Technology

• Dartmouth College in the WiFi limelight, again as they replace their 1500 802.11b APs with A+B+G APs. WiFi Net News wonders how WiMax will change Dartmouth’s plans next time around.
   
• Foof makes some snazzy looking iPod and laptop cases.
   
• Michelle has set up an example of the worst designed web page ever. It’s a counter-example thing.
   
• Brad Templeton brought a VoIP phone to Burning Man. His site has info on how he built it and where people called.

  My main interest is in the satellite IP service they used. There was far too little info about that.
   

  <li>
    Regarding Satelite IP <a href="http://telecom.about.com/cs/thebusiness/a/sat_internet.htm" title="About.com">About.com</a> has information and links. <a href="http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/satellite-resources.html" title="More links here, too">More links here, too</a>. <p>
      This might be an alternative to the <a href="/post/10192" title="cell carrier mobile networking">cell carrier mobile networking</a> options that I dug up earlier.<br />  </li> </ul>

• The Save Betamax campaign has nothing to do with videotape and everything to do with the fair-use rights that allow us to legally convert CDs to MP3s or legally use Tivo to keep up with our favorite shows. These rights are under siege by content producers who want to charge consumers for every use. Copyfighters look here.
    
• Rumors are that OQO will release their Ultra Personal Computer soon.
   
• Other rumors suggest that Skype will release a Palm client for their VoIP network next month.
   With SkypOut, their VoIP to PSTN service, I may finally get the Clie VoIP solution that I’ve been looking for.
   
• AppleInsider has a couple of interesting galleries of Tiger screenshots [1] and [2].
   
• The Importance Of… has an interesting lesson on the difference between Ones and Els, as relates to the CBS memos.
   
• Pentax has a new SD videocamera that I’m lusting over for some reason.
   

Be geeky and look at the Apache modules:

Set your path:

It’s a shame that Dell doesn’t list the thermal loads of their products in the datasheets at the online store. It’s a shame that it took several Google searches to get close to a link with the info, then mine the Google cache of a Dell support forum and find/follow a chain of links before I could get that detail.

As it turns out, there’s some Dell and the Environment page where they list all their products and their environmental properties/certifications/regulatory compliance. When you do find it, you’ll discover that a Dell PowerEdge 2650 is listed with a minimum heat dissipation of 878 BTU/hour, but no maximum. The datasheet for the similar Dell PowerEdge 1850 server claims 854.69 to 1,387.73 BTU/hour.

It would of course, be better if Dell offered a link like how hot does my server get? or something else like that. Let’s hope Google indexes this.

We could see messages about the tape drive in dmesg, but it wasn’t giving the device name. We tried working with /dev/st0, but we kept getting errors. Everything seemed right, but it didn’t work.

It turns out our SCSI card was the problem. It wasn’t being properly recognized. After a tip, we tried the following:

/sbin/modprobe aic7xxx

Where “aic7xxx” is appropriate for our Adaptec card.

We checked lsmod and found the aic7xxx stuff properly initialized there (shortened output):

/sbin/lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
st                     30612   0 (autoclean)
aic7xxx               127232   0
scsi_mod              126812   4 [st aic7xxx aacraid sd_mod]

Then I went looking for the tape drive here:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi 
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: DELL     Model: PERCRAID RAID5   Rev: V1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
  Vendor: SEAGATE  Model: DAT    DAT72-000 Rev: A030
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 03

Finally, dmesg shows the following:

st: Version 20010812, bufsize 32768, wrt 30720, max init. bufs 4, s/g segs 16
Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
(scsi1:0:6:0) Synchronous at 40.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 32.
st0: Block limits 1 - 16777215 bytes.

iTunes on the PC on my desk (notice I feel more possessive of the desk than the PC) hasn’t been able to share music to or from iTunes on my PowerBook. Blame the firewall.

A moment of Googline led me to Travis Saling’s guide to enabling iTunes sharing through a firewall. Here’s the ports that need to be open:

Port 3689 TCP

Port 5353 UDP

However, he notes:

Mac OS X users have it slightly simpler. They only need to allow one port through [port 3689 TCP], for reasons that are unclear to me as yet (I’m guessing the Mac firewall is at least partially stateful, which would explain this).

Sun’s T3 documentation is available online:

The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Configuration Guide explains physical configuration.

The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Administrator’s Guide explains the software side.

The short course:

Creating volume ‘v0’ using half the disks:

vol add v0 data u1d1-4 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v0 data
vol mount v0

Creating volume ‘v1’ using the other half of the disks:

vol add v1 data u1d5-8 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v1 data
vol mount v1

Listing volumes:

vol list
volume        capacity   raid   data     standby
v0            108.6 GB    5     u1d1-4    u1d9
v1            108.6 GB    5     u1d5-8    u1d9

It’s been almost 47 years since Sputnik began the space race and 35 years since a few men hobbled about on the moon, but I don’t yet have a flying car and I can’t take an orbiting vacation. Folks, the space race wasn’t won, it was abandoned. And that’s why we have the Ansari X Prize.

Burt Rutan’s team seemed to be in the lead earlier this year with the successful launch of SpaceShipOne, the competition has been in the news lately. The da Vinci Project is hoping to launch on October 2 (exactly 47 years after the launch of Sputnik). The da Vinci team, which recently got a cash injection from an online casino, is using a helium balloon to get to 25km (80,000 feet), then launching their rocket for the last 75km from there.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Space Transport Corp lost their prototype in an explosion; Armadillo Aerospace lost theirs to throttle problems during a recent test; and after some early successes, development of Rotary Rocket’s Roton seems to be dead.

Public Radio’s Savvy Traveller has some travel perspective on all of this.

Thanks to Ars for some links and a heads-up.

Sandee called me from home Friday to say she was having trouble playing music from our primary music server. Every time she selected a song iTunes complained that it couldn’t find the file. I had a plausible explanation at the time and didn’t think much of it, but Sandee was really reporting something much more serious: the complete loss of all our music.

Over the past five years or so, we’d built a collection of about 65 gigabytes of music, just under 20,000 files that could play 24/7 for over two months straight without repeating. The sense of loss was — and is — palpable.

The hard drive sounds like a vacuum cleaner sucking up pennies, so I’m not really surprised that the recovery software has failed. I’m always a strong advocate for personal backups, so more than one person has pointed out the irony that I don’t have a real backup of this data. Anyway, I’m rebuilding. I’ve recovered the contents of my iPod, I’ve got a few scattered files backed up here and there, but most of it is being re-encoded from the source CDs.

If nothing else, please back up your data.