Category: Computers and Software

Yesterday morning, for reasons we haven’t been able to figure out, both my wifi router and what has to have been the most disappointing phone base unit ever created suddenly and simultaneously went to that big recycle bin in the sky.  Our Internet connectivity went away as I was trying to send out a meeting invitation for work, and when I went down to reboot the router I saw the phone base was dark too.  After ruling out any common power issues and verifying that the two wall warts were indeed working, I had to conclude that both boxes were dead.  How very odd.  The only common thing between them is that there was a direct Ethernet connection, but nothing else on the network took a hit.  The Gigaset box had a phone line plugged into it, but that phone line passes through the A400 VOIP card in the server — neither of which were damaged.

Anyway.  I happened to have a spare non-IP base for the phones, so I connected that and had phone service back an hour or so after the loss.  The wifi router, though, was another matter.  In a very strange twist of timing, my new E4200 Linksys was on the UPS delivery truck – all I had to do was wait for it.

I’m not completely thrilled with the E4200V2.  Its performance seems to be excellent, and the signal strength reported by my cell phone and the Roku are substantially higher.  I wish to hell it ran DD-WRT; I really missed some of that firmware’s troubleshooting and logging capability.  I doubt I’ll return it, though.  Swapping out the router is disruptive enough, and while DD-WRT is great, I was mostly using it to overcome some real deficiencies in the old hardware.  It’s not a perfect solution, but the price was attractive and it will do.

What I learned from this is that I need better disaster plans, and need to test them more thoroughly.  I had a backup of the router configuration — but it’s a binary file.  Of course it’s completely useless on a different router, and I didn’t have all of the port forwarding and other rules written down anywhere.  My Asterisk backup plan failed miserably, I have to fix that.  I really need a seamless, fault tolerant VOIP setup with failover that actually works.  I’ve got some work to do on that stuff to avoid the headaches the next time something unexpectedly goes TU.

I need to upgrade the wifi router in the house.  The old Linksys WRT54G has been working for years, but it just can’t handle HD video streams.  So, I went shopping for a new Linksys E4200 V2, which is supposed to be the baddest, fastest one out there.  Dual band, 900 MBPS and all that.

Best Buy has the E4500, but I don’t want that one — it requires a constant connection to Cisco.  WTF?  Newegg was the same, only the E4500.  No thanks.  So I looked on eBay and Amazon.  It seems that they go for $125 and up new, and around $80 or so on up used.  I’m not in the mood to screw with someone else’s used router, so I was looking only at new and factory-refurbed.

Then I find the Linksys on line store…  factory refurb, 30 day warranty, $79.99 with free shipping.   Sold.  Anyone want a nice, current generation WRT54G already loaded with DD-WRT?  I have one for sale cheap.  🙂

I’ve seen a dramatic drop-off in email spam since implementing a greylist program a couple of months back.   As odd as it may sound, greylisting works by initially rejecting all new incoming email with a response indicating a temporary rejection.   A “real”, legitimate mail server will retry sending the email after a few minutes.   A spam-generating virus program running on a hijacked computer generally will not.   As a result, nearly all spam email just simply goes away…   and none of the “good” mail gets lost.

The system keeps track of senders that have successfully delivered mail, and adds them to a whitelist of “known good” senders so that future mail from those senders doesn’t get delayed.

This system has allowed me to retire a very long list of filter rules to try to catch spam.   The amount of time I have to spend dealing with it has dropped from a couple of hours per week to a few minutes per week.   It’s not perfect — but then, nothing is.   My employer spends tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-spam technology, and I still seen one get through every once in a while.   For zero cost and near zero hassle, this works pretty well.

This has been bugging the hell out of me for a while now.  I write my user manuals in Word 2007, and export them as PDF files for inclusion on the HamGadgets web site as well as on the CD-ROMs I ship with each order.

Once in a while, I get an extraneous slash character in the PDF file bookmarks.  This always happens on a page where I have a diagram or picture embedded.  For example, this time it was the page of the ID-O-Matic manual that has the schematic diagram.  I could play around with moving the picture, etc — sometimes I could make the problem WORSE, but never better.  One time it showed up with a completely new bookmark, just a slash on a line by itself, which took me to the picture — not the page heading.  Eureka.

Turns out — your embedded picture can have text format attributes set, just like text can.  The picture in question got added with a “Heading 3” attribute, which made it show up in the PDF bookmarks.  Since it was a picture with no text, it jsut had a slash for the bookmark.  Depending on exactlyhow things were laid out, it could show up either prepended to the heading (like “/Schematic“) or on a line all by itself.  I imagine it would have probably shown up in the TOC if I’d added one.  I selected the picture, hit the Normal text format button, re-saved as PDF…  end of problem.

Word Help was useless, as usual, and Google searches for this turned up almost nothing.  There was a post to a M$ Office forum from someone in Holland with the exact same problem, posted in 2010 and with no replies posted.  I’m not going to sign up to that forum so I can “necropost” the fix, but maybe this blog entry till get indexed and save someone else some trouble.

I’m pretty satisfied with Linux Mint, for the most part.  However, one thing does bug the hell out of me — their “branding”.  Listen, if you want to make my desktop background a cute little Mint logo, fine.  I don’t care.  But when you start screwing with the Firefox search bar and sending me to some oddly-formatted, mint-filtered search page, something has to change.

Fortunately it’s not difficult.  Just delete one file and edit a couple of others…

rm /etc/linuxmint/adjustments/15-mint*firefox*
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

In the two XML files, you’ll see the customizations that send you to the Mint customized page.  When you finish, the tail end of the file should look like this:

<Url type=”text/html” method=”GET” template=”http://www.google.com/search/”>
<Param name=”q” value=”{searchTerms}”/>
<Param name=”ie” value=”utf-8″/>
<Param name=”sa” value=”Search”/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

Kill and restart Firefox, and your search should be back to normal.

After a few days with Fedora16, I’d had it.  I’m sorry, btu the new Gnome 3 interface is just unusable.  Maybe if you want your desktop to be just as horrible as an iThingie…  but as a desktop, it’s just unusable.  Yeah, I read about “change your workflow” and all that nonsense.  Excuses for a really, really poor user interface.  I shouldn’t have to completely change the way I work to make my desktop happy.  It kind of sucks, because I’ve been happily using Fedora for years.  But, after all this time they managed to find a way to chase users off.

I’ve never been an Ubuntu fan, and CentOS just doesn’t do it for me.  I made that mistake twice, and one of them I’m still living with.  Not again.  So I decided to try Mint Linux.  Mint is a Debian distro, like Ubuntu, so I’m learning to live yum-lessly, but at least I can use the desktop UI like a normal computer.  It’s still not perfect.  For example, if you drag a window’s top bar too close to the top edge of the screen, it “snaps” to the top and assumes you really wanted to FULL SCREEN your Gedit note pad, not just slide it up out of the way a little.  Urk.  I can’t find a way to turn that irritating little quirk off.  I’m also not terribly impressed with the cutesie workspace switching, but I don’t use it often enough to be an issue.  So, Mint for the win — for now.