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.

I had a machine that I picked up to test internet connectivity. They were able to do email, but not visit web pages. My first thought was that internet explorer may have been a bit sideways, but when I got it to the workbench I figured I had solved the problem. No ethernet port. They’ve been using USB then to connect to their DSL modem. So, I plugged in a network card and tested and everything worked fine and scheduled the redelivery. But, when I got it onsite things didn’t quite work out as smoothly. Here’s the setup. A DSL modem with built in switch had a laptop hooked up via ethernet (with absolutely NO connectivity problems) and this desktop which was hooked up first via USB and now via ethernet.

What was really peculiar is SOME websites came up, others didn’t. Mozilla.com came up, google.com came up, crucial.com mostly came up (page content loaded with one or two items missing.) MSN.com wouldn’t come up. bankofamerica.com, dell.com were missing in action too. They would act like they were going to load and then take minutes trying.

I checked firewalls, disabled the entire security suite. That made no difference. I checked DNS settings – no difference. I tuned the system for performance as best I could. No difference. I went through all the settings related to internet explorer and reset to defaults, no good.

It just didn’t make sense, they were going through the same router yet one was clearly not working the other was. The one that was not working had worked fine on another network. So, I switched the network cables, no joy. Finally, not knowing what else to try (and not having the password for the dsl router/modem) I decided to just unplug the dsl router/modem and let it reset.

Uhm…

Right.

Everything perked up and started working.

The SCREWIEST DSL modem situation i think I’ve seen.

Two pc’s hooked up to the same router, the same way and one could pull up every single site mentioned above with no problems, the other could just pull up some of them and rebooting the router fixed it. I’m wondering if there may have been some sort of ip address that the pc had maintained through the usb/ethernet cable switch over, but I really have no CLUE why that would be an issue.

Actiontec is the brand name on the modem btw. Actiontec GT704AWG

I’ve run across this a few places, where a webmaster actually BEGS users NOT to use a firefox plugin or addon when visiting their site. So, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of those plugins that will have webmasters really disliking you, hating you, banning your ip because of abuse and otherwise marking you off their Christmas Card list.

Speed Dial – can reload a page frequently looking for the latest content. Seriously – there’s something called the refresh button. If it’s too hard to use you don’t need to know what the latest content is. The problem – if people leave their browsers up and forget and leave this switched on… loading a page every 60 seconds can be annoying if it’s one person – imagine if it was 1000, 10000, etc. Server melting…

Overaggressive Ad blocking plugins. Let’s face it, if content is free online then the only way webmasters make money off of it is by advertising. It’s the same thing with broadcast tv. The ads pay for you to be able to see the content for free. I found this webmaster pledge to not host annoying jiggling/bouncing/distracting ads to be an interesting read. The truth is, without the motive to make a bit of money for the VAST hours of time people spend on their sites, many would dry up and quit. Mozilla’s Adblock extension is listed as a GOOD example of configurable ad blocking software.

Fasterfox and any of it’s variations that use pre-fetching. Bandwidth HOG. One of the things this plugin does to make the internet faster is that it starts prefetching EVERY link on the page that you’re currently reading. Which means on this site one page visit would equal about 260 page loads. (One for each article link on the main page, categories, pages, up and down the sidebar, etc. etc. etc.)

As a general rule you can evaluate whether an add-on is going to put you on a blocklist from a webmaster by the following questions: Does it load more than one page at once from the site? Does it repeatedly load pages from the site? Does it neuter advertising content without user control? If the answer to any of these questions is YES, take a serious reconsideration about using the plugin. Certainly there’s some grey area. But I do know of some webmasters that ban users that 1)don’t allow the display of ads or 2) use excessive bandwidth.

Ugh…. you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as follows

An Exception OE has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01) + 0000019A. … Was Called From 0028:C004BD2E in VxD VFAT(01) + 00009CB6

For starters I loved the detail that got recorded by my client – you feel like you can sink your teeth into that much better than “my computer crashed – it gave some strange error message – could you fix it?” Of course, when I looked at it I couldn’t reproduce the error and was told that it was maybe once per day.

If I remember correctly the OE exceptions with address 0028 seem to be hardware related. So, I see it refers to VCACHE and VFAT (Fat32 filesystem of course on win98) – so I do a few disk checks. Scandisk says everything is okay, so I tried a smart test from a linux livecd. That seemed to declare the hard drive healthy with no current/previous failures, so I moved onto a full read/write test to see if there were any badblocks on the drive. Again, all came up as clean.

So, the message came up again and this time I turned my attention to the system memory. I ran memtest and all was reported as being okay, then I ran the Windows Memory testing utility, again all came up as good and healthy. The system had 64MB of memory.

Now, I’ve seen bad memory manage to pass the memory test utilities before. With this system it sounded like the error message was more likely first thing in the day, then after a reboot it was fine, so I suspected there might be some “cold boot” issue with the memory that I wasn’t getting an opportunity to really test, so I decided the simplest thing to do was to swap the memory and just see if things happened again.

So, I had some used memory (128MB) that we had pulled from another machine there that I used in place of the 64MB installed. It’s been a few months now and from what I hear there aren’t the random startup errors like we saw previously (and of course performance has improved.)

I had told them that if that didn’t solve things we’d just need to look at a replacement machine (which is still on the horizon, but now has been delayed a bit longer.)

I use Google Calendar for most everything I do. Since I have a number of different jobs I have a tendency to break things down into individual calendars. So I have my personal calendar events, my computer work, my piano schedule, Church. Each of these are in separate calendars within my Google Calendar account. So, usually when I go to add an item I get a drop down box in the dialog box that let’s me choose which calendar to put the task in.

Today that vanished.

I don’t know why and I don’t know where. I worked with my calendar as normal today letting every new appointment go into my personal calendar which became quite annoying.

So, I started poking around the settings to see if something had changed. Nothing seemed different. I navigated to the list of calendars. I didn’t want to share any of them. I clicked on the Church calendar to see the dialog to change settings related to that and didn’t make a change. I clicked to create an appointment again and the drop down list was back!!! – Only two calendars to choose from – Church and personal…. hmmm

So I went back to the calendar settings page and clicked to “look” at the settings for each calendar and now I’ve got all the choices back.

That was strange….

It’s unusual for mail servers to suddenly start rejecting messages internally and from external sources. That’s exactly what I saw though over the weekend. A mailserver running mdaemon on Windows 2000 was rejected ALMOST every message that was sent it’s way whether it was an internal mail sender and recipient or external sender to internal recipient. The really interesting things was to see a message sporadically succeed. This problem was with mdaemon, but could have occured with ANY mail server. Here’s why…

It sounds like the problem started March 27th around 5 AM or so, as I was told. I logged in remotely and manually attempted to send a message (telnet) and was immediately told invalid recipient after entering what I knew was a correct email address. I tried a second time and it accepted the recipient. Then, I tested further every further test failed. So, I researched mdaemon, I discovered that it has an adaptive spam filtering which can be enabled that essentially locks out a mail sender after receiving attempts to deliver to 3 non-existent addresses from that sender. (I was further informed that a system had been virus infected which made me suspicious that this could be what happened…)

Anyway, when I actually got to look at the server setup I saw the logging of mail transactions and started looking through. It looked as though there were two blacklists setup, relays.ordb.org and bl.spamcop.net

Hmmm… I’ve used blacklists before and was thinking I haven’t been using relays.ordb.org (the open relay database) lately. I wonder why… I can’t recall. So, I googled and discovered that the ordb was shutting down. But that was announced a year or so ago. Why would that start causing trouble now?

I continued my search and found…. from this site

3/26/08 Update: ORDB has “listed the entire world” — returning any query with a “listed” response. The result is that if you still have ORDB in your mail server config files, you’re now blocking 100% of your inbound mail. For anyone still trying to “use” ORDB, you’re not going to receive any inbound mail until you disable queries to it.

Ah! Disabled black list – restarted mail server – mail starts coming in. Now, I remember hurrying to remove it from all the mail servers that I administer when the news first came out. (This is a machine that someone else setup/configured and took care of.)

So, moral of the story to those using blacklists – it is good to stay informed of their current status. The occasional successful mail deliveries appeared to be caused by timeouts in looking up the sender in the database.

Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?

Companies using WSUS that want to avoid the auto rollout will need to disable the auto-approval of Update Rollup Packages.

Ultimately, the reason for the forced update is enhanced security. Internet Explorer 7 is more secure than it’s predecessor. So why would people want to decline the update? I know many find the new user interface a bit disorienting, but there is a more significant reason some have avoided IE7. The most crucial reason I’ve seen people avoid it is compatibility problems with their software. At one point some versions of Quickbooks did not get along well with Internet Explorer 7 for example. It’s always good to find a “test system” to test such updates on. (Especially if you’re making upgrades to a business critical machine.)

First, I guess I should give a primer, what’s an RBL? RBL stands for Realtime Black List (or Realtime Block List depending on who you talk to.) The idea is there are machines that either 1) have no business DIRECTLY trying to deliver a mail message to a legitimate mail server or 2) are known to spew out junk mail, or viruses or other bad content. So, many service providers make use of blacklists to decline messages from suspect machines. In some cases these lists are cultivated in house, in other cases people make use of various publicly available lists online.

But…

These lists block IP addresses from sending mail, what if you’re webhost is simply forwarding mail on to your ISP account and the ISP then blames your webhost’s machine for this spam? Or more likely, what if your website is sharing an IP address with other websites (Name based hosting) and one of those is sending out junk. Or, even still… your ISP decides it’s time to launch a new outbound mail machine and they pull an address from a block of addresses that used to be reserved for dial up users. In any of these cases, the end result is your mail doesn’t get from point A (you) to point B (your recipient), and the machine along the way rejects the message.

So… several weeks ago I ran into problems with mail FROM bellsouth(at&t) mailservers getting blocked due to the ip’s of the mail servers formerly being in the dynamic ip space….

well I also ran into problems with AT&T (@bellsouth.net address) blocking inbound mail from a particular site and was lucky enough to be helped with the following link where you can request delisting from AT&T’s blacklist. It’s a handy link to have on hand. I’ve needed it once again for another site since the first inquiry I sent to AT&T.

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.

I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.