Seattle Wireless Field Day 2006 went really well today. I woke up to an alarm I didn’t remember setting wondering if I was late for work, realized it was Saturday and I was technically late for Field Day. Fortunately I was already dressed, unfortunately a little hung over. I noted my plans on irc and managed to lean forward and fall in the general direction of the drivers seat of the suburban. On my way to Matt Westervelts’s house I remembered needing snacks and stopped by Madison Market for a ton of chips (which we didn’t really even eat, but they looked nice on the table) and other assorted foods. I stopped by Andy’s and we headed to Matt’s. Casey was waiting there, and we departed pretty quickly. Matt, Andy and I took my suburban towards Magnolia, found a Tully’s coffee and Albertsons near by for more supplies and then headed back towards the park.

It only took a couple trips to carry all of our gear to the end of the park from the parking lot. It’s interesting to note that the parking there is a four hour limit, but the cop that was camping the parking lot when we left didn’t seem to care about any of that. Which is good, because the whole parking thing is stupid. Besides the lack of power, Magnolia suited us pretty well and the weather turned out good. There was a horrible Urine smell in the toilets, but I think we were thankfull to still have them. There was a birthday party for a bunch of kids and they had a generator and inflatable bouncy castle which made us immediately jealous. Next field day, Magnolia’s totally getting a bouncy castle, even if I have to rent it myself. We had a cheap ‘shelter kit’ from walmart that was marketed as something much more useful but worked nonetheless as our hang out (registration tent). A picnic table nearby was base for the antennas and wireless hardware. That’s the extent of the photos that I took, but I’m sure if you watch flickr you’ll see more crop up (tag search) or on the planet.

Setup was basically a snap for our site, and we proceeded to hang out in the shelter most the day, playing on the frs radio which nobody seemed to understand on us, enjoying our snacks and basically talking smack about everything. Definately best saturday ever, not that anyone was doubting it would be. Gasworks blew up, someone nobody there considered there wouldn’t be power I guess, which wasn’t too bad because we couldn’t get a direct link there from any other sites. Next time we’ll probably find another park near the bay and see if we can really get a mesh up.

Our critical systems didn’t have any power problems but we went through a lot of laptops as their batteries ran out and we didn’t have a way to charge them other than running my truck back at the parking lot. I can run it with the keys out, so I suppose we could of locked the laptops in there on charge, but it wasn’t a big deal. Andy brought a small UPS that didn’t really work, and a jump-start battery that worked pretty good at keeping the ATA online, despite a quirky warning buzzer. Matt’s LiIon battery packs ran the wireless gear without problem and only used 25-50% of the battery all day. Somehow I forgot one my ata, and never bothered trying to setup the grandstream due to the lack of laptop power. Next time, rent/buy a generator. Especially for the aforementioned bouncy castle. With no cars allowed in Magnolia, we debated using a motorcycle as a generator a couple times, and could probably get away with it, but didn’t happen to have one with us and when Matt Wilson came by with the heater later, he brought his car and not his bike.

The evening ended with most of us congregating back at Magnolia and all turned out great. I think everyone had a great time and we’re looking forward to probably doing it again in the spring.

Traditionally everyone’s used Ghost for imaging PCs. We have a copy of Ghost 8.2 and Ghost 9 at my new job. Apparently after Ghost 8.x the traditional network imaging tools went into the ‘Ghost Solution Suite’ for enterprise and Ghost 9.x is more designed for a single PC, for the average joe to easily image their own machine for backup purposes. I’ve been digging around for the Ghost 8.x CD, and in the interm checked out the Ghost Solution Suite. It’s a bunch of tools, and all I want is imaging. It’s fairly cheap, I think something like $30-40, but you have to buy ten licenses to start. “Why?”, I thought.

I found Ghost 8.x and went to install it on my desktop and after the standard EULA is a licensing warning, an excerpt:

Symantec wants to be certain its customers understand the Symantec Ghost license agreement so they can be sure they are operating within the law. Here are a few points from Symantec about Ghost’s license:

Each machine that is cloned with Ghost needs a license, regardless if Ghost software is removed after the PC is cloned

Serious?! Every site I know that uses Ghost for image deployment only has one license. Crap. So maybe this is why people use Microsoft RIS.

All this is because the current ghost configuration has been locking on an upload at “Adding MFT Table File”. When I say locking, it predicts something like 8000 hours to complete and just sits there.

I’m trying the ghostcast server which seems to be hanging up now on “Adding MFT Logfile File”.

Symantec unhelpfully suggests using a third party program to defrag the MFT, which are all windows programs with no simple path to a bootable cdrom.

I got looking at Acronis’ deployment system “snap deploy”, but it’s still $20/cloned device, whereas Symantecs Ghost Solution Suite starts at $40/computer and you have to start with 10 licenses.

There’s a handfull of dd-ish hacks like this and this, but they aren’t solutions. There’s ghost4linux which has interesting origins from a package called ghost4unix. There’s Partimage and then PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost).

Honestly, I’m just tired of this. Why must it be so hard?

So as I’m trying to sort out licensing at my job, I’m curious how everyone has done it. This should really be a poll, but everywhere I’ve worked has had a couple disconnected spreadsheets. Is there a reasonable solution without creating your own database, or going with some large companies enterprise asset tracking software?

A couple days ago a Dell W5300 printer at work got a “900 RIP Software Error”. A reboot fixed it, but upon reading around the net a little, it appears the guts of this beast have a secret identity of Lexmark. The printer has an ethernet and a USB interface, and I found that the ethernet interface had a few issues. I had read many lexmark users say they reflashed the printer by running a “copy 551_061.fly lpt1” from dos. I couldn’t find the file online and it seemed like a lot of people had the same problem.

Today the printer locked up again, although there wasn’t any evidence of the same error, I figured it was time to do the update. I downloaded R103128.EXE from Dell’s site which contained the 551_061.fly and a readme file. Luckily, the readme pointed me to the web page for the print server in the printer which had a upload firmware option. This firmware appears to have only upgraded the firmware for the network card.

Everything came back up okay, but the printer was still all jammed up. More appropriately the print queue on the server was. I poked around a little and found that “net stop spooler” and “net start spooler” would properly destroy the queue’s where canceling the print jobs would not. Not trusting the print server in the printer any more, I’m taking the lesser of two eviils and having the windows server spool for the time being, while gently patting the printer on the head. We’ll see how that goes.

Film at 11! Mark your calendars and dump your dates. SeattleWireless Field Day 2006 is going off this Saturday, the 28th of October. We will be at Alki, Magnolia and Gasworks parks here in Seattle and there is even talk of others linking in. It’s guaranteed to be the biggest Field Day ever, the depth of which exceeds even your wildest imaginations. Everyone’s going to be there, and if they aren’t, it’s going to be your fault for not bringing your cool self. We’ll build a huge wireless network, get everything connected, and then ultimately prove our geekdom by chatting with each other on IRC.

See you there.

Creating a bootable cd starts with a bootable floppy disk, but my new workstation lacks a floppy drive. Download Virtual Floppy Drive. Uncompress and run ‘vfd /install’, then run ‘vfdwin’, start the service, switch to a device tab, choose a file, drive letter, put it in disk mode. Now I have an A: drive.

You can format the disk using windows explorer, then use a framework like netbootdisk.com to create the disk. Save the image and use it with vmware or keep it around and convince other programs like nero it is a real floppy drive so you can burn bootable cds. The cool part is that if you make a *dos boot floppy with cdrom drivers, you can then access the cdrom as a drive letter and have 700mb of utilities, or with network support simply connect to a network share and map it to a drive letter. We also do this with bootable dvd’s to give the network a break and distribute large, bootable, ghost images.

Unfortunately netbootdisk only supports logging into a domain with the “full” redirector enabled, and everytime i enable it, even with everything else disabled, there isn’t enough conventional memory. Thanks again bill. I’ll be back to troubleshooting this on monday.

With Seattle Wireless field day 2006 coming up in two weeks (October 28th) we made plans at the last hack night to make sure we knew how wireless works. Andy and I got together at Matt’s place while he and Ken got some gear prepped. Ken and I went down to a parking lot near Alki while Matt and Andy met Galan and Eric at Magnolia.

We were fortunate to have some spare parts at Alki. Having so many different antenna connectors only served to complicate matters. There weren’t any public access points nearby and we gave up on that search eventually. Unfortunately this prevented access to manuals for the VoIP gear we were planning on testing. Despite the fog, cold weather, bad pigtails, etc., we coordinated and got the 2.75mi link up across the bay.

Ken and Matt toyed with a few settings on the access points while we set up some VoIP equipment between a Cisco ATA and Sipura 3000 ATA. Lacking a manual for the Sipura on hand, I wandered around the web configuration page a bit, enabled IP dialing and allowed dial/answer without register, and we got a call going. The quality was pretty bad, but we were testing the connection in ad-hoc mode so bandwidth was limited, as further evidenced by some quick iperf tests Ken did. I set the Sipura to prefer the G729a codec (it defaults to G711u) and the call cleaned right up.

The guys at Magnolia said nobody seemed to notice them, but Ken and I were graced with singing russians with aspirations of Starbucks and some kid who was interested if our “satellite phone” was letting us talk to other worlds. I guess there’s too much geekiness in Seattle for any of this to be out of place.

So in two weeks we’ll do it again, at least on this scale. Eric mentioned setting up an IRC server and we’ll at least have some food. It’ll register somewhere between a picnic and our grand plans and notes.