What if my SATA controller doesn’t see my new 1TB SATA hard disk?

April 29th, 2009

First-generation SATA controllers have several problems getting along with newer SATA drives, among them: inability to negotiate transfer rate of the drive down from 3.0Gb/s to 1.5Gb/s, and failure to account for the large capacity of the drive (>527GB).  There is more information on this issue in this excellent post.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell which issue is being experienced when the BIOS merely locks up, or the controller locks up during drive inquiry and is invisible to the system thereafter. Assuming first that the problem persists under a newer version of the Linux kernel with the libata drivers mostly sorted out, there are several other potential compatibility fixes that do not involve buying and installing a newer SATA controller card that you are sure will work:

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Posted in Computer Hardware Interfacing, Linux/UNIX/Open Source, PC Hardware/Consumer Electronics | 36 Comments »

SSH tunnel through HTTPS

March 12th, 2009

Many people at corporate jobs find themselves behind a firewall which only allows outgoing traffic to destination ports 21 (ftp), 80 (http) and 443 (https). To access one’s network at home, the workaround is to run the SSH server at home on port 443 instead of the usual port 22, then use the SSH client to create a tunnel so that arbitrary traffic will be sent through your home machine instead of through the firewall.

Some people who are even unluckier find themselves behind a firewall which does layer 7 packet inspection, meaning that traffic outgoing to a destination port of 443 that does not look like HTTPS traffic will be dropped by the firewall.

Fortunately, PuTTY combined with proxytunnel will allow the passing of non-HTTPS traffic through this type of firewall. It is accomplished through a “triple-proxy” method, where a connection is made to your HTTPS proxy web server at home through your restrictive corporate proxy, then an SSH session is tunneled through the HTTPS connection, and then the SSH connection acts as a proxy for the network traffic that is not permitted to pass through the corporate network. All traffic is encrypted and completely unidentifiable by packet inspection as anything other than a normal encrypted HTTPS session.
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Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source, Reverse Engineering | No Comments »

The quick and easy way to make Paint Bucket Wine(TM)

February 15th, 2009

Basic idea: Yeast eat sugar and convert it to alcohol, but you want this to happen without other things also infecting and eating the sugar, mainly because their waste products aren’t as useful or tasty as alcohol.

Materials needed to get started:

  • One brand new, clean 5 gallon plastic pail with lid, any plastic type but 3 or 7 preferred
  • One packet of active dry yeast, red brewer’s yeast preferred
  • 14 cans of juice concentrate, required to have no sulfites or preservatives
  • One standard size bag of granulated baking sugar
  • 5 gallons of water, filtered or distilled water preferred
  • A winemaking hydrometer
  • Bleach & a clean sponge

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Posted in Frugal Living, Independent Living | No Comments »

Compaq Proliant DL380 Generation 1

February 4th, 2009

I was given a Compaq Proliant DL380 (Generation 1 or G1) as part of an exchange for doing some filesystem recovery for a customer. It came with 2x800MHz/256K SECC2 Pentium III CPUs; 512MB PC133 CL3 SDRAM DIMMs; five Compaq 18.2GB Ultra2 SCSI hard disks (two failed); a Compaq “Integrated Smart Array” onboard RAID controller; a floppy drive, slimline CD-ROM, and single 275W hotswap Compaq power supply. Here are HP’s specs for the system. Here is where you can find manuals and documentation for the system. Now, this isn’t a bad machine as-is, but let’s turn it into a beast with some smart buys on the used market.

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Posted in Computer Hardware Interfacing, Linux/UNIX/Open Source, PC Hardware/Consumer Electronics | 2 Comments »

A list of the best 64-bit Ubuntu Intrepid entertainment software

January 28th, 2009

Here is a command you can simply paste into your terminal to install most of the best available Ubuntu games, emulators, and media players that do not require external repositories and that are available on the 64-bit ‘amd64’ architecture. You do want to make sure you have the universe and multiverse enabled.

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Debian/Ubuntu automatically build kernel modules when kernel package is upgraded

November 7th, 2008

I don’t know how many times I have had to deal with the situation where a system requires some module that is built separately from the kernel tree (such as OpenAFS and NVIDIA drivers) and a kernel upgrade is installed either automatically or as part of an upgrade set, leaving a surprise for the next reboot when the module for the new kernel version does not exist. (Other Debian users have reported similar gripes.)

I came up with the following solution. It uses module-assistant to automatically build every kernel module package whose source is currently unpacked in /usr/src/modules.

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Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source | 2 Comments »

Securely delete /home when it resides within the root filesystem

July 31st, 2008

Here’s a way to obliterate everything in a sensitive directory if you do not have the luxury of wiping the entire disk device it resides on. It overwrites every file with random data and renames every file to a random name.


 for temp in `find /home/ -type f`; do SIZE=`du -k $temp | cut -f1`; \
    echo -n Obliterating $temp; FAILED=; dd if=/dev/urandom \
    of=$temp bs=1K count=$(($SIZE+1)) >/dev/null 2>/dev/null \
    || FAILED=1; if [ ! -z $FAILED ]; then echo ... failed; else \
    echo ... done; FNAME=`base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '+/\r\n0-9' \
    | head -c 50`; mv $temp $FNAME;  fi  ; done

Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source | No Comments »

VIA KT600 chipset and PCI Wireless card experiences

May 20th, 2008

Seems VIA’s Athlon chipsets, specifically the KT600 in this board, don’t much care for some common PCI wireless chipsets. All of these are actual PCI devices, not on a Cardbus adapter card.

A Broadcom BCM4318 “AirForce” failed even basic PCI configuration; it was detected instead as a Gammagraphx device (0000:0040). Same card works perfectly in a system with nForce3 chipset.

A card with an Atheros chipset worked under light use, but caused random kernel panics under even light NFS traffic while acting as a file server. Under Windows, sporadic hangs were the result. Didn’t check if this one worked in the nForce3 board yet.

Finally after almost giving up, a card based on a Realtek RTL8185 worked correctly and reliably.

Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source, PC Hardware/Consumer Electronics | No Comments »

Adventures in a Windows XP hard drive transplant

February 14th, 2008

Donor: Intel P4, Intel chipset, SATA disk

Recipient: AMD Opteron, NForce Pro chipset, SCSI disk

  • The first thing that was encountered is a STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. This is because the hard disk controller has changed and Windows does not have the new controller in its CriticalDeviceDatabase. See the Knowledgebase article. The best way to avoid this is to install the driver in question before dismantling the donor system, but when the donor system has died, such planning is not possible. There is a way to “fix” the transplanted disk by hooking it up as a temporary slave disk, that is outlined in this article. The basic strategy is to copy over the entire CriticalDeviceDatabase branch from a working installation, and also to be sure that any necessary driver services that it refers to are also added in, and obviously that the appropriate driver files themselves are copied in.
  • The second thing that was encountered was some driver for the donor system was loading, not finding its associated hardware, and barfing a different STOP error. The “ghosted” devices that traditionally are shown in Device Manager in Safe Mode are not shown in Windows XP. There is a way to cause them to be shown so that they can be removed to stop the offending driver from loading.
  • The last thing that was encountered was a piece of dumb luck caused by moving from an Intel to an AMD processor, specifically with Service Pack 2. It turns out that the SP2 Intel processor driver is too stupid to realize that it is being loaded on a non-Intel CPU, and barfs out a STOP 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, …). What’s worse is that Microsoft initially posted an incorrect fix in their KB article, and then instead of correcting the instructions, they removed the fix from the article entirely. Consequently, third party sites had to archive the fix. Basically, in CurrentControlSet as well as the archived ControlSets, change the “Start” value from 1 to 4 for all instances of the ‘Intelppm’ service.

2 frickin’ days! Thanks, Microsoft!

And people ask me why I make such a point of avoiding Microsoft products…

Posted in Incoherent Rambling | No Comments »

CNN and the Turner Media Plugin on Linux with Firefox

November 28th, 2007

If you get an “Unsupported Platform” error when trying to play CNN Videos, follow these instructions.

Follow the link to LinuxQuestions.org and follow the instructions there.

Remember when you configure UserAgentSwitcher to fill in the AppName as Netscape and the Platform as MacPPC or you will get the same error again.

Posted in Linux/UNIX/Open Source, Reverse Engineering | No Comments »

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