Take 2

The Palm Pre came out recently, and I had to get one.  Or two, depending on if you count the returned ones.

It took 5 hours and 8 visits to 3 different Sprint stores to come up with nothing.

The Pre has a lot of things going for it.  WebOS is excellent.  I never had an issue with the OS.  The problems that I had were to do with the hardware.  In particular, the screen.  Watching NFL Network on the phone was awesome.  The GPS and youtube apps were good too.

The first Pre had the discoloration issue that is discusses in length in other places on the internet.  Do a search for Palm Pre Discoloration and you will see what I mean.  The second Pre had a black spec in the middle of the screen.

The picture below shows it.  It is above the ‘C’ in the text “Premium Channels”.  Also, the lower screen discoloration issue is clearly visable.

Two tries, and two defective phones.  The rep at Sprint would not replace the second one, as they have a one return policy.

Speaking of Sprint.  I don’t think I’ve ever had representatives mislead me so much about anything like this before.  I was told various things such as:  “You have to have a repair center declare the phone defective before you can return the phone.”  “You can’t return the phone except at the store you purchased it from.”  “You can’t exchange the phone at this Sprint store.”  “We can’t put you on our list of people who want a Pre.”  “We won’t have another Pre in stock for 2 to 3 months.”

I may have well have been handing them radioactive material for the responses they were giving me.  The way that Sprint is handling this realease is unkind at best.  Please be aware of that if you decide to purchase this phone.

The last piece of hardware that I expect a failure from is the motherboard.  There are no moving pieces, not much wear and tear.  Plus, I spent $250 on the last board.  It was an AW9D-MAX; top of the line when it was purchased.  I would expect it to last more than 2 1/2 years of off and on use.   Now that you already know what went wrong, I’ll lay out the troubleshooting that finally lead me to this conclusion.  Motherboard issues are extremely hard to diagnose.

My computer began power cycling itself for seemingly no reason about a month ago.   The times it would occur were inconsistent.  I could narrow it down to times when the system was under a lot of stress.   Kernel compilation combined with watching a flash video would take the system down within 2 minutes.  I also noticed that the crashes weren’t always the same; sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a kernel panic when on the console.

Instability is an awful thing.  It prompted me into action quickly.  The first things that were changed out were the processor and the video card.  They were recent purchases, changes I was going to do anyway.  The issue still persisted.

At this point, I went off the path.  Every kernel or BIOS feature that could cause instability was checked.  I went though 10 different kernel setups, flashing the BIOS, and resetting the BIOS to factory defaults.  In a final attempt to convice myself that this was not an OS issue, I reproduced the problem on a live CD.

Memory can go bad at times.  I proved this was not the case by two methods, switching out DIMMs and running memtest86+.  The problem wasn’t the memory modules.

There were only two options left.  The power supply and the motherboard.  At this point, all hope of a painless fix were lost.  It was time to spend some hard earned money.

I started by replacing the power supply.  I have had power supply issues before that had caused flakiness.  When a system is under load, a poor power supply (or one with insufficient wattage) will no longer be able to power the components of the system.  I decided that getting a modular, 80+ efficiency power supply would be worth it even if it wasn’t the issue.   I am now the proud owner of an Enermax EMD625AWT power supply.

The Enermax power supply is great.  The fan doesn’t spin up unless the power usage is high, so it stays nice and quiet.  After reading a bunch of reviews on it, I am totally convinced that I made the right call on purchasing it.  However, it was not the problem.

The problem was the motherboard.  It had to be, there was nothing else.  That story is for another blog post.

Updating a computer is quite straight-forward.   Either type a command or click a couple of times,  wait, and reboot.  When the computer restarts, everything is back to the way is was.  Right?

Well, the truth is that this may not always be the case.   Case in point, my last Cent OS 5 update.  Without getting into the details, the end result was that a service that I relied on was not running after the reboot.  After checking the logs, I discovered that it was due to the service being locked down to running in a specific manner (the port mountd could run on was restricted).

Security patches are the reason for a majority of updates to a stable system.  The software has a security issue, the software gets patched, and then the patch is sent to the users.   The cycle happens offend, and, most of the time, without negative impact.

These is another kind of “patch”.  One that restricts what a process or a user can do.  These are important to do as they improve the overall security of the machine.  However, they can also be quite the nuisance.   Security updates in the restrictive sense cause a lot of pain.  Remember when Windows XP SP 2 came out and introduced Windows Firewall?  I do.  It was painful to adapt in some cases.  The access controls that are built into Vista are another example of this.   Again, security restrictions causing pain.

I don’t fault a software vendor for including major (user affecting and application affecting) updates when a new release goes gold.  Can anyone imagine how much more malware would be out there if Windows Firewall wasn’t on by default?  On the other hand, users and application developers prefer that their applications run correctly all the time.

A perfect OS would never need additional user or application affecting restrictions placed upon it.   It would be set and forget.  Security updates would still need to be applied, but everything that ran before the update will run after the update.   OSs on the market today are getting closer to this goal.

I’m pondering this because these are the decisions I like to make.  Do we release an update that will break users’ applications (causing them grief), or do we allow a system to run insecurely (which could cause an number of issues)?  This question comes up in the technology world _very_ frequently.  Typically, there are costs associated with both choices and a decision is made.

What is the right answer.  Well, it’s mu, of course!  And that’s why technology is challenging and fun at the same time.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now.  I finally found put the time to it and found a really good tutorial.  For people wanting to do the same, check out http://www.neuhalfen.name/drupal/node/3.

This weekend was a busy one.

* Created a gentoo chroot on my server that shares compiling duties with my desktop using distcc.
* Recovered /etc on my server after antecedently deleting it.  This involved recovering the iptables, nfs exports, and fstab after loading an old backup.
* Fixed a nasty cups-pdf issue on my desktop where the /var/tmp directory had the wrong permissions and the logs were of no help.
* Rebuilt the arcade using Debian Lenny and SDLMAME 128u3.
* Cleared up a bunch of spam comments on this blog and implemented re-captcha.
* Switched the web xen instance to using the pygrub bootloader instead of specifying a kernel and initrd on the host OS .
* Finally beat Civ 4 on the Noble difficulty level.

I really need to elaborate on these things as there is quite a bit of knowledge associated with these tasks that is scattered throughout the Internet.  Of course, that’s was wikux was for….

We’re back and doing well after spending 2 1/2 weeks in Kenya.  Due to popular demand, the pictures are up in the gallery.  Click on the image below or follow the gallery link to get there.  Thanks for the thoughts and prayers for us while we were away.

You’re trying to connect to an OS X box and your vnc viewer just doesn’t seem to work. Then, after many a google serch, you discover that OS X’s remote access protocol is incompatible with most VNC servers.  Tuning to Apple for help yeilds a solution, for a small(large) fee.

Thankfully, there is a better way.  There is a free VNC server for OS X called Vine.  Download it and install the server.  Now you should be able to connect through a typical VNC client.

Remember, if you use tightVNC to connect, use the F8 key to bring up the menu that allows you to switch to fullscreen and disconnect the session.

The storms that went through yesterday had an interesting effect on the available wifi networks in the area.   It wasn’t so much the storms that caused this, it was more the lack of power in the area when the lightning started striking.   Here is what the wireless situation looks like with and without power:

Before power goes out

A UPS on internet equipment is something that I haven’t seen in too many places.  Apparently, not many people in my complex have heard of it either.

Power just went out

And finally, I win.  The Xantrax Xpower 400 actually kept the Internet up for over 8 hours after the power outage.

I stand alone

Of course, the server didn’t do as well, and I had to turn it down after 20 minutes.  It’s tough to have 99% uptime off of home DSL.

Some content is taken from http://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=1200182458.

I tried to link my ebay account to my paypal account and it would just simply not work. After going through the prompts many times, it would still say that there was no association. There is a fix in an odd location.

Go to account settings -> addresses
Click on all addresses
Then click on add paypal addresses

This gives yet another paypal login. After login, I was greeted with a message thanking me for creating a paypal account. Hmmm.

Sometime, you just don’t know which dll files to register.  Enlighten yourself with dependancy walker .