netbook (running Linux of course, no Windows) to satisy my couch web surfing needs. More research is needed on that matter.

Quest for a Low-Power Home Server

brian — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:03:00 +0000

For quite awhile I’ve been interested in setting up a low-power machine to do my home server tasks and allow for some geeky linux experiments. After doing the initial cost-benefit analysis it didn’t appear that I’d be able to build anything that would be cheap enough to give a reasonable return on investment, in terms of power consumption. However, after months I finally came across the MSI Wind PC barebones at NewEgg.

My amazing wife bought it for me as a gift, and I’ve been nipping at the bit to get this thing going. This little guy has a low-power Intel Atom processor on-board and appears to be plenty of power for my needs. Also, I won’t need to purchase any additional hardware. I already have 200-pin DDR2 RAM that I pulled from my iMac, and I have a few SATA hard drives laying around to choose from. To start I’ve configured it with a 2.5″ laptop hard drive since it will consume less power and be less “loudy” (something a college professor of mine used to say – still cracks me up). I may add a larger drive in the 5.25″ bay for some storage if I need it later. I opted to leave it without an optical drive, since I can easily install GNU/Linux from a USB drive. I’ve installed a server configuration of Ubuntu 8.10 so far. When idle, the server only consumes 21 watts.

Here are some of my plans for the server, which I may write about in the future:

Run a VPN server for my home network, possibly OpenVPN
Build a web-based Wake-on-LAN system so I can wake up my iMac from an iPhone shortcut on my home screen, even while on Edge connectivity
A backup relay, to upload important data from my network to an off-site location

Bloody (or Tomato-y) Brilliant Firmware

brian — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:42:47 +0000

I’ve tried a number of third-party firmwares for my Linksys WRT54GS router, however I find myself extremely satisfied with one in particular: Tomato. I just upgraded to the latest version and once again I was reminded of how wonderful this software is. Just like the other third-party firmwares for Linksys routers, it’s based on Linux. However, I think these differences really push Tomato over the edge into greatness.

The number one feature that I think is very important, is the easy no-hassle upgrades. When I see that there is a Tomato software update with the help of Google Reader, I simply download the file and upload the contained .bin file to my router. I don’t need to reconfigure any settings, unlike all of the other firmwares that I’ve used in the past. Having to reconfigure a crap ton of settings with a software update is not acceptable in my book.

Brilliantly, Tomato incorporates bandwidth monitoring right into its web interface. When I used the DD-WRT firmware, I had to get Cacti installed on a separate Linux box to achieve a similar goal, and it wasn’t nearly as convenient. With Tomato, I just configured it to save the bandwidth data to a CIFS/Samba share on my Linux server (for lack of size and not wanting to burn out my router’s NVRAM by saving all of the data there). The bandwidth graphs make use of AJAX and SVG, which work well and look pretty cool.

Multiple DDNS (dynamic DNS) client configurations can be entered, so I can have both DynDNS and OpenDNS updated if my public IP address changes. Friggin’ brilliant…

Last but not least is the GUI. As I mentioned before, its web-based like other firmwares, however this one has a clean and fast interface. AJAX is used to give it some nice on-demand features. My favorite is when I’m selecting a channel for my wireless network and it actively scans and displays the strongest SSID neighbor for each channel.

I think I’m going to donate some money to Polarcloud.com for this incredible product. The only feature that I’ve been slightly missing with Tomato is a VPN server. With DD-WRT, I used the PPTP server and was able to remotely connect my laptop into my home network from anywhere on the Internet. I did have some security concerns with it, so I’m not sure that I’d still be using the VPN configuration, but it would make a nice addition to Tomato’s great feature set.

Now go out and install Tomato on a compatible router near you…

Fedora Printing and HPLIP

brian — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:55:21 +0000

Last summer, I setup my HP DeskJet 930C printer to my linux server running Fedora 7. I used the included CUPS server to share the printer with the rest of my network, including a Windows XP box, and two Macs running Leopard. It was working great until a few months ago when printing just stopped working from all of the network hosts. From the Windows machine, the queue window now had “access denied, failed to connect” within the title bar. Who knows what caused all of this, maybe a scheduled yum update or radiation from a meteor shower. Not knowing why it suddenly broke, I started tweaking settings in CUPS and Samba, but nothing worked. I used yum to upgrade to Fedora 8, but CUPS alone still didn’t work.

I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:

yum install hplip-gui PyQt

Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!

To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.

I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!