Another day another problem. We planned to increase the available bandwidth in  our  office to 16mbit. This required an upgrade to ADSL2, not a major problem, or so I thought.

We were still making use of the ADSL router/modem solution from the internet provider we were with several years back and due to the age of the device it did not support ADSL2. We since have switched providers and received a new modem as part of our upgrade to ADSL2. However the new box was modem only, and we obviously need a router for the Office. So of I went to find a suitable device.

We run several services for our roadwarriors out of our office I.T. room, so port forwarding is a MUST have feature for us. I was absolutly suprised that I was unable to find a suitably priced router solution which supported port forwarding, even calling around to the sales guys from netgear and d-link was a disappointment. We purchased devices from both companies only to find that we were not able to do true port mapping, and sent them back.

The routers we sent back only supported what is called virtual servers which is almost what we wanted but not really. We have several web servers that all must run on port 80 within the intranet but also must be accessible from the outside world  (obviously with a different port  outside per webserver.)  The virtual server feature only allows the mapping of incoming requests for fixed port to a different IP on the same port. What a bummer.

So what where we to do?  Our old hardware solved the port mapping issue (strange that such an old router had a better feature set than all current offerings we looked at.) but we where not getting the 16mbit goodness from our ADSL2 line.

One of my tech guys stumbled upon an excellent solution called,
fli4l. The software is a free linux based router solution that fits onto a single floppy disk, the freaky thing is that the fli4l server  only requires  a  single networkcard to do it's routing magic. Most excellent.


Our new router can be seen in the middle, the modem is directly connected by the
yellow cable on the bottom switch.

First we configured the fli4l  floppy disk, included is not only an excellent web interface, but also a cool monitoring client that now runs on my linux desktop. An old dell laptop with broken TFT and keyboard would be put back to use as our new router. We hooked the modem up directly to our switch connected and connected the laptop to the same switch (remeber only one network card), wacked in the fli4l floppy and bam we had a working solution pretty much out of the box. I LIKE

check it out here:
http://www.fli4l.de

fli4l

Another tragic school yard slaying a la columbine occurred a couple of days ago here in Germany.

link | link

The report was barely announced and politician are once again calling for the complete ban on ego shooters. Is this another knee jerk reaction from those trying to protect the population from themselves or does this reaction have merit?

Computer graphics have evolved over the years however game play in principle has not. The player invariably carries a weapon and has to shoot something, a game concept that has carried over from real life kids pretending to shoot each other while playing Cowboys and Indians in their backyard.

When I was playing Rambo on my C=64 all those years ago, my machine gun touting alter ego was represented by barely discernible brown blob of pixels blasting his way up the screen, fast forward to 2006 and I can feast my eyes on the wonderful rendering of my workmates alter ego slumping together after heaving his head blasted on to the wall he was cowering behind just seconds earlier, before I fragged his ass.

Rambo - This Game was banned in the 80's in Germany for being to violent.

Counter Strike source - buy it in any PC-Games store in germany.

Now we are all sane adults who grew up playing computer games, computer games with shit graphics. We are all able to discern what is real and what is fiction we are not psychos and we appreciate the nice rendering and realism in modern computer games.

However that is not the point, the point is that young people and kids are playing these games, and while I do not believe that playing a computer game will make someone a psychotic killer, I do think that the realism of computer games has a desensitising affect towards violence especially on children and young adults. That is is the real danger.

Looking back on my teenage years the game Rambo, Green Baret etc. on the C=64 were all banned for being to violent, however we still managed to acquire these games and played them regularly and that was pre-internet, so a ban will only serve to hurt game sales with no influence on the access of these games to the population .

The focus needs to be put on motivating parents to spend more time with their kids. If your teenage son is running around the woods dressed in full army camouflage carrying a real gun and blowing shit up with real selfmade bombs, the least of your worries is him playing Counter-Strike. 

I just found a post-it note lying around on my Desk describing a fix for a problem I had several month ago when I started out with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

Now I can't remember which kind soul posted this on the Internet but it helped me out so I thought I'd just post the text word for word in the hope that someone out might also find this information useful.

If after a system update you’ve discovered that streaming Flash is without sound - fear not. Dapper will at times drop the sound from Firefox & Flash, as always you need to search the forums before freaking out as someone has more than likely already experienced the problem and discovered a solution. Trial and error has lead me to the following fix on my system.

sudo aptitude install alsa-oss
sudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”

It looks like I have finally succeeded in abandoning the Micro$oft empire. Over the years I have made several runs at switching over to Linux with little success, there always seemed to be something missing. Several month ago I once again attempted the switch this time to Ubuntu, and this time around things are going well. I love my new shiny OS.

However going the way of Linux was not an easy switch and took some getting used to, and definitely some unlearning of the windows way of doing things which have become a habit over the last 12 years.

One thing that I was unhappy with was the extra mouse buttons on my MX510 not working the way I wanted to. Logitech make the best mouses but unfortunately they do not support Linux yet. To cut it short the extra buttons did not work out of the box with my Ubuntu installation and that sucked,

Following this How-To on the Ubuntu forums I got the mouse working exactly like I wanted. The only MAJOR issue was that the X-Server would crash on startup if I did not have a mouse connected when I fired up the system. That's a major issue on a laptop. ;) Anyway, after some tinkering I figured out what the problem was.

The How-To specifies that the extra buttons on the MX510 only work when the mouse driver in the xorg.conf file is set to "evdev". Seems this change was breaking the X-Server. The reason being that no core-pointer was present when I booted the laptop with the mouse unplugged, and X-Server seems to need a core-pointer to be happy.

The solution was to configure my Touchpad as the core-pointer. Voilà, I am now one step closer to a perfect system and still windows free. :)

Here is what I did:

Open the xorg.conf file for editing:

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the InputDevice section for the Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad" and replace:

Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"

with

Option "CorePointer"

the find the InputDevice section for the Identifier "Configured Mouse" and replace:

Option "CorePointer"

with

Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"

Ensure only one device section has the Option "CorePointer" set as X-Server will refuse to boot if more than one device is the core pointer.

My system is a Dell Inspiron 9400 - Ambassador.

An extract from the working xorg.conf file is listed below:

[code]Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
     Driver         "evdev"
 #   Option         "CorePointer"
     Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
     Option         "Device" "/dev/input/event9"
     Option         "Buttons" "10"
     Option         "Resolution" "800"
 EndSection

 Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier     "Synaptics Touchpad"
     Driver         "synaptics"
     Option         "CorePointer"
 #   Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
     Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
     Option         "Protocol" "auto-dev"
     Option         "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
 EndSection
 [/code]

I was looking for a desktop search tool today, I stumbled upon Beagle for this task, unfortunately the build of beagle that comes with Dapper Drake does not index Thunderbird mails however the 0.2.8 release of beagle does. Yay. Here is what I did to get it working nicely together with Thunderbird under Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

Dowload beagle: download.gnome.org/sources/beagle/0.2/beagle-0.2.8.tar.gz

tar -xvvf beagle-0.2.8.tar.gz


sudo apt-get install mono mono-devel
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev   : Not sure if this is needed but it was mention somwher for ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libmono-dev        : Fixes: "configure: error: missing the mono.pc file"
sudo apt-get libxml-parser-perl            : Fixes: "Parser perl module is required for intltool"
sudo apt-get install libsqlite0-dev    : Fixes: "checking for SQLITE3... configure: error: You need to install sqlite 2.x or >= 3.3.1es:"
sudo apt-get install libgnomevfs2-dev    : Fixes: "No package 'gnome-vfs-2.0' found"
sudo apt-get install libgnome2-dev    : Fixes: "No package 'libgnome-2.0' found"
sudo apt-get install gtk-sharp2
sudo apt-get install libgmime0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install librsvg2-dev
sudo apt-get install libexif-dev
sudo apt-get install libxss-dev
sudo apt-get install xpdf-utils

Beagle search can't open thunderbird mail items.
The startup script for thunderbird on ubuntu is called mozilla-thunderbird however beagle thinks the startup script is called thunderbird.

Setting a symlink did not work the script complains.

To fix this I copied (duplicated with different name) the mozilla-thunderbird file to thunderbird (beagle will use the script called thunderbird as the launcher)
I then changed the line in the thunderbird script that read:

progname="$0"

To:
progname="mozilla-thunderbird"

voila:
beagle-search now finds thunderbird.

This is probably a nasty hack but what the hey works for me.