So make sure and stop by the IT dungeon sometime today and show your appreciation to your sysadmins. If you aren’t sure how to show your appreciation, a friendly greeting, a thank you, a cup of coffee, donuts, coupons for a free lunch, taking us out to lunch, or even just cold hard cash are some of the ways that you can tell your sysadmin how much you appreciate them.

However, one feature that neither client offered is, of course, staying connected to the IRC server when the computer is asleep. It is quite useful for me to be able to log into the IRC channels that my colleagues are on and be able to scroll back a ways to see what the current conversation is about, or to see if I missed anything that is important to me. The obvious solution here is to use an IRC client running on a remote machine that is always running. Most people I’ve talked to use the Irssi running in a screen session on a shell server somewhere. This is a perfect solution to the stated problem.

Using this method to connect to the IRC does bring up one whole new problem. Since I am in anywhere from 7 to 10 different IRC channels at a time and have work to do that doesn’t involve watching all channels all the time, I’ve relied on Growl notifications to alert me whenever someone mentions my nick. This is one feature that most people have to give up on in order to stay connected using Irssi in a Screen session. Well, I did some research and found a couple of pages on the internet that provided very useful information to make possible using Irssi in a screen session on a remote server and still get Growl notifications anytime your nick is mentioned! Here is how to do it:

First of all, I won’t go into setting up Irssi or Screen. There is more than enough documentation on the web to help with doing that. Also, I don’t want to take credit for figuring out how to do this. Most of the information came from this page.

First step:
Download this script, unzip it and place it in your ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/ folder (create this directory if it doesn’t exist yet).

Second step:
Make sure your SSH public key is on the remote server where you will be running your irssi instance.

Third step:
Create a script on your local computer. I named it “growl_irc.sh” and placed it in my ~/bin/ directory, which I have added to my PATH variable.

#!/bin/bash

# Kill all current fnotify sessions
ps | awk '{if($0 ~ /fnotify/ && $1 ~ /[0-9]+/ && $4 !~ /awk/) print $1}' |
while read id; do
kill $id
done

# SSH to host, clear file and listen for notifications
(ssh username@hostname -o PermitLocalCommand=no \
"> .irssi/fnotify; tail -f .irssi/fnotify" |
while read heading message; do
growlnotify -t "${heading}" -m "${message}";
done)&

Fourth Step:
Download and install growlnotify. It is in the DMG in a directory called Extras that you can download from http://growl.info/

Fifth Step:
Write a simple script, which opens an SSH session to the remote host and also starts the growl_irc.sh script. I call it “irc” and put it in my ~/bin/ directory:

#!/bin/bash
~/bin/growl_irc.sh
ssh user@hostname

Sixth Step:
On the remote server, I wrote another little wrapper script to resume the screen session. It just has one line:

screen -raAd

This can also be called “irc” or this line could be added to the .bash_profile file, if that is all the remote server will be used for.

So now my workflow is as follows: Open a terminal, type irc, once logged into the remote server, type irc again and I have my Irssi up and running with working growl notifications. Enjoy!

Extra tips:
Since I don’t want my irssi window to get lost among all the other terminal windows I have open, I use Terminal.app for regular terminal work and iTerm for Irssi. This way I can have default window sizes and colors for Irssi be different than for other terminal stuff.

You can configure the growlnotify Application in the Growl Preference Pane to make changes to how long the notification stays on screen, etc.

If you read the manpage for growlnotify, you can find ways to tweak the notification’s icon, etc.

Look at the scripts available on http://www.irssi.org/scripts to find how to change the appearance of Irssi, i.e. to get colored nicks and a list of active nicks in a channel on the sidebar, reminiscent of X-Chat or other GUI clients.

Ok, so to shorten this long rant I will get to my point. Late last year my wife and I decided that we would start considering the possibility of moving back to the US. I casually applied for some jobs here and there with no real hopes. Then I found my holy grail. I noticed that Mozilla was looking for a Systems Administrator. This had kind of been my dream job ever since I was in college. Back then, we’ll say 2005 or 2006, I was just starting to get into open source software and linux and servers and really becoming a computer geek. Anyway a good friend of mine got an internship at Mozilla in Mountain View and after he moved there from Oregon, I decided to go visit him. While I was there, Mozilla was hosting an open house of some sort and I got invited to go check out the company behind everyone’s favorite browser. I was truly amazed when I got there. The people were all really friendly, knowledgeable and passionate about open source and making the web a better place. I had no idea that anything like this existed. Everyone I met seemed extremely happy, everyone loved their job. I thought I had a good job at the time, but never had I seen everyone at my place of employment be genuinely happy to be at work every day. I got the feeling that there was no such thing as a disgruntled Mozillian. I was impressed. Unfortunately I didn’t see myself ever getting to work there, because they already had desktop support people, and that was pretty much the extent of my experience at the time. They were still a pretty small company and were mainly focused on hiring developers and such. I wrote it off as a dream that would never come true and always hoped that someday I would find a place to work with such energetic colleagues. Well to date this hadn’t happened. I graduated college, entered the real world, got a job at a small tech firm which seemed like a good place to work, but once I got there I realized that there is no such thing as a “fun” place to work. Yeah, you have good days and bad days and you have fun with what you are working on, but I haven’t encountered anything like what I saw at Mozilla. So once I saw that they were looking for a Sysadmin and the job description pretty much matched my experience exactly, I applied for it. I couldn’t reasonably think that I would be so lucky to get an interview, but I could dream. Things that good just don’t happen to me. Plus it all seemed to perfect to really work out. The timing was right. They were looking for someone, just as I was getting disgruntled with my current job. My wife and I decided we would love to move to Northern California if the opportunity ever presented itself. But again, we didn’t really think I would get this job, it was just simply too good to be true.

Well, after two months of phone interviews, a trip to California and back, pleasant experiences all the way around, I was offered the job and of course I accepted it. It took some negotiating with my old company to let me leave in a reasonable amount of time (normally you have to give 3 months notice to quit a job in Germany), and I have to stick around long enough to train my replacement, but in less than a month I’ll be starting my dream job in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Now the stress of moving is starting to hit me. Gotta pack everything, plan everything, cancel cell phone contracts, utilities, apartment, find a new apartment, figure out how to move cats internationally, figure out how to get my car from Oregon (it has been sitting for two years), etc., etc.

Anyway, I moved my domain registration and websites, and am now much happier with the performance. I have much more control over my DNS entries server software.

During the move I encountered a small problem with my WordPress database that this blog uses. At the old webhost, the database was set to use latin1_swedish_ci collation. When dumping the database there and importing it into my new server, all the German Umlauts and other non-ASCII characters were mysteriously changed to illegible strings of nonsense. I am no SQL expert and wasn’t sure where the problem was coming up. Re-dumping the database to a textfile using mysqldump and then opening the file with vi showed all the umlauts as a weird string. Dumping the database and piping the output through iconv and into a text file showed different weird strings. None of which ever converted back to legible characters, no matter how I tried to view the file (vi, kate, less). I also tried a few different settings on the new database server, like creating the database with the same charset. Nothing I tried seemed to bring my Umlauts back.

I eventually gave up, opened the dump file in vi, identified the character strings that needed converting using this guy’s blog post as a guide, and did a quick “search and replace” with vi:

:%s/oldstring/newstring/g

I ran that on each string in the list and re-imported the dump into the new database. After then having some trouble logging into the blog’s admin area, I found it was useful to rename the Plugins directory. After the plugins get deactivated, adding them back in one at a time worked fine. It choked on one of them, but it isn’t one I use anymore anyway. Now my blog is back up and running and things are looking good.

I haven’t done a tech post in quite a while, so here is one that will hopefully help someone out. A friend of mine recently got a new notebook computer, and the particular model was extremely inexpensive, but seemed to have decent specs regardless, at least for a Linux notebook. The Compaq Presario F500 series sports an NVidia graphics controller, a 1.8GHz AMD processor and 512MB of memory, which can be upgraded to 2GB. This seemed perfect to replace his aging Toshiba Satellite that we upgraded all the up to 512MB of memory and still barely putted along at ridiculously slow speeds, regardless of which operating system we put on there and attempted to optimize. So given the very low price of the new notebook, which was even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC’s, I recommended it. It came with Vista Basic Edition on it, but armed with a Linux disc, we were able to resolve that bug very quickly.

The timing coincided with Ubuntu’s 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release, so we decided to put that on there. It got about half way through loading the installer before it hung. Googling around through the Ubuntu Forums led to the conclusion that that particular version of Ubuntu wasn’t going to work very well. Most forum threads indicated that it would need some kernel boot parameters to function, namely “nolapic” and “noapic”. Well, these didn’t help us much further either. Most of the Google results were for the F500 series of notebooks, but perhaps the sub-model F560US was yet a little different. OpenSuse didn’t seem to want to load up either and the only operating system that would even install on this thing was Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. So we went with that, with the “nolapic noapic” boot parameters for GRUB.

In the meantime, I decided to switch from Gutsy Gibbon to OpenSuse 10.3 on my own notebook, since the KDE implementation of Gutsy seemed to have some pretty bad bugs in the network manager that were very annoying. My friend really liked the look and feel of Suse over Ubuntu, so he asked me if we could put it on his Presario. I figured it was worth another try, since I didn’t want him to be stuck with Ubuntu Feisty until the end of time on that brand new notebook. This past weekend I decided to tackle the project again to see what I could come up with. Faced again with the installer hanging at various points throughout the boot sequence, I found that what finally worked was adding “acpi=off noapic” to the kernel boot parameters in GRUB. I was all excited that it was working until I got the system all installed and set up and tried tackling the wireless card. The notebook has a Broadcom chipset of some sort normally sold in Dell notebooks, so there is plenty of documentation online about how to maybe get it to work with the native bcm43xx driver and extracted firmware from the Windows driver as well as many indications that NDiswrapper would work great. Lets just say that after many hours of trial and error and troubleshooting, I realized that having the “acpi=off” boot parameter was not going to allow the wireless card to function regardless of what driver I was using. After a few more hours of googling and trying every boot option that I could think of that had to do with IRQ and ACPI, it just would not boot at all without “acpi=off”. It was either no wireless or no booting at all with this thing. I decided to give up for the day. I gave my friend an ethernet cable and told him I would put Ubuntu Feisty back on there the next day for him. Of course, as most people that know me will tell you, I don’t give up easily when it comes to computers and I have a gut feeling that it should work.

I decided to start over from scratch with Ubuntu Gutsy again. Mostly because there is a lot of community documentation available for Ubuntu and I know the workings of a Debian system a little better than I do Suse and I figured I would install a command line only system and mess with it until I got it all working. If I could get Gutsy working on it, then I could use what I had learned to get OpenSuse 10.3 on it, like my friend wanted. Again I was able to successfully install and run the system by using the “acpi=off” boot parameter and again the wireless card couldn’t bind to IRQ0 with that setting and I was back at square one. But now I just had a command line system and was able to reboot quickly and get to testing really quickly with every different boot parameter and system setting I changed.

At some point I finally found the answer I was looking for. After literally just trying random boot parameters in conjunction with others and by themselves I discovered that the system boots AND runs AND the wireless card works if you use the following boot parameters:

noapic irqpoll nosmp

That was it. It worked great. I was able to bring up the wireless interface (so far didn’t have a working driver/firmware in there, but I didn’t get any more IRQ errors from dmesg) So I rebooted a few times, added the lines to GRUB permanently, installed the KDE desktop and ran a bunch of tests to see if I could get the system to hang. It didn’t. It worked like it was supposed to. So now back to installing OpenSuse. Well, I didn’t want to go through the entire Suse install process, which takes forever compared to Ubuntu just to find out that my boot parameters didn’t work for Suse, I decided to try the LiveCD that Suse has now. I booted it up (with my boot parameters) and it came up nicely. I was convinced that it would work, and as I was about to pop out the live CD and insert the install CD, I noticed that the Live CD had an “Install” option. I gave it a shot. It actually worked. Upon rebooting halfway through the install process, I added in the boot parameters again and when the system was finished I went into the Boot Loader settings in YaST and added the boot parameters in there. That way I don’t have to enter them each time I boot the computer. If you install using the regular installer CD, when the first menu comes up if you just add in the boot parameters, I think the installed system will remember them for you and you don’t have to edit anything in the YaST settings. I think the LiveCD has a few bugs that the regular install CD doesn’t have. I also had trouble enabling community repositories in YaST, which doesn’t seem to be an issue when you install using the regular CD.

One more thing I noticed: Don’t install the Broadcom firmware from YaST. In fact don’t install it at all. Blacklist the bcm43xx driver and use NDiswrapper. The bcm43xx driver, once the firmware is loaded, causes the entire system to slow down to a crawl and it doesn’t work. So, here is the install process for getting OpenSuse 10.3 working on a Compaq Presario F560US model:

Installation Guide

1. Insert CD and boot.
2. When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
3. Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
4. Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
5. While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
6. Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
7. Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:

su -

(enter your root password)

cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/

cd DRIVER/

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -m

echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

reboot

Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.

The apartment is coming along.  I finally got some furniture this past weekend and my clothes washer-dryer unit is pretty neat, as it is just one unit that washes AND dries my clothes.  Can’t complain about that.  I’ve obtained some dishes and made a few trips to the local Ikea store to get ideas about furniture.  I’ve got just about everything I need, except I still have no tables at all, no desk, no coffee table, nothing.  So for now my work consists of sitting on my couch with my laptop computer on my lap.

After waiting 3 weeks for my internet service to be connected and activated, I finally received a letter from the internet service provider saying that they cannot fulfill my requested service contract for some unknown reason, so it looks like I have to go with someone else for service.  It is kind of ridiculous that I have to wait so long for a DSL connection in this country.  The house is wired and everything.  They should be able to flip a switch and send me a bill.  I guess things just move slowly in this country.

That is all for now.

However, one thing about IT is that customers don’t change. Individual customers learn and improve and have less problems over time (at least some of them), but in general I always get stuck going back to covering the basics with users. You know, things that seem mundane and simple to me, like installing Firefox, sometimes aren’t totally obvious to people that don’t do it every day. So, while my job is interesting and exciting sometimes, there are days when I am stuck clearing browser cookies and updating drivers, because for people that don’t do these things every day, it isn’t completely obvious. This is job security for me. My brother sent me a video clip that is funny and true on so many levels:

So I was thinking this must be due to some Y2K bug, that somehow escaped everyone’s attention for the last 7.5 years. Fred pointed out that it is actually something to do with the way the site was programmed and it clearly wasn’t tested with Firefox. So I tried it with Internet Explorer when I got to work (no Windows boxen at home), and sure enough, the page shows up with the correct date using IE. The weird thing is, that most of the subpages at that domain work fine in Firefox, so just the front page is broken. It’s a sad thing that even the government isn’t ensuring that their pages are compatible with other browsers. Oh well, it makes for a good laugh.

So overall I was very impressed with how far the technology has come and I hope to see more movies in the future done with the 3D effects. One thing to note, however, is that this whole thing is playing visual tricks on your eyes and I think if the movie were longer I would start to develop a headache, similar to the type of headache you get when your monitor’s refresh rate is set too low. This is probably something that varies from person to person, but something to be careful with nonetheless. Also I would definitely not recommend using the 3D glasses as sunglasses, even though they look and feel like sunglasses, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your vision after prolonged use.

So if you get a chance, check out one of the 3D movies that are starting to be released. It is unlike anything I’ve seen before!