Posts

Posted on

Manually resetting services on Gentoo

Jboss 3.2.3, which runs on my box, crashes about every 24 hours. This would of course be a huge problem for a production quality system, not for a prototyping-only installation such as mine though. Nevertheless there’s a problem. As soon as I stop Jboss by executing “/etc/init.d/jboss stop”, Jboss fails to shutdown properly. Restarting the jboss service afterwards doesn’t work as the start script wrongly assumes that jboss is still running. Fortunately, there’s a way to manually reset the state of services in Gentoo. For Jboss, just do:

# /etc/init.d/jboss zap

Afterwards you can restart Jboss by executing

# /etc/init.d/jboss start

Posted on

Detachable Sound Streams Bar

The sound/radio stream links listed at the bottom of this page are now detachable (i.e. can be opened in a separate pop-up window). Just click on

(OPEN IN POPUP WINDOW)

below the title of the section and see what happens ;) Feel free to use it as your switch desk for your daily dose of sweet tunes ;)

Posted on

Firewall replacement

Replaced the rather buggy firewall with a better one, updated its firmware and enabled Quality of Service (QoS) control. Web server access should now be faster and finally, remote JBoss and remote SMTP authentication using SASL work :)

In other news, last night was pretty short as I tried to fix my network printer[1] which ceased working (and still doesn’t work). I don’t expect this night to be much longer. Once I read that people who sleep less live longer (contrary to intuition). Good prospects, I suppose ;)

[BTW indicated times on this blog seem to be wrong (it’s 02:13 local time ATM). Need to check it ASAP.]

[1] Update 20040830: It’s alive again :)

Posted on

NX bit, Exec-shield, PaX, W^X, DEP etc.

There’s a very insightful article on the NX bit on wikipedia.org explaining the differences of the approaches of Exec-shield, PaX, W^X and DEP:

Wikipedia: NX bit

AFAIK, the entry for DEP is not quite correct (“Emulation: No”) as DEP can emulate the NX bit on CPUs that don’t support it.

Hint: If you plan to buy a new computer, it’s probably wise to make sure it has a CPU supporting the NX bit (e.g. AMD64) as both Linux 2.6.8+ and Windows XP SP2+ can now take advantage of it.

Posted on

IBM models for Neptun IV announced

IBM models for Neptun IV – autumn/fall 2004 (Neptun site)

I think IBM’s notebooks are better than my current notebook/TabletPC m200 by Toshiba. Some quick notes about the IBM notebooks above:

IBM X40:

+ small, lightweight
+ SD card reader
+ long battery runtime
+ Bluetooth
– relatively weak CPU, only a 1.2 GHz Pentium M (not a Dothan core)
– small HDD
– very weak graphics chip (Intel Extrem Graphics 2)
– no DVI out (only VGA)
– bad design (tapered/slanted bottom/keyboard)
– no external drives included
– has a trackpoint, but no touchpad

IBM T42 medium:

+ nice and fast CPU (Pentium M 735 Dothan)
+ Bluetooth
0 CD-RW/ DVD-ROM Combodrive (adds weight; should be a DVD+/-RW nowadays)
0 moderate weight (neither lightweight nor very heavy)
– small HDD
– low resolution screen (only 1024×768 even if it’s 14.1″)
– average GPU (ATI Mobility Radeon 7500/32 – equals in about a Nvidia FX Go 5200, but without DirectX9 support)
– short battery runtime
– no DVI out (only VGA)

IBM T42 large:

+ nice and fast CPU (Pentium M 735 Dothan)
+ Bluetooth
+ high resolution screen (1400×1050/14.1″ ideal! – 1400×1050 is more adequate for a 14.1″ than for a 12.1″ screen such as with my Toshiba M200)
0 CD-RW/ DVD-ROM Combodrive (adds weight; should be a DVD+/-RW nowadays)
0 moderate weight (neither lightweight nor very heavy)
0 average/large HDD
0 long battery runtime (though only thanks to a 9-cell battery pack)
– fast GPU (ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/64 – drawback: demands a lot of battery power. IBM should have included the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700/64 like Apple with its Powerbooks. The 9700 uses less power and is even faster than the 9600.)
– the 9-cell battery pack increases the depth of the notebook (huh? despite of a decreasing battery runtime, they should have rather used a standard size battery pack IMHO)
– no DVI out (only VGA)

I’m curious how the Apple models will look like. The biggest plus of an Apple Powerbook is probably its nice overall design and well-balanced, powerful functionality and of course MacOS X (which is the only truly user-friendly OS at the moment). The biggest minus is the fact that everybody is expecting a soon release of 1.) a dual-core G4 Powerbook 2.) a single-core G5/64bit Powerbook. So people eventually decide to wait another half a year.