aviary

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article about setting up a wireless ISP on Linux.

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article that answers the question: “Why FreeBSD?”

Worth a read. Which reminds me - I hope I did post the research I did in May or June about BSD, as I’ve already forgotten which distro fits me best. If I did, this place is definitely useful, because I honestly don’t remember how I went about researching BSD.

After my dual Athlon MP 2400+’s burnt out, I’ve been living in the laptop world. It definitely is a very different view from the desktop world, which I’ve preferred since the beginning of time. After getting the T43p though, I really miss the fact that I can use a dual screen of equal size on the desktop; not to mention that the density of pixels can be lower, so everything’s generally easier to view.

To actually be able to use that function though, I need a new processor. Of course, I have a few options - if I’m getting a processor, I can get an Athlon XP, an Athlon MP, or an Athlon XP-M; if I’m willing to upgrade the motherboard, I can get one that is pin compatible with Athlon 64, or even one that is Socket 939. For now, though, I think I’ll stick with XP-M. It’s cheaper, going to run a lot less hot, and works with my current motherboard, which can actually sport two XP-Ms at a later time.

For reference, the articles that I read yesterday on this topic are here:

• Intel Pentium M 780 as Heart of Your Desktop PC, with ASUS CT-479 Adapter
• The Next Generation of Cool: AOpen’s 37 Watt Pentium M Desktop PC
• 4 AMD Socket 754 MicroATX Motherboards: Getting the Job Done on the Cheap
• Life in the Fast Lane: New Boards for the Athlon 64
• Finally Available: Nine Socket 939 Athlon64 Motherboards!
• Digital Daily review of Epox 8RDA3+
• Digital Daily review of Abit NF7-S
• Digital Daily review of Asus A7N8X
• Digital Daily review of boards based on the NForce2 Ultra 400 Northbridge

Wikipedia, again, served very helpful.

• List of AMD Athlon XP processors
• List of AMD Duron processors
• List of Sempron processors
• List of Athlon 64 processors

That’s it for now, though I’m sure there’s a lot more articles that I’ve read about this topic that I never actually jotted down.

Message Authentication Signature Service works to standardize DomainKeys Identified Mail comes from Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Cisco’s Identified Internet Mail email authentications. I thought DomainKeys was good enough, but I guess I’ll read DKIM’s draft.

Stumbled upon EncFS in the Freshmeat feeds. encfs is a user-space filesystem encryption program that does things on the fly using the FUSER kernel module. This looks *really* interesting.

Saw this on the HDAPS mailing list a few days ago. How to make a DOS boot disk without using “the other OS,” because you’re a linux user, but need to upgrade firmware with projects that only run on dos (original post):

Subject: [Hdaps-devel] Updating hard disk firmware (Was: Re: Head parking)

Martin Knoblauch wrote:
> Download is simple, just don’t use the “IBM Download Manager”. Main
> problem is that one needs a bootable floopy drive and “the other OS” to
> create a bootable floppy. It would be great if IBM could provide floppy
> images for use with “dd” for the poor Linux users.

You may be able to use this process to avoid using either a floppy drive
or “the other OS”:

1) Download the appropriate firmware exe from
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-41008
(in my case, this looks like fwhd3313.exe)

2) Find a freedos disk image (I used one that came with biosdisk -
http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/)

3) Create a disk image for the firmware executable:
cp /usr/share/biosdisk/dosdisk.img /tmp/fwdisk1.img
mount -oloop /tmp/fwtemp.img /mnt/tmp
cp fwhd3313.exe /mnt/tmp
umount /mnt/tmp

4) Create a blank disk image for the extracted contents:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/boot/fwdisk.img bs=1474560 count=1

5) Run qemu to extract files and write the disk image:
qemu -fda /tmp/fwtemp.img -fdb /boot/fwdisk.img
A:\>fwhd3313
…
exit qemu

6) Set up grub to boot the new disk image (requires memdisk from
syslinux - http://syslinux.zytor.com/):
$EDITOR /boot/grub/grub.conf
title IBM Hard Drive Firmware update
kernel /memdisk
initrd=/fwdisk.img floppy

7) Reboot and select the “IBM Hard Drive Firmware update” option

It allowed me to run the firmware update program, however it didn’t
believe my drive needed updating, so I haven’t even successfully tried
the entire process. Please let me know if it works for you.

DISCLAIMER: I also provide no guarantees. Hopefully your hard disk
won’t fly off the spindle or anything else bad. If it does, blame
someone else.

Frank
- —
Frank Sorenson - KD7TZK
Systems Manager, Computer Science Department
Brigham Young University

Some projects that I’ve either found before and forgotten about, or never found at all:

• bootsplash - does exactly what its name suggests
• supermount-ng - kernel space automounter upon insertion and ejection; would’ve been helpful if we found out about this years ago while trying to set up library linux computers to treat floppies like windows does

Someone asked Slashdot for suggestions for an Open Source Web-based File Management. An older ask Slashdot covered the same thing. The following looks promising:

• UMich’s mfile, which is expected to be released soon.
• Knowledge Tree
• OpenFile
• WebDAV is, of course, a logical solution, but I never got it to work *reliably*, and not at all with HTTPS on both Windows and OSX. But this comment thread suggestions:
  • Use a combination of Plone for the server side (it’s based on Zope)
  • Use Novell’s free NetDrive client on Windows to actually mount your WebDAV shares to a drive letter, and be happy that it supports HTTPS. (Though you have to hunt for the download link.)
  • WebDrive for Windows
  • Goliath for MacOS (9 and X), but I’m not sure you can create a mountpoint.
  • Cadaver for a unix command line.
• FSGuide, a Norton Commander-like web-based file manager.
• Horde
• Webmin with Fireanager module, using Usermin module to configure access
• ByteHoard - PHP based
• phpFileMAnager

Novell GPL’d iFolder, but is an Mono/.NET application.

Part III of the KernelTrap’s OpenBSD Hacakathon coverage describes how OpenBSD addresses ICMP flaws, and that no other operating system has come even close to implementing that many failsafes. Their preview article, part I, and part II are still available.

This is rare - an IBM developerWorks on a Series 2 TiVo.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lobtivo/

Neat.