The Telarah Times

I used Cisco’s SDM to configure the stateful firewall component on a Cisco 877 but I let it add all the automatic Instant Messenger rules.

That’s when things started going wrong. The Cisco crashed and reloaded… probably 10 times a day.

Deleting the IM stateful inspection rules fixed the continual reload problem.

The crashinfo file on the router contained these tell tale entries…

-Traceback= 0x81E985EC 0x80C43388 0x808676A0 0x80C45D1C 0x81A29B74 0x81A2A248 0x8036A34C 0x8036D490
000190: *Jul 22 21:29:37.639 PCTime: %SYS-3-CPUHOG: Task is running for (120000)msecs, more than (5000)msecs (246/2),process = Appfw IM DNS Resolver.
-Traceback= 0x81E985EC 0x80C43388 0x808676A0 0x80C45D1C 0x81A29B74 0x81A2A248 0x8036A34C 0x8036D490
000191: *Jul 22 21:29:42.699 PCTime: %SYS-3-CPUHOG: Task is running for (125000)msecs, more than (5000)msecs (261/2),process = Appfw IM DNS Resolver.

OK so it happens so rarely that I had to post about it. On Wed 14 Jul 2010 06:38:24 PM AEST I got this when attempting to put on some tunes to shower by:

If you use Dia or another open source diagramming package you may need some network infrastructure icons.

Cisco publishes some here http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac50/ac47/2.html

Note: Dia already includes most of these which were converted several years ago when the licensing was favourable but the recent licensing doesn’t appear (IANAL) to allow Dia to package them now.

Until yesterday I had two hard drives in my Fedora 13 box.

Hard disk 1 – /dev/sda was a 200GB Western Digital and hard disk 2 – /dev/sdb is a 500GB Samsung containing my Fedora 13 installation.

The Western Digital, after many years of faithful service has died, and so I removed it because it was hanging Fedora’s udev disk detection routines on bootup.

Knowing that my grub device.map and menu.lst (grub.conf) would have changed due to the disk removal I used a Fedora 13 Live CD to re-installed grub and edit my /boot/grub/device.map so that it said that the Samsung drive was “(hd0) /dev/sda” and that grub.conf had all it’s kernel “root” entries pointing to the correct hard drive and partition.

That’s were the problem started. On reboot I could select the current kernel from the Grub loader, or just let it boot to the default, and as soon as I’d done either it would reboot.

The problem ended up being the “splashimage” parameter in grub.conf. It was pointing to (hd1,1). So when booting with default options it caused a reboot because it couldn’t find the splashimage.

A work-around was to edit the grub root line at each reboot which seemed to bypass the splash search and allow a boot.

But the fix was to edit grub.conf to make the splashimage parameter correct as shown here:

# previous entry from when I had two hard disks.
splashimage=(hd1,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
 
# after hard disk removal the 2nd hardisk became the 1st and so was now hd0
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,1)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_bb-lv_root
#          initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_bb-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=vg_bb/lv_root rd_LVM_LV=vg_bb/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_AU.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686.img

This post is another one of my memory jogger posts.

After posting this I stumbled upon, in the original sense, not the http://www.stumbleupon.com/ sense. A link to http://www.site5.com/hosting/ which seems to have a better approach to hosting than some other hosting companies in that it has normal cheap as chips shared hosting, but also some gauranteed uptime offerings featuring fully redundant site and email configurations.

At $20+USD a mo. yes you pay for it. But if you are doing eCommerce, and need the availability, then it’s worth it.

I also like the website which, from left to right goes from the lowend to highend offerings e.g. Web Hosting => Reseller Hosting => Virtual Servers => Dedicated Servers.

Another plus is their contact us section has an actual phone number. I don’t know if you get a human or a near turing-compliant recorded voice but a chance to speak to someone, anyone is always good.

Of course I haven’t used them and can’t vouch for them in terms of personal experience. So I’m just posting this in case I need their type of service in the future.

I work on the “I can’t recall. But I think I blogged about it” style of memory retension.

This is a handy site if you want to check if a web site you can’t access is unavailable to just you or to everyone else as well.

Just append the URL to the end of http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

e.g. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/en.wikipedia.org

I’m posting this from an Android based phone. Very featureful. A little difficult for my big fingers to type with, but I’m getting better with practice.

Battery life is about a day if you use the apps on the phone and keep the phone screen running.

Overall I love being able to access the web using wi-fi or mobile networks.

So many features it’s going to take ages till it becomes unconscious to use.

Love being able to connect to a work VPN and get the Exchange e-mail. Also love how it unifies the phone/exchange/gmail contacts.

Anyway a thumbs up for the HTC Desire.

You can’t have a website without a web host. It’s like having a house without having any land to build it on. Until you get that virtual real estate, all you have is a design and a plan. Before you go shopping for a web host, you should be aware that there are different kinds of web hosting, with different benefits and different price ranges. Here’s a breakdown of what different types of web hosting mean, so you can decide exactly what you need before you get into a hosting contract.

Low End Hosting: Shared Server

Just because shared server pricing is on the cheap side doesn’t mean it’s low quality. A shared server plan may only cost you a few dollars a month, but this is only because it doesn’t take up too much of the web hosts resources. When you enter a shared server arrangement, you get to use part of a server to host your website. The rest of the server is used by other people to host their websites. There’s no way that any of their websites can bleed onto yours, but you do share an IP address and control panel, and things that affect the entire server will affect you as well as them.

Mid Range Hosting: Virtual Private Server (VPS)

With this arrangement, you’re still using the same server as other people, but it is partitioned so that your part of it acts as if it were its own server, with its own IP address, control panel and functionality. It costs a little more, but it’s cheaper than a private server while still giving you many of the benefits of a private server, including increased disk space and bandwidth, and more freedom with your use of toolsets and applications that go with designing and maintaining your domains.

High Level Hosting: Dedicated Server

In this case, you’ve got a server all to yourself. This one can be pricey, because the web host can’t make any money off of the server other than what they get from you. However, if you’ve got a big Internet business with lots of websites and pages and lots of traffic, this is the way to go. You get massive bandwidth and disk space, and complete freedom and control over administration of the server, including the ability to change operating systems and programming languages if it suits you.

Other Options: Cloud Computing, Reseller Hosting

Cloud computing is a plan where you purchase services, disk space and bandwidth a la carte, you just take what you need and pay for what you take. If you’re planning long term server use though, you should probably make the move to at least a shared server eventually. A reseller hosting plan is sort of like subletting an apartment. You pay for the whole server and sell pieces of it to your own clients. This is a good option for a web designer or a budding web host.

Besides wasting copious amounts of time, which could be better spent communicating with your family. YouTube can also be a fantastic training resource. Tor example despite me being red/green colour blind I still occassionally want to edit images and the Open Source Tool to do that with is the GIMP.

So doing a search on Gimp Tutorials on YouTube gives you a plethora of different information and techniques to try.

Which made me think what else is available on the giant cultural Hoover that is YouTube.

Maybe you want to do some vector graphics editing with Inkscape.

Or use my favourite 2D CAD package QCAD

Desktop Publishing? Try a Scribus Tutorial

There are even some pretty cool Linux vs Windows comparisons. 6.2 million people may or maynot agree with me.

With the arrival of the information age, one of the problems we may face is filtering and sifting the huge amount of information that is available to to us, and then discerning what is of value and what isn’t. Turning to YouTube for tutorials, likewise involves an element of sifting. But in general, just like best selling books, the more people that watch a video the better the quality (or entertainment value) of the video.

YMMV but video sites can be a good place to look for tutorials and comparisons of Open Source Software.