Statrix Redux

Thank goodness it’s one of those days…what? What did you expect? 🙂
Actually my last post turns out to be mostly wrong. The upgrades didn’t upset the apple cart. When I got home I had no trouble connecting with the USBConnect card. I can’t imagine what I did wrong earlier – I mean I only had to plug something in to a USB port, but hey, it didn’t work then, now it does.
In the meantime I’ve learned that both the memory upgrade for my Eee PC shipped yesterday and, just so it won’t be lonely, the Eee PC shipped today. That’s good because the former is kind of useless without the latter. The 8 Gg SDHC card is shipping from elsewhere, so I can’t say when it’ll be sent or arrive. No worries though, it’ll be nice to have, but I can get by for a while without it.
Aloha!

As I said, ARRGHHH…
It seems that whatever updates I installed yesterday on Fedora 8 broke the Sierra driver meaning that today I can’t connect the Toshiba using my USBConnect card. It’s not insurmountable of course, when I get home I fully expect I’ll be able to rectify the situation, but it is a bit annoying. Indeed I could probably fix it now downloading whatever I need from the computer I’m using at work to my pen drive, copying it over, and going from there. But they pay me to work and while I’ve a minute or two on break for this, I certainly don’t have the time to figure out all I need to do to get my broadband back up. [What I suspect I’ll need to do is look at one of my previous posts where I hope I left some instructions and links.]
Speaking of pen drives, all is not completely lost for things to do on break today. Last night I set up Damn Small Linux on my 2 Gb pen drive. It comes with QEMU which is supposed to make it possible to boot Linux inside Windows (I’m using XP) and guess what…it does!

It’s not the fastest thing around, but then my work computer isn’t exactly the fastest thing either. No matter, it works fast enough to be fun.
Aloha!

I’ve just found good news out about the Eee PC. It seems someone has already gotten a driver out for the Sierra USBConnect 881u air card I have. Here’s a link to the post on the eeeuser.com forums.
I realize now that I’m not going to be able to resist this little confection. I’d much rather get the 8g, but they are out of stock and it’s going to be a while before they are out. I’d like to get one before I got to Alaska so I have a notebook, but am not burdened too much by carrying it around.
Naturally I’d upgrade the memory from the default 512 (ouch – but then Linux will run in most any environment) to 2g with a 1 x 2GB 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2-667 200-Pin SO-DIMM. They don’t seem so expensive these days. I may just upgrade the Toshiba as well and, while I’m at it, I may as well look at memory for the MacBook.
Aloha!

Yeah! It’s back and badder than ever. It took a little longer than anyone expected, but it’s running sweet and fast (though I can’t open it up yet, not for a couple of hundred miles at least). The only problem I can detect is that all the vibrations are different so I’m not quite used to it yet.
The other “good” news is one of my credit cards just had the limit upped. Sadly it’s not the card I ever want to use – it’s a backup and I really, really need to not buy an Asus Eee PC. with the new balance.

Really, really, not. 🙂
Aloha!

I’m still waiting for my moped to come home from the shop (perhaps it’s not really there and is actually out carousing) but that isn’t keeping me from checking out some other fun stuff. [Update: not today I’m told, they are just starting now – ouch, earlier they’d said maybe last Saturday.]
The latest site I’ve discovered that promises to be a “cool tool” is TripIt.com. I saw this in a newer post on Joel On Software this morning and had to try it out. Joel thinks it’s “totally awesome” and, while I didn’t fall to me knees wonderstruck, I did think it was nifty. I don’t travel as much as I suspect Joel does, though I’m no slouch, and that probably explains the difference.
The thing it does well is take email confirmation letters from airlines, hotels, and the like and combine them into a unified itinerary. I did more or less the same thing cutting and pasting into Backpack, but I had to do the cutting and pasting (and can you believe I’m complaining about a few mouse clicks?!).
I’ve an upcoming trip to Alaska so I was in the perfect position to give it whirl. I forwarded my plane and hotel confirmations to “plans@tripit.com” and in a few seconds I was notified my itinerary was ready. And it was – complete with maps, directions, and few other goodies I didn’t manage to put into my Backpack account. It even has a iCal calendar that I did put into my Backpack calendar. Now if it would only do it automatically… 🙂
Actually there was one little hang-up, the first time I tried it my email client defaulted to forwarding my confirmation letter as an attachment. It was bounced back. Forwarding the confirmation inline worked fine though.
If you aren’t planning a trip I’d recommend you book one right away so you can give this website a test drive!
Aloha!

Today I upgraded the “other” site I manage and what a pain that was compared to this one. I realized later that I did this one incorrectly and it still seems work. But on the other site I use GoogleMapper and it’s not all that forgiving if you do things differently.
I’m writing this in hopes next time around I’ll remember. The other site I manage has a strange directory structure because of the way the host maintains a home directory.
statrixblog.statrix.com is a subdomain under the public_html directory here and I can keep all my files in ../public_html/statrixblog. On the other site there’s no ../public_html, the .. in the last example is the public_html file. So if I want more than one site up there it would have to be accessed as www.domain.com/site1 and www.domain.com/site2. The problem is I want to be able to keep things in their own directory and be accessed only as www.domain.com on that site. That means an index file pointing to the correct directory. No real problem, except that GoogleMapper is more or less hardwired to a different structure so I have to manually edit the locations. I’m not happy about that, but Ilike GoogleMapper, so there you go.
The other problem is I forget to uncheck an option which drops the MySQL tables by default when the plugin is deactivated. That was painful – I had to recreate a bunch of maps. I hope that never happens again. 🙂
In any case it’s done now.

I’m home again and Fedora has finished updating itself, I’ve reinstalled the development tools I needed and compiled and installed a new Sierra driver (sierra.c). After tweaking the pppd scripts a wee bit I’m now good to go with the Sierra Air Card. I’m a happy camper.
I’ve also successfully upgraded this site to WP 2.3.3.
That leaves just the site I manage for that nameless organization I keep mentioning and my moped. The former is bit dicier than this site was as it’s a little less vanilla. As for the moped, I haven’t a clue, but I’m hopeful.
Aloha!

I’ve upgraded this site to the recommended WP 2.3.3 and had, once again, no hitches. It’s really quite simple and when they say three steps, they mean it.
Meanwhile on the laptop front I’m using the MacBook today while I download all the upgraded Fedora packages for the Toshiba. It’s a long sort of process with some 180+ things to download and install, not to mention the development packages I need to get next. Why so much work? I’m glad you asked…
My Toshiba is MS Vista free – I wiped the hard drive this morning and reinstalled Fedora (which may not actually have been completely necessary). It’s no longer a dual boot machine, but given a compelling reason I could be persuaded to add a different Linux distro.
And finally my moped is (hopefully) in the shop and having a new engine installed. With any luck I’l get it this afternoon, but Monday for sure. I’d prefer today, but I can be a bit impatient at times, so it may be better spiritually to have to wait. 🙂
Today is also the first Rainbow Baseball game of the season, the alumni game. It’s not opening day, so I’m not breaking other plans to be there, but I wish I were. Opening night is this Friday at 6:35 P.M. against Hilo. I’d love to say it’s any easy win, but they love to beat us (though it’s not happened all that often).
Aloha!

Got it! I’m now writing this from the Toshiba laptop using the Sierra 881U card running Fedora 8. Here’s why it works.
Fedora 8 uses a 2.6.23 kernel with has the patches for the TRU Install stuff that Sierra uses to make their USB dongle a flash drive the first time it’s used. The kernel needs to be patched to ignore that aspect of the card.
Sierra Wireless has most of the answer in this FAQ All I needed to do was download the driver, compile it, and install it. The FAQ claims that the module is already in place, at least by my reading, but in the 2.6.23.14-115 version I had with Fedora it’s not. I diff’d the original sierra.c and the new sierra.c to be sure. I also checked to make sure the patch was in place and it was without my having to do that portion.
So how to compile the module? I used to use Red Hat back in the day so Fedora and it’s rpm system seemed familiar, but it’s been years. So like a good noob I checked the docs I could find. The wiki had the answer. Since I didn’t need to compile a kernel, only a module, I followed the instructions at the bottom of that page labeled
Building Only Kernel Modules.”
Back to the instructions from Sierra on installing the scripts into /etc/ppp and /etc/ppp/peers. They worked for me straight out of the box but using wvdialconf showed me I could up the speed setting to 460800.
So far I’ve…
1) Downloaded and installed the scripts from Sierra editing the speed
2) Downloaded the driver module from Sierra
3) Downloaded and installed the kernel-devel stuff from Fedora to be able compile the module
4) Compiled and installed the module (the default Makefile that came with the sierra.c code worked
WIth the new driver the modem is found and dmesg showed it connected at /dev/ttyUSB0/1/2! Excellent.
I then tried the new pppd scripts to connect and while it found the DNS just fine it set a route of 10.64.64.64 which is, as you migh expect, useless.
What to do? Google of course.
That found me some instructions on KernelTrap on using an 875u AirCard.
Essentially it boils down to starting up the script, finding a good route with routetrace, removing 10.64.64.64 and replacing it with the good route, then editing resolv.conf with a good DSN (which was found by the modem and showed in the term window.).
That’s pretty much it! I’m here as proof. The problem, of course, is that it’s not particularly automatic, but if I can’t figure that out after all this, I’d better hang it up.
Now the question becomes, do I blow away Vista? I think so. I can’t think of any reason for keeping it around other than having something to frustrate myself with. 🙂
That’s it for now then! Time to reconfigure!
Aloha!

Well I can’t say for sure that I’ve found a complete solution to the problem of Vista deciding I should only be allowed local access, as opposed to internet and local access, when using either my Wi-Fi card or my USBConnect 881 card. It’s all in the firewall.
This Toshiba came with a MacAfee security suite. I removed it because after 30 days I’d have to pay to continue using and because RoadRunner, my home provider gives us a copy of the CA security suite.
The problem seems to be one of limited access to an existing found network which suggests a problem with the actual connection or a security problem. Since I’m not a networking guru I checked the security settings. After playing around with the settings in CA to no avail, including turning off the CA firewall, I realized there is also a Window Firewall available through the control panel. I turned that off and voila, I can now access the internet through my USBConnect without getting dropped (unless the computer goes to sleep). Now if I could just get Linux to recognize the card… 🙂
Aloha!