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altivoOut for dinner to celebrate our 28th anniversary. Good, very good, but very fortunate that we don't eat that way more than once or twice a year. Cheese ravioli with Alfredo sauce, steak medallions broiled and encrusted in Parmesan, garlic bread with bruschetta, broiled chicken in apricot sauce... It was all really rich but oh so tasty. And we were bad. We ate it all. ;p
Surprisingly, I don't feel horribly bloated, but I may yet regret it.
I gave him some carefully chosen books a couple of days ago. He went and bought special hardwood today to make a weaving accessory that I need. (We'll see if it gets done. ;p )
Also in today's mail, two boxes from Amazon. Plush toy goats! These will be props when Argos appears in this year's edition of "Story time with Winston" on July 22. One is a Folkmanis puppet and quite nicely detailed though a bit small for my hand. The other is a white goat from Pink Moose, one of those not-yet-stuffed critters with a zipper that you are supposed to stuff yourself and then zip up. The book we're reading is John Rocco's Wolf! Wolf!, a clever retelling of Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf!"
I'm a bit disgusted with Userful, the vendor I've been battling for months now. Their product refuses to recognize the NIC in new Dell computers. They're blaming it on "a bug in Linux" but in fact every Linux distribution I've tried configures the NIC without difficulty. Their real problem is that they build their distribution on a three year old release of Fedora, which wasn't that great a distro to begin with in my opinion. Fedora recognizes and works with this chipset in their current version (13) but evidently not in the version Userful is still using (would you believe 8?) Even I, who always drag my feet about upgrading 'NIX systems, am never that many releases behind.
Their "solution"? Go buy PCI NICs and put them into the machines, and disable the onboard Broadcom NIC. That wouldn't be so terrible if you could use the cheap 100BaseT cards that are available for $9 or so apiece, but oh no, don't use anything with Broadcom or Realtek chips. That rules out nearly anything that sells for less then $50.
I'm tempted to build a Fedora 8 environment and compile Broadcom's driver source against it, which appears to be what is needed. There's a bug in Fedora 8, yes. Broadcom claims that their current source will work around it, and function correctly with any 2.6.x kernel. Userful could do this, of course, and since they already have the development environment, it would only take someone a few minutes. But no, they are "too busy" with their next release, which apparently will still be running on a four year old code base that doesn't recognize newer devices.
This did at least inspire me to hack my way into their closed system. I now know how to obtain root level access, which they have tried to keep from their customers. This may prove useful in solving some other long standing issues. (I've had one problem open for nearly a year now.)
Surprisingly, I don't feel horribly bloated, but I may yet regret it.
I gave him some carefully chosen books a couple of days ago. He went and bought special hardwood today to make a weaving accessory that I need. (We'll see if it gets done. ;p )
Also in today's mail, two boxes from Amazon. Plush toy goats! These will be props when Argos appears in this year's edition of "Story time with Winston" on July 22. One is a Folkmanis puppet and quite nicely detailed though a bit small for my hand. The other is a white goat from Pink Moose, one of those not-yet-stuffed critters with a zipper that you are supposed to stuff yourself and then zip up. The book we're reading is John Rocco's Wolf! Wolf!, a clever retelling of Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf!"
I'm a bit disgusted with Userful, the vendor I've been battling for months now. Their product refuses to recognize the NIC in new Dell computers. They're blaming it on "a bug in Linux" but in fact every Linux distribution I've tried configures the NIC without difficulty. Their real problem is that they build their distribution on a three year old release of Fedora, which wasn't that great a distro to begin with in my opinion. Fedora recognizes and works with this chipset in their current version (13) but evidently not in the version Userful is still using (would you believe 8?) Even I, who always drag my feet about upgrading 'NIX systems, am never that many releases behind.
Their "solution"? Go buy PCI NICs and put them into the machines, and disable the onboard Broadcom NIC. That wouldn't be so terrible if you could use the cheap 100BaseT cards that are available for $9 or so apiece, but oh no, don't use anything with Broadcom or Realtek chips. That rules out nearly anything that sells for less then $50.
I'm tempted to build a Fedora 8 environment and compile Broadcom's driver source against it, which appears to be what is needed. There's a bug in Fedora 8, yes. Broadcom claims that their current source will work around it, and function correctly with any 2.6.x kernel. Userful could do this, of course, and since they already have the development environment, it would only take someone a few minutes. But no, they are "too busy" with their next release, which apparently will still be running on a four year old code base that doesn't recognize newer devices.
This did at least inspire me to hack my way into their closed system. I now know how to obtain root level access, which they have tried to keep from their customers. This may prove useful in solving some other long standing issues. (I've had one problem open for nearly a year now.)
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 01:00 pm (UTC)Nice! We're celebrating 27 years this September.
Very few of my acquaintances are still with their original partners.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 01:53 pm (UTC)Fortunately for me, Untangle just released an upgraded driver package to support more NICs. Unfortunately for me, that doesn't help any of the Broadcoms I've tried. :P Why the hell they're still using a 2.6.26 kernel, I don't know. At least they backported the patch I asked for from 2.6.27. Happily, I can compile Intel source code. Unhappily, I cannot compile Broadcom source code, and never have been able to. Not ever.
$9 apiece for a NIC? Robbery! They sell them here for $.50 apiece. Intel or 3Com cards will run you $3 apiece. At a price difference like that, you tell me how many you want, and I'll ship 'em to you in bulk. Even putting them in a nice padded envelope, you'll save appreciable amounts of money. :P Oh...we are talking used, here. :) But even new ones...my brand-new gigabit PCI Intel NICs are only $40...
no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 02:43 pm (UTC)There is a supposed fix for the problem that just requires adding a line to modules.conf or the equivalent file in the distro being used.
Redhat forums say that the problem is finally fixed in the 2.6.32 kernel.
True, I could get used NICs somewhere, even eBay. The trouble is, you can't be sure they are in working order until you try, and to buy used I have to lay out my own cash and ask to be reimbursed by the library after the fix is in place and working. If I buy new from an approved supplier, then it's just a purchase order and my own money isn't involved. I got burned for about $100 on repair parts that turned out to be not what the seller said they were, so I'm trying not to do that any more. The last place I worked I did have lots of old boards laying around. Here the network stuff was all done by an outside agency until I arrived, so those kind of things tended to disappear, along with the manuals for everything. For example, I have five APC UPSes, but can only locate two of the serial port status cables that always come with them. ;p Standard procedure here seems to have been to install the UPS without monitoring software or status cable. On the other paw, I have a Nokia cell phone charger that one of the consultants must have left plugged into an outlet here. I didn't find it until two years after they'd been released.
Oh, and Userful tech support is nearly useless. They tell me to install PCI NICs. So I asked for a list of devices known to work correctly. They say just don't buy Broadcom or Realtek. (Of course, manufacturers rarely tell you what's on their card, and even change chipsets and drivers without changing the part number or name of the card at times.) I pointed this out, so support says I should tell them the card type I'm considering and they'll let me know if it works.
I countered with Linksys LNE100TX and they said "Go ahead, that one is fine." Checking further, I find that the LNE100TX uses a Realtek chip that has been a known problem in Redhat. So much for support.
I've never liked Redhat linux versions and this business does nothing to improve my views.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 11:40 pm (UTC)I just got a phone call from the Userful support manager in Alberta, BTW. She's all apologetic, of course, but so non-techie that I can't even begin to explain my frustration to her in terms she can understand. Clearly they have a revolving door problem, as whenever it goes from logging written problems to actual phone conversations, someone else is managing the department. I suspect the same goes on in development, which is why they can't get their asses off that four year old Redhat release. She admitted that they've modified the kernel, which is just so wrong in a thousand ways that I could never get her to understand. What they do in their software doesn't require kernel mods. It all depends on virtualization and external drivers that can and should be loadable modules. These are of course words that mean nothing to her. I did steer her away from the NIC issue, since they clearly aren't going to resolve that any time soon, and onto the video problem I've had open for TEN months. She was of course shocked. Right, lady. Shake up your staff and put them to work. I'm all for it.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 08:18 pm (UTC)Same goes for a lot of tech. Routers, switches, access points, NICs, RAM, power supplies, optical drives, mice, etc. etc. etc. And given that it would be bought in the US and then shipped within the US, it would keep costs to a minimum. I can even test the gear for you, if you'd like. :) We've got lots of test space for that.
Sometimes there's some sweet deals, too. Like a 24-port Dell 10/100 switch, with another two gigabit ports, for $3. Ravenwood got a little GPS unit for $1. 5-port gigabit switch for $5, wireless print server for $5, Cisco routers for $5-25... NICs at the above prices... You tell me what you're looking for, and I'll keep an eye out. ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 11:27 pm (UTC)My shopping lists are likely to be very specific and deal with equipment much older than I'd expect you to find, but I'll keep it in mind. I'm looking for PCI SVGA cards that were used in DEC Alphas, for instance. There's a very short list of the ones that work with VMS, and they are really hard to find. When I do find one, they usually want the price of a whole new computer for it. Nuh uh.
Small (4 or 8 ports) ethernet switches that will handle both 10 and 100 MHz are something I could use at home. Rack mount or tabletop, doesn't matter. I could take two of them at say $20 or less each. There's a very specific list of somewhat older (ten years or so) Seagate SCSI drives I can use, too. If you want to hold onto the list and watch for them, I certainly wouldn't object.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 08:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-02 10:11 am (UTC)