i summon one kim

Wulffmorgenthaler RSS

Kimmo Suominen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:43:07 +0000

Hesarilla ei vieläkään näytä olevan syötteitä sarjakuville, joten raaputin sivulta sellaisen myös Wulffmorgenthalerille.

http://kimmo.suominen.com/stuff/wulffmorgenthaler.xml

Evolution with Google Apps

Kimmo Suominen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:04:56 +0000

How to sync Evolution with Google Apps

Ekiga on the intranet

Kimmo Suominen — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 13:25:07 +0000

Ekiga has a problem talking from behind a firewall, or maybe the problem is that both the firewall and Ekiga are trying to be too clever. I’m running siproxd on the firewall to transparently handle SIP connections. All the hardware phones and ATAs as well as X-Lite work well, but Ekiga fails to register.

The fix is controversial: I’m disabling STUN.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/ekiga/general/nat/stun_server --type=string

However, this means Ekiga won’t work from less “intelligent” networks anymore. Since I’m considering Ekiga for my laptop, this might be a problem. Maybe I should try X-Lite under Wine.

Ubuntu doesn’t like AMD?

Kimmo Suominen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:55:26 +0000

I’ve been observing a really strange problem on Ubuntu Server 8.04: processes are sitting in limbo not doing anything. I first observed this as phones losing their SIP registrations periodically (but at random intervals).

When debugging the issue, I saw that a ping running on the system would often just sit there, not sending more packets, sometimes for seconds on end (I didn’t always wait to see if it would ever continue). Since hitting a key on the keyboard would immediately be echoed back, it wasn’t a problem with the terminal or ssh connection. Pinging the system from another would work without problems. Interrupting ping would report no packet loss (which was true — you can’t lose replies to packets you didn’t send).

My best guess is that the alternative scheduler chosen by the Ubuntu developers for the server kernels doesn’t work as intended on AMD CPUs (or just the Athlon XP, or some other part of the hardware I’m using).

My “fix” was to switch to Debian 5.0 (lenny), which doesn’t exhibit this problem at all.

I could have tried with the desktop edition of Ubuntu, but can’t really spare the time right now. Especially since I now have something that works reliably again.

I did try with different network hardware, though. I was originally using an SMC card based on ns83820 (but for some reason not reporting anything at all with ethtool — works fine with the gsip driver on NetBSD). I then switched to a Netwjork “brand” card based on r8169 (well liked by ethtool). No difference, but stayed with the latter (working ethtool is always nice).

Power Outage

Kimmo Suominen — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:04:28 +0000

Two power outages this morning (or more — I was out). The results: one dead Kaveman and one dead power supply on a switch (external, thankfully). Which in turn resulted in some hunting of rogue DHCP leases from an OpenWRT AP…

Spotify on my Ubuntu laptop

Kimmo Suominen — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:45:46 +0000

Being on the road is a challenge to my music listening habits: no Squeezebox and no Spotify. I’ve managed ok with my iPods and Last.fm streaming. However, there’s been no good reason to miss Spotify, though, even when running Ubuntu on the laptop. Just follow the instructions to install and run Spotify under Wine.

High CPU load from Firefox

Kimmo Suominen — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:58:32 +0000

“Suddenly” Firefox had begun to pin the CPU at 100% even when not doing anything. I started to uninstall related recently added software. Looks like the culprit was swfdec-mozilla, which I had added hoping to get Cooliris working (no such luck — didn’t work with flashplugin-installer either). No flash now, but also no load when browsing the web. (And no burning sensation from the laptop.)

Asterisk installation

Kimmo Suominen — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:28:42 +0000

Just a short note on getting a minimal Asterisk environment installed on current versions of Debian and Ubuntu:

aptitude install asterisk
m-a a-i zaptel
modprobe ztdummy

Also add ztdummy to /etc/modules so it gets loaded when the system starts.

If the m-a command is not found, install the module-assistant package.

New syslog on lenny

Kimmo Suominen — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:03:16 +0000

New installations of Debian have rsyslog as the system logging daemon. Upgraders, however, will be left with sysklogd — and no instructions on how to switch. I’m hoping purging the old one and adding the new one will work ok, as I’ve made no local mods to the logging configuration…

Upgrading to lenny

Kimmo Suominen — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:41:59 +0000

I’ve been always a fan of the robust upgrade procedure documented in the Debian release notes, which has worked without problems even over ssh to remote machines. This has made upgrading very painless (at least since sarge — I haven’t used Debian actively longer than that).

Yesterday I ran into a problem, though, which was only saved by having remote console access. I have a system with a slightly more complicated disk setup: it has two SCSI disks running as a RAID 1 array using md and lvm. Upon rebooting after the upgrade, the system didn’t reappear on the network. What I found on the console was the initramfs panic shell: the root file system had not been found. Rebooting the old etch kernel worked fine.

The workaround proved to be very simple, once I distilled it from the search engine results. Just add rootdelay=10 to the kernel options in the bootloader. I’m using GRUB so this translates to editing the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub.

I had also added raid1 to modules in /etc/initramfs-tools and regenerated the initrd, but that (alone) didn’t help. I’m not even sure it is needed at all — it might already be included anyway when using MODULES=most in initramfs.conf.