Use your iPod with multiple computers

Written at lunch time in English • Tags: , , , ,

Okay, you can use an iPod or iPad with more than one computer, which is good news for me. Just set the device to Manually manage music and videos on its home iTunes computer first.

Unfortunately there are exceptions to this rule: the only iPod that can be freely connected to both Mac OS and Windows computers is the iPod Touch. The iPad allows for this as well.

For more information: Using iPhone, iPad, or iPod with multiple computers

PuTTY: Strange packet received: type 3

Written early in the morning in English • Tags: , ,

Direct connections from PuTTY to Cisco routers kept dying on this error, so I finally ran a search. The workaround is to disable re-key on the SSH session. In the PuTTY settings dialogue, goto

Connection > SSH > Kex

Change the following values to zero:

Max minutes before rekey: 0
Max data before rekey: 0

Source: https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2013927

Minimum requirements

Written in the mid-afternoon in English

I just had a moment of contentment for being able to copy files using UNC paths across the Internet between different sites. This is thanks to having spent too many hours figuring out limitations and quirks in the routers, access points, firewalls and servers in the picture. Last night I finally moved all IPv4 traffic to my new DMVPN tunnels.

As a result I have realized what the minimum IT hardware requirements are for comfortable living. (more…)

Fixes to VMware Tools

Written at evening time in English • Tags: , , , ,

I just patched a couple of ESXi hosts to 4.0.0 build 256968 and found that VMware Tools were no longer loading after upgrading them. After some digging everything is more or less back to normal. (more…)

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Hesarilla ei vieläkään näytä olevan syötteitä sarjakuville, joten raaputin sivulta sellaisen myös Wulffmorgenthalerille. — [Kesäkuussa 2012 sarjakuva sai nimekseen Wumo.] — http://kimmo.suominen.com/stuff/wumo.xml
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How to sync Evolution with Google Apps

Ekiga on the intranet

Written in the mid-afternoon in English • Tags: ,

Ekiga has a problem talking from behind a firewall, or maybe the problem is that both the firewall and Ekiga are trying to be too clever. I’m running siproxd on the firewall to transparently handle SIP connections. All the hardware phones and ATAs as well as X-Lite work well, but Ekiga fails to register.

The fix is controversial: I’m disabling STUN.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/ekiga/general/nat/stun_server --type=string

However, this means Ekiga won’t work from less “intelligent” networks anymore. Since I’m considering Ekiga for my laptop, this might be a problem. Maybe I should try X-Lite under Wine.

Ubuntu doesn’t like AMD?

Written late in the morning in English • Tags: , ,

I’ve been observing a really strange problem on Ubuntu Server 8.04: processes are sitting in limbo not doing anything. I first observed this as phones losing their SIP registrations periodically (but at random intervals).

When debugging the issue, I saw that a ping running on the system would often just sit there, not sending more packets, sometimes for seconds on end (I didn’t always wait to see if it would ever continue). Since hitting a key on the keyboard would immediately be echoed back, it wasn’t a problem with the terminal or ssh connection. Pinging the system from another would work without problems. Interrupting ping would report no packet loss (which was true — you can’t lose replies to packets you didn’t send).

My best guess is that the alternative scheduler chosen by the Ubuntu developers for the server kernels doesn’t work as intended on AMD CPUs (or just the Athlon XP, or some other part of the hardware I’m using).

My “fix” was to switch to Debian 5.0 (lenny), which doesn’t exhibit this problem at all.

I could have tried with the desktop edition of Ubuntu, but can’t really spare the time right now. Especially since I now have something that works reliably again.

I did try with different network hardware, though. I was originally using an SMC card based on ns83820 (but for some reason not reporting anything at all with ethtool — works fine with the gsip driver on NetBSD). I then switched to a Netwjork “brand” card based on r8169 (well liked by ethtool). No difference, but stayed with the latter (working ethtool is always nice).

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Two power outages this morning (or more — I was out). The results: one dead Kaveman and one dead power supply on a switch (external, thankfully). Which in turn resulted in some hunting of rogue DHCP leases from an OpenWRT AP…
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Being on the road is a challenge to my music listening habits: no Squeezebox and no Spotify. I’ve managed ok with my iPods and Last.fm streaming. However, there’s been no good reason to miss Spotify, though, even when running Ubuntu on the laptop. Just follow the instructions to install and run Spotify under Wine.