I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.

The hard drive also tests fine. So, I tried a stress test of the cpu, cpuburn.

The system died and it took several minutes before it would restart. It sounds like an overheating issue.

I installed speedfan under windows so I could see the reported CPU temperature and sure enough when it came back up it was in the 50-55 degree celsius range. After testing a few online videos and observing the temperature (and a few online searches for the expected temperature range and auto-cut off levels) it appeared that it would shut down at around 57 degrees celsius (maybe 56) and then refuse to reboot until it had cooled well below the threshold.

So, we ordered a new cooling fan. Unfortunately it didn’t do much better than the initial fan. The temperature still hovered in that borderline high range of 53-55 degrees celsius. So, I looked in the bios to see if there was any way to adjust the auto cutoff. (At this point in time it was annoyingly frequent.) No way to adjust (bios on this by the way is identified as F15 revision (for the long string of GA – 7VT600 F15 that shows on system boot…. the revision date is 8/16/2004-kt600-8235……etc.etc. The processor is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Socket A)

SO…. new cooling fan not being productive, no bios updates to allow us to tinker with the threshold temperature for cutoff… so I did the smarter thing which was add a second fan to the case. This fan was placed to blow air out of the back of the case from just behind the cpu heat sink. Since that fan has been installed I think the highest temperature I’ve seen registered was 51 degrees celsius (under heavy load – 10 minutes of an online flash video running fullscreen.) Most of the time it settles in the mid 40’s celsius.

My hope is that has at least bought us a few more months of use out of the system.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

I looked at the xorg.conf file from /etc/X11/ – it looked normal (it was the default config file) I first tried doing some edits to clearly specify the trackpad device (cursor movement with the trackpad had been working though, it was just the clicks that weren’t registering.

So, after making changes I restarted gdm (the greeter) ( /etc/init.d/gdm restart ) and gave a try. Some things started working, tapping the trackpad substituted for the left click and the right click work. The external mouse worked with both buttons.

So, I chipped away a bit more. I verified that the files existed for some of the appropriate packages, some I reinstalled. I uninstalled compiz (having read a bug report related to that) I reverted to an older version of xinput-synaptic and came back to current. I tried mapping the mouse buttons with an .xmodmap file.

Nothing productive.

One thing that I did notice was that the right trackpad or both mouse buttons would work only when I had restarted gdm, not on a freshboot. So, I started looking at the boot process and the output in /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if there was anything significantly different being reported there. Nothing useful.

I disabled the “dontzap” feature that’s new in jaunty. If you read the release notes they have disabled the ability to “kill off” the graphical interface with ctl-alt-backspace… I essentially re-enabled that option so it’s quickly and easily possible to restart the gui.

The bottom line of what I found was this. If you’re moving the mouse (trackpad) when gdm first starts, the mouse buttons will be usable (with the exception of the left button on the trackpad (!)) If you don’t move the mouse at the startup of gdm it get’s “stuck” in pointer mode… I can bring the cursor down over the “options” menu in the lower left corner of the greeter screen and it still holds it’s i-beam icon as though you are editing a text window, the options does not highlight on the mouseover and no right/left click/tapping will work until gdm is blown away and restarts with a ctl-alt-backspace.

After that everything works with the exception of the left trackpad button (although you can tap.) I tried reversing the buttons and it’s still the one on the left that doesn’t function.

Wondering if I was missing something I tried an experiment. I (using another computer) installed Jaunty 9.04 to a USB hard drive and brought it up to date with all the current updates. I booted this usb hard drive on three or four systems and it worked marvelously (hardware detection “just worked” on each machine.) The only one to exhibit any problems was this Acer Aspire One ZG5. Guess what the problems were? well…. if I didn’t move the mouse when the greeter screen first came up I wasn’t able to do any mouse clicking (the pointer seemed frozen in the i-beam cursor icon mode) and even if I did (or restarted gdm) the left button did not work.

I came to the conclusion that there were two different issues, one I suspected may be a software issue and an update could fix it (the initial boot problem with useless buttons.) The second problem (left click not working) could just be a hardware issue – since it only affects the trackpad and not an external mouse. As I think about it, I do wonder if the trackpad were faulty (left button) could it cause the other problem when it’s first initialized (?)

If I knew I would have access to the machine again I might have filed a bug report with Ubuntu to see if they could get someone to verify this as software issue (or not). SInce I won’t have access to it, I wouldn’t be able to follow up with more information if they needed it, so instead of a bug report I’m posting here.

The only way to know for sure if it’s Ubuntu 9.04 or the netbook is to have an identical model to test, which I don’t.

So, does anyone out there have the same IDENTICAL model netbook – with jaunty 9.04 – are you seeing a similar problem or does it work just fine? The updates on this machine were current as of June 1, 2009.

Comments are open in case anyone has some input on the issue.

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I’ve had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would support it.) So, I thought I’d open this up and ask – what’s the oldest (working) computer hardware you still have?

I’ve seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They’re about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It’s nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony Vaio which is not a bad size, but most laptops are just too big to be REALLY portable.

I think this size notebook is an improvement on the concept of the PDA because it gives you more options.

The problem I’ve had with PDA’s is tedious data entry, a tendency to take away buttons and make touchpad style sensors (which really makes using them as an audio player annoying – you have to look at the device to skip a track, you have to look at the device to adjust volume, etc.

IF PDA’s are going to be that annoying to work with you may as well just have a miniature computer with a REAL keyboard. It would be nice to seem them add tablet/touchscreen capabilities though. That would be a good plus.

Most of these start around $400 by the way, which is not a bad pricepoint.

Some time back I did an article here about leaky capacitors and linked to some really great photos of a “healthy” mainboard capacitor and “bulging” capacitors. The long-story short version is this… Once upon a time there was some corporate espionage among capacitor manufacturers. Someone had a really good electrolyte formula (the goo inside a capacitor) and the other companies wanted it. Well, what they wound up getting was not the real formula, but a fake. So… any capacitors made with the false formula will be more likely to fail. In fact, it’s as though over time the electrolyte expands causing the capacitors to bulge and in some cases leak. Why is this computer related? Because if you crack the cover of a pc and look there are dozens of electrolytic capacitors on the mainboard.

I’ve seen some active failures (smoke) and I’ve seen some that are just “bulging”. So… when I see a system that is acting unusual. Strange and seemingly random freezes and the hard drive doesn’t seem to be the problem, the next thing I start suspecting is that the system board has problems. The most recent one that I saw had a row of capacitors next to the CPU and all had bulged and a tiny bit of crusted electrolyte had leaked out on each.

The symptoms the system gave were as follows: to start out with the power supply was dead – not sure if this could be caused by the capacitor issue on the mainboard – (fluctuating power demands?) but upon replacing the power supply the system failed to post – it gave a long beep followed by two short ones. This is when I inspected the board and found the crusty/leaky capacitors.

So, I made sure video/cpu and memory were firmly seated and tried to boot again. This time it started up and made it partway up to a scandisk. In fact it was at 52% when it just stopped, frozen. I waited a little while, but the system had really hung. So, I powered down again and doublechecked all on board connections. Tried a third time, again long post beep… again… start to boot and make it through the scandisk to the desktop and it freezes while accessing the old tape backup. Reboot… long post beep – long post beep… then finally successful boot to the desktop and a seemingly stable system.

At this point I put the cover back on and set it up right and tried to make sure that everything was working… it was. So, I held my breath, shut it down and started up again and all seemed well.

The moral of the story is…. after things warmed up the system seemed fine. However, it’s in the process of failing due to the leaky capacitors and I advised the owner to make plans to replace it. In this case it was fine after it warmed up but considering the nature of failing capacitors it’s impossible to say that’s always the behavior you’ll see…. it may be that they do fine cold and when it warms up it starts going “loopy”. So… if you’re having unexplained flakey behavior it could just be that your the victim of a 10-15 year old case of corporate espionage gone bad.

I’ve had a couple of small wireless projects lately and have really been having a great time playing around with the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router and one of the many GREAT 3rd party firmwares dd-wrt. I know, for a couple years I’ve meant to get a hold of one of these little linksys boxes for testing. I had read about OpenWRT and found it an interesting idea. For those that don’t know, the original linksys wrt54g wireless routers were designed based around a customized linux firmware. What made this nice is linksys made the source code available for their firmware which made it a lot easier for others to improve upon linksys’ built in software.

So, where the original device may have had shortcomings in the software community members quickly started coming up with improvements. Well, somewhere along the line, linksys moved to a different embedded OS which allowed them to cut the memory use in half and get the boxes out a bit cheaper, but the continued to make the original device with the wrt54gl designation – the L supposedly denoting linux.

Some of these firmwares allow for features that are truly amazing out of these cheap network routers. (I should stop at this point to mention that it’s not just a linksys only party here, there are other brands, buffalo, acer, netgear among others that are supported.) In fact, dd-wrt’s support devices list is here. Some of these devices have usb ports, more memory, etc. which of course makes the potential for the device much greater.

So, what can you do?

For starters, my interest in the project was to run two SSID wireless networks off the same hardware. That is something that is just becoming easy to setup in the dd-wrt firmware with the V24 series of dd-wrt which is at release candidate stage. From what I saw it was easy to setup virtual SSID’s which allowed both wireless network names to share the same MAC address. This arrangement gave me a weekends worth of playing. (I was working with v 24 RC4 of dd-wrt, there are newer releases v 24 rc6.2 is out, but seemed to be a bit buggier.) The newer releases seem to implement making up a MAC address for the virtual SSID’s which should improve matters greatly. (All this depends on your hardware though – it looks as though the wrt54gl should support it.)

Here’s the problem I saw with virtual SSID’s and the same MAC address. Wireless clients would see either one or the other network each refresh of the list, connecting to one would then make connecting to the other more challenging. One scenario this could work is if you have an existing WEP network and want to upgrade to WPA. Set the WEP legacy network to not broadcast an SSID, allow the new WPA network to broadcast SSID and that would make for a decent transitional setup. Unfortunately I was setting up two new networks a WPA members only network and an open guest. With shared MAC addresses I saw no good way to accomplish this yet without lot’s of end user support. (Maybe when dd-wrt v24 is a bit more finished I’ll revisit.)

Okay, enough of the side trip… what can you do with this box. Besides the usual router possibilities, you can now setup virtual lans… do you need to divide users into several different isolated networks with a shared gateway to the internet? Okay, easily done. You can even setup dhcp to give out addresses to each network. (And firewall either both from each other or just one from the other.)

QOS – quality of service. Do you want to make sure the users of this device don’t eat up all your internet bandwidth? Easily setup with quality of service limits. Set the total bandwidth and then priority levels for each type of traffic (peer to peer, voip, web, smtp, etc.)

Open wireless access – there are several hotspot possibilities here, either with a roll your own captive portal implementation (or you could use the prefconfigured setup for nocatsplash which is just a single enter button.) Or, you can integrate with chilispot, or sputnik or other online services.

If your device has enough memory you can install other software on the box, from game servers, print server software, network tools, etc. With a usb port that means you could have a file server, print server, or scanner server.

Finally, I’ve got a setup that I’m happy with. I wound up using two of the boxes for ease of setup. (The recent release candidates did not seem to be stable enough in ALL areas for me to be really comfortable, so I used version 23.) I essentially setup a members only access point with WPA encryption that setup a vlan on one port of the switch which the guest network will plug into. The guest network will have open access, terms of use captive portal that redirects to a portal page of our choosing. (As well as having isolation between wireless users.) This way the internal members only network not only has WPA, but is firewalled off from the free wireless users. The guest access point has a strict bandwidth limit at around 1/3 of our total bandwidth to avoid disruption of the members only network from outside leeches… All in all, it has turned into a very nice setup. It has seemed quite stable so far and includes the option to schedule daily or weekly reboots if necessary.

Another plus to this is that when the newer firmware stablizes, if I want to upgrade I can just setup another box with the free firmware and when I have all the configuration done I can just swap the boxes. I now have a couple other projects lined up with the wrt54gl (including a replacement for a home firewall which I estimate will wind up saving a few dollars a month in power.)

Just thought I’d do a quick post – I’ve had kind of a poor track record in ordering USB thumb drives lately. I ordered one which I absolutely hate… it was about the size of one of those small pieces of gum and didn’t have the proper USB adapter on there so all you do is slide it into the usb port on your pc – the problem is… which direction – well they say it will only work one way and you’ll feel some resistance the wrong way, well I tried it and found resistance both ways so I got down on hands and knees and looked in the usb port to see where the contacts were and lined the stick up with those so I KNEW beyond a doubt I was connecting it the right way. I managed to get it in and thought I was never going to get the thing out. Since then I’ve been using a usb extension cable with that annoying thing…

My other frustration though has been USB thumb drives that come with stuff bundled on them. When I buy a piece of storage I don’t expect it to have 20 MB of software to install to enable extended features I just want A PIECE OF STORAGE!!! Hello?

So, there’s a certain computer that is in a fixed location that I want to do a clonezilla backup for. I really don’t want to save the image over the network and I don’t want to waste a real hard drive for it. In fact, our in progress image was capable of being burned to a dvd, so I shopped around for an 8GB USB memory stick. They call them thumbdrives, thumb drives, jump drives (although I think that was a model name from one maker.) I’ve also heard some people call them tongue drives…. I think they misunderstood “thumb drive”… anyway.

I finally found one that I REALLY like – it’s made by Kingston Technology and is their 8GB DataTraveler – it’s USB 2.0 . The markings I find on it are that it’s made in China – DTI / 8GB CH 040808 5v 04236-348.AooLF (or is that 04236-348.A00LF ? )

Anyway, you can find the Kingston 8GB DataTraveler USB flash drive – High Speed USB at Amazon… for about $40 (a bit less). Of course, they do have smaller capacities as well.

This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and I recall very many long hours of hair pulling making USB scanners and Windows 98 work years ago. Fortunately though, the driver cd was included in the bag their friend had passed along. The install process went smoothly, but there was one little detail missing.

If you read the title of this post, you know what, the power adapter. That little black “wall-wart” that takes power from the outlet and actually causes the scanner to run. I have lost track of how many devices I have now that have these ac-dc adapters. In the last few years I’ve collected a box for the leftover ones. For when a network switch fails, or a device that uses batteries comes with the ac/dc adapter. All of those situations I wind up stowing it in “the box”. According to the bottom of the scanner it accepted 12V 1.25 amp input only.

So, I told her I would have to look and see if I could find a replacement and revisit. The first stop I made at home was “the box” to see if there was a suitable match, but of course, no. It seems every device uses a different voltage. (One note on voltages…. always always try to replace adapters like this with a voltage that is as close as possible to the rated voltage. 12V in this case is necessary, 13 technically might work. I have a tendancy not to trust these adapters and test them with my meter first. (Many adapters rated at 5 volts may actually put out 7 volts… Generally less voltage could cause the equipment to not work properly, too much could actually burn out components. (A small percentage more should be okay, but as always you should try to match the rated voltage.)

The amperage is a situation where you need at least the rated amperage. More amperage is ok because the device will only draw what it needs. In this case I gave a call to the local Radio Shack to see if they had a 12V adapter that put out that many amps. They did in fact have a 12V, 1.5 Amp adapter which sounds like it would work.

Now, as you know, every electronic device ever made uses a different size barrel connector. One of the correlaries to murphy’s law must be that if you have a power adapter it will not match the jack. Radio Shack has the “adapt a plug” system which means they have the barrel plugs separate from the power supplies (which is excellent.) Fortunately, there are a few more common sizes, B and M are the most common (I had 2 M’s and a B already for some of my equipment.) In this case I didn’t have the device with me when I went to radio shack. (Always a good thing if you’re able to take the device with you.)

So, I opted for the next most popular plugs that were a close match to the size of the power jack on the scanner. K and N were the next most common plugs that looked as though they would match. So, I got one of each.

The bottom line is the adaptaplug tip K with a 12 V adapter is what I used. The fit seemed fairly snug and it seemed as though the scanner performed as it should. When I connected the 12V adapter, adapt a plug K and Microtek Scanmaker 4800 up, it power up and the computer recognized it as a new device. After that a test scan seemed ok I labeled the bottom of the scanner with the adapt a plug size (just in case we needed to replace it again.) By the way, the tip is positive on the adapter.

I’ve been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane…) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia’s product lines of late… Here’s a nutshell idea…. They’re currently using 4 digit product numbers – like 7300, 7800, 8300, etc…. I found this breakdown in zdnets talkback…

how the breakdown works out (just an example as same applies to ati):
home or business card:
nvidia 7100 / 7300 – display to screen only

home gaming or business designing:
nvidia 7600 – play dvds and light games at low resolution (diablo2 / couterstrike)

gamers:
nvidia 7800 / 7900 / 7950 (single) – play dvds and medium games at medium to full resolution (nfsu2 / bf vietnam)

gamers with money:
nvidia 7800 / 7900 / 7950 / 8800 (sli) – play dvds and heavy games at full resolution

true gamers (cost is irrelivant)
nvidia 7950 / 8800 (sli / quad sli) plus physx card – do it all without breaking a sweat

It might exaggerate things a bit, but the 7900 video cards would have more horsepower than the 7300 cards /etc….

Here’s another good breakdown on the model number maze.

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.