phaq

Wer einen Swisscom Centro Grande sein Eigen nennt, mag da vielleicht gelegentlich an die Grenzen stossen, die einem Swisscom hier angedeihen lässt.

Angesichts der Komplexität der vielen Funktionen mag es für die breite Masse durchaus Sinn machen, hier den vielfältigen Funktionen, die das von Pirelli Broadband Solutions stammende Gerät eigentlich mitbringt, einen Riegel vorzuschieben – schliesslich werden dann weniger versierte Anwender auch nicht dazu verleitet, etwas zu verkonfigurieren.
Wer allerdings etwas tiefergehende Konfigurationswünsche hat, wird es zu schätzen wissen, dass man über die Hintertür dennoch an die erweiteren Funktionen des Geräts rankommt.
Read more…

Gosh … I’ll never (as in _never_) cease my home internet again before moving out of the flat. Here’s another workaround to trick my Squeezebox Server into downloading firmware files from a local server – just because of lack of internet connection. Dooooh!
Read more…

What a shame: After four years of service my 3rd generation MacBook Pro broke last wednesday – obviously a well-known issue with the Nvidia GPU. Strangely enough, this really is easily to be fixed with your kitchen’s baking oven…

Read more…

This february I had my 30th birthday. My boss surprised me with an eeePC 1000H as an unexpected as well as also a very cool gift

Ok, I must admit, that I took a glimpse at the tiny netbooks more than once. My dream was to actually run it with OS X instead of Windows or Linux.

So, just the next-day my netbook was OS X-ified (a topic, which I’ll cover later on), only to notice some more or less annoying issues.
Read more…

When initiating a PPP/PPTP connection through Windows RAS you will usually end up with an altered network default route which will redirect all and every traffic through PPP/PPTP.

There are many cases however where such a behaviour is simply not desired, considering Windows RAS providing you with no way to circumvent this, you’re on your own for once more.

I wrote this script, ras_init.vbs, out of the requirement to restore my default route for normal connections and route only specific hosts and networks through PPP/PPTP.

ras_init.vbs is released under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2. Any feedback is appreciated.

---

Note: Some time in the past the code of release 0.3 has been lost. As this script is not actively maintained any more, I will not invest time to redo the bugfixes.
The script would need to undergo a major rewrite, maybe in PowerShell, to work on Vista/Windows 7/Server 2008 anyway.

---

ras_init-0.2.zip

Change Log:

r0.3 2007/06/06

• fixed a bug with wrong RAS_Routes array enumeration
• changed script to figure out language settings on its own
• addedd support for RAS_Name, RAS_User and RAS_Pass attributes to include whitespace characters
• added support for Windows Vista (requires administrative privileges though)

r0.2 2006/06/16

• add support for interactive/non-interactive mode

r0.1 2006/06/13

• initial release
• tested on Windows 2000/XP
• searches through all interfaces and looks for the expected RAS subnet address
• removes RAS default route and replace it by your local default route
• optionally set up host/network routes for routing through RAS

This patch is actually a follow-up development to my article on implementing filesystem allocation limits on FreeBSD jails.

My previous article basically lined out how to place jails inside a vnode-backed memory device to enforce filesystem allocation limits. This became possible through a new flag introduced to mdmfs in FreeBSD-CURRENT which allowed to skip 'newfs' (which requires mdmfs actually to be called mount_md to work properly).

This solution is quiet handy as it will automagically mount the container volumes as required. But since we do not live in a perfect world - and computers ain't perfect either - crashes do happen. File system corruption on volumes will prevent jails to startup as their (virtual) root device will fail to mount.
This is where this patch comes in. It will enable mdmfs to optionally run an fsck on given volumes.

To apply the patch, create a new temporary build directory first:

#mkdir /root/mount_md
#cd /root/mount_md

Then get the original source code from CVS. Maybe it’s easiest to get this particular release through WebCSV at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sbin/mdmfs/mdmfs.c?rev=1.27.

Save this file to your previously created build directory.

If you have wget at hands you can also download it directly.

#wget -user-agent='Mozilla/5.0' 'http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sbin/mdmfs/mdmfs.c?rev=1.27' -output-document=/root/mount_md/mount_md.c

Download and apply the patch: mount_md.c.diff

#wget -user-agent='Mozilla/5.0' 'http://www.phunsites.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/mount_md.c.diff.txt' -output-document=/root/mount_md/mount_md.c.diff

#patch < /root/mount_md/mount_md.c.diff

Compile the source:

#gcc /root/mount_md/mount_md.c -o /root/mount_md/mount_md

Then copy the file to some location you like, eg. /usr/sbin.

#cp /root/mount_md/mount_md /usr/sbin/mount_md
Make sure you call the file as given in the example. It won’t work otherwise.

Special care must be taken that you DO NOT replace your existing mdmfs binary file by this new version. DO NOT overwrite it. Do not rename this patch to mdmfs. Use the names provided in this example instead.

Setup Jail’s fstab

Now check out your jail's fstab and look for this line:

md /var/jails/192.168.0.1 md rw,-P,-F/mnt/r5_vol1/jails/192.168.0.1/rootfs.volume

Change it as follows:

md /var/jails/192.168.0.1 md rw,-P,-F/mnt/r5_vol1/jails/192.168.0.1/rootfs.volume,-Tufs

or

md /var/jails/192.168.0.1 md rw,-P,-F/mnt/r5_vol1/jails/192.168.0.1/rootfs.volume,-tufs

The difference in the two lies in the '-T' or '-t' argument. Both enable fsck before mounting the volume, hence '-T' runs 'fsck -y' while '-t' does not.

You need also to provide the filesystem type with either option for fsck to work properly.