sean | 
07 31st, 2008| 
I recently installed Ubuntu for the first time in a while, since version 6 actually. My normal laptop runs Debian Etch and hasn´t been updated in about 9 months due to the samba update breaking smbclient on my laptop and thus forcing me to not care too much about updates, but I recently acquired a 1000mhz PIII laptop with 384mb ram, wifi, DVD-ROM, 1400×1050 screen 15¨ LCD (!) and 30GB of hdd. Not bad for free. Anywho, I have this insatiable urge to run bleeding edge software (see openSUSE being always updated / broken on my web server and the deafault ubuntu software repos, although being some of the largest out of all the linux distros (debian probably coming in second) they still don´t have things like Adobe Flash Player. Let´s fix that:
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Unlike Debian which uses the standard /var/log/sshd style logfile, OpenSuse uses the newer syslog-ng facility and is generally more annoying when trying to just parse a log file for some useful info. However, it is not impossible, and it seems many users (including myself) were having a hard time finding where failed sshd login attempts get logged. Webmin was not of much assistance in this area, nor was google. I however did manage to eventually find, by using my grip function that I posted about earlier in /var/log to find this little nugget:
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As lead technician at my IT firm that specializes in service, I have to deal with a lot of printers. It seems that one thing all Windows printing systems have a hard time with is the infamous “Stuck Print Queue”. You go to print a document and that cute little printer pops up in the corner. Then you get hit with the Red X Of DOOM! and an indescript message about how your document failed to print. Well fret no more, me laddy! With this simple batch script, you can be up and printing again in a jiffy. I have to deal with this problem at least twice a week, so I now just refer people to this to fix it.
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I’ve had my aluminum iMac keyboard for quite some time now and the only real drawback to using it in windows is the lack of print screen and scroll lock, especially for someone who does a lot of remote work on *nix in their windows session.
Why Apple didn’t just whip up a fix themselves is beyond me, as this keyboard really could have mass market appeal in much the same way iPods do. For those new to the game, iPods such as mine had to be tricked into working with a Windows PC, and even then you had to have firewire. Your reward was the best MP3 player at the time…no one said bleeding edge is easy.
The same holds true for the new iMac keyboards. Is it too much to expect a keyboard to “just work”, considering the company behind it? Apparently, yes. Luckily, there are people around to sort these kind of things out and fix problems that manufacturers artificially create in a vain attempt to move product. This goes against my methodology that if a person possesses “oppressed” hardware that is purposely crippled, that person will, with enough community and knowledge, un-cripple and enhance a product beyond the manufacturer’s wildest dreams.
References? See: RockBox Sansa e200R series (Crippled Real Rhapsody), PodZilla on early iPods (more formats, ogg support, etc.), WRT54G v5 (and the earlier versions, although the v5 was made to get buyers to fork over a premium for a router that could be hacked and have its warranty voided, the WRT54GL…the L stands for Linux, but ironically enough loading Linux onto it will void the warranty).
Worthy of honorable mention is Cisco, because what would the world come to if, lord forbid, you used a NON CISCO GBIC IN A CISCO ROUTER??? IOS has its chips on apocalypse.
But alas, slash rant.
This is from my ip2k.com wordpress that I forgot the password to and deleted. For a while, I was #1 on google for ‘connection aggregation’ but not anymore.
This started off as an idea in the back of my mind and eventually turned into a few pages of text, then into a whitepaper used for a final project in my networking class (recieved A+ too)
first page is removed because you don’t need to know my name:
The Community Connection Aggregation Project
IntroductionCCAP is a logical CAN (community area network) topology intended for increasing internet connection speeds among communities by a factor of n at little or no additional cost.