Author Archives: Ilkka

Netgear Universal WiFi Adapter (WNCE2001)

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I have had a problem with my Playstation 3 and wireless, even though the Playstation and my wireless modem are in the same room, the connection has always been slow. Plus the Playstation doesn’t support Wireless N-standard, but my modem does. I had been looking for a device like this for some time on Amazon UK, but the offering wasn’t good, or I didn’t find them with the terms I used. Whenever I found something, the seller didn’t ship to Finland. Thankfully I managed to find this in one of the stores here in Finland.

Netgear makes it very easy to set up. There is a guide with instructions and the support for Wi-Fi Protected Setup is there too. I wasn’t sure if my modem had the support for Wi-Fi Protected Setup, so I chose to do the configuration manually in browser. It was a one minute job, and very easy. After configuration, you simply plug the network cable from this adapter to Playstation and power it up.

What about speed and reliability? I have used this for little under a month and download speeds on my Playstation have grown significantly. Only once it has started to act up by my Playstation 3 showing “internet cable unplugged” message, but it was only because the adapter was right next to Playstation in small space that gets heated by the Playstation.

I also watch movies and tv-shows from my laptop with PS3 Media Server. Before I had to reduce the quality because the wireless was slow and couldn’t keep up with the bandwidth required for the stream, but now I don’t have to worry about that. I can get good quality HD over WiFi and the only problem is whether my laptop can encode the stream fast enough, but for now it can handle it.

Overall, it was well worth the money.

Darkball.net has changed homes

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My site has changed home. The site was hosted on a Debian server located in Germany. Currently it is run on Ubuntu Server, which is ran on OpenStack cloud at Espoo, Finland. In a couple of months, it will move homes again, this time to Kajaani, Finland.

This change of locations has brought new features, DarkPad, an EtherPad open for everyone to use. Another new feature is a SSL certificate from StartSSL. It is accepted by browsers, so it’s much better than self-signed certificate.

My Take on Creating Windows Server 2008 R2 Image for OpenStack

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I started to follow this guide http://networkstatic.net/building-a-windows-image-for-openstack/ since it felt like the best one found from the Google.

At first I had problems with finding a KVM-supported virtual machine. My laptop supports Intel VT-x, so I knew it should be possible. At first I tried Virtualbox, which I already had installed on this laptop, but after some testing, I found out that VirtualBox doesn’t have support for nested virtual machines. The request for this has been open for 4 years! After this I tried my Ubuntu VM on ESXi environment, but it wasn’t enabled there either. Lastly, I solved the problem with VMware Player. Luckily the engineers at VMware had decided to built the support for nested virtualization in their products.

The next problem I faced was with the VNC connection to the Windows Server. For some reason it decided to show only a small area of the Windows Server, which can be seen from the picture below. The map network drive box is cut off at the side and the bottom. This caused some problems, since you couldn’t really see much of the screen. I managed to install the Red Hat VirtIO ethernet drivers, so the Internet would work on it. I also enabled remote desktop connection and disabled the firewall.

Uploading to Glance was easy and there weren’t any problems with it. The OpenStack environment is running on Folsom release.

At first I tested the image with tiny flavor: 512MB RAM, 1 VCPU, 0GB Root Disk, 0GB Ephemeral Disk. It booted up fine and once a floating IP was assigned to it, you could use RDP and connect to it. This flavor doesn’t give you much to do since it only holds the 15GB base image and half of that is used by the Windows Server itself.

After this I tested 2nd flavor: 2GB RAM, 1 VCPU, 10GB Root Disk, 20GB Ephemeral Disk. This flavor gave me an error instantly. It took me a little while to realize that the base image I created had 15GB disk. There is no way it can fit on the 10GB root disk on 2nd flavor. Kind of a newbie mistake, but we learn from our mistakes, right? If you give a bigger root disk than the base image, you need to expand the base image or create a new drive from the unused space.

Windows Server shows the ephemeral disk as offline at first, so you have to put it online first. Then you have to initialize it and then format and assign a drive letter for it. Then it’s ready to use.

The only problem I have is that the Volumes can’t be attached to the Windows instance. OpenStack suggests /dev/vdc/ as a mounting path, and since it’s a path that is used on Linux machines, it won’t work with Windows. Using some other name doesn’t work either, e.g. “F:”.

My only problem has been solved with a single command. After the command below, the Windows Server could see the empty, offline volume that was attached via CLI. Attaching a volume to Windows instance doesn’t work on Horizon, it errors out instantly.

nova volume-attach <server> <volume> <device>

WordPress favicon picker By Clorith

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favicon

Insert favicons on you WordPress site

So, why should you use this plugin over the dozens of other favicon plugins?

One simple answer; favicon.ico

So far, what I’ve found is that all plugins that handle favicons for users all follow the same approach of inserting a link tag in the head section of your site.
I take a slightly different approach, I still do the head tag (Requires your theme make use of the wp_head() function), but I also add rewrite rules to your site.

“What do the rewrite rules do for me, and why is this so full of awesome ?!” I hear you asking?

All browsers today will be going for a favicon.ico file on your site when they visit it, in my instance, they would be hitting www.mrstk.net/favicon.ico, in many cases this will just end in a server error log filled with “404 Not Found” requests for the file, as there is no such file by default.

This means you need to manually upload a favicon.ico file to the root of your WordPress directory, or had to at least. Not all users have this ability, they may be on a hosted solution, they may not feel familiar with FTP clients or similar, or any other reason you can think of that would sound pretty good in a sales pitch.

By simplifying this, with a single input field where you enter the path to your image (or hit the upload button and pick it form the media library/upload a new one!).

Requirements

For the head tag, your theme must use the wp_head() function

For the rewrites, your server must have mod_rewrite enabled (most servers have this these days, but check with your hosting provider if you are unsure)

Download mRSTK favicon picker

Samsung Dive

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Samsung Dive seems to be very interesting addition to my Galaxy S3. I had a cheap ZTE Blade and it didn’t have anything like this, I’m not sure if my Asus Transformer TF101 has anything like this either pre-installed. Dive is just so fantastic in a case if your phone gets stolen or you lose it. I have always wanted a program that does that. Luckily I don’t have a habit of losing my phone, but it would be a shame to lose a piece of hardware that cost me 600 euros.

New Phone: Samsung Galaxy S3

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I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 yesterday and I fell in love with it. Hooking up my google account made it install about 40 apps straight away. After fiddling with the settings, it’s starting to look like my own phone. 50GB of space in Dropbox for two years is also a good addition to the phone. Especially when you can make it even bigger by referrals and doing the free bits on Dropbox site.

I gave the camera a small test run and image quality seems to be good, for macro photography as well. Even my bluetooth headset, Nokia BH-217 works flawlessly with Galaxy S3, which is awesome.


Photo of our puppy outside yesterday. I was just testing the camera.


Me testing the macro option in camera today. I’m used to low quality cameras on my old Nokia phones and on my ZTE so the quality on this looks fantastic.

I can say good bye to my old ZTE Blade. No bad feelings towards you after a year of use. Now I’m sitting and waiting for Jelly Bean update to land on S3. I wonder how long it will take Samsung to release OTA update for it. Maybe two months, half a year? Who knows. I know one thing though. I’m enjoying fully of my new phone for the next couple of years.

Dropbox vs Google Drive

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I was wondering if I should move from Dropbox to Google Drive. One day later I installed Drive application on my PC and I noticed Google Docs apps on my android phone was updated to Drive app. It gave me instant access to the files I already had in my docs account, which is good.

Dropbox has Public folder, where you can share documents, images and other files to your friends easily. Google Drive lacks this kind easy “right click file -> copy public link” feature. This alone will make me stay with Dropbox, for now. Who knows if they implement such feature in the future.

CA ARCserve and No Compute Resource Found On Specified Host

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I was running CA ARCserve r16 on virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. The environment it was running in had 3 physical VMware ESXi hosts and all of these were controlled by a single VMware vCenter server.

I had created a new virtual machine on one of the hosts so I could test backing up and restoring with ARCserve. When it came time to test to restore the whole virtual machine from the backup I had made earlier, I encountered this weird problem. Googling the error message didn’t help, because nobody had encountered it before. ARCserve had created an entry in the error log saying “CreateVM Failed with error msg – “Err_code: -133 CreateVM: Exception Raised – No Compute Resource Found On Specified Host. “.

This problem made me stumped and I tried several things to solve it. The solution was so simple. I was trying to restore the virtual machine to VMware vCenter’s server. For some reason vCenter didn’t know how to rely the request to one of the ESXi hosts, so the solution was to change the IP-address to point directly to ESXi host. I’m not saying this is the correct way to do things, but it solved the problem for me.

Ice Cream Sandwich on Asus Transformer

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I bought my Asus Transformer TF101 on August 14th. It was running Android 3.2 aka Honeycomb. I had used Android before, so using the Honeycomb version of Android wasn’t that much different to Gingerbread. I had waited for Asus to release Ice Cream Sandwich for their TF101 model. Transformer Prime got it earlier, but the owners of TF101 had to wait for Google approval process to end. Well, enough of that now, because this post was supposed to be about my user experience of ICS on TF101.

My first thought about ICS on a first boot was “Blimey this looks fantastic”. I looked around a bit in the menus and saw that the menus look a little different. Things had changed places, icons had been changed. It felt faster than it did before the update, which was a really good thing. The next thing I noticed was that the X’s on a single notifications had disappeared and there was a single X where you could clear all notifications. This seemed like a bad thing, but I tend to forgot that you can swipe the notification to clear it off. So no complaints there either, just my own forgetfulness. ICS has also added the smaller setting buttons in the notification bar. You can set WiFi off or on, disable bluetooth from there and so on. Honeycomb didn’t have this, so it is a nice addition to almost perfect tablet OS. The other new thing I like in this OS is the Data Usage. It shows how much data different applications use. I like to see how much data I use on different things. I didn’t miss this feature in Honeycomb, because I couldn’t even think that something like this could exist by default in tablet operating system.

I have moved to CloudFlare

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I had been using FreeDNS. I liked how they were offering a free DNS service. Of course it being free, there was a downside. You had to share your domain with other users. Basically if somebody wanted to create a subdomain on your domain, you would have to allow it. This made me little worried, but I still used it. The thing that made me change to CloudFlare was FREEDNS’ recent hardware problems, which made my site unavailable. So far CloudFlare seems to be offering much better service and I hope that they live up their promises.

Bottom line is, I don’t recommend FreeDNS to anyone, since there are better services out there that do the job without you having to share your own domain to other people.