That said, around 3 years ago I left Sprint (after 7 years) and went over to the magenta side. I started traveling internationally and wanted a GSM phone and so, firmly remembering my hatred for Cingulair wireless (now AT&T) I went to the only provider at the time that would enable me to roam almost anywhere. And boy am I lucky that I did.

No other US nation-wide carrier presently supports dual-mode calling (WiFi and Cellular) which is a huge shame as it has been the single best feature of being a T-Mobile customer. Being able to fill the gaps in their coverage with WiFi is wonderful by itself but the true surprise is being able to reduce or even eliminate roaming charges when traveling internationally. I spent two weeks in Australia earlier this summer and while I was there when I could I spent much of my time actually registered on the T-Mobile network via UMA as opposed to roaming on Vodafone AU. This saved me about $80 on my bill versus the previous year when I was in Australia without having a phone capable of WiFi.

I really don’t know why every carrier doesn’t support this, being able to fill the gaps in your network by using unlicensed access technologies sure beats the hell out of the expensive femtocell technology, and the customer benefits of reducing roaming charges is a pretty compelling business case (if you ask me).

As an aside, presently only the BlackBerry and a couple Nokia handsets on T-Mobile support UMA. This is one of the huge reasons I won’t even consider switching to Android at this point.

One of the greatest things about my current job is the ability to work from just about anywhere using just about any computer as long as I have an Internet connection and a SSH client. I frequently find myself working from home on my personal laptop, or from friend’s houses using their own computers and I am as effective as I would be at the office. Today really cemented that fact with me when I made the Monday morning blunder of arriving to work without my laptop. Instead of driving all the way back home (and wasting even more of the morning) I just grabbed a spare laptop that is laying around the office and using that today.

I remember a number of nights earlier in the year when I was on-call and out somewhere either without my laptop or without an Internet connection. Though it was slightly slower than I would have been on a laptop I managed to resolve a number of production critical emergencies using nothing more than my BlackBerry and MidpSSH.

I leverage a few tools to make this happen but the most important one I think of them all is GNU screen. The usefulness of this to anyone who wants to be able to use any computer in the world to be productive cannot be over-stressed. I recall one evening while I was on vacation in Australia last month where I noticed (via our internal IRC channel) that people were trying to troubleshoot a problem with our network storage infrastructure and was able to connect in to my work computer 12,000 miles away and fix the issues with nothing more than a terminal application on my laptop.

For IM and IRC I have as much connected to Irssi as I can reasonably manage. Irssi is a really great compliment to screen and there are a number of sites advocating that particular use case. I never miss anything with this configuration as I am always online and Irssi is kind enough to log everything and provide a pretty lengthy scroll-back buffer. What I end up with is essentially one screen session that contains my e-mail (using mutt) for both home and work, IRC, IM, and many of our internal web-based tools (thanks to w3m). Thanks to work being almost exclusively a Linux shop all of this can sit running all the time on a system sitting in one of our data centres with what essentially amounts to a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the Internet. From there all I ever really need is ssh(1) to connect to any of several hundred servers scattered across the United States and I can manage to be just as productive as if I was sitting in the office.

I honestly can’t imagine considering a job where I’m tied down to an office, or at the very least one where I was tied down to an office and then expected to work non-normal business hours. With pretty simple tools it is extremely easy to allow IT people to work from anywhere happily and securely. The ability for employees to continue to do their job from anywhere on the planet should the need arise is not only great for morale and general quality of life (you mean I can work from the beach?!) but makes sense when business critical applications and services require specific expertise that may not be replicated anywhere else in the company (what do you mean Bob is on vacation in Fiji?!).

We flew from AUN out over the San Francisco Bay, out to the Golden Gate Bridge and then down the Pacific coast to HAF where we went and had dinner. After dinner we flew over San Francisco back up to AUN after dark which was a truly beautiful view and if I am honest was almost magical.

I think it jarred something loose in my head. For as long as I can remember I have always been fascinated with aviation and have always wanted to learn to fly. For years though that dream sat idle in the pile of things that would be nice to do someday when I made ‘real money’ and could afford such extravagances (like air conditioning or food). I’m not really sure how much I was smiling after that first flight but I imagine you probably could have seen it from at least 10,000ft. I think I was hooked at that very moment. It really doesn’t help that my friend is a very persuasive individual when he is passionate about something, and flying is something he is exceptionally passionate about. It took me a few months, and a few more trips to convince me that it was truly something within my grasp but last week I finally got down to the local airport SDC, and took an intro flight with the resident CFII.

We flew out of SDC and then down towards my house in Fairport, circled around and came back. It was only a half-hour of flying time but it was easily the most memorable half hour of my life in the last few years. And to be clear in the last few years I have been to Edinburgh and London, Australia… twice as well as California three times. So that is a statement that I do not take lightly.

There are some logistics still up in the air but never before have I been quite as excited about anything as I am about the prospect of being able to take to the sky and explore the world of General Aviation.

While my wallet will never be quite the same again I can’t thank everyone who finally kicked me off this cliff enough. I can’t promise I will take malicious notes here chronicling my experience as I seem to have an aversion to updating this damnable thing but I am sure I will update more often than I have recently.

I have been meaning to install ESXi on a server I have sitting in the house for a while but a lack of CD-ROM drive has been stalling things for a while so I wanted to see if there was any chance of booting the ISO image from the network.

The server has internal storage, so I’m not RUNNING ESXi off the PXEBoot image, I’m installing it.

1. Yes, there sure is
2. All the guides currently around the Internet, SUCK.

Prerequisites, or what you should already know…

You will obviously require a working PXEboot Network infrastructure, which means a functioning TFTP server and a functioning DHCP server, which is setup to give out your TFTP server and PXELinux executable. There are numerous guides on this so I’m not going to go into that here. For reference, I’m running Ubuntu Server 9.10 on my TFTP host and OpenBSD 4.7-current on my DHCP server.

Process, or what the hell do I do…

Get the VMWare ESXi ISO from their website, this should be more straightforward than it is, but what can you do. Once you have the image, use something like Daemon Tools under Windows, or a loopback mount(8) under Linux to get access to the ISO. The root directory of the ISO should look something like this:

boot.cat
cimstg.tgz
cim.vgz
cisco_n1k
ienviron.tgz
image.tgz
install.tgz
isolinux.bin
isolinux.cfg
mboot.c32
menu.c32
README.txt
sys.vgz
vmkboot.gz
vmkernel.gz

If you look at the isolinux.cfg file, you will see what files are loaded for boot. I copied mboot.c32 (the chainloader), and *gz to a subdirectory in my tftpboot dir (the Ubuntu default of /var/lib/tftpboot in my case) called esxi. I then added the following line to my pxelinux.cfg/default file:


LABEL esxi
kernel mboot.c32
append esxi/vmkboot.gz --- esxi/vmkernel.gz --- esxi/sys.vgz --- esxi/cim.vgz --- esxi/ienviron.tgz --- esxi/install.tgz --- esxi/image.tgz


You should now be able to boot your system and select Network Boot, it will take a while to tftp over the image.tgz file but once it does it should fire up the ESXi installer and let you install as you would over the harddrive. A few minutes later you should have a screen telling you to reboot and then you should have a working ESXi server.

Bluetooth DUN, T-Mobile UMA

After much searching, this post got me the closest though recent changes either with the new OS 5.0 on the 9700 or T-Mobile’s network have made some tweaks necessary.

http://pegelinux.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/blackberry-curve-8310-as-bluetooth-modem-on-ubuntu-hardy/

I will not go into all the step-by-step details as it is covered above and elsewhere, but first you need to get your computer to bind to the Blackberry DUN service via Bluetooth, I chose to edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf to make this happen automatically, but BlueManager also seems to be able to do the same thing with a much more friendly UI if you want to try that route, anyway you cut it, you need to have the DUN service show up as a /dev/rfcomm# device. Once you have completed that you will want to setup pppd(8) much like the above article suggests.

This resulted in a session that looked like the following for me:

mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/chatscripts$ pppd call gprs
Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!
defining PDP context...

PDP context detached
Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-disconnect-chat finished (pid 14843), status = 0x0
Serial link disconnected.


As you can see, a number of Naks have been received for things that do not work and the connection fails. Tracking each error down step by step I removed noauth from the peers file and replaced it with user “” to force a null user-name in the PAP authentication. I also removed userpeerdns as it appears that the Blackberry was refusing to give it to me. The final piece was that I was hitting what I assumed to be a race condition, as the Blackberry did not have an IP address to give me yet, it kept sending ConfNak to me until it finished setting up the tunnel to T-Mobile on my behalf… (see inset)

Tunnel List


mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/ppp/peers$ pppd call gprs
Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!
defining PDP context...

PDP context detached
Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-disconnect-chat finished (pid 15117), status = 0x0
Serial link disconnected.
Script /etc/ppp/ip-down finished (pid 15112), status = 0x0
mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/ppp/peers$


Looking at the phone it appears that it snuck into Modem Mode and I was able to ssh around and perform the speedtest that adorns the top of this post. I used the gprs-disconnect-chat file unmodified from the post I linked to, but modified the gprs and gprs-connect-chat files which you can get by clicking on their names or looking at http://www.ub3rgeek.net/gprs/

Modem Mode, UMA

Backups prevent:

1. Data loss from computer error. (Operating System or Application Crash)
2. Data loss from drive failure.
3. Data loss from user error. (Accidental deletion, alteration, etc)
4. Data loss from disaster. (House burns down, computer lost or stolen)

It is important to note that RAID systems ONLY address drive failures and should NOT be thought of as a backup solution.

My Goals:
I really like Time Machine. Apple did an AMAZING job with that application and bundled with the Time Capsule you get a really robust, high-capacity versioned backup solution that solves 90% of the problems that backups are supposed to solve. If you periodically copy your Time Machine backup to an external hard drive and store that at a friend’s house or in a safe deposit box or at the office, then you get 100% of the backup goals in a neat little package. You can even restore a Time Machine backup from the OS X restore CD. Slick.

Since I don’t run OS X I have to engineer a solution myself. I want a system that allows me to produce versioned backups on the network without much interaction. It must be encrypted on disk as my laptop’s /home is encrypted and storing the backup unencrypted would be a super-easy attack vector. Ideally the storage would be swappable so I can have 2 drives and swap it with an off-site drive periodically and so I could fairly easily restore the data to a new drive when the drive in my laptop (or the backup drive) scorches itself.

My Solution:

• USB 2.0 hard drive with dm-crypt whole-drive encryption
• rdiff-backup over ssh
• cron(8) and some custom scripts

I have an old IBM ThinkPad R42 laptop that I’m not using for anything anymore so I tossed Ubuntu 9.10 on it and plugged it into the network. (I would use my server but I do not have any USB 2.0 ports on that machine currently.) I connected a 250GB USB hard drive to the ThinkPad and encrypted a partition using dm-crypt to store the backups and meta-data.

I then setup ssh on the ThinkPad to trust my ssh key from my laptop and I setup sudo(8) to allow my user to run rdiff-backup without entering my password. Combined with my backup.sh script, i can fire off a backup in the background from cron(8) that doesn’t really affect the performance of my laptop over the network.

I am a big fan of jwz and this is how he does backups.

That first Linux distribution was Slackware, a distribution by Patrick J. Volkerding which has always focused on simplicity, stability and having a sane collection of packages and defaults right out of the box. It is kind of like the OpenBSD of Linux if I was to try to make a really unnecessary analogy. Over the years my home server has always been Slackware, it was what I was the most comfortable with and it has never let me down. I even ran Slackware on my workstations up until a few years ago when World of Warcraft came around and I needed something a little more bleeding edge to get an X server with all the fancy direct rendering and 3d acceleration bits to make wine happy. I have trusted literally TeraBytes of data to Slackware and have not once been let down.

Over the last few days I have been struggling with a number of problems with my Sirius transcoder scripts. Between Sipie being unloved and requiring some work, and vlc being a royal pain sometimes I decided to upgrade my home server to Slackware 13.0. I have to start by saying i’m impressed with Slackware and the progress it has made over the years, a very small team (usually of one) has been able to make a stable, secure, reliable distribution for a very long time and the new version is no exception. And Slackware 13.0 is no exception to this rule, now bringing in amd64 support into the core distribution.

After a good 2 days of fighting the realization came that I just had to embrace, I have changed. The sad truth is that as with hardware I have come to expect software to Just Work(tm) and leave me out of it. I spend 60 hours a week wrestling with hardware and software in my job as a Systems Administrator for an ISP and I just don’t enjoy fighting it when I get home like I used to. My server acts as a media server for my PS3 so I can enjoy media content on my TV, a VOIP server for my home (I do not have a land line any longer) and hosts a number of status monitoring applications and stream recorders that I turn into podcasts for my private consumption. I need it all to just quietly work and cause me as little grief as possible.

So sadly it became time for me to go from loyal Slackware user for over a decade to full-on Ubuntu convert. We use Debian (and now Ubuntu) at work and I have been using Ubuntu in varying places since a friend of mine gave me a link in a chat pointing to what he promised was going to be a new Linux distribution that would change how people looked a Linux. It just made sense to convert, it meant I didn’t have to maintain 2 local mirrors anymore for security updates, I am much more comfortable with apt(8) and dpkg(8) and utilities like slapt-get(8) and swaret(8) are just kind of (very good) 3rd party hacks on top of the Slackware package management system.

It is amazing to see how far this dream has come, more and more I find myself quietly relying on various Free Software products to make my life simpler, easier and better and Slackware and Ubuntu have both been huge parts of that software stack. Thanks Pat, for 13 years of reliability, stability, security and sanity. Thanks also to Mark and Matt and the entire Ubuntu/Canonical gang for literally changing how thousands of people think of Linux. I converted my Mother a few weeks ago and have had less calls about the computer than I ever did with Windows.

Secondly I have removed my old Gallery instance. I’ve been using Gallery 1 for ages because I don’t see a good reason to upgrade to Gallery 2 which I consider HIGHLY inferior due to the reliance on a RDBMS. As a replacement I have redirected all /gallery/ URLs to my Flickr page.

Thirdly, as a result of moving to Bazaar from CVS, much of the code that has been linked in previous entries is now over at repo.ub3rgeek.net.

Finally, for anyone with a BlackBerry that would like to get the SMS messages off the device so they can save the memory without losing the messages, or just to be able to use Unix tools to manipulate the messages I have written a small Python script which can be used, alongside the Barry Project’s btool program to extract the SMS messages to a set of files sorted by Phone Number of the person you are corresponding with.
You can get the script at http://repo.ub3rgeek.net/branches//top/bbtools/files. Feel free to let me know if you find it useful.

The moral of this story as I’m sure no one cares why I chose which VCS is to say that any of the code hosted on my CVSweb and linked to in one of my previous posts is likely to have moved to the new loggerhead interface over at repo.ub3rgeek.net. If you happen to follow me on FriendFeed or watch the home page here, you will see updates from my bazaar commits as they happen.

Fancy, eh?