Feb

1

Hardware Failures

February 1, 2010 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | Leave a Comment
Posted in Experiences

While perusing through Digg, I found it interesting to note that both the Linux and Windows users have something to say about hardware failure issues. I found it interesting, that regardless of software issues, both groups of "observant" users have come to realize that the hardware quality (read that as "robustness" - is there such a word?) may have declined? The Digg entry pointed to this post: "Computing, Even in Linux, is All About Failure".

It's just an opinion, but it seems to me that todays hardware is pushed to do more, faster, better, and so on. Given that hardware manufacturers are in the business to make money, it makes me wonder if some other facets of our hardware has not suffered somewhere? Sensitivity to power fluctuations, heat, EMI (electromagnetic interference), ESD (static electricity) maybe? Granted, when I started playing with computers, there was no such thing as cell phones, etc. that could effect computer equipment. And that equipment was no where near as powerful (or sensitive) as today's equipment.

A case in point, the only reason why I have limited hardware issues (it really is the only reason), is that I operate my hardware in cooler environments (and air clean it regularly). Yet I still have had hardware failures. Also as a very lose guide, hard drives tend to fail (on average) after a few hundred  operating hours. It differs between manufactures, but there's a bit more understanding on Wikipedia's "Hard disk failure" post, there they also refer to the "Bathtub Curve" (an engineering aspect that describes decreasing, increasing and constant failure rates). Always make sure you have a backup of your backup (redundancy).

Side note: For those that don't know me, I've been playing with computer's since the early days, (to consumers at least) of the 1970's

Case in point, I paid almost $300 for a high end cooling case on one box (and it works great - the sides even, always feel cold when in use). My servers (those on my LAN) operate in an ambient air temperature currently averaging at 16°C (in the summer they are moved and average 20°C).

On the boxes in my work area they average 22°C and I even use an external fan on them to remove radiant heat away from the fan intakes on those boxes, when the temperature goes up. Remember if the fans on your computer exhaust warm air, and then suck it back in, your PC is getting virtually zero cooling!

Granted, this has given me an environment with a lower failure rate than most, and still the odd time I loose a drive, optical drive, power supply (or network card), etc.

What a lot of people don't realize, I think, is that static (ESD) we do not feel, can still damage components. A case in point for obvious ESD, last winter I was moving one computer, I reached to pick the box up and felt a static jolt. Because it was the case of the unit, I didn't think it would have been an issue (I'd gotten away with that before). It was an issue, the network card got pooched. Another time I reached for the USB drive and pulled it out, no static or anything was felt, but the moment I touched it, my hard drive failed (because of static) and I could hear the speakers make a brief noise (and the USB drive was dead).

Finally, I've come across this again, and again, and again, avoid using a cell phone near your PC. Granted it's not medical equipment, but the cell still radiates a relatively strong field (EMI) which can interfere with PC components. Given that today's  hardware is becoming increasing specialized, it has to do more, store more, be faster, use less energy, etc., it's much, much more sensitive as a result. You can in some circumstances, actually cause a data read and write error if the EMI field interferes with that operation - which over period of several errors (or one big one) can eventually "pooch" data or a file system.

Speaking of ESD... Commonly a static charge (like you get walking across a carpet) is about  the 10000V - 13000V range. That sounds very high, but remember that the amperage is super low. It's the amperage that causes us (terminal at times) harm, not the voltage.

In winter, when humidity is low and it's warm (from the heater or furnace) static shocks (ESD) hurt more (we feel that a lot). But it terms of our hardware and how we are able to feel ESD, charges below about 4000v are not felt. You can handle your hardware and never feel any ESD, but still have damaged components from low ESD voltages. Components can be damaged voltages as low as Read more

Jan

15

Building a Business Network Using Ubuntu – Introduction

January 15, 2010 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 3 Comments
Posted in How to...

                                                              

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Building a Business Network Using Ubuntu

This post begins the first (an introduction) in a series of several posts, discussing the benefits that Ubuntu Linux provides to business owners. Naturally, by default, I'll be touching on several open source applications and server packages throughout the series. Hopefully I can also dispel some of the myth and uncertainty, for business owners who have never used Ubuntu before.

The idea for this series was borne out of the excessive questions from clients in my work life. Some have made the switch to Ubuntu, many are interested and some don't know enough, because they've never tried working with a Linux based operating system like Ubuntu.

The two Ubuntu versions I used (in my own business as well as suggest to clients) are:

Ubuntu Server Edition.
The server edition is where various business related packages are installed. Such as print servers, web servers, billing systems, firewalls, and so on.

Ubuntu Desktop Edition.
The desktop edition (also used on laptops) is where various applications are installed and used to access the resources on the server.

Note: The newest Ubuntu version "Lucid" 10.04 is scheduled for release in April of 2010 and will be an LTS ("Long Term Support") version. At which time, I'd suggest this as the version to use.

For business owners not familiar with Ubuntu, please check Read more

Dec

15

CIFS VFS Shutdown Error When Using SMBFS

December 15, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 7 Comments
Posted in Linux Fixes

I recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) and set up access to (DNS-321) my network shares using smbfs; as in the post "Sharing the Same Files Between Two PC’s". Shortly afterwards, when rebooting, shutting down, etc. I received this error message:

ACPID: Exiting

NM_SYSTEM_SETTING: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: Devices removed (UDI: /org/freedesktop/hal/devices/net_00_30_1B_BE_38_3D)

[601.136038] CIFS VFS: Server not responding
[601.136085] CIFS VFS: No response for CMD 50 mid 166

Then the system would sit for several seconds before doing anything. This never occurred with my Ubuntu 8.04 system (remembering that I installed and configured the network shares the same way).

Side note: For those not familiar, "VFS" refers to "Virtual File System" (node) and "CIFS" is "Common Internet File System). CIFS VFS is a virtual file system / project for Linux to allow access to servers and storage appliances. More from the documentation I found during research, is found on:  http://linux-cifs.samba.org/

As near as I can surmise, since network-manager is installed, this is probably and issue where scripting for shutting down network-manager has higher priority than umount scripting and / or a permissions issue? A case in point is that the umount command would not work until I used sudo.

XKCD Comic - Make me a sandwich

XKCD Comic - Make me a sandwich

Initially there were two ways I could fix this:

1) Various forums and site suggest removing network-manager from the system and configuring the network myself. It's a possibility, but I didn't want to do that.

2) Use terminal to sudo umount //192.168.3.10/sites && sudo umount //192.168.3.10/stock each time I wanted to restart, shutdown, etc. Again that's a possible solution, but annoying to keep having to do.

Strangely, Google was not helpful (for me) as there were only a few mentions of this error in returned search results, and I could not glean much from them.

I played with the idea of using a Read more

Dec

14

Leave the Num Lock On!

December 14, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 3 Comments
Posted in Linux Fixes

Leave the Num Lock on!

Leave the Num Lock on!

I recently (finally) upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 (I've always had issues with x.10 releases for some reason). Until the upgrade I wanted to remain with the LTS track, but (it seems) less developers are supporting it, hence the move. I've performed excessive numbers of installs of Ubuntu and various applications on test boxes, but they (obviously) were not my primary system, it's important to note this, as ordinarily I did not notice a small annoyance regarding Num Lock. On my updated primary system, I noticed this issue immediately, when I tried to log in.

Here's the rant... If I set the BIOS in my hardware, to turn on the Num Lock, then I've done so for a specific reason! For Ubuntu to keep turning it off when I log out, reboot or start up the PC - That's just plain annoying. I did a bit of Googling to try and find if the issue is being addressed (I remember fixing it using numlockx, and will get to that shortly), but only found a few threads where developers were discussing the "how tos" and "maybe" of the issue. While I'm not a developer, by any stretch of the imagination, I do know that other OS's accomplish this feat (of abiding by the BIOS num lock settings). So... Ubuntu, please abide by the BIOS settings (with regards to Num Lock).

However, for those of you who want to ensure the Num Lock is on, we can use the numlockx tool. There's probably a ton of sites listing this and discussing it at great length, but for ease of reference, here are my notes from the last time I had to fix this issue: Read more

Dec

9

Is There Any Good Screencasting in Ubuntu?

December 9, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 10 Comments
Posted in Applications

One of the things I've personally found frustrating in Linux is the development status of screencasting applications, or lack thereof. Some projects remain in beta, never coming to fruition, and eventually being abandoned. Others have quirks that seem to cause different issues based on what system they're installed on.

Why am I posting about this? It's very difficult (at times) when new Linux (Ubuntu) users ask me how to do something and I cannot show them. Sometimes I'm far away, at other times it's difficult to talk them through the necessary activities on the phone, often I do not have remote access to their systems (so they can watch what I do), and at other times there would be too much to write. Often the person I'm trying to help might not be technically savvy enough to follow my direction, but they do know how to use a web browser.

That's where screencasting comes in!

I think many of us are aware of some of the commonly mentioned packages:

Istanbul - Every time I've tried it, it's broken. Is it even in development anymore? Last news post on the site is in 2007.

Xvidcap - I often encounter problematic output (maybe a codec issue?). Is it in development anymore?

Wink - While Wink does work on the systems I've tried, I find it just looks horrid, especially the note explanation boxes you can add. They look cheap and tacky, not something I would use for a business (or personally). One issue that may effect Open Source enthusiasts, it that the source is closed.

recordMyDesktop - I often get sound problems with it. What is happening with development? It appears the developer bowed out in January 2009, and a new one took the reins in May 2009, but are there any changes, updates or fixes?

ffmpeg - I did try the solution presented by Embrace Ubuntu (where ffmpeg was patched), and while it did work, I found that ffmpeg (in this case) did not provide as stable an output as I expected.

Screenkast - I could not get it to work properly. Is it under development anymore? (Last update was in 2007).

As I mentioned, the above (I think) are the common tools that many of us may already be aware of. I also think the above tools are listed and discussed at length on several other sites, that's why I chose to not go into any detail, discussing them - Been there, done that, we've seen them all before...

Suffice to say, I felt that I was at an impasse, I just wanted something that will work. Something that could save a screencast in FLV format for streaming across a web site. Granted the FLV format is proprietary, I wanted that because it's a current web standard. Also, I did not want to have to manually convert the video file (as an extra step).

There are online tools such as ScreenToaster (which a reader suggested to me), but I prefer to do the work myself because the PCs I use sometimes don't have a web connection. After asking around someone suggested vnc2swf, which I found has since moved on in development to Read more


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