Month: July 2004

Adan's bedtime routine

Adán’s bedtime routine has gotten a lot easier. Last night he actually ended the bath instead of me saying “It’s time to go now”. He said, “Daddy, all done bath”.

He has memorized the books we read at night. Not sure if this is a good thing but it sure makes it easier on me since he reads to me.

Here’s the list of books we read:

– The Foot Book : Dr. Seuss’s Wacky Book of Opposites
– Go, Dog. Go! (Bright & Early Board Books)
– Goodnight Moon
– The Cat in the hat Flips his Lid

Then he sings the following songs:

– Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
– ABC song
– Row Row You Boat
– Itsy Spider
– Old Macdonald from the singing bridge in a Dora the Explorer episode.

Then a little water, and the blankets must be JUST right or he’ll get up and knock on the door. But that’s it.

by jmrodri

Sendmail & local ISP

I’ve always had my machines attempt to send me email at my isp address but they always got bounced back.
So I finally set out to determine how to get sendmail to use my ISPs smtp server to send out email. And it turns out be a trivial task, but one I will document here for others to use:

You must be root to do this and stop sendmail:

su
/sbin/service sendmail stop

Always backup your configuration files otherwise, don’t come crying to me when your sendmail.cf is 0 bytes.

cd /etc/mail
cp sendmail.cf sendmail_cf.bak
cp sendmail.mc sendmail_mc.bak

Edit sendmail.mc (uncomment or add)

define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.your.isp.com')

Ensure you have sendmail-cf installed, otherwise install it.

rpm -q sendmail-cf
yum -y install sendmail-cf

Now rebuild sendmail.cf and restart sendmail.

m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
/sbin/service sendmail start
by jmrodri

iPod & Fedora Core 2

I DID IT! I DID IT! I got my iPod and Fedora Core 2 talking to each other. It was an uphill battle.

Apparently, FC2 was shipped with firewire turned off:

Fedora Core 2 ships with a kernel that’s quite close to 2.6.6 and
that, as such, has seriously broken Firewire modules, so they were
disabled to avoid the problems described in section 0.1.
link

Here’s what I did to get the iPod to work with FC2.

Hardware

Belkin 3-port FireWire PCI card Model:

F5U503
Apple iPod 20GB

Configuration

Edited my /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
alias scsi_hostadapter1 sbp2

*NOTE: scsi_hostadapter1 was added since I already have an LSI Logic scsi adapter.

Kuzdu added the following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdc2  /mnt/ipod  auto  noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

Log messages

If you connect your iPod after Linux has booted you might see the following errors in /var/log/messages file:

ieee1394.agent[3185]: ... no drivers for IEEE1394 product 0x/0x/0x

Googling for the above error yielded an article stating the following (see resources below):

I haven’t really sorted out the problem but I have noticed that is the
ipod is picked up and mounted if the ipod is plugged in when the machine
is booted.

Connect your iPod, reboot into Linux and kudzu should kick in asking if you want to configure new device called “iPo”. Click on configure. Then in your /var/log/messages file should be the following (sdc might be sda if you don’t have any other SCSI devices):

kernel: scsi2 : SCSI emulation for IEEE-1394 SBP-2 Devices
kernel: ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device
kernel:  Vendor: Apple     Model: iPod Rev: 1.51
kernel:  Type:   Direct-Access         ANSI SCSI revision: 02

On the filesystem

Kudzu should’ve created /mnt/ipod for you, if not create it. Then mount /mnt/ipod. Doing an ls -l /mnt/ipod yields four directories: Calendars, Contacts, iPod_Control, and Notes. Your music is located in a series of directories fXX where XX is a 2 digit number, on my iPod it’s 00 – 49. Those fXX directories are located in /mnt/ipod/iPod_Control/Music.


Most of the above was trial and error with many reboots in between. FC3 should be out next week and it should have the FireWire built in to the kernel already during installation.

Resources

kernel-2.6.6-1.435.2.3
iPod not recognized
Linux 1394 site
RIMBoy’s Firewire Storage How-to

by jmrodri

Wonderful drive to work

The weather this morning (around 8:10am) was great. I took the t-tops off of the Trans Am, rolled down the windows, cranked up the stereo (Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory) and cruised on into work.

My favorite part of my commute is where US1 (Capital Blvd) becomes Dawson St. in Raleigh. At well above the speed limit (50 in a 35) this becomes a quick right turn, then left.

by jmrodri

Logitech MX500 Mouse & KVM switch a no-no

I got rid of my IBM Scrollpoint III mouse which was flakey because of it’s scroll “stick” instead of a wheel. I replaced it with a new Logitech MX500 Optical Mouse. I have one of these mice at work running on RHEL 3. Liz has one working with Windows XP Pro. So imagine my surprise when it didn’t want to work with Fedora Core 2. I almost crapped myself.

I decided to try it with Windows XP. And the MouseWare driver auto detected a 2-button Logitech basic mouse. Logitech’s website gave me a clue to the potential problem:

Unfortunately, Logitech does not provide technical support for any of our products when connected to a pass-through device. A pass-through device can be thought of as any device that the Logitech device plugs into and then is interfaced or plugged into the computer. The reason for this is that these devices can interfere with communication between the Logitech device and the computer. Examples of a pass-through device are switch boxes, extension cables, KVM (Keyboard Video and mouse combination) switches, port replicators, third party port adapters or converters and y-adapters.

If you have a passthrough device and the Logitech device is not functioning correctly, please connect the Logitech device directly to the system for testing. If the Logitech device works correctly when connected directly to the system but does not work correctly when connected to the passthrough device, please contact the manufacturer of the passthrough device for further diagnostics.

If you do not have a passthrough device and are planning to purchase one, please be aware that your Logitech product may not work correctly through it. Different manufacturers implement device support differently, which can affect the functionality of your Logitech device.

I unplugged the mouse from the KVM and directly into the machine. Rebooted Windows XP and the MouseWare drivers now recognized the mouse correctly. I promptly rebooted into Linux and all was right with the world.

by jmrodri