Yes, you can use that Sprint EVDO Rev A Pantech PX-500 card on Ubuntu!  Network credentials are stored on the card so all we need to do is make sure we have a couple of kernel modules loaded and write two simple scripts to get it all working.  The PX-card has an OHCI compatible USB bridge internally off of which hangs the CDC serial port so it’s pretty easy.

First make sure you’re running a recent kernel by running uname -r and a terminal prompt.

Then, insert the card and let’s make sure you have the necessary kernel modules loaded:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo lsmod | grep cdc

cdc_acm                    15904 0

usbcore                     134280 7 cdc_acm,ohci_hcd,xpad,usbhid,uhci_hcd,echi_hcd

If your output matches the above, you already have the cdc_acm and ohci_hcd kernel modules loaded automatically. 

1) Install the Sprint Connection software on Windows XP or Vista

2) Insert the card, choose yes to update the firmware and activate the card by calling Sprint and providing the necessary information.

3) Reboot into Linux and insert the card into a free PCMCIA slot.  This tutorial will be done on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn with kernel 2.6.20-16-generic.  If you use the the 2.6.20 kernel, you won’t have to compile in any additonal modules.

4) We’ve already confirmed that we have the correct kernel modules above so now you’ll need to create two extra files using these steps:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo vi /etc/ppp/peers/Sprint_EVDO

noauth
# Connection Script
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/sprint-evdo” 
defaultroute
replacedefaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0
230400
local
novj

michael@feisty:~$ sudo mkdir /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@feisty:~$ cd /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@fesity:~$ sudo vi sprint-evdo

TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           ’\nBUSY\r’
ABORT           ’\nERROR\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO ANSWER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO CARRIER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO DIALTONE\r’
ABORT           ’\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r’
”              \rAT
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATE0V1&F&D2&C1S0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATS0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATDT#777
TIMEOUT         20 
CONNECT         ”"

5) run this command to start the connection:

michael@feisty:~$ /usr/sbin/pppd call Sprint_EVDO updetach

And you’re good to go.  Interestingly, I saw about 25% faster speeds consistently under Linux and XP compared to Vista.  I know the card hasn’t been officially certified under Vista, but it’s not certified on Linux either and 25% is a huge difference.  Test your speed over at Speedtest.net

P.S. You might get different results with another distribution (especially Suse) and kernel but if you are still having problems, drop me a line at mikebuckingham at gmail dot com and I’ll try and help.

Not only did Ubuntu install beautifully, but it recognized my wireless card and I only had to put in my WPA key to make it work.  Hibernation also works incredibly well whereas if I did that in Vista, I’d have to start in safe mode and reboot.   I’m incredibly excited about Dell’s move and it kills me to not buy one today to support the cause and reward a company for finally getting it.  But I don’t think the boss (Amy) really cares about the FOSS movement so it will have to wait for a few days.  Ok, weeks.  You’re right honey, years.

Yesterday Wordpress released a significant update to the world’s most popular CMS. Mainly security fixes but also:

1) HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
2) Comments are filtered to prevent long winded ones from hosing up your well crafted blog layout.
3) Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI environments

And while I’m on this subject, you should checkout Nixcraft’s guide to upgrading Wordpress in three simple steps via the command line. I used it to upgrade the three Wordpress installations I manage on this server and was able to do all three in under 6 minutes (the longest thing was tarring up the directories).

After recently ending my three year love affair with Gentoo, I moved to Ubuntu when I found Mint, an Ubuntu based distribution that comes preloaded with all the codecs necesary to enjoy multimedia as well as some other tweaks. Debian’s dpkg/apt package manager is by far the best in the biz (yes, even better than portage), but I had stayed away from Ubuntu because 1) it’s so popular 2) I hate that damn brown theme and 3) it took me a half day of “apt-get install” -ing just to play a damn mp3 file. I understand why but please don’t drag me down into your ideology war RMS.

With Mint, it’s just install and play! That being said, you’ll still need to install some stuff like smbfs (to mount your NAS smb shares), nmap, sshfs, etc, but once you’ve got it absolutely perfect, you can clone it easily.

While doing some research for this post, I found some crazy ass 50 line awk scrtipts and choked on my Mountain Dew more than once. I’ve got a better method and no, this doesn’t involve the use of dd (which I’m thinking of writing a lengthly post on since I have some time). The idea here is just to export all of the packages I currently have into a text file and then use dpkg to install those on any other debian based machine.

Run this to ask dpkg to export all of your installed packages into a text list:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt


On the new machine, copy installed packages.txt to / and use dpkg to import and have apt-get install these packages (after you’ve run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade of course):

sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed_packages.txt


Then do apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you're done!

(Source: Knoppix Wiki)

Firefox 2 was released today (not yesterday as reported by most of the tech news sites). Get it for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (I’m having a problem compiling it on my Gentoo Linux box though).

Notable Improvements that I think you’ll notice:
1) Page rendering speed (I actually noticed)

2) Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.

3) Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.

4) Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash. This is already a feature of Opera but is incredibly annoying at work as it tries ot authenticate 15 pages at once upon startup.

5) Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a separate application.

http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

If you use or know of the Free Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix distributions, laugh with me. If not, move along, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

(via Reddit)

But the real reason is that I just wanna get my life back. Earlier this year, I made a huge decision to leave a promising upper management position and it has paid off so far. So this is phase 2 of the life reclamation project. I no longer want to have to limit my hiking or cycling or just hanging out with my friends just becuase one of my servers might do down or Cpanel is going to release a new version that will likely break everything.

Additionally, the market and economics have changed considerably. What was once a pretty profitable and fun trade has become a mere commodity with the advent of affordable grid computing and cheap datacenter space.

This was an incredibly difficult decision (unlike the job thing) because this will have a significant impact on my paying and non-paying customers. For all of my customers, I will refund every cent of the money you paid me in 2006 and will provide extensive migraion assistance (i.e. I will do it for you if needed) to minimize the impact. The target date for shutdown is December 1st. If you host a website with me, you have received an e-mail prior to this and I will be giving you a phone call on Monday. I highlyrecommend the GS product from MediaTemple. 100 GBs of storage and 1 TB of monthly transfer. Plus, these guys really know what they’re doing. (note: I have no affiliation with MediaTemple nor received any compensation from them). They’ve been around for a long time and have a great reputation.

As for this blog, it will likely relocate to Blogger or Typepad, details will follow soon and you will be able to read RCS without changing your bookmarks.

To install the Firefox plugin as root in the CLI:


# cd /usr/src
# wget http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_linuxplugin
# tar -xzvf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# cd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/
# cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.7/plugins


The above commands extracts the archive and copies the binary plugin to the Mozilla Firefox plugins directory.

Restart Firefox. Enjoy.

history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r -n

This will print them commands you used most often to your terminal. Why is this handy? Well if you see a command that you use often and it’s fairly long, it might be time to make an alias or perhaps you see a group of commands that you can concatenate the output using pipes and a single alias. You don’t need to be root to do this obviously but I happened to have a root terminal open on one of my webhosting machines to make this example.

In my example, you can see that I hit vnstat (a simple yet incredibly accurate bandwith monitor) a lot in addition to a custom perl script I wrote to graph it’s output using rrdtool. I had some serious bandwidth concerns a few months ago due to a few of my customers’ sites that had become incredibly popular in a very short period of time.

About a month ago, I had a terrible dream that there had been a fire in my house and though I’d managed to save the kids and Amy, I felt as if I’d lost something irreplaceable. I didn’t actually solve that in the dream (from what I can remember) but on the way into work the next day, I realized that I would have lost all my digital pictures and thousands of digital documents I had created over the past 10 years. Sure, I’d been smart to back everything up multiple times on RAID 5 disk arrays (I’ve had many hard disks fail) but the problem was that all of this data was stored in one physical place. A fire, flood or major earthquake would mean losing them forever.

Offsite storage isn’t new to me (I back up all of my client’s websites in two different locations (one East Coast and the other on the West Coast) which has saved my ass on a few occasions. Also, at the time, I managed an Engineering group for a major ISP where we took data backup extrememely seriously.

My were requirements weren’t simple:

1) At least RAID 5 (preferably RAID 6 and NO SOFTWARE RAID)
2) Secure datacenter in a geologically and politically stable part of the world
3) Good, redundant connectivity
4) Support for rsync, sftp, ssh, Webdavs, smb and fuse (specifically sshfs so I can mount it locally on my Linux box)
5) A decent TOS (terms of service)

A week’s worth of searching led me to rsync.net. They’re a little pricey ($1.80 per gig per month) but these guys know what they’re doing and only doing this one thing (most other providers also did shared web hosting). They have a TOS that really favors the privacy of the customer and secure file transfer is their priority. They support all the protocols I required above and just yesterday added Dupliclity which is basically rsync + gpg. Kick ass.

I’ve been using them for a little over 3 weeks now and they get 5 stars. SSHFS mounting has worked flawlessly and they even helped me with some really crazy stuff I was trying to do with rsync. It took me only a few hours to write a shell script that rounded up all the changed data on my machines and NAS arrays and automatically upload them to my rsync share.

If you are serious about protecting your data, sign up with rsync, they’re really the only game in town.