So, after a trying a couple of different AP’s, and realizing they were either unstable or lacking important features; I decided to build my own. It’s apparently not that easy to find a nice and stable AP/router/switch nowadays. You can’t just go and buy one for $100-$150 and expect it to be stable. And by stable I mean not being forced to power-cycle the device every couple of days.

After my last D-Link (DGL-4100) died, I bought myself a corporate grade Cisco/Linksys device (WRV200). It promised a lot of what I wanted from a device like that, and it gave me the option to setup VPN (road warrior style and site-2-site). FAIL! -> It promised, but did not live up to my expectations; Sure, you were able to du all of what it promised, but if you started to use it for real, the poor router overheated and hanged. Since I bought 3 of these to interconnect 3 sites using VPN, I was not very happy.. Took a while to have them returned.. Going through the procedure of proving they did not live up to the promises made..

I ended up researching alternatives, and found mikrotik (www.mikrotik.com) and their line of hardware; routerboards (www.routerboard.com). I wasn’t sure about if I would like running a scaled down and restricted linux based router os where I could not alter things I wanted; but after trying it for a month or so, I decided to buy one and play around with.. Now, I thought the RB493UAH that I got delivered was a broken promise too, as it was hanging after just half a day of heavy use. This proved to be a hardware error, and I got a new one sent out without having to return the old one in advance. Great service here! Anyway, the second one has been up and running for 2.5 years without having to reboot. Firewalling, connection tracking, and all that jazz is enabled and I still get 100mbps throughput in between all interfaces. Torrenting with 300-400-500 simultaneous connections from more than one internal host is smooth and I get maximum throughput both ways (in/out) duplex. I also have one wireless card in it, and am adding a new 802.11N card in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, I finally ended up getting 2x RB433UAH, with various wireless cards, and am running VPN in between sites just fine as well. whee..

ALIX 2D13:

Since I already have been playing around with my fit-pc slim for the past 3.5 years, and it’s been a fun little device; I decided to try a new router/ap/server project. I bought a ALIX 2D13 board (based on the same AMD Geode CPU – LX800 and chipset – CS5536; as the fit-pc slim), 8GB of 30MB/s flash, a TP-Link wireless N card and some other nick-nack’s to get things going.. I agree it feels kinda old to buy a new device (3.5 years later) with the same old cpu as my old fit-pc slim, but it’s been 100% stable running ubuntu 8.04 from start.

I have not decided what OS I will be running, but will mess around with it in the free days around x-mas. Options I am looking at are:

IPCop, IPFire, AlpineLinux, VoyageLinux, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Linux Mint or FreeBSD.. I’ve been considering pfSense and m0n0wall but they are just to0 scaled down. I want to be able to do more than just a router/ap.

Once you download this app, launch it and enter this secret number: 91929394.59 followed by enter (once). Quit the app (pressing the home button) and reboot your phone (iOS 4.x caches available keyboards, so reboot is needed). Once rebooted, enter Settings -> General -> International -> Keyboards -> Add new keyboard. You should have a keyboard named Emoji there. Enable it, and whoops; You have Emoji icons. (you touch the globe icon just beside the spacebar to switch between keyboards)

I could enter an appointment today at 5pm on my phone, choosing to alert 30 minutes ahead of the appointment – The result would be that the phone would alert me at 3:30pm instead of 4:30pm. Even though it showed the correct time in the calendar on the phone.

On a side note, both MobileMe and our company’s Exchange would save the appointment at 4pm. Now, this has to do with my timezone settings. I was playing around with that, but no real change.. It was always displaying one hour wrong from what I entered. Also, if i entered an appointment the right time in any of the above calendars, the iPhone calendar would show one hour in advance.

I booked an appointment at the genius bar at apple, and they were as stunned as me.. But playing around in the phone together we found a second time zone setting in: Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendar called Time Zone Support. Apparently, if you want time zones to work when you travel (to have your appointments at the right time where you are located), you have to turn Time Zone Support OFF! (?). This will change the appointments to the time you are when you move between time zones.

I guess I might not be the only one with these issues.. So sharing..

Ever since Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I have been thinking somthing like this would happen. Oracle is not exactly known for contributing to the Open Source community, even if they claim they are committed to helping and enhancing it. It feels like their ultimate goal is to close source everything. I can’t understand the nature of such an organization. Isn’t shared knowledge, more knowledge? We all want to evolve, and what better way than not inventing the wheel over and over again. Soon Oracle will want you to pay a license fee for every execution of your java application (per processor)

I am dreading what they will do with MySQL when they get there.. Same licensing model as Oracle DB?

Just had to comment on this, as I think it is ridiculous and def. not adding anything to the community.

Apparently, one of the drives purchased at the same time as the drobo (WD20EADS) 2TB drives was faulty. It reported fine when doing S.M.A.R.T tests, so the drobo thought it all was fine and wrote to it. The drive could write data, but it was slow as back in the 1980′s. Needless to say, I sent it in to WD for a replacement.

It took two weeks to get it replaced. Once the new drive arrived, I had already bought another two WD20EADS drives and put them in the drobo. It was therefore not urgent to insert the replaced drive.

Drobo has been working fine. Some days ago I inserted the replaced drive. The drobo was blinking yellow for a while and then everything was fine (all green). I did not have any data on the drobo at that time, since I had been running tests, but I had deleted the test files. The yellow blinking (while it was syncing data) was pretty fast. I am guestimating it to approx. 1-2 minutes.

Yesterday I decided to move some data over to the drobo. It all went fine, but the drobo notified me it had a drive failure. Look at the drobo itself, and sure, there is a red LED blinking. Guess which drive?

Today I am sending back the failed drive to WD. What is really bothering me is that I received a faulty drive from them (in exchange for my other faulty drive), and I am forced to pay the return shipping for it.

Overall, I am happy with the drobo, but after reading a lot complaints online about people having problem with drobo’s losing data, I am having doubts. I will do some hardcore testing with it to make sure my data is not lost. The whole point is to be able to have a secure, easy accessible, and easy expandable storage subsystem. What I am doubting is not any of the latter but the fact that it might not be secure. I had some ideas on building my own storage subsystem using a small server running OpenSolaris with direct attached storage (DAS) and ZFS. There are some issues though. Will go more into detail later.

By the way, anyone attending MySQL UC 2010? I’ll be there!

To fix this I booted the system on a bootable GRUB CD and rewrote the mbr from the GRUB shell/OS.

If you don’t know how to do this there is a bootable superGRUB image that can be installed on USB Flash, Floppy or CD-ROM. It has some fancy menus that will guide you through different processes. If you want to learn more about GRUB it is also a great resource to just start up and play around with.
I believe SuperGRUB can be found at http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

We will do a walkthrough of technologies that can be used, pros, cons, common pitfalls and how we solved it at bwin games ab (company i work at).

I will post more information about this later. Just wanted to share my excitement.

Almost 6 months from when i put it up i have what, 2 posts now?

Things at work are going well, and i am planning a vacation this summer with my girlfriend to actually go to visit some family that i apparently have in Kraków/Poland.

I will also try to renovate the kitchen at the same time. Before we leave off for vacation i will remove everything from the kitchen, and demolish some walls and remove some wardrobes in the hallway.. then i will have a painter spackel and paint the walls and the roof.. I will put new spotlights in the hallway and the kitchen, so a new roof has to be installed..

well, i’ll get back with some more information when i know what i will do completely..

You can read more about bwin AG at http://www.bwin.org and you can play at http://www.bwin.com

For those who does not know what bwin/betandwin does, they are the biggest online sportsbetting, casino and poker company in Europe. The Swedish branch (where i work) is the division who develops, maintains and operates the poker platform (old ongame e-solutions ab). Our office is located in the center of Stockholm, in the main central station building.

Same company, new name, same work new work.. :S

What i want to save/post is just general stuff about life and some pictures for family to recap on what they have missed.. Some information about me and maybe a bit of my hobbies..

We’ll se if i stick to it or if i do something else..