01.21.10
Posted in Hacks, Linux/*BSD/Unix at 4:12 pm by Nate Smith
Recent glitches required me to update a server I had running Php and MySQL. Before upgrading mySQL I dumped all of my databases using the dump command. When I went to recreate a couple databases in the new installation using PhpMyAdmin a few databases were a little too large and timed out as they were imported. I found a hint to a nice way to import saved tables here (http://www.modwest.com/help/kb.phtml?qid=241&cat=6) but my favorite tip was in the comments: ”
"you can also get to the mysql shell and then type "source file.sql",where file.sql is your dump file"
This turned out to be very handy. Good stuff.
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02.26.09
Posted in Debian, Geek Culture, Hacks, Slug - the NSLU2 at 10:08 pm by Nate Smith
The Griffin RocketFM wasn’t cutting it. I hooked up a small USB audio adapter and a Ramsey FM30 Stereo FM transmitter and now I 
am cooking with GAS. The Ramsey FM30 has great power and range - all around my house and a bit beyond so I need to be careful not to get a visit from the FCC.
I had an old BBE sonic maximizer so I put that in the loop between the USB sound adapter and the Ramsey and now the Audio is almost commercial quality. (there is still some noise getting in somewhere - probably from dirty power). The BBE boosts the highs and the lows enough to make the music sound a little more robust.
This is exactly what I wanted for working around the house and in the garage. I’m looking forward to the summer.
The only thing I would like to add is the ability to Text-to-speech the local NOAA forcast and slip it into the playlist on a regular basis.
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12.14.07
Posted in Hacks, IPcop, Security at 4:14 pm by Nate Smith
Here is a cool use for aging Cobalt Raqs and Qubes out there. Load IPcop onto it! The Intel and AMD-based Raqs have two network interfaces making them perfect for a common firewall/router. I loaded it onto one of my AMD based machines. Some things I discovered:
- Seagate 7200.9 drives are not liked by Cobalts, don’t even bother trying to use them
- Remember that IPcop uses port 222 for ssh.
- Remember that IPCop uses port 445 for the https web administrative system.
Anyway, right now the installation for the RaqCop is a little bit painful. The method I used involves a VMware disk image and a program called winimage. Basically you write the VMware image to the Raq hard drive using WinImage. Of course to do this you need a machine running Windows, and you need to remove the hard drive from the Raq. I suppose you could plug it into an internal PATA slot, but I mounted mine on an external USB drive.
Two other points - you must have a “up-to-date” ROM in your Raq, and you need to boot from SDA4 or hda4 the first time you start the RAQ after installing RaqCop. The RaqCop will come up with an address of 192.168.5.17 (a refreshing change from all those 192.168.[1,2].x addresses yes?).
After that you can ssh (on port 222 remember) to the RaqCop and run ’setup’ to configure timezones and interfaces.
Hats of to the RaqCop guys. You can check it out over at http://raqcop.com/. I hope they keep after it, it would be really nice to have a working LCD and an easier PXE-based installation. Very cool project, check it out.
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12.12.07
Posted in Debian, Hacks, Slug - the NSLU2 at 11:36 am by Nate Smith
I now have Wordpress running on the slug - this blog in fact. It still suffers from some performance issues, but I don’t anticipate being “digged” anytime soon. I had to use lighttp, slimed-down mysql and php-cgi along with some caching to get to the level of pokiness it is at now. I also changed the kernel swappiness setting. Not sure if that is helping or hindering. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a bit of a hack. Maybe the slow machine will act like tarpitting to the blog-spammers?
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06.20.07
Posted in Debian, Hacks, Linux/*BSD/Unix at 1:42 am by Nate Smith
What a cool little computer. The Linksys NSLU2 or as it is affectionately known, “The Slug”, is a little network computer that is meant to serve up USB disk devices on a network. It has been hacked. (yay smart people!) and you can now run Debian on it. Wow. The machine itself would have been nice to have a flash card expansion in it, but oh well. With a Thumb drive of two to four Gigabytes you can download a very functional installation of Debian Linux and run the device for a VPN, email, a phone system or a media server etc. Once you connect a USB hard drive it becomes a very capable machine provided you limit the tasks. It is capable of much more that it was with the original firmware. It is also possible to overclock (de-underclock) the machine by simply crushing, cutting or desoldering a resistor. The Slug is even better than Linux on the Linksys WRT54G because the slug is expandable and faster. Right now I am working on setting one up to relay the weather. I can already make telephone calls on it using Callweaver software. I have another one set up as a bacula file daemon with a hard drive and a USB tape drive attached. I need to learn my way around UDEV a little more to make this work like I would like. I’m using a USB hub for the Tape Drive and Hard drive and the devices get “misplaced” during a reboot.
Linksys gives hackers a lot of nice tools. Thanks Linksys! The Linksys Slug, check it out, very cool.
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