phaq

Today I got a complementary SqueezeBox Radio to join two SqueezeBox Boom and a SqueezeBox Classic at my home.
As I’m preparing to move homes very soon, I’m currently without broadband internet at home (this post is written through a 3G wireless connection).
But here’s the pitfall: How would you setup a so declared internet radio without a working internet connection?
After all Logitech’s first time wizard seems to require an internet connection, otherwise you’ll be stuck with an error message. Because I’m using all my SqueezeBoxes with the SqueezeBox Server only, I’m not dependending on the internet connection. Luckily, there’s a (undocumented) way to work around this.
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I always wondered about an obscure behaviour observed in my home network.

Whenever I access my website using it’s plain domain name (http://phunsites.net), I’d end up with a password prompt from my DSL router.

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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…

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Currently playing around with my Netra T1 105 and a Sun StorEdge Multipack enclosure, I wondered if I really could add the whole enclosure while the host is online.

I used to do hot-plugging before, but I’ve never done this with a whole enclosure at once. Well worth a try?
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So, this is the end, after all what we went through?

Today I took the time to shutdown the Phunsites’ Lab. During all these years, it served a good purpose. Most of my ideas and PoCs were initially developped on these machines, before they evolved in some detailed design specs.
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Murphy stroke again. This time he crushed my RS232 USB-to-serial dongle, which used to work fine on my MacBook Pro running OS X.

I use a very basic Aten UC-232A dongle. There exist various variations out there, but most of them contain a PL-2303 chip, so despite some of them looking very different in design they’re basically the same thing.
Obviously mine stopped working after upgrading from OS X 10.5.x to 10.6.x “Snow Leopard”.

Looking for alternate drivers I came along a few sites, including some driver update pages which requered me to pay for it.
Oh wait a minute … paying for a device driver? Gosh … get lost!
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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.
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Last week I got myself a now toy at work: a Transtec PROVIGO 410E iSCSI RAID device.

The task was to review if it could serve its purpose as (expandable) external storage system for my company’s (then still new-to-be-built, now in service) ftp mirror, a disk-based backup system and other possible areas of working.
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While playing around with a Supermicro 6014P-T server I wanted to install a (Linux) CLI to manage the AOC-2020SA RAID controller.

Bad enough that Adaptec Storage Manager (ASM) included with the Supermicro driver disk does not include a CLI.
Let’s not argue about whom had the great idea to provide a GUI-only java-based management application to be used on 19″ 1U rackmount servers.
Of course I’d never run such a server headless or without X11 installed so why would I ever need a CLI!?
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On a Sun Ultra 5 keyboard and screen are used as default input/output devices. This causes the serial port not to be used by default, at least not unless you send a keypress over an attached terminal.

To change this behaviour, two values need to be changed in OpenBoot.
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