Sonos Megafail

Posted on 2009-11-04 by Stefan Rubner

I’ve been a Sonos fan for some years now. No more. Two weeks ago I sent in my defective ZP100. Had to pay a service fee of € 103,08 to get it fixed or a replacement unit. Today the replacement unit arrived. Oh boy, how happy I was. Now I’d finally be able again to listen to music while working – or so I thought.

So I wired the device but when I plugged in the power cord there was this faint “brzzzt!” sound. “BRZZT?!?” I thought and did a closer inspection of the box sent to me. As I feared, the voltage switch on the back was set to 110V. 110V!

WHO THE FREAKING FUCK SENDS OUT REPLACEMENT UNITS SET TO 110V IN **GERMANY** ??? Without attaching anything like a little note or a sticker to the unit, saying something in the way of “WARNING, Check voltage setting on the back!”. Oh well, so now I paid € 103,08 for a ZP100 that never had a chance to play some music. And I’m so pissed that I consider selling off all my remaining Sonos stuff. Any takers? but will keep the other stuff nevertheless.
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Give more threads to Varnish

Posted on 2009-11-04 by Stefan Rubner

When running my preferred proxy cache Varnish on Linux I realized that I couldn’t start enough threads on heavily accessed systems. As I found out, reducing the stack size is the key to get to the number I need. Oh well, if everything would be easy, I wouldn’t get paid I guess ;)
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It comes by night and sucks the essence from your computers

Posted on 2009-11-01 by Stefan Rubner

Today, after some intensive initial beta testing by Jan-Piet I decided to release Bacula 3.0.2 for ReadyNAS NV/NV+/Duo/1100/X6.

For those of you who don’t know Bacula and what it does: The headline says it all. Or to quote the website:

Bacula is a set of Open Source, enterprise ready, computer programs that permit you to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. In technical terms, it is an Open Source, enterprise ready, network based backup program.

That said, you should know that’s it’s not a snap to configure, so be sure to read the documentation or at least have a look at the quick walk-through provided by Jan-Piet.

Posted in ReadyNAS, security, Software | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

ZFS on the Mac: The power to forge

Posted on 2009-10-25 by Stefan Rubner

Dustin Sallings writes:

Then today, I read this:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

That made me very sad, so I decided to do something about it.

And so he did: ZFS/Mac archive on Github
There’s even an installer for Snow Leopard in pkg format.
But please keep in mind his warning before trying it out:

You still need to kind of know what you’re doing to make use of it.

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Nice Try

Posted on 2009-10-14 by Stefan Rubner

nice_try

Unfortunately for the sender, though, I happen to know the tech support guy of said domain in person.

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iSCSI target 1.4.18 for ReadyNAS Duo/NV/NV+

Posted on 2009-10-13 by Stefan Rubner

Today I released the iSCSI Target Addon 1.4.18 for the Sparc based ReadyNAS series. There’s not only the dramatic change in the version number. In addition a lot of changes happened behind the scenes:

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Posted in ReadyNAS, Software | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

I feel heavily tempted

Posted on 2009-10-13 by Stefan Rubner

Sonos S5

What a coincidence. The day after my ZP100 died completely (guess I’ve been too happy there) Sonos announces the S5. Looks like a very good replacement for my ZP100 and as Volker put it: I guess I don’t want just one, but more. Not half a dozen, but two or three would definitely be nice. We’ll see, Christmas is near anyway ;)

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Heute schon gemendelt?

Posted on 2009-10-13 by Stefan Rubner

anmendel

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New Toy

Posted on 2009-10-12 by Stefan Rubner

newtoy

Posted in Hardware, Helden der Technik | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Sonos System Revived

Posted on 2009-10-11 by Stefan Rubner

Since I had some spare time today, I decided to try Volker’s tips to revive my halfways broken Sonos setup. My problem was that one player wouldn’t show up at all while a second one would drop from the network after five to 15 minutes. While I was on it i decided to clean out the ZP100 because it tended to get a bit too warm for my liking. Actually there was nothing to clean out so I guess I have to live with it.

After that was done I found that I had to upgrade both of my switches – the main GS716T as well the GS108T in the office – to new firmware releases to be able to set the SPT priority. A major obstacle there was the fact that to update the switch you need to use Internet Explorer so I had to first install XP in a virtual machine before I could actually upgrade the switches. Not nice from Netgear. Since this isn’t documented anywhere it took me a while to figure that one out.

sonos_working_again

I then disconnected all Zone Players from the network and from their power source. Then I reconnected the ZP100 in my office. Once that one showed up in the Sonos Controller I reconnected the ZP80s in the living room and in my room. Until now no more dropouts or missing players. I’m a happy camper again ;)

Posted in Entertainment, Sonos | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Move it, move it (a.k.a. “Screw it up the IBM way”)

Posted on 2009-10-06 by Stefan Rubner

I work with web sites for a living. I give them a place to live, I trash them when they’re no longer needed and I also move them. And believe me, moving a site is the trickiest of the jobs. But in all of my professional life, I’ve never ever seen a blunder like this (output shortened for brevity):

crow:~$ dig developer.lotus.com
; < <>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 < <>> developer.lotus.com
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;developer.lotus.com.		IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
developer.lotus.com.	127	IN	CNAME	192.147.106.27.
192.147.106.27.		0	IN	A	67.215.65.132

Really. Did they outsource the last thinking person in their networking department? Ok, maybe they fixed it and the change just hasn’t trickled down. So let’s try a different approach (again, shortened:)

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Posted in Helden der Technik, internet, Misc, Networks, security, Software, the ugly truth | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Make your ReadyNAS the NTP time server of your network

Posted on 2009-10-06 by Stefan Rubner

Since it wasn’t that much work I decided to honor the request and build the server component of the NTP protocol suite for the ReadyNAS Duo/NV/NV+/1100/X6.
There are two archives available:

After installation the server will start immediately. However, it will take some time for the server to actually sync time and date with the official time sources. So it takes about 15 to 20 minutes until any client on your network can actually sync its time with the time source on the ReadyNAS.
Have fun with the tool and remember: Works for me, ymmv.

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Quote of the Day (German DB-Edition)

Posted on 2009-09-30 by Stefan Rubner

Im Osten kriegt die Bahn EU-Fördermittel zur Modernisierung im Rahmen des “Aufbau Ost”. Deswegen sind die da mit dem Stellenabbau schon weiter.

Bahnmitarbeiter aus dem Osten auf die Frage, warum er und viele seiner Kollegen vermehrt in den Südwesten kommen.

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Interesting searches: readynas uninstall togglessh

Posted on 2009-09-28 by Stefan Rubner

For reasons unknown to me, I get a lot of hits from searches for “readynas uninstall togglessh”. Obviously a lot of people who tried the ToggleSSH addon for their ReadyNAS found that it didn’t suit their needs and now want to uninstall it. Ok, so I’m going to tell you how to fix your problems ;)

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Make your ReadyNAS your scanning hub

Posted on 2009-09-20 by Stefan Rubner

Finally being bothered enough by always having to connect my USB scanner to yet another computer, I decided to bring the SANE backends to the ReadyNAS. As a result, I proudly presend sane-backends_1.0.20-readynas-0.1.0. Using this addon will add support for a vast variety of USB scanners to your ReadyNAS.
To use the scanner attached to your ReadyNAS, you’ll also need a compatible SANE frontend. Those are available for Linux and Windows (XSane) as well as for Mac OS/X (TWAIN SANE, even already with a version for Snow Leopard).

Some screenshots (taken on Linux):

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Resolved: “ld: fatal: file values-Xa.o: open failed: No such file or directory” when compiling on (Open)Solaris

Posted on 2009-09-18 by Stefan Rubner

Ah well. Compiling software on Solaris could be really easy if it weren’t for the small problems all the time. Today I was faced with 

ld: fatal: file values-Xa.o: open failed: No such file or directory

when trying to compile Subversion 1.6.5 on OpenSolaris.

Solution:

pkg install SUNWarc

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MySQL Tuning: The PHP Auto-Reconnect Patch

Posted on 2009-09-17 by Stefan Rubner

Now this would be really funny if it weren’t so sad in so many aspects: I know of more than one company running MySQL. Ok, no news there. But the MySQL servers of said companies are dropping connections. Not twice a week or once a day but two or three times every bloody second. Investigation of the cause is underway but obviously that doesn’t help to fix the problem at hand.
Since the major platform in said companies is PHP, there’s another problem: Tests have shown that if a connection failed a subsequent connection request will go through just fine. While not ideal, the best solution for the moment would therefor be to enable the auto-reconnect feature built into every MySQL client. But for PHP, there is no option to do just that.

That’s because even while PHP is using the

mysql_option()

function – which is needed to enable auto-reconnect – internally, nobody cared to make it available as part of PHP’s language. Maybe it would be easy to do just that, but I found it easier to patch PHP directly to enable auto-reconnect by default. You want to know how? Read on.

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Quote of the Day (German Edition)

Posted on 2009-09-16 by Stefan Rubner

“Was ist das denn?”
“Die technische Bezeichnung ist ‘Dingsbums’”

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Remove outdated languages from Ubuntu’s Firefox

Posted on 2009-09-16 by Stefan Rubner

Always on the bleeding edge I like to use beta versions of upcoming Ubuntu releases. This sometimes poses a little problem: More often than not, there come outdated language definitions with Firefox, causing some minor annoyances.
The biggest annoyance of which is that you just can’t seem to delete those offending addons:

firefox-undeleteable-addons

The solution, albeit simple, is harder to find:

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Small Updates to WebSVN for ReadyNAS and ReadyNAS Pro

Posted on 2009-09-16 by Stefan Rubner

I just released a small update to WebSVN for ReadyNAS / WebSVN for ReadyNAS Pro which by now is available for both, the Sparc- and the Intel-based systems (as if you hadn’t guessed that already ;)). With version 0.9.3 you will now be able to run WebSVN even if you haven’t created an SVN repository already. Before 0.9.3 this would result in a somewhat meaningless error message about a missing configuration directive which just wasn’t true.
Also new in this version is the ability to add BDB-type repositories. While this is the “old” repository style I’m told that using BDB as storage engine will give you a performance boost on larger repositories. So I decided to add that function as well.

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