viernes 27 de enero de 2012
Pepephone vuelve a ofrecer la del pulpo
Pues eso, que los de Pepephone vuelven a ofrecer la tarifa del pulpo (que es la que tengo yo), ahora se paga el primer minuto a 0 y va aumentando de precio hasta los 4.9¢/minuto de máximo, eso sí, siempre con establecimiento de 15¢, si a alguien le interesa podéis pillarla en la web promocional del pulpo pepe
domingo 1 de enero de 2012
Feliz 2012
Como algunos de mis amigos parecen leer este blog he pensado que estaba bien felicitar el año por este medio, y además se me ha ocurrido utilizar unas fotos que a algunos les traerán recuerdos de los good old times...
en esa foto se puede observar parte del hardware con que fueron tomadas las fotos: una capturadora de video y una cámara VHS, por aquel entonces no crecían las cámaras digitales por todos lados :-) He fechado esto en el año 1998, a ver si alguien me lo puede confirmar, es en la Taboada's Party y estábamos pasando mucho frío, digo... preparando la Arroutada de ese mismo año. Una de las atracciones de la party (al menos para los linuxeros) fue:
un PC (Pentium 166 a 200) que llevaba 12 tarjetas de red, 4 PCI y 8 ISA configuradas en modo bridge (haciendo switching) y que sería el "core" de la red de la Arroutada de ese año, esta es una vista del equipo:
Y aquí tenéis un detalle del expansor de bus que habíamos utilizado para poder meter 5 tarjetas ISA más en la máquina:
La verdad, todavía conservo esta cacharrería por aquí, algún año de estos en una Dudes o algo así me gustaría intentar volverla a poner a funcionar :-)
Mientras tanto... unas imágenes más del engendro, una del interior con las 12 tarjetas numeradas:
Una de la parte trasera con todas las tarjetas con sus BNCs conectados en la que me veo yo con las pintas de aquella época y sin dormir :-)
Y una última en la que se el interior sin los papelotes de numeración de las tarjetas:
Que tiempos aquellos :'-)
Nada más, feliz año a todos y que sigamos pudiendo disfrutar de la informática como siempre lo hemos hecho.
en esa foto se puede observar parte del hardware con que fueron tomadas las fotos: una capturadora de video y una cámara VHS, por aquel entonces no crecían las cámaras digitales por todos lados :-) He fechado esto en el año 1998, a ver si alguien me lo puede confirmar, es en la Taboada's Party y estábamos pasando mucho frío, digo... preparando la Arroutada de ese mismo año. Una de las atracciones de la party (al menos para los linuxeros) fue:
un PC (Pentium 166 a 200) que llevaba 12 tarjetas de red, 4 PCI y 8 ISA configuradas en modo bridge (haciendo switching) y que sería el "core" de la red de la Arroutada de ese año, esta es una vista del equipo:
Y aquí tenéis un detalle del expansor de bus que habíamos utilizado para poder meter 5 tarjetas ISA más en la máquina:
La verdad, todavía conservo esta cacharrería por aquí, algún año de estos en una Dudes o algo así me gustaría intentar volverla a poner a funcionar :-)
Mientras tanto... unas imágenes más del engendro, una del interior con las 12 tarjetas numeradas:
Una de la parte trasera con todas las tarjetas con sus BNCs conectados en la que me veo yo con las pintas de aquella época y sin dormir :-)
Y una última en la que se el interior sin los papelotes de numeración de las tarjetas:
Que tiempos aquellos :'-)
Nada más, feliz año a todos y que sigamos pudiendo disfrutar de la informática como siempre lo hemos hecho.
miércoles 21 de diciembre de 2011
Camiseta de GPUL para Artai
Últimamente a mi mujer se le da por coser, y se le ocurrió hacerle unas camisetas a Artai reciclando camisetas nuestras, esta salió de una antigua camiseta de GPUL mía :-)
Por cierto, también se le ha dado por hacer un blog sobre lo que anda cosiendo, está empezando, se llama Agulla e fio para quien pueda interesar.
Por cierto, también se le ha dado por hacer un blog sobre lo que anda cosiendo, está empezando, se llama Agulla e fio para quien pueda interesar.
viernes 25 de noviembre de 2011
Executing with a key/button (how to hibernate without the propper button) + ACPI bug workaround
Some time ago I found a problem with one of my desktops when remapping the acpi power button events to hibernate instead of power off the machine, the machine was sending two events on each button press which sadly meant that Linux would hibernate again when powering the machine on :-(
The solution I had to apply to this was to protect my hibernate acpi support script with a lock that avoids the double pm-hibernate call. This ended up being like something like this:if lockfile -r0 /etc/acpi/powerbtn.lock
then
...
pm-hibernate
( sleep 2 ; rm -f /etc/acpi/powerbtn.lock ) &
fi
Anyway, while I was waiting for the ACPI guys not to answer me I was exploring some things which are the ones I wanted to write down here.
First: The good old typical linux low level mapping with setkeycodes, in this case if you want to map scroll lock (0x46) to the sleep key (142) you'll dosetkeycodes 46 142 You can use showkey -s to see the scancodes and look for key codes at /usr/include/linux/input.h and /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
Second: If you happen to have around a webcam with a button you can try to do something with it, if you are lucky enough that button may be mapped to the "XF86WebCam" key, this happened to me on a Logitech Quickcam 5500 (046d:09a1). It is easy on icewm to map this key writing on .icewm/keys something like this that execs your favourite command:key "XF86WebCam" favourite_command As usual the typical tools like xev, configs like ~/.Xmodmap and infos like /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB apply here.
There is something you must be aware of, the webcam button may not work if the camera device is not opened, in this case you can launch on background on your startup sequence a little perl script like this one which sleeps forever once it opens the video device:perl -e "open(FILE, '/dev/v4l/by-id/usb-046d_09a1_76A5BF10-video-index0') || die 'Cannot open the device\n';sleep;" &
Third: There are some programs like esekeyd and triggerhappy that can map your events (like the ones from the webcam) to keys and things like that, esekeyd has some limitations I comment here and triggerhappy is supposed to be a bit more powerfull, but I don't know if triggerhappy can work without the perl script I commented earlier, esekeyd right now can't. The config for esekeyd on my machine was to set on /etc/defaults/esekeyd this:DAEMON_OPTS="/etc/esekeyd.conf /dev/input/by-id/usb-046d_09a1_76A5BF10-event-if00" and then I used acpi_fakekey from the acpi-fakekey package to fake the sleep key (142, see first comment on where to get the codes) when the camera button is pressed by setting on esekeyd.conf this: CAMERA(press): acpi_fakekey 142
Fourth: Userspace typically can't just signal hibernate but there I discovered the upower package that allows you to signal hibernate from userspace using a dbus signal and works great, with that my second example ended up with this sh oneliner (that locks my desktop and then sends the hibernate event wich acpi processes) on .icewm/keys:key "XF86WebCam" sh -c "xscreensaver-command -lock && dbus-send --print-reply --system --dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Hibernate"
The solution I had to apply to this was to protect my hibernate acpi support script with a lock that avoids the double pm-hibernate call. This ended up being like something like this:
then
...
pm-hibernate
( sleep 2 ; rm -f /etc/acpi/powerbtn.lock ) &
fi
Anyway, while I was waiting for the ACPI guys not to answer me I was exploring some things which are the ones I wanted to write down here.
First: The good old typical linux low level mapping with setkeycodes, in this case if you want to map scroll lock (0x46) to the sleep key (142) you'll do
Second: If you happen to have around a webcam with a button you can try to do something with it, if you are lucky enough that button may be mapped to the "XF86WebCam" key, this happened to me on a Logitech Quickcam 5500 (046d:09a1). It is easy on icewm to map this key writing on .icewm/keys something like this that execs your favourite command:
There is something you must be aware of, the webcam button may not work if the camera device is not opened, in this case you can launch on background on your startup sequence a little perl script like this one which sleeps forever once it opens the video device:
Third: There are some programs like esekeyd and triggerhappy that can map your events (like the ones from the webcam) to keys and things like that, esekeyd has some limitations I comment here and triggerhappy is supposed to be a bit more powerfull, but I don't know if triggerhappy can work without the perl script I commented earlier, esekeyd right now can't. The config for esekeyd on my machine was to set on /etc/defaults/esekeyd this:
Fourth: Userspace typically can't just signal hibernate but there I discovered the upower package that allows you to signal hibernate from userspace using a dbus signal and works great, with that my second example ended up with this sh oneliner (that locks my desktop and then sends the hibernate event wich acpi processes) on .icewm/keys:
lunes 17 de octubre de 2011
Monitoring IBM ServeRaid
I have been managing a PIV based IBM server with an IBM ServeRaid 4Lx scsi controller, using Debian (currently squeeze) which supports it without any problem, but without having raid monitoring all this time (no tool on Debian for this). There is nothing I hate more about raids than not having monitoring of its status, so today I managed to get some time to start searching around about how to monitor this beast.
I ended up downloading the IBM CD for the card from ftp://download2.boulder.ibm.com/ecc/sar/CMA/XSA/ibm_fw_srsupp_7_12_14_anyos_32-64.iso to see if I could find the soft there and there it was, as easy as mounting the iso and copying ipssend from the linux/scsi/cmdline/ directory to my /usr/local/sbin and then running it.
Now I can feel much more confortable about this machine, not as much as I would feel as if it was running softraid with mdadm's monitoring, but enough for now.
I ended up downloading the IBM CD for the card from ftp://download2.boulder.ibm.com/ecc/sar/CMA/XSA/ibm_fw_srsupp_7_12_14_anyos_32-64.iso to see if I could find the soft there and there it was, as easy as mounting the iso and copying ipssend from the linux/scsi/cmdline/ directory to my /usr/local/sbin and then running it.
Now I can feel much more confortable about this machine, not as much as I would feel as if it was running softraid with mdadm's monitoring, but enough for now.
domingo 2 de octubre de 2011
How to solve 90% of the problems with your Foxconn DH910, aka TCom TC300, aka Pirelli DP-L10, ...
I was going to write this in spanish as Ya.com (Deustche Telecom spanish ISP) sold a lot of these devices around here, but it has always frustrated me a bit that almost all the info one finds about this device is found in German, so I'll write it in english (if anybody wants to ask something in spanish I'll answer trying to clarify it).
Anyway... this used to be a really valuable phone I have three and each costed me 20€, the phone was sold unlocked and it has SIP capabilities, so the uses can be quite a lot, besides, the hardware seems to be hard to break, unless you think it is really broken and start to botch inside with the help of your 1 year old son, which is what I did when I thought one of them was badly broken as it didn't keep any settings when it was turned off.
Most of the problems you find on this phone like the problem with the settings I had, the problem with the screen presenting just one ç or other weird performances are solved by flashing the phone again with a good firmware, that's it.
So, I'll try to write here all I know about flashing this devices, mostly cause I tend to forgive what I learn, but for others to learn as well.
There are several ways to flash this device:
I've said that only one of the methods has never failed to me, the others have failed a lot of times, not on flashing but when it downloads the firmware, to the phone before flashing it. You can find a lot of people with errors when downloading the firmware, most of them saying that memory is full or that there are not enough resources on the phone for this. I have developped a theory on this and a way to workaround these errors that seems to work ok whether you are flashing from the net or if you are flashing via USB. I believe that the problem is that the phone enters some kind of power saving mode and this causes the download to fail, so if you are pressing a key (for example, then hangup key) in order to avoid the screen to go black, the phone won't enter that mode and thus the download will finish ok, as easy as that. I have never read this tip anywhere, which seems quite weird to me as it was quite easy for me to find this out, don't know if the logic behind it is correct or not, but it works.
That said, I'd like to get deeper on this on the next part of this entry, so if you have enough just stop reading and if not... there we go.
###000# shows a screen with a lot of options you can use, here you can find them in spanish among them ###800# (enter engineering mode) and ###810# (clear all user settings).
There are a couple of programs that will allow you to change a firmware to include your stuff there or change defaults to those you want, they are tc300ex and mobilecustomizer (a front end for tc300ex), you can read about how to use them here.
I'll add my own notes about changing the firmware images, as I tried to find info on this and had to guess it all by myself:
On data_service.ini I used this settings:
WallpaperId=3
W1_STARTPAGE=http://www.google.com/m
W1_BEARER=1
To set the wallpaper to the sun image, set the startpage on wap browser to google for mobile and, more important, to set the wap to work over wifi and not gprs.
On wifi_voip.ini I had to fight a bit to guess this:
P1_WIFI_PROFILETYPE=2
P1_DHCP=1
P1_TFTP_OPT=0
P1_SSIDTYPE=1
P1_SSID=Your_SSID
P1_WIFI_AUTHTYPE=3
P1_WIFI_ENCRYPTTYPE=2
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKTKIPKEYFORMAT=1
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKAESKEYFORMAT=1
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKTKIPASCIIKEY=XXXX
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKAESASCIIKEY=XXXX
Which are the normal settings for wpa2 (aes) the important thing here is the tkipkeyformat and the aeskeyformat which if set to 1 means that it will be given in ascii (using the values I stated above). I know those values are for aes, and don't know about tkip, even tough people on the forums recommend tkip over aes, I still use aes, tkip is supposed to be substracting 1 from the value of either authtype or encrypttype (I'd bet for this one, but maybe it is both).
By default all the wifi profiles are active, I tried to set it so that only one was active, but there were problems, so better leave it like that and change it by hand if we just want one.
Downloading a firmware over the wifi is really slow, around 3 or 4 Kb/s on my tests, so it takes longer than doing it over usb, but you don't need the damm windows around, you don't even need a computer if somebody sets things up on a server for you, so I'm going to comment on how to do it.
You need a web server serving the file T60N925.00_FOX-general.cfg with something like this on it:
[Provision]
SERVER=twintel-fw.arcor.de
BACKUP_SERVER=twintel-fw.arcor.de
FIRMWARE_FILENAME=PU_D910.0.3.91_ACR.img
Of course you can point to whatever firmware image you want, even the one you have just set up with the tools I commented before.
The phone must be plugged and you must enter engineering mode (typing ###800#) and then on the setting meny go to provision and set the server-address to the address/name of your web server, then go to settings and choose to update once, exit to the main screen and wait for a while for the phone to ask you to download, while downloading you'll see an arrow moving down (remember to not allow to enter energy saving by pressing the hangup key while the arrow shows downloading), when it finishes the arrow points to the small phone. After that you have to enter again the provision menu and select to upgrade now.
I guess that's all at least all the important things are there and pointers to where to find more info, beware that most of it is on german, so good luck with that, but I hope the info I have written here will be enough for almost anybody.
Anyway... this used to be a really valuable phone I have three and each costed me 20€, the phone was sold unlocked and it has SIP capabilities, so the uses can be quite a lot, besides, the hardware seems to be hard to break, unless you think it is really broken and start to botch inside with the help of your 1 year old son, which is what I did when I thought one of them was badly broken as it didn't keep any settings when it was turned off.
Most of the problems you find on this phone like the problem with the settings I had, the problem with the screen presenting just one ç or other weird performances are solved by flashing the phone again with a good firmware, that's it.
So, I'll try to write here all I know about flashing this devices, mostly cause I tend to forgive what I learn, but for others to learn as well.
There are several ways to flash this device:
I've said that only one of the methods has never failed to me, the others have failed a lot of times, not on flashing but when it downloads the firmware, to the phone before flashing it. You can find a lot of people with errors when downloading the firmware, most of them saying that memory is full or that there are not enough resources on the phone for this. I have developped a theory on this and a way to workaround these errors that seems to work ok whether you are flashing from the net or if you are flashing via USB. I believe that the problem is that the phone enters some kind of power saving mode and this causes the download to fail, so if you are pressing a key (for example, then hangup key) in order to avoid the screen to go black, the phone won't enter that mode and thus the download will finish ok, as easy as that. I have never read this tip anywhere, which seems quite weird to me as it was quite easy for me to find this out, don't know if the logic behind it is correct or not, but it works.
That said, I'd like to get deeper on this on the next part of this entry, so if you have enough just stop reading and if not... there we go.
###000# shows a screen with a lot of options you can use, here you can find them in spanish among them ###800# (enter engineering mode) and ###810# (clear all user settings).
There are a couple of programs that will allow you to change a firmware to include your stuff there or change defaults to those you want, they are tc300ex and mobilecustomizer (a front end for tc300ex), you can read about how to use them here.
I'll add my own notes about changing the firmware images, as I tried to find info on this and had to guess it all by myself:
On data_service.ini I used this settings:
WallpaperId=3
W1_STARTPAGE=http://www.google.com/m
W1_BEARER=1
To set the wallpaper to the sun image, set the startpage on wap browser to google for mobile and, more important, to set the wap to work over wifi and not gprs.
On wifi_voip.ini I had to fight a bit to guess this:
P1_WIFI_PROFILETYPE=2
P1_DHCP=1
P1_TFTP_OPT=0
P1_SSIDTYPE=1
P1_SSID=Your_SSID
P1_WIFI_AUTHTYPE=3
P1_WIFI_ENCRYPTTYPE=2
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKTKIPKEYFORMAT=1
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKAESKEYFORMAT=1
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKTKIPASCIIKEY=XXXX
P1_WIFI_WPAPSKAESASCIIKEY=XXXX
Which are the normal settings for wpa2 (aes) the important thing here is the tkipkeyformat and the aeskeyformat which if set to 1 means that it will be given in ascii (using the values I stated above). I know those values are for aes, and don't know about tkip, even tough people on the forums recommend tkip over aes, I still use aes, tkip is supposed to be substracting 1 from the value of either authtype or encrypttype (I'd bet for this one, but maybe it is both).
By default all the wifi profiles are active, I tried to set it so that only one was active, but there were problems, so better leave it like that and change it by hand if we just want one.
Downloading a firmware over the wifi is really slow, around 3 or 4 Kb/s on my tests, so it takes longer than doing it over usb, but you don't need the damm windows around, you don't even need a computer if somebody sets things up on a server for you, so I'm going to comment on how to do it.
You need a web server serving the file T60N925.00_FOX-general.cfg with something like this on it:
[Provision]
SERVER=twintel-fw.arcor.de
BACKUP_SERVER=twintel-fw.arcor.de
FIRMWARE_FILENAME=PU_D910.0.3.91_ACR.img
Of course you can point to whatever firmware image you want, even the one you have just set up with the tools I commented before.
The phone must be plugged and you must enter engineering mode (typing ###800#) and then on the setting meny go to provision and set the server-address to the address/name of your web server, then go to settings and choose to update once, exit to the main screen and wait for a while for the phone to ask you to download, while downloading you'll see an arrow moving down (remember to not allow to enter energy saving by pressing the hangup key while the arrow shows downloading), when it finishes the arrow points to the small phone. After that you have to enter again the provision menu and select to upgrade now.
I guess that's all at least all the important things are there and pointers to where to find more info, beware that most of it is on german, so good luck with that, but I hope the info I have written here will be enough for almost anybody.
martes 20 de septiembre de 2011
El kernel de OpenWRT para la Fonera crece de nuevo
El año pasado ya comenté algo de que el kernel de OpenWRT (era la versión kamikaze y pesaba 786432 bytes) no entraba en la Fonera, al menos no con las instrucciones iniciales que había dado en la DudesConf 2 en la charla sobre la liberación de la Fonera, pues bien, me he puesto a jugar con la versión backfire (10.03.1-rc5) y me he encontrado con un kernel de 917504 bytes.
Así pues hay que volver a corregir la primera linea de "fis create" que indicaba en la charla, usando esta en la que se deja menos espacio para el root con lo que queda más espacio para el kernel (lo justo para que entre el actual):
fis create -b 0x80041000 -f 0xA8030000 -l 0x006D0000 -e 0x00000000 rootfs
Por lo demás he notado esta versión bastante lenta en la fonera, al menos la parte web, pero bueno, como no suelo tenerla corriendo tampoco hay problema, por cierto, si vais a deshabilitar la interfaz web (borrar /etc/rc.d/S50uhttpd) quizás también deberíais de deshabilitar el colector de datos (/etc/rc.d/S95luci_bwc).
(Editado ya que los tamaños de los kernels en bytes estaban mal aunque las cuentas y comandos si estaban bien, por cierto, los tamaños se respetan en la 10.03.1 final, así que eso sigue siendo válido)
Así pues hay que volver a corregir la primera linea de "fis create" que indicaba en la charla, usando esta en la que se deja menos espacio para el root con lo que queda más espacio para el kernel (lo justo para que entre el actual):
fis create -b 0x80041000 -f 0xA8030000 -l 0x006D0000 -e 0x00000000 rootfs
Por lo demás he notado esta versión bastante lenta en la fonera, al menos la parte web, pero bueno, como no suelo tenerla corriendo tampoco hay problema, por cierto, si vais a deshabilitar la interfaz web (borrar /etc/rc.d/S50uhttpd) quizás también deberíais de deshabilitar el colector de datos (/etc/rc.d/S95luci_bwc).
(Editado ya que los tamaños de los kernels en bytes estaban mal aunque las cuentas y comandos si estaban bien, por cierto, los tamaños se respetan en la 10.03.1 final, así que eso sigue siendo válido)
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