The Treehouse Blog

A week or so ago, the power supply in Oak abruptly died (while the machine was up, no less). It was a Coolmax, and as it turns out, Doug had one die on him the next week. Both of us have now e-mailed Coolmax for return instructions, which has met with no response. I rushed a replacement PS from newegg and all was well (filesystems happy and all).

Tonight, one of my drives began having short reads. The fsck has put lots of really nasty looking things in my lost+found, but I don’t think anything overly terrible happened. Either way, newegg will be shipping me a new drive tomorrow. Personally, I prefer replacing hardware when I think it’s too old, slow, or small, not when it decides that it will be on the low end of the MTBF spectrum.

smartctl has been helpful in looking at drives carefully. However, as it doesn’t yet work on SATA drives in Linux, who can I forward my donation to in order to get that bumped to the top of the queue? Seriously, I’d pay $20 or so for that to work, and I bet others would too.

I’ve spent maybe 10 hours on this now (not all this week, mind you, but still). Getting WPA-PSK w/ TKIP certainly isn’t as easy as it should be, but that is probably entirely due to driver issues. Seems you can’t buy a great 802.11g card for Linux.

I had tried various versions of the Linux IPW2100 drivers, 1.1.0 most recently, and always ended up getting errors saying that the IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT ioctl was not available. This is a symptom of a driver that doesn’t have the WPA support, but lsmod clearly showed the TKIP and other encryption-related modules loaded. Google suggested using the load and unload scripts provided with the driver, and to check the initrd for an old driver that might be overriding the freshly-compiled one. modinfo confirmed that the new drivers were getting loaded… still no luck. That’s where I was for a long time, retrying every once in awhile to see if anything was happier.

As it turns out, there is a problem in the way the drivers are compiled as modules which can be fixed with this patch (local cache). Keep in mind that the post I’m referencing here is only two weeks old… so, I’m probably not the only one having this issue. I’m somewhat amazed (and very happy) that Google has indexed it that fast.

Now, technically, that was enough to fix my problems. However, I spent the next 45 minutes or so trying to figure out why my connection would reset several seconds after coming up… which turned out to be another instance of wpa_supplicant in the background screwing things up. Tip: run one wpa_supplicant at a time.

The “bedroom stuff” was moved this evening, which means I’ll be spending the night :D. I still have a bunch of books and things at… erh, the parent’s house, but those can move on at a much reduced pace. I can only hope that having this phase of the transition done will allow me to spend the time I need to on my classes, which I’m sorry to say, have been neglected substantially as of late. Don’t rush over to visit just yet… the living room is full of boxes, and I’m not going to worry about the entertainment system until things calm down ;).

The office has moved! Thank’s to Doug‘s help, all of my office/computer/network stuff has been moved in. We’re up on Kuhn cable, and things are looking good. Not sure when the bedroom stuff will be moved, but probably no later than next weekend. Chris also stopped buy this evening (er, last evening at this point)and dropped off a couch, and helped out with other stuff. Thinks are starting to get wrapped up, which is good news for my classes, which I have definitely been neglecting.

Painting is essentially complete. Getting the inside of the exterior doors painted would be a bonus, but isn’t required, I guess. The new flooring has been installed. The toilet innards have been replaced. All of the new light fixtures are up. So, it’s essentially ready to be moved into. The todo list looks like… installing new faucets, tracing and terminating cable to the patch panel, having Kuhn install cable (Friday), and buying the final touches (new blinds, stocking the kitchen, etc). Chances are there will be some type of moving this coming weekend. But, at the moment, I need to try to finish any and all homework I should have been doing over break…