SmashTech

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Sony Drops Linux Support on Slim PS3

With the release of the PS3 Slim, Sony has announced that the new SKU will no longer support the ‘Other OS’ install option. It is going the way of PS2 support before it, and being cut in the name of cost savings. Sure, Linux on the PS3 was crippled under a hypervisor which prevented direct access to the GPU, but it still marked a step in the right direction for opening up a nice hardware platform to the masses for something besides games & movies.

This change, fortunately, does not affect existing PS3s, but raises the question – What if one day for some reason, Sony just decided that they aren’t including the hypervisor anymore in firmware updates? Would those of us with Linux installed have any way of pulling that data off the drive?

When All You Have is Document Imaging…

…everything looks like a document. I was surprised, to say the least, to learn that one of the salesmen for Flowerco, after having his computer replaced, wanted access to the legacy document imaging system (which we’ll call FileMania).

It was my assumption that FileMania was only used for some billing and insurance paperwork, not anything that sales would really need. Turns out, he was using the software as a rudimentary CRM, to track customer calls, contact information, and the like. Hardly an ideal solution, but unfortunately, there isn’t much else we currently have available for him.

If users don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs, they will find some way to use the tools they do have to make due.

Ubuntu Media Center PC

I finally had it with Vista on my media center PC. Slow startups, it never saved my resolution for the TV correctly, and frequently locked up while loading videos. It’d been a while since I tried Ubuntu (normally I use Fedora), so I decided to load up Jaunty and see how it worked.

First, the bad. It did not load the accelerated drivers for the Intel onboard video. While it sucks for 3D, it was more than enough to run XBMC smoothly under Windows. Under Ubuntu, videos would play fine, the interface was just dog-slow. I could’ve researched and fixed the problem, then I remembered I had an old GeForce 4 that Vista didn’t support. I slapped that in there, loaded up the nVidia drivers, and XBMC ran smooth as butter.

Now, the good. Wireless. Freaking amazing, I did not expect it to work right after an install with a Linksys WUSB54GSC I had, but after logging in, I was presented with a list of wifi networks, and connected to mine with no problems whatsoever.

There was some Samba weirdness. For some reason, it initially only showed my other Windows PCs, and my OpenFiler server didn’t show up in the Network list at all, even though they were all in the same workgroup. Changing my workgroup settings seemed to fix that.

On the whole, I’m very satisfied with how XBMC on Ubuntu turned out to be.

Rebuilding Software RAID5 on an Atom

The replacement drive for my 1TB RAID5 finally came in last night. I had never actually had to do a rebuild with the md toolset before (I’ve always had hardware support in the past). I wasn’t able to find any rebuild option in OpenFiler’s web interface, so I ssh’ed in.

First, I looked at the partition structure of one of the remaining working drives with fdisk -l /dev/sdd, then I matched this partition setup on the replacement drive. Then I added the new drive back into the array with mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/sde1, and monitored the rebuild process occasionally by looking at /proc/mdstat.

The total time for the array rebuild was just shy of 4 hours and 30 minutes, on an Atom N270.

Pad a Numeric Field with 0 in DB2

Say you’re storing a time in a 6 position numeric field in DB2 (in HHMMSS format), and you need to pull the hour. SUBSTR(FIELD,1,2) will work great as long as the time is 10am or later, but before that, you’ll start pulling weird times like 91:00. This is because SUBSTR does not pad a numeric field with zeroes in query. To force a prepended 0, do SUBSTR(DIGITS(FIELD),1,2).

Backing Up with Virtualmin and S3

Virtualmin is a great open source server management tool. In fact, its what I use for my hosting. Amazon S3 is a great, affordable online storage service. What do you get when you combine them? A great way to back up your servers.

Virtualmin has had support for local and remote backups for some time now, but the idea of weekly 8GB FTP sessions to my home server doesn’t seem so grand (it would interrupt the Linux ISO torrents). So I signed up with S3, and for less than the cost of a egg mcmuffin, I can keep 4 weeks of full system backups available for restore at a moments notice.

This guide assumes you’ve got Virtualmin Pro (not sure if the free version does S3 – it does, give it a try!), and an active S3 account.

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