Author: admin

Drobo connected to Asus router running TomatoUSB

Simple – Don’t do it! This was from a couple of years ago when running TomatoUSB on an ASUS RT-N16 router. DD-WRT had issues where the wifi would drop off periodically. I found that TomatoUSB (Shibby or Toastman) were both very good alternatives. So good that I’ve since moved onto Tomato for almost all of my routers.

Anyways, some of the issues I ran into were:

Value too large for defined data type …

Sep 24 00:01:08 unknown daemon.err smbd[1539]: disk_free: sys_fsusage() failed.
Error was : Value too large for defined data type
Sep 24 00:01:08 unknown daemon.err smbd[1539]: disk_free: sys_fsusage() failed.
Error was : Value too large for defined data type

root@unknown:/tmp/etc# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 5.6M 5.6M 0 100% /
tmpfs 62.0M 400.0K 61.6M 1% /tmp
devfs 62.0M 0 62.0M 0% /dev
df: /tmp/mnt/Monster: Value too large for defined data type

Along with this, the CPU on that router just couldn’t handle NTFS-3G well – CPU utilization was going through the roof on writes. I think reads were okay.

It would be better to just build a cheap NAS.

A relatively easy/inexpensive way to speed up your old desktop or laptop for ~$100

REQUIREMENTS:
Ghost binaries on bootable CD/DVD or USB thumb drive
Windows 7 installation DVD or USB thumb drive

There are several ways to speed up some old computers. Sometimes, they might not even be old – they’re just slow.

My mother’s laptop was crawling. It had a dual-core 2ghz chip, 4gb ram. Why was it slow? I figured, 4gb ram is enough to run Windows 7 – I’m running a bunch of VMs and I only have 5gb ram on the server. So, it had to be i/o. Since I had an old 128gb SSD from a laptop I had before, I put it in. The problem was, the laptop had a 320gb hd. Clonezilla wouldn’t clone it – gave me some issues with partimage. I remember that the old Ghost 2003 would do a bigger to smaller disk. So, I tried that. Ghost gave me other issues. I tried ghost.exe -fdsp because this is Windows 7. Vista changed some things with NTFS or something that made Ghost stop working with the default settings. The first time I tried Ghost, it ran for 90 minutes and ran into a bad sector. 🙁 It failed. So I tried bypassing it. I ran ghost with the -BSC -FRO switches. It then ran into some issue with a big file or something and told me to pass the -NTC- switch. Well, that failed and told me the same thing, so I just decided to abandon the ghost idea and start fresh.

Since I had the idea of upgrading my mom’s hd, I did the same with a couple of other computers, so my process has been repeated. On the other machines, I got 1tb Seagate ssd hybrid desktop drives (sshd) for $80 each. Ghost 2003 or 8.0 both work for Windows 7. The first thing I did was put the SSD in along with the disk I wanted to clone. I booted from one of my old Ghost DVD archives, but on one machine, there was only 2 SATA ports, so I had to figure out a way to build a bootable USB thumb drive. The one I ended up using was UNetbootin – with that, I created a FreeDOS bootable thumb drive and copied the ghost.exe binary there. Since the stupid Ghost DVD archive only had .GHO files on it and I could access the DOS partition, I ended up copying ghost.exe by extracting it from an old Hiren’s Boot CD. With that, I was able to boot from USB. You can copy ghost.exe onto the USB drive, but FreeDOS boots in it’s own jail or something. The ghost.exe actually ends up on b:\. You should be able to then do the clone using ghost.exe -FDSP -BSC -FRO. After a successful clone, since this is Windows 7, we’re not exactly done yet. The disk will not boot – will give
Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1.Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2.Choose your language settings, and then click “Next.”
3.Click “Repair you computer.” If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

Status: 0xc0000225

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

This is an easy fix. Just follow the directions. Boot with the Windows 7 install DVD or USB thumb drive and go to repair and it’s done almost automatically. On one host, it asked to run CHKDSK afterwards. I let it run and everything was dandy as well. But if all else fails you could buy one of the best budget gaming laptops that is guaranteed to run great.

OPS1 – VMware Management app for the iPhone – Fantastic!

I’ve been using this app for quite some time, but haven’t found the time to write about it.

If you use an iPhone or iPad and manage a vSphere environment, you’ll want this app. You can get it here: OPS1 – VMware and Amazon AWS Cloud Management for …

It’s made by a company called Spragos based out of Santa Clara, CA. You can find their website here: http://www.spragos.com.

It’s pretty awesome that I could manage my vSphere hosts and VMs without having to power on the laptop. Since I’m on a Mac, I don’t enjoy bringing up the vSphere thick client and even the web client takes quite some time to load. Most of the time, I just need to power on or off a VM or shutdown a host anyways. This app has allowed for me to do these things without having to power on my laptop or even if I’m on the laptop, I don’t need to start up Fusion for the client and I’m loving it.

Here are some screen shots. You can configure a single or multiple hosts – connect to vCenter or an ESX host directly. It will also cache credentials. Since I’m not necessarily in a super secure environment (my home lab), I don’t care much about security. I hate having to type my password in over and over just to log in or even my user name for that matter.

After logging in, here’s my home screen. From here, I usually head over to Virtual Machines or Hosts, depending on what I want to do.

IMG_2026

I’m I’m interested in what’s going on overall, I would navigate to Status. Here, I could see at a high level that everyone’s going just fine with my host.

IMG_2032

It’s not always this way though – see, it pulls events and alarms from Corporate Event Planners.

IMG_2400-1

If you go into VMs, you can see a nice list of the VMs:

IMG_2027

Then, you can drill into the properties of the VM and see what’s going on, make changes, power on or off, etc

IMG_2029

IMG_2028

If a VM was suddenly unresponsive for some reason, maybe the CPU stats could give you a clue as to what was going on. In my case, I just had a couple of spikes.

IMG_2030

I think you get my point. It’s a great app! Download it free and try it yourself. I honestly feel that the value of the free version is well worth the measly $10 for upgrading to the Enterprise version. It’s probably saved me hours of time if you aggregate the couple of minutes it takes to start up the mac, start up fusion, start up the vSphere client and then logging into the ESX or vCenter server.

Here’s a few other screenshots just for eye candy’s sake.

Adventures in the quest to install Lion on my MacBook Pro …

This was pretty fun. I had to install a new HD in my Mac. Since Lion was out and I was still on Snow Leopard, I figured I might as well upgrade that too. I downloaded and burned it on a dvd. I figured, After swapping out the hard drive, I could install from DVD. Unfortunately, the DVD didn’t read. Damn! It was a pain to swap the disks and I didn’t want to do it again. So I tried booting from USB – attached the old disk to a usb enclosure and it booted! Linux couldn’t do that! Windows couldn’t do that! This was awesome. From there, I was able to just install Lion via the downloaded dmg file and pointed the install to the newly installed disk.

By the way, trying to burn a dmg file on Linux or Windows is a pain in the ass. I tried with both and gave up after about an hour of google searches and trying different converter products.

I’m starting to hate Sony laptops!

I guess it’s not just Sony. It’s just managing device drivers. Windows 7 has fixed most issues, but man … keyword = MOST!

A friend asked me to upgrade her laptop to Windows 7. It’s a Sony VGN-FJ67C/R. It’s a laptop from China, so you probably won’t run into the exact same one, but you might run into a similar issue with one from here.

So, I installed Windows and it found a few drivers – the ones that were missing were the Wireless network, video, sound, camera, and mass controller. I’ll thank God that Windows detected and installed the driver for the network. Had it not done that, I’m sure finding it on the net first would’ve been a pain. I started with a Windows update, then went through the device manager and started my search for drivers one at a time. The first was the video driver. Ven 8086 and dev 2592 sent me to Intel’s site and told me that it was a 915GM. Unfortunately, Intel didn’t make a driver for Windows 7 on it. Damn it! Searched around a little bit … couldn’t find it. Well, not a show stopper. Let’s move on. So, updates finished installing and I restart the machine. Somehow, magically, the video card driver starts to install. Awesome! Well, I find that the audio driver is installed too. The damn sound doesn’t work though! Oh man … this will be a pain … well, after an hour long exhaustive search (Sony doesn’t have drivers – HP does, but they don’t work), I just go to RealTek.com and install the RealTek HD drivers from there. Magically, it works! It’s Ven 10EC Dev 0260 if you’re interested. That was a pain in the ass! Last, but not least, I had the mass controller – ven 104c and dev AC8E – TI PCI-7×20/6×20. It wasn’t too bad. I just installed the Windows XP driver and it worked! Actually, some site said that they tried it, so I just followed suit. Superb! 🙂

This took a little longer than expected, but man… I guess it was satisfying. 🙂

Hope a person that reads this doesn’t spend as much time as I did! 🙂

how to import a zimbra trusting cert into IE

Well, I finally made some progress. Of course, being relatively new to CAs, certificate trust chains, etc. I ended up wasting half my day figuring it out.

Most of the research I did pointed to importing the certificate presented to the browser when using the ZWC into the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store, which no matter how many dozens of ways I did it made no difference. I ended up going into /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/ca and converting the PEM format ca.pem certificate into Windows compatible DER format:

openssl x509 -inform PEM -in ca.pem -outform DER -out ca.cer

Then I imported this into the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store and finally I’m not getting the warnings from IE.

I did have one more question for anyone knowledgeable with certificates and domains/DNS. I’d like to use the servers host name as the URL instead of the FQDN (e.g. https://mail/ instead of https://mail.subdomain.domain.com/) to simplify things, but of course the browser then complains the URL doesn’t match the certificate (issued to mail.subdomain.domain.com). Anyone know if this is possible without getting the warnings? I tried to create a certificate using just the hostname but it requires a proper domain name.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
EnSn
View Public Profile
Send a private message to EnSn
Find all posts by EnSn
Add EnSn to Your Buddy List
#3 (permalink) Add to raj’s Reputation Report Post
Old 03-08-2010, 06:06 PM
raj’s Avatar
raj raj is offline
Moderator
raj’s Zimbra Wiki Sandbox Page

Joined: Oct 2005 – Rep: 6 x 6 raj will become famous soon enoughraj will become famous soon enoughraj will become famous soon enough
Location: USA, Canada and India
ZCS/ZD Version: Release 5.0.18_GA FOSS Ed., CentOS 5.3 on VMware ESXi
Posts: 592
Default
just for future …you can just download the ca.pem and rename to ca.crt and double click on it in windows the install the cert..no need to convert

Raj

Toyo Sushi on Sloat Blvd in San Francisco

This is yet another, Chinese owned sushi restaurant. We sat at the bar and the chef had a scared look on his face when my buddy asked me if we should do “omakase”. I’m fairly certain he didn’t know what that meant. This place is okay. Their “shari” (rice) really sucks. It had no taste – not salty, not sweet, not sour. Their fish though that day was very fresh and tasted very good. After one piece of nigiri, we did sashimi for the rest of the night. The chef at the bar was lame. We tried ordering from him and he seemed to acknowledge our orders, but never fulfilled them. He told us that he was very busy and we would have better luck ordering with the waiters. That was pretty disappointing. We took 3% off of his tip for that and I don’t expect to go there again.

How to Flash an AirLink101 AR430w router with DD-WRT firmware

1. Connect cable to WAN port and power on router

Download contents from: http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/down.php?path=downloads%2Frelease+candidates%2FDD-WRT+v24+RC7%2FAtheros+WiSoc%2FAirlink+101+AR430W/

2. Set your host IP to 192.168.20.80 (Don’t bother with any values in DNS Server/Alternate DNS)
3. ping -t 192.168.20.81
4. Run PuTTY/PuttyTel (YOU MUST USE PUTTY – SecureCRT and the regular Windows telnet DON’T WORK!) and set port to 9000 with Telnet option. – on the 2nd ping, hit open to connect to the router on 192.168.20.81. If you miss this, you may need to reset the router and try again.
You’ll see:
You’ll probably get these messages:
/releases/svn.porsche/redboot-ar231x/redboot-ar231x/redboot_cobra/ecos/packages/devs/eth/mips/ar531x/current/src/ae531xecos.c#390:ae531x_send AHB ERROR: AR531X_DEBUG_ERROR = 00000145
/releases/svn.porsche/redboot-ar231x/redboot-ar231x/redboot_cobra/ecos/packages/devs/eth/mips/ar531x/current/src/ae531xecos.c#393:ae531x_send AHB ERROR status_4 = 00000145

It’s safe to ignore them.

5. Started TtftpSrv in background.

In the screen, run:
load ap61.ram
go

6. change host IP to 192.168.1.23 and then change your command prompt window to run: “ping -t 192.168.1.1”

7. with putty, telnet to 192.168.1.1 9000
You’l see: DD-WRT>

Unfortunately, after this, it’s a little shaky as to what I did. If you do all of these steps in this order, it should work.

ip_address -l 192.168.1.1 -h 192.168.1.23
fconfig bootp false
bootp: Setting to false
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .
DD-WRT> fis init
About to initialize [format] FLASH image system – continue (y/n)? y
*** Initialize FLASH Image System
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .

DD-WRT> ip_address -l 192.168.1.1 -h 192.168.1.23
IP: 192.168.1.1/255.255.255.0, Gateway: 0.0.0.0
Default server: 192.168.1.23
DD-WRT> load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} ap61.rom
Using default protocol (TFTP)
Raw file loaded 0x80080000-0x800a8717, assumed entry at 0x80080000

fis create -l 0x30000 -e 0xbfc00000 RedBoot
An image named ‘RedBoot’ exists – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xbfc00000-0xbfc30000: …
… Program from 0x80080000-0x800a8718 at 0xbfc00000: …
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x807f0000-0x80800000 at 0xbffe0000: .

reset

DD-WRT> fis init
About to initialize [format] FLASH image system – continue (y/n)? y
*** Initialize FLASH Image System
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .

fconfig boot_script true
boot_script: Setting to true
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .
DD-WRT> fconfig boot_script_timeout 3
boot_script_timeout: Setting to 3
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .
DD-WRT>

DD-WRT> load -v -r -b 0x80041000 linux.bin

You should see something like this:

|——————————————————————————-
Raw file loaded 0x80041000-0x803cefff, assumed entry at 0x80041000————–
DD-WRT> ———————————————————————-
——————————————————————————–
——————————————————————————–
——————————————————————————–
–

Then run:
fis create linux
This will take forever. This would probably be a good time to set your telnet session so that putty doesn’t timeout and die.

Here’s a screenshot:

putty config to set the timeout

DD-WRT> fis create linux——————————————————–
——————————————————————————–
——————————————————————————–
… Erase from 0xbfc30000-0xbffbe000: …………………………………………………
… Program from 0x80041000-0x803cf000 at 0xbfc30000: …………………………………………………
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .
DD-WRT> DD-WRT> DD-WRT>

DD-WRT> fconfig
Run script at boot: true
Boot script:
Enter script, terminate with empty line
>> fis load -l linux
>> exec
>>
Boot script timeout (1000ms resolution): 3
Use BOOTP for network configuration: true
Default server IP address: 192.168.1.1
Console baud rate: 9600
GDB connection port: 9000
Force console for special debug messages: false
Network debug at boot time: false
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xbffe0000-0xbfff0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xbffe0000: .

Please reference: http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=29779

and http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=23510&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=240

and of course http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/release%20candidates/DD-WRT%20v24%20RC7/Atheros%20WiSoc/Airlink%20101%20AR430W/flashing.txt

By the way, here’s the end result:

Airlink DD-WRT screenshot

Flashing the Airlink AR430W woes …

Timing needs to be right in getting into the damn Redboot – takes forever.

Trick is to do a ping in one window and when you see 2 pings, use putty to connect to 192.168.20.81 port 9000. Another command prompt window WILL NOT work.

Then, ran into this issue:
/releases/svn.porsche/redboot-ar231x/redboot-ar231x/redboot_cobra/ecos/packages/devs/eth/mips/ar531x/current/src/ae531xecos.c#390:ae531x_send AHB ERROR: AR531X_DEBUG_ERROR = 00000145
Not sure if that’s an issue.

Then, try loading the ap610.rom and go and it reboots. Will try following the instructions from here http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=23510&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=240 tomorrow.