You should now have beautiful fonts. Enjoy!

Problem was, I didn’t read the information about bluetooth GPS units being very flakey with gpsd. Turns out that it’s pretty easy to kill a unit by sending incorrect info to it. (If you’re ever using gpsd and a bluetooth unit, make sure you use the “-b” flag, to put it in read-only mode).

So what do you do when your GPS unit is spewing out garbage and not even trying to get a satellite lock, even after resetting it, powering it off. removing the battery, shouting, etc? Well, the sensible way is to get hold of the SIRFdemo software (Windows only, I’m afraid, but it works under Wine. Just symbolic link your /dev/rfcomm* device to a file called “com1″ in ~/.wine/dosdevice/) and see if you can issue a factory reset command to the unit. If you’ve truely borked the unit, like I had, that ain’t gonna work, as it’s not even listening to incoming commands.

So after dancing around the room and getting annoyed that you’ve killed a £30 device for no good reason, you’ve got one last option: rip it open and see what makes it tick. There is always some small joy in inspecting and dissecting the corpse of a dead peice of kit.

Take out the battery and remove the two small rubber feet at the base, revealing a couple of hidden screws. Unscrew everything that you can see and unclip the base.

Oooh, turns out that there is a backup battery on the circuit board! The little bugger has been retaining the bad settings I issued all this time. No fun postmortem, but some CPR instead!

To clear the devices memory all you have to do is short the battery contacts with a conductive material for a few seconds. Plug in a USB power source and see if the device comes to life – if you get the red satellite lock led lit, you’ve done it. If not unplug the device again and short the contacts again for a few more seconds. Make sure the shorter is actually conductive – a lot of screwdrivers, for example, have a non-conductive film that will prevent this working.

Put it all back together again and never, ever, use gpsd without the -b flag…

We flew ANA from Heathrow to Tokyo, direct. We rolled snake-eyes and got an upgrade to “blanket and eyemask” class. Heathrow security is really over the top. The journey over was so relaxed and peaceful. Got to watch “The boy in the striped pyjamas” on the way over (major tear-jerker). Landed in Tokyo to find that the atmosphere is apparently liquid, it was so humid. Customs, immigration and security are very efficiant and polite – in stark contrast to the UK. Massive fear of swine flu – masks on all airport staff and many passengers.

Flew on to Saporro in terrible weather (got repeatedly warned that we might be turned back if it got any worse), but got their safely. Peaceful journey turned into mad panic as we realised that we had minutes to catch last train to Obihiro, did not have a ticket and did not speak any Japanese. The international medium of miming helped us through. Japanese people have been so polite and helpful. I can’t imagine a British person having any patience for someone turning up and jabbering at them in a foreign tongue. Not seen anything of Japan yet as the sun set as soon as we left Tokyo (7:30 – it’s 10:30 back home…) so the last plane and train journey were in darkness.

Kay’s brother and father were waiting for us at the station to take us to the hotel. Fantastic to see them. Paul’s car speaks Japanese! Room in hotel is fantastic – led to belive they were all coffin sized, but this is like a small room in UK. Paul loved his masses of IrnBru, Heinz Beans and Nesquick. Unloading all them halved weight of our bags…

Slept in until after midday, but awoke fully-charged. Spent afternoon wandering and getting bearings. Tonight we (Me, Kay, Maria, Bob and Rosemary) have been for a big meal with Miyuki, her parents and baby Islay at her brothers (Tomo) restaurant. Fantastic time. No paul to translate so we relied on their good but limited English and my terrible phrasebook Japanese (I’m awful at languages – why was I the one doing the talking?).  Miyuki’s clan appreciated the effort and we had a lot of laughs over it. Paul hadn’t told Tomo that I was vegetarian, like he was meant to, so he had to rush out and buy ingrediants especially for me. I really appreciate that and the food he whipped up was amazing.

Kay’s parents and aunt plus Miyuki’s parents ended up performing a rendition of “Singing in the Rain” outside, much to amusement of everyone over 40. Miyuki and us cowered in embarrassment.

Tomo turns out to be something of a darts champion (dartsu chanpion) in Obihiro and nearly bowed in my direction when I haltingly told him that my dad was friends with Phil Taylor and they played darts together. I must get him an autograph when I get home.

The restaurant was the size of a small living room, wit one table and a bar, hidden in a wall. I can’t get over how compact everything is here. There are car parks which are just tall 3m x 3m towers and the cars are stacked up via a lift system. The cars themselves are all tiny and I view them much as an American might view a British car. Yet at the same time the streets are very broad, much like North American streets. When we got here late at night the entire city was quiet. No cars, no shouting, no arguing, no fights. So peaceful.

That reminds me: we’ve seen almost no grafittii since getting here. The streets and buildings are worn but everything is tidy – it reminds me of a French city in that regard. The Japanese really are a clean and tidy people. It’s even bad form to take a wet umbrella into a building – you have to leave it in the porch or outside. I’ve seen no drunks yet, despite the number of bars and the fact that Tomo’s restaurant seems to be in a red light district. Writing this now in hotel room and all I can hear are the occasional cars going past.

BTW, the police will shoot you if you jaywalk.

Off to bunch of chalets tomorrow to stay prior to the wedding. I’m expected to drive…

The core of any decent NAS server is a bank of drives configured in a RAID array, so I’m going to start off my NAS building by configuring a level 5 software RAID set.

My scenario is that of an established Ubuntu setup, booting from a single SATA drive that I wish to add a large RAID array to, creating a large storage area that can be mounted anywhere on the filesystem, independent of the main OS and its partitions. For now I’m not intending to mount the OS itself on a RAID device – that’s another topic – but it would really make sense to have the OS sitting on a desperate RAID 1 device, benefiting from the additional redundancy. The nice thing here is that you just need a small drive to hold only the OS. Grab a couple of 5GB drives off Ebay for a fiver and use them!

For now this is all taking place inside a VirtualBox VM, but it should work just as well on a physical system.

So, first of all create a regular VM, with four SATA drives attached to it. The first one of these (on port 0) should be your OS drive. The other three (on ports 1,2 & 3) should be equally sized drives – I used drives of 5 GB for this test, but they can be as large or small as you want, it don’t matter, just as long as they are of equal size (and even then, it doesn’t matter too much as we’re gonna partition them) – these form your RAID array.

Install Ubuntu Server onto the first drive. During the install just look for a device called “sda”  and choose “Guided partitioning” for that. If you’re unsure, just connect the first drive by itself, install, shutdown, connect the RAID drives and reboot.

Once the OS is installed you can use

cat /proc/diskstats

to see all the physical drives and partitions on your system. Each drive on your system should show up in /dev/ as something like

/dev/sdx

where x is a letter starting with “a”, onwards.

Your OS drive should show as /dev/sda and you should also see something like /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sda5  and so on. sda represents the physical drive (well, as physical as it can be on a VM) and the numbered “sda”s afterwards represent partitions on the drive. Your OS drive is obviously already partitioned and formatted, but your array drives will likely have nothing to show but the plain unnumbered versions, as they are unpartioned as yet.

To start the process of building the RAID you’ll want to format the three drives of your array. If you’re using the command-line (you Linux warrior, you) then use fdisk to partition and format each drive. Run

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

which will take you into the interactive fdisk programme. It’s a little confusing so for now just type “n” (for new) and then “enter” to create a new partition. Following this choose “p” for Primary partition and then type “1″ to create partition 1. You’ll be asked what cylinder to start the partition on. I just accept the default (1) and also accept the default for the end cylinder (which will depend on the size of drive that you created). You’ll now need to mark the partition as wanting to be part of a RAID array. Type “t” (for type) and then enter “fd” for, erm, RAID array (it was logical up until then). Then write these changes to the drive with “w” (for write – yay, consistency returns).

You’ll need to repeat this for every physical drive that you want to be part of the array. You’ve already done /dev/sdb, so now get /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd done.

The only problem you might encounter here is if for some reason there is already a partition on the drives. If this is the case then before using fdisk to do any of the above steps, type “d” (for delete) to remove the already existing partition – then carry on as outlined.

Okay, so your drives are all ready to be RAIDed up! Time to install ::drumroll:: mdadm

sudo apt-get install mdadm

This is the package that allows you to create and control software RAID arrays. We’ll use it initially to create your RAID set

sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

With that command you’ve said “create a RAID disk device at /dev/md0, comprised of three disks, called sdb1, sdc1 and sdd1″. Notice that we specified the partitions to use on your three SATA drives, not the drives themselves. Be sure to get the number of RAID devices correct – it’ll just cause heartache later on if you get it wrong.

Hopefully everything should go okay with that. If it has, then the system should already be syncronising the partitions with each other, in the background. You can watch this process and see when it’s complete with the most fantastic watch command

watch cat /proc/mdstat

You’ll see the percentage compeleted slowly creeping upwards. This could take minutes to hours, depending on the size of the drives and the numbers used. Why not go bake a cake while you’re waiting? Raspberry jam, for preference, as I love raspberries.

After a period of time equal to n the drives should be syncronised and the array built.

You’ll have to tell the mdadm configuration file about the new RAID that you’d like it to manage. The following command will output details about your new array and add it to the config file.

sudo mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Okay, we’ve got a RAID array! It is currently sitting at /dev/md0, looking like a regular drive device to the OS. However it isn’t formatted or mounted just yet, so lets format it.

sudo mke2fs -j /dev/md0

This formats /dev/md0 with an ext3 filesystem.  It’s a nice command as it handles all the settings for you and makes sensible assumptions. BTW, if you want the filesystem as ext2 then just leave off the -j option.

So now we’ve got a formatted device device we’ll have to mount it on the filesystem. You can mount it anywhere you want really, but for now I’m sticking it in /var/, so that it’s accessible to all users. You’ll need to create a mount point, which is just a directory that the to-be-mounted device will take over, like a Goa’uld or something:

sudo mkdir /var/media/

So that our RAID mounts on every boot we’ll need to add it to the fstab file, whereUubuntu keeps all the dirt on what drives it should take care of. Open fstab in nano:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and add the following line to he bottom of the file:

/dev/md0 /var/media auto defaults 0 3

Now if you want to you can reboot the system and see that the RAID will get mounted on /var/media, but we can use the “Mount all” command to make it happen right now:

mount -a

Hopefully your RAID device should now be mounted at /var/media. Go on, have fun – copy some files to it. Copy them back. Delete them. Just go crazy.

I’ll hopefully follow this up with configuring alerts for failing drives in your system.

References

• http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=188
• http://mywheel.net/blog/index.php/software-raid-in-ubuntu/
• http://www.review-ninja.com/2009/05/software-raid-raid-arrays-mdadm-on.html

In the meantime I’ve found myself Twittering a lot. You can follow me via @SonniesEdge.

I was going to repurpose Moodle for this (yes, wince with me) for the sole reason that most of our staff are familiar with it on one way or another. However, I’m being drawn towards Drupal, due to its content-orientated approach, massive support and ability to integrate custom code as modules.

Life is weird.

I couldn’t go any longer without my own computer, so after a few days intensive research I’ve gone and splunged down the money for a Samsung Q210 ultraportable.

Naturally, the first thing I did after pulling faces at the pre-installed Vista was to install the latest Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex release. As always with Ubuntu things went swimmingly – booted from a USB key image and Ubuntu was installed.

However, getting wifi working (using FOSS and not ndiswrapper ::spit:: ) took a bit of figuring out, but is actually quite simple.

Step 1: Disable native drivers

Goto System => Administration => Hardware Drivers and deactivate the “Support for Atheros 802.11.wireless LAN cards” option.

Step 2: Install prerequisites

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install build-essential
• sudo apt-get install subversion

Step 3: Download MadWifi drivers via svn

There is a patched version of MadWifi that enables support for the Q210s wireless card, the Atheros AR242x.

• cd /usr/src
• sudo svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/branches/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6 madwifi-hal-0.20.5.6

This may be updated in the future, so keep an eye on this thread to see how things progress.

Step 4: Install

• cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6
• sudo make
• sudo make install
• sudo modprobe ath_pci

Finally,tell Ubuntu to load the appropriate module at boot:

• sudo gedit /etc/modules

and add this to the end of the file:

• ath_pci

You should now be able to reboot and see your locla wireless networks in Network Manager!