Shortly after Christmas, that computer suffered a catastrophic disk failure (and as an aside, I hate LVM when that happens...). So I reinstalled, this time using the Ubuntu rather Kubuntu variant. This should allow use of Userful Multiplier --- a commercial multiseat solution with free two-seat licenses. The base package even comes via the Ubuntu repos.
I still had a couple of minor issues. One was possibly related to the Radeon card (as in: don't drive one monitor in dvi mode and one in analog mode but rather use both in analog mode via a dvi/analog dongle) so the live cdrom offered by Userful just went into a perpetual 'reconfigure, reboot, reconfigure, reboot, ...' loop. Another hitch was that their license manager no longer wanted to use the license key I had requested in November when I tried in vain to use Userful with KDE. And of course I wouldn't a new key as the home ip address hadn't changed... Now, with a newly requested key from another IP address, things appear to work at last using the default Gnome setup --- and the kids are back in proper 'parallel' use of their workstation.
All in all, Userful Multiplier is a nice and useful product especially as long as stock XFree does them the favour of no longer competing in the basic two-seat case.
Somehow /usr/sbin/Xephyr-path.sh from
/etc/gdm/gdm.conf now read
Otherwise, the tutorial referenced in my earlier post still applies. And the kids are very impressed with new eye candy in KDE 4.1.[server-Xephyr1] name=Xephyr1 command=/usr/sbin/Xephyr-path.sh -display :0 -br -dpi 100 -xauthority /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -screen 1280x1024 handled=true flexible=false [server-Xephyr2] name=Xephyr2 command=/usr/sbin/Xephyr-path.sh -display :0 -br -dpi 100 -xauthority /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -screen 1280x1024+1280+0 handled=true flexible=false
But two cards are not needed. As the machine is running a standard Kubuntu setup, I just followed this excellent three-part tutorial for Ubuntu multi-seat setup which describes the process using nothing but standard Ubuntu software. From setting up a 'big desktop' spanning two screens (which is easy enough using one card via the vga and dvi outputs), it is fairly straightforward to modify the gdm.conf setup to spawn two gdm greeter instances using the Xephyr nesting xserver.
So far, all is well. We'll see what possible shortcomings we will find. The GL extensions are not supported, so some eye-candy will be unavailable.
Old computers, I hear you ask, well how old? Real old. The older two were from an age where the bios didn't yet boot off cdroms -- circa 1995. We had bought those in Kingston just off the Queen's campus. These were respectively a pentium 90 and a pentium 100, which still have traces on the web as miles.econ.queensu.ca (e.g. in a number of Debian changelogs) and rosebud.sps.queensu.ca which was of course Lisa's office machine and for a while the only internet address showing SPS.
The next two were purchased around 1999 in Toronto on College St just north of U of T's main St George campus. Those, an AMD k6-2 300 and a Celeron overclocked to 450 MHz (woot :) lived happily in the basement of our Toronto home, forming the first lan I built. If I recall they were initially connected using a crossed ethernet cable and a second nic to the ISP. Oh boy.
At least those latter two still boot off Knoppix. And do they ever feel slow. To think now just how many Debian packages I must have built on at least three of these over the years... And each machine must have gotten at least five decent years of usage out of them. One of the second generation computers eventually morphed into the kids play computer but even retired from that a while ago.
In any event, it was good to have them recycled, and also good to have been able to do so without paying a fee as is increasingly common. So cheers to Triton. I may be back in a few years as there are still a few computers spread across the house.
Lo and behold, that's what I saw today in my techbargains feed: a Buffalo LinkStation Live which contains a 500gb SATA for $199 after rebates. Some quick googling lead to these wiki pages which looked promising: anything from enhancing the stock Linux setup by enabling a few more services to a custom Linux distro (similar to my wrt54 router running linux) to reportedly some work-in-progress for a native Debian installation. Nice!
So off I went, ordered the thingie for local pickup for an additional 5% off and picked it up a little later at the local Circuit City (where visits are seemingly a recurring event these days). The documentation is very brief and insist that you install something on Windows -- just to find that the little box autoconfigures itself just fine. Presumably some network discovery is going to find the assigned dhcp address which is needed for the web interface. A few minutes later, a new (fixed) IP address was assigned, ntp was enabled and that was about that.
After dinner, I quickly followed this tutorial to get the box a bit more Unixy without going too far (yet) from the default: start up telnet via a simple Java command-line tool, login, then enable ssh, set it up in /etc/init.d, add some extra binaries. All very quick and simple [ with the caveat that the addons.tar didn't want to get there via the Java tool, so manual scp once 'inside' did the trick ].
NFS, which I like for shuffling files around, appears to be little trickier for this ARM-based LinkStation Live. So at least for now I am content with simple rsync'ing of my backup directories on the few machines here. Much better than the current setup with mutual backups between workstations and semi-permanently being out of space.
All in all a rather pleasant gadget and recommended at the price. The extra $100 in rebates are valid from today to the 12th.
#! and
/bin/sh may
not be a good idea). Fails not once, but twice: you say
/bin/sh, but you meant
/bin/bash as you use features of the latter. Oh well, I guess
we all made
that mistake in our
youth. Irregardless, the software never installed. Which is a pity as this
would be about the first 'household appliance' I bought with native Linux
support. So close, and yet so far.Updated to fix a markup error. And the shebang space is standard, I am told.
Postscriptum: Turns out it was 'just' the power surge. Putting the cable modem and the router onto a different wall outlet, and a surge-protector and battery backup ups to boot, fixed the issue.
[...] disk drives that held up to three times as much data in the same space, were more reliable, actually cheaper to build, and used 70-95 percent less energy to run.
[...]
Our metal foil drive costs less, not more, and spins up so quickly that data can be read from disk as fast or faster than it can be read from flash. Who needs a hybrid disk drive?
[...]
The market potential is one billion computer disk drives and one billion mobile phone drives per year. And it all starts around this time next year when metal foil drives will begin to appear under well-known brand names.
Bring'em on.
while true; do
cat <<END | atftp --tftp-timeout 1;
verbose
trace
connect 192.168.1.1
put openwrt-g-code.bin
END
sleep 1;
done
This assumes that you have a Linux box plugged into the box with a
tftp client pushing the binary image to the wrt54g which will
read it thanks to the ping trick described User Guide
mtd erase nvram; rebootdnsmasq.conf as per
Using and
here.
nvram set lan_ipaddr=192.168.2.1; nvram
committ' and editing of /etc/dnsmasq.conf followed by
reboot
ipkg update works as well, ipkg install
dropbear gets ssh so that telnet can be
disabled.
ssh from outside / forward
ssh from outside
a la Section 6 and 7 of GettingStartedTips.
Same for http. -s a.b.c.d option to allow ssh only from given
address a.b.c.d
nvram set wl0_wep=on nvram set wl0_wep_bit=128 nvram set wl0_key1=DEADBEEF12345DEADBEEF12345Also set the
wl0_ssid, and define a specific list of MAC
addresses we talk too:
nvram set wl0_maclist='XX:XX:XX:XX:XX YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY' nvram set wl0_macmode=allow
nvram set lan_ipaddr=192.168.1.x/etc/dnsmasq.conf accordingly/etc/init.d/S45firewall/ partition.
But then it didn't matter. In December, I had finally bought what Cringely so aptly called a disruptive technology: one of those inexpensive Linksys WRT54G. Somewhat procrastingly, I had started to both configure the box using the admirable OpenWRT Linux operation system one can load onto it, and migrate essentially all services of the old gateway. So today and yesterday I finished the setup, which worked well enough. Now it is the new gateway, redirecting http to the bigger server in the basement, same for ssh from less than a handful addresses, rejecting the rest and is otherwise NATing away. Luckily, in the interim I had the older Speedstream 801.11b gateway I had once bough along with a Speedstream 801.11b card that turned out to be a piece of crap. Still, it was easy to cover the basics with it for a day to not be off the net, but it doesn't of course offer the magic of iptables needed for the finer-grained firewalling and access control, which I intend to add soon and the host of other Linux goodies that are available for OpenWRT thanks to Linux networking.