The tomato firmware for Linksys WRT54GL routers has a “Basic”/”Static DHCP” option that allows you to set up static IP addresses for each of your boxes behind your router. But this is what I actually set before adding the Windows machines and the Windows machines didn’t seem to reference this. Luckily I found some information about dnsmasq, which is an advanced option in tomato: Advanced configuration / DHCP / DNS. The format is as follows:

local-ttl=1
address=/whisky/192.168.1.10
address=/tequila/192.168.1.11
address=/brandy/192.168.1.12
address=/vodka/192.168.1.13

It’s simple and our Windows 7 machine recognized the addresses immediately, even when I created a shortcut and started typing the \\hostname for the host I wanted to connect to.

UW SCSI 18.2GB SCA hard drives

The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project has always had interesting parts available for enthusiasts, but a lot of our computer building effort has been oriented towards building functional machines for Internet use and  Microsoft Office training. We set a bit of a minimum bar as to what we’d spend extra effort to get going (and some machines need lots of love). Over the past few months we’ve seen an increase in requests for legacy hardware we haven’t looked at in years (386, 486), and at the same time seen in increase in supply of older equipment: an Apple Macintosh LC II came in just yesterday.

So we’ve decided to spend a little effort trying to get some of these legacy machines going rather than passing them on to our Ontario Electronic Stewardship partners. Some of these machines won’t even come close to correctly rendering a page on the Internet, but they’re part of computing history, a history that’s worth keeping up. Many older machines are perfectly functional for certain tasks: word processing, 8-bit gaming, even desktop publishing (old Macs with DTP software).

Of course we’ll continue to provide our regular lines of Ubuntu Linux 10.04-LTS computers and Microsoft Registered Refurbisher (for low income families) Windows XP computers. Our MRR and Linux systems will continue to be the bulk of what we offer, but from time to time don’t be surprised if we have a Timex Sinclair or ancient Apple available.

Technorati Tags: Computer Recycling, hardware

At any rate my Bold 9780 pretty much automounts when I plug it into my notebook. I looked through the directory tree structure and couldn’t find any indication of browser data. Then I remembered Net Direct’s Barry tool. Checking the Ubuntu repositories I saw there was a Gtk gui to back up a Blackberry, but I took this to mean making a raw backup, which I could just do with tar.

I checked out the barry man(ual) page and discovered that if you issued:

btool -t

Barry would list all the types of databases it stored, one of which turned out to be ‘Browser Bookmarks.’ To dump the database I just needed the -d switch and to redirect it to a file:

barry -d ‘Browser Bookmarks’ > raw-bookmarks.txt

What I discovered is that barry dumps the database as a binary+ascii file that resembles the following:

Raw record dump for record: 75200bac
00000000: 06 00 a9 00 40 01 44 01 0b 00 ac 0b 20 75 00 6b  ….@.D….. u.k
00000010: 00 11 87 a9 80 97 2c 08 04 01 00 28 57 65 6c 63  ……,….(Welc
00000020: 6f 6d 65 20 74 6f 20 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65 61 74  ome to freshmeat
00000030: 2e 6e 65 74 20 7c 20 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65 61 74  .net | freshmeat
00000040: 2e 6e 65 74 81 b9 fc f8 f6 c2 e3 a4 d5 08 00 05  .net…………
00000050: 01 00 20 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 66 72 65 73 68 6d  .. http://freshm
00000060: 65 61 74 2e 6e 65 74 2f 66 61 76 69 63 6f 6e 2e  eat.net/favicon.
00000070: 69 63 6f 00 a6 b2 ee 84 df 65 00 00 00 29 00 12  ico……e…)..
00000080: 00 15 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65  ..http://freshme
00000090: 61 74 2e 6e 65 74 2f 01 c2 21 00 00 00 00 00 00  at.net/..!……
000000a0: 00 04 00 00 8f ff ff ff 7f                       ………

It’s readable, but still in an unfriendly format. I may as well just browse to each site on the device and type its URL into Firefox on my notebook.

I’ve gone down 3 paths trying to parse this file: hexdump, od, and xxd. So far I haven’t had a lot of luck. The closest I got was Brendan Zagaeski’s hexdump examples:

hexdump -v -e ‘”%010_ad |” 16/1 “%_p” “|\n”‘ raw-bookmarks.txt

But this seems to remove some data and it maintains the addressing in front of each line, so cutting and pasting isn’t so easy.

For now this is as close as I’ve gotten to synchronization. I hope someone with better sed/awk skills will shame me by posting a solution.

Technorati Tags: Blackberry, Bookmarks, Linux, Synchronization, Ubuntu

dmidecode showing the max and current CPU speed

We get a lot of custom-built systems at Computer Recycling. Every now and then we run into a system that doesn’t behave well or under-performs for what it should.

Checking these under-performing systems can be a daunting task because it can involved checking a big variety of things:

• RAM testing
• Hard drive testing
• ensuring BIOS settings are not set strangely
• Checking jumpers on older motherboards
• etc…

One really handy quick tool I found to see if a CPU is under-performing is dmidecode. dmidecode is part of a standard Ubuntu installation. If you have Ubuntu installed, you have dmidecode installed.

If you run dmidecode on its own it spits out a large amount of information. This information can be limited by the -t (type/class) switch followed by a type (in our example 4, for processor/CPU). Add the grep command to further limit what we want to “Speed” and we can determine the maximum and current speed of the CPU:

 sudo dmidecode -t 4 | grep Speed

The result we got on a mis-configured system we had was:

Max Speed: 2400 MHz
Current Speed: 1900 MHz

If we run a few other tools we’d see that the speed the CPU is running is slightly higher than 1900MHz. What actually happened in this case is that the motherboard was running at 100MHz (SDRAM only) instead of 133MHz, despite the system having a 512MB 133MHz memory stick in it.

Technorati Tags: CPU speed, dmidecode, Linux, processor speed, Ubuntu

Ubuntu 11.04 running Gnome 3

If you’re in the Kitchener, Ontario area tomorrow evening I’ll be hosting an Ubuntu Hour between 7pm and 8pm at Misty Mountain Coffee shop. Misty Mountain is located at 33 Queen Street South in downtown Kitchener (a block up from the downtown bus station). Whether you’re a Linux genius or just interested in Linux feel free to come out. We’ll be meeting in the meeting room at the back of the coffee shop.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Ubuntu