Edit January 7: See bottom of post. Every person I’ve talked to with a RAZR seems to have this problem, and nobody has known how to fix it. You know what I’m talking about! You put the phone on ‘vibrate’ and stick it in your pocket, confident that when that important phone call comes in you’ll know. 3 hours pass by and nothing happens, and you pull the phone out of your pocket only to find out that it’s now on ‘silent’ and you have 5 missed calls! WTF! ...

So I finally got my WatchGuard eval unit. 2 months after I would have liked, but c’est la vie, I guess they had some employee turnover over there and my box got lost in the shuffle. Upon opening the box, everything looks very nice, and yes, its all red, and very cute looking. Turning it on, however, the LCD screen just says ‘Booting OS …’ and never makes it farther… Not a great sign. ...

I’ve been getting intermittent complaints recently that our Cisco 7960 phones are refusing to work and displaying an ‘XML Parse Error’. In inability to transfer calls seems also to be part of the equation. Well, I’ve never had the problem myself and didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with the phones or the setup so I’ve been ignoring it for the most part since power cycling the phone seems to resolve the problem for a while. Recently however we have changed our incoming caller pattern to go through a receptionist in all cases, and she’s been having the problem very consistently. Well, it turns out the problem is a deficiency in Cisco’s SIP implementation. Lots more details are available at http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=5336, but apparently downgrading to revision 7.4 solves the problem. I have no idea if the bug persists in newer (8.x) versions or not.

I have a radeon 9200 video card in my HTPC, since when I bought it all the HTPC enthusiasts over at http://www.avsforum.com seemed to think ATI was better for tv output. I also wanted the possibility of using a component adapter cable (which I never bought). For years I’ve been happily using the ATI proprietary FGLRX drivers under linux to drive my Toshiba 27" TV with an svideo cable. Alas, all good things come to an end. Xorg 7.0 came along with my Fedora Core 5 and MythTV 0.20 upgrade, and with it came FGLRX breakage. Or to be precise, along with it came an FGLRX upgrade. ...

My MythTV system has been in place for several years now, and has seen many versions of Fedora. Ensuring the IVTV modules were loaded correctly after a system restart has always been a bit of a black art, however, and with Fedora Core 5 this seems to be no less of an exception. However, I think I have got it partially figured out, so here it is. First things first. Modern 2.6 linux kernels apparently fully support hardware autodetection. I understand that to mean you aren’t support to need to manually (or in a script) modprobe ivtv nor should you have to explicitly put any configuration into modprobe.conf. If your IVTV kernel modules are installed correctly, it’s supposed to be automatically detected, and then udev is supposed to create the relevant devices for you. This is working for me, however changing the permissions on video devices in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules isn’t working. I tried to use this line to do it, but it appears to be ignored in general. ...

So I had a great idea… Why don’t I buy a DVD burner and then start using DVD’s to install software, make backups, etc, etc. Well… it was a nice idea, but then I had another great idea… Why don’t I run windows XP 64 since I have an AMD Opteron system! Turns out none of the wonderful bundled DVD burning software will even install on XP64, let alone run, so there it sat. ...

So I’m working on some linux software and am running linux on my desktop. One of my major pet peeves every time I go back to a linux desktop is that out of the box my button 4 and 5 don’t work correctly under firefox. Here’s the fix. Under Fedora Core 5, use this: cat > /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh <<-EOF #!/bin/sh # /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh # Required for the configuration of a 5-button mouse xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 8 9 4 5 6 7 10 11" EOF chmod a+x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh Under CentOS 4 / RHEL4, use this: ...

Sun has really been pushing innovation with Solaris recently, and since it’s now freely available and open sourced, what better time to give it a test drive? With the Solaris Express Nevada 49 release (get it from http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/ and click the CD Version or DVD Version links under step 3b) Sun has officially included their BrandZ extension to Solaris containers. BrandZ allows containers to be ‘Branded’, the upshot of it is that you can run an entire system under a lxrun-like technology. ...

Smoothwall came through with a demo license for me in just a matter of minutes, and I spend a couple hours playing with it. It has a fairly complete web interface, but unfortunately even with all its fancy features I saw absolutely nothing that would allow me to operate it as a layer 2 firewall (bridging my static ip addresses into a dmz) nor does it have support for routing said static ip address without NAT. Given we have clients and servers on static IP addresses and a class C address block to boot, it seems a waste to have to static nat them all and deal with that complexity when a dual dmz solution with layer 2 support would take care of it. So it’s back to the drawing board. ...

In the process of trying to figure out my VM performance problems, I’ve been doing a lot of filesystem benchmarking. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of consistency between platforms or machine classes as to benchmarking methodology, so I’ve had some trouble generating comparable numbers. However, I’ve gotten the solaris filebench suite running on linux, and bonnie++ running on solaris, so I can now generate comparable numbers across both platforms. One of my primary interests is the throughput I can get out of the 3ware 7506 raid controller in my unix nas box, both in order to optimize it and in order to compare to other solutions and determine if they will actually be an upgrade or not. In the process, I’ve been benchmarking an older Dell Precision Workstation 420. It has 4 wd1200jb drives plugged into its onboard IDE boards (yes, they are sharing ide channels), and is currently running opensolaris nv47. I played around with a few different ZFS configurations, but eventually settled on raidz, leaving me with 360G usable disk space. Here’s some of the numbers I got: ...