Saturday, July 05, 2008

Gbit card, modem, HDD

Ok, I had it for now with this r8169 kernel driver. I even tried a suggested newer kernel version but even that didn't help. I put in a new Intel card and it seems to work fine.

Because I switched ISP, I have to return my modem (not my property; Sagem BASE F@ST 3202). I still wanted to know if I could get access to superuser account again. It is still accessible by serial port for which there is no connector unfortunately. An phone data cable with some soldering helps in these cases.
Well.. I just cleaned up the pads I probed and screwing it back together.
Since I can't remember what cables it came with, I just put in the ones in worst condition :)

I also bought a WD MyBook 1TB disk.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

My network

New SSH keys generated to login without password on my server, macbook, imac and website. Works nicely. I have set MacFusion to mount automatically.

I've put back the r8169 network card in my server and it now appears to be running stable. Perhaps it's also because I upgraded the kernel version again to 2.6.24-gentoo-r3. Oh and I soldered 3 capacitors on it. They always leave out some to make it cheaper.
[edit]Shit.. still problematic[/edit]

After fiddling with MAC address in Time Machine to backup over firewire target disk mode, I found out that Apple added a hidden feature that enables network disks. With this gigabit network, that should go speedy although it still could be buggy or cause system hiccups. I wouldn't try backing up with my disk or imac turned/turning off though.
This method does not use the filesystem feature with hardlinks etc. but creates one big file: "{machine name}_{MAC address}.sparsebundle". It's probably more optimal for network links.

Btw, my macbook is named Diana and my imac Morte. From Noir-et-Blanc, which I have not seen yet but do have the Morte figurine. The internal HDDs are also called like that to prevent confusion when mounting them over the network.

Monday, March 24, 2008

link down

Since updating my kernel of my linux server, the 1Gbit card (r8169) gave troubles. Occasionally, the link went down.
dmesg shows some PCI quirks and IRQ routing conflicts but afaik it's been like that before.
Although I also had enabled the onboard USB ports and added USB to the kernel.
I then tried loading back the old kernel version only to find out that the problem persisted.
Could the card have gone bad? Sure it's a coicidence. Or perhaps the driver is just buggy somehow. I will test the card in another PC.
Back with the old and slow r8139, it seems to work just fine.
I hate this kind of crap. It takes too much time to figure out.

[iMac] samba vs sshfs

I tried moving some files from my linux server to the external firewire drive on my iMac. It just did not work and my iMac would not see the UTF-8 encoded filenames. Then I learned about the utf-8-mac encoding and though wtf. My gentoo linux installation doesn't know about that. (NT_STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND)
I tried muCommander and bash in the hope that Finder was just screwing up. But nope...
ls: 耳をすませば サウンドトラック « Whisper of the Heart/: No such file or directory
So, after fiddling around, I used MacFUSE and MacFusion user-interface to mount my homedirectory via ssh. That works.
I guess that's another -1 point for OS X.

Also, I could not overwrite files starting with a dot (normally invisible in Finder). It gives "Error code -43". Oh well, that's just a feature.