Reading (For Dummies)

The Death of Telephones

A few weeks ago I got my Cingular 8125 cell phone (aka HTC Wizard). It's a PocketPC phone (running version 5.0 of the windows mobile operating system). It is an amazing little piece of technogadgetry.

It runs a 195Mhz Texas Instruments OMAP processor, which is a little embedded CPU that has both an onboard DSP and a generic ARM core on the same die. It's kind of slow by today's standards (the phone was released over a year ago in Asia) -- most of the newer phones have 400mhz Intel X-scale processors. It's still pretty capable, though, and can reliably be overclocked to 240mhz. Also, given how quickly this thing eats its own battery, I'm glad the CPU isn't any faster...

But on to the subject of this posting, the death of telephones. What's most interesting about my phone are its networking capabilities. For example, the phone has 802.11b built-in, and can connect to Cingular's EDGE networking (again, newer phones do 802.11g and either 3G or EVDO, all of which are much faster). Still, EDGE is just good enough to do Skype calling with...802.11b is more than plenty...at least, when I overclock my CPU.

"What's so interesting about that?" you ask? I'll tell you. My cell phone plan works like this: $40 for 450 rollover talk minutes per month. Another $40 for unlimited data usage. I use Skype. Skype is $15 a year for unlimited calling out. In theory I'll never have to use those 450 rollover minutes except for inbound calls. I predict that this will become even more interesting if someone develops an always-on low-power networked VoIP telephony device -- minutes will no longer matter, only megabytes. Unless, y'know, net neutrality fails.

D-Link DNS-323 Needs Work

A few weeks ago I had a job interview during which I was asked to define the word 'quality.' Memories of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came rushing forth, and I found myself at a bit of a loss for words in how to answer. I didn't get the job.

D-Link shouldn't get the job either. I recently purchased their DNS-323 network attached storage device and my review is: it stinks.

I bought it as it promised to be a good, cheap, RAID-1 NAS. What I got has a firmware laden with old software that is buggy as hell. The firmware included uses the Linux 2.6.6 kernel, and offers Ext3 filesystem support. I never realized that Ext3 had so many problems in the older kernels...

I've been trying to copy my laptop's data to the disk, about 60 gigabytes worth. I can't copy it all at one time -- the NAS randomly drops files, and leaves stale file handles open on the physical hard drive. Rebooting the NAS won't clear the problems (probably some partially written inode data?) and the interface doesn't provide any ability to run fsck. My understanding of Linux's VFS is brought into question, as I thought file locking and whatnot would be handled by the VFS and not the physical drive layer. Something bizarre must be happening.

I updated the firmware, released two days ago, that promises to fix problems copying large numbers of files to the NAS. Does it? Hardly. I reformatted the NAS after installing the firmware, just to be sure. This NAS will probably be best as a roll-your-own-firmware box. I suspect that the filesystem problems are fixed and fixable but D-Link was just too lazy to get them compiled. Newer kernels and devtools have only been around for about 2 years...

D-Link's toolchain is dated 2004 and doesn't incorporate many of the bugfixes in the arm libc since that time. For example, the toolchain code has quite a few weird functions and macros like this:

void myfunc(complextype *b){
  int c;
  (complextype *)c = b;
  *((void *) b->next)++ = c;
}

It's called an lvalue typecast, which was a bug (not a feature) in gcc many years ago. Most other c compilers don't touch this kind of calamity and bow out at the parsing stage for good reason -- the programmer clearly didn't know what they intended to do :).

There are also oddities in determining if the files are copied over correctly, probably due to the way SMB presents directory blocks to clients versus the way VFS (or whatever filesystem layer it is that OS X uses, unless it uses HFS directly? Not sure). To get around them, you could do something like this:

$ find -s /Local-Drive-Directory/ -type f -exec md5sum {} \; > /some/path/localdrive.md5sums
$ find -s /Nas-Drive-Directory/ -type f -exec md5sum {} \; > /some/path/nasdrive.md5sums
$ diff /some/path/localdrive.md5sums /some/path/nasdrive.md5sums

If you get any output from the diff command, you know the NAS has hosed your data, and you know which files it hosed.

I have to repeat that I'm pretty miffed that D-Link shipped the 323 with a broken firmware. Thankfully I did not lose too much data finding the problems. Nothing irreplaceable, anyway...

In summary, quality this is not...

RedHat 5

This morning we had a fun telecon with RedHat about RHEL5. Not much really new information for me, as i've been to a million meetings with RedHat, Oracle, Sun, NSA, and other fun groups for the last year, but there was probably a lot of new information for most of the government folk invited.

A gentle ribbing: how the presentation looked on Linux

RedHat seems to have the right ideas. They're targetting both the server administration geeks (I'm one of them right now, admining 30 or so linux servers) as well as the research/MLS geeks (I'll be one again, assuming my funding comes through). In short, RedHat is the new Sun. (I don't think that Novell is the new Microsoft, though with their recent collusion I suppose one never knows.)

They did get one thing wrong though: the screenshot above shows how the presentation portion of the telecon looked on my Linux desktop. The upper left pane is the 'chat room' (blank), the right pane has three sub-panes that are survey questions with radio buttons (again, blank), the lower left pane is where I could take notes (yep, I could type, but it showed up blank on my screen). I was running Ubuntu Dapper with Firefox 1.5.0.8 and the latest Flash player for Linux (released December 6th). Kind of a bummer that RedHat is depending upon their potential buyers' running Windows as their desktop OS. The desktop doesn't seem to be their market right now, though, so I guess it all works out in the end.

The Mystery of the Package in the Daytime

Something odd is happening at home: my packages are disappearing. Just another downside of living in a big city, I guess. So far it's two confirmed packages missing with a value of about $300...I pretty much wish I had a job at which I could receive deliveries from the likes of UPS and DHL again.

Maybe it's time to break out some old toys?

FON Fun

I got another neat toy today. My FON router arrived. I registered as a FON user about a year ago, when I heard that they were kind of a "Socialist's free Wi-Fi." I hadn't paid them much attention though, as I had decided to load a different firmware on my Linksys Wireless-G(Linux) router. A little over a week ago, FON sent me an email saying that I was eligible for a free router for some reason. Free as in free, no shipping and handling, no nothing. I immediately signed up.

The complete kit

I wasn't really expecting the router for months. Imagine my surprise when it came today. It's pretty slick-looking. It comes with an ethernet cable, power supply, and a comprehensive manual, as well as a pretty nice box. It looks good enough to sell in any retail store that sells routers from companies like Linksys -- I certainly think that they should market it to such places. Plus, now that I have a registered access point, I can use other access points for FREE. And free is a very good price.

It works pretty well, too. It shows up as two access point, a "Public" (for other FON users, no security, no ability to configure), and a "Private" (encrypted with a key printed on the bottom of the router, and very slightly configurable). I was happy to see that they use 192.168.10.x as the default network, to prevent troubles with just about every other router in the world, which uses 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x. That should keep people from getting circular routes and not being able to connect to the internet with it. As a device, it just "works." I would say that my biggest concern with it is heat...after being on for only a half hour, the case is already very warm to the touch (far more so than my regular access point). Only time will tell if the router burns my house down...

Security Enhance PostGreSQL

Every once in a while I come across a piece of computer news that makes me happy and sad at the same. Sad because I had the idea and lacked the motivation and time to do it, but happy because it got done.

One such idea was flitted to me by a coworker of a coworker at the SELinux Symposium last year. It involved making a multilevel database. I actually have been putting together a research proposal for DARPA to implement such a thing for these last few weeks (luckily have quite a few other ideas). Yes, indeed, someone has made PostGreSQL with type enforcement (my Japanese is pretty rough, too, the Google provides a funny English translation. You may want to try his English documentation page, which is probably in better English than I can speak).

I guess there's still the nag in the back of my head saying that tying software too tightly to operating systems is a bad thing. I can sort of quell that fear by saying that there's a lot of benefit to TE, and people can always port the FLASK architecture to their own operating system. Sparta, for example, has been doing this already.

All around good news. Now on to the next project.