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.

After much consideration, I’ve left my current job. I’m going to be taking some time off to consider how much I really want to work, as the time and expectations of this job really burnt me out. So if anyone knows of a swank techie job kicking around Seattle, feel free to drop me a line.

I took a motorcycle basic rider course recently through the Motorcycle Safety Company. The course was one weeknight and one weekend morning of classtime, followed by a pretty simple multiple choice test. After that we spent about six or seven hours each on a saturday and sunday in a parking lot learning basics. At the end of the last day we had a skills test; upon passing I got a waiver for my motorcycle endorsement on my license.

So recently I picked up a 2006 Yamaha xt225 at Eastside Motorsports in Bellevue. They were pretty helpfull, but didn’t know a whole lot about the machine. I went in looking for an xt225 though, so it didn’t matter that the sales person didn’t know how many gears it had when I asked, I already knew. I’d been looking around quite a bit for the right ride. I rode a Yamaha TW200 dual sport at my class and knew I wanted a dual sport, preferably something inexpensive. The tw and xt series are well known for being reliable, and while not particularly powerfull as far as engine size goes, the xt will maintain highway speeds but is more for riding around both off and on road. I put over a hundred miles on it today, riding out to the penninsula and then taking the ferry back (note, when riding a motorcycle onto a seattle ferry, PASS GO, COLLECT 200 DOLLARS. That is, you’re supposed to drive around the line, board anywhere in traffic you can fit in, proceed around to the front of the ferry. You get off second, after the bicycles, but before the cars. Quite nice.)

I’d like to leave town for a few days, but I’m helping a friend move on Saturday, so I’ll be poking around in search of some forest service roads, trying to put my last job behind me.

The suburban’s on the road again, and it’s been through enough testing I’m willing to say that out loud. After the trouble with the broken head bolt and my inability to press the power steering pump pulley back on, I did get everything back together.

I washed off the underside of grease, and there appears to be a small oil leak somewhere on the passenger side that I can’t determine. Looks below the heads, but above the starter. Not a great sign, I’m sure something important and much harder to work on back there is leaking. Anyways, it’s running.

I had trouble getting the exhaust manifold flange gaskets to seal back up, so I took it to a midas and asked them to replace those and check the timing. Two days later they had broken a bolt and realized they didn’t have a timing gun, so I took it back, bought a timing gun, wasted a bunch of time getting parts from Schucks, but got it all back together again.

A couple days later the muffler fell off. So I took it to Dan Fast Muffler in Bellevue and got everything replaced with high-flow performance parts from the y pipe back. The original catalytic converter in my suburban had pellets instead of the honeycomb style that’s standard, so this opened the exhaust up quite a bit, definately improving performance, hopefully improving mileage a tad. It’s 3″ from the y-pipe back to a passenger side exit behind the rear axle.

Wendell and Hannah are staying at the SS Awful Shark as they’re moving here. They came up over the holiday weekend with Denny. We saw a couple movies, including Howl’s moving castle at the egyptian midnight show which rocked. Monday Wendell, Hannah, Ken and I drove out to Mount Rainer National Park and wandered around the Sunset visitor center. The mountain was amazing and I was glad to have finally gotten so close.

I’ve been consulting a lot this week, which means fixing user problems. I had a problem with a fresh install of Excel from Office 2000 Small Business, after I had done a restore using FAST. Excel kept giving me errors saying “Cannot open C:\Program” and “Cannot Open Files\Microsoft” in sets. Three sets to be exact. Obviously a quote problem. I eventually found some keys in the registry under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Excel\Options called OPENx where x is blank or a number, which contained excel files that it auto-opened. I surrounded the path’s with double quotes and it worked okay.

Been watching “House” lately to stay distracted. Funny show. Check it out.

green mud valley
Originally uploaded by btmspox.

so I’m rebuilding my engine this weekend, despite having much cooler plans originally, if anyone wants to come help…

I fixed an old coolant leak recently after ignoring it for, probably a year, due to it’s location and being a special order part. Now that coolant pressure can build up again, it’s going right into the engine instead.

I started gettings lots of white smoke and then oil started coming back out the PCV valve. I check the oil level and it was high. Drained the oil and it was all steam and there’s white sludge in the oil under the valve covers. So, ton’s of coolant leaking in.

Hopefully whenever it overheated it didn’t warp/crack the heads.

Thankfully there’s always help over at FSC.

Geek Jokes
Originally uploaded by btmspox.

My house is basically a Joss Whedon alter. Tori picked up this shirt on slashdot recently and saw the “10 kinds of people tshirt.” She and Tanya figured I’d get it, and asked me when I got home. Of course I chuckled. “oh ho! that’s so classic!”.

A couple days later what do I find across the road from work? The next day I used it as an example in one of my A+ classes as a good reason to know binary. You get dork jokes.

My life is full of troubleshooting windows problems. Day and night. There’s no end. Anybody know how to make the address book template for word’s letter and envelope wizard match that in a normal word document (that you can modify in the default template)? Anyways…

I recently used the File And Settings Transfer Wizard (FAST) to copy a profile from one XP computer to another. After I started up the new machine, and ran FAST again to restore, it said that the files were created using another version of FAST. And it dies. How useful… especially if you dumped the old data for some reason. I took a screen shot but forgot it at the customer site. Anyways, it all had to do with this update (kb 307869) that gets sent down that fixes a few FAST bugs but lacks backwards compatibility. I got around this by going into the windows folder and showing hidden files (tools / options). You’ll see an folder for each hotfix. Find the one for KB307869, go into the folder and run the spuninst.exe program to remove the hotfix. Rerun FAST. Reinstall the update.

What a pain. In other news, I’m settled in my new house. Been camping a couple weekends and working a lot during the week, so I haven’t had much time off otherwise, thus nobody really seeing me. We’ll see if things calm down as a couple people at work come back from vacation.

Offline files and folders, windows 2003 small business server, windows xp

Group Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Offline Files

Subfolders always available offline -> Enabled

So when you make a share “available offline”, it makes the existing subfolders available offline, but not new ones. Because that’s usefull. I understand if you’re only trying to make specific folders available offline, but there needs to be a “make share available offline” option, because that is _obviously_ what I was trying to do.

I ordered Speakeasy’s dsl online earlier this week, which was a neat process. There was no online form, but I chatted with someone online through their website to complete the process.

Qwest was here today to setup the pair. They came by before I was home but had to come back. Originally there was a little trouble finding the strange demarc hidden in the basement, but then the other end of underground drop cable had to be found, as the address for this interconnect was afoul.

All went well though, and they just tested it. It was interesting hearing the coversation, as the technican called another, who conferenced with Covad’s testing center (not sure why they were involved) in India who did the line test. The tech and I were rather amused by the whole process, but I’m sure he deals with it every day.

However, I just checked the UPS tracking for my install kit, and 3 day select has been rescheduled so that I’m supposed to get the package 6 days after shipment. It left georgia on the 20th and it’s only made it to iowa as of this morning. It was probably supposed to be on a plane and ended up on a truck. We’ll see when it gets here and what Speakeasy has to say about it.

I’m going to go back to the couch and focus my attention on getting unsick in the interim though.

Spent the day at ITEC in Seattle. I saw a couple people there, one from Seattle Wireless. It was dead slow, it seemed like there were more exhibitors than antendees, and many of the antendees I saw were actually my vendors there just for networking. Kind of a waste of time, but Mark and I gave a presentation on the IT industry and on staying up to date by working on projects, joining user groups, attending classes, etc. Maybe we’ll get a couple customers from it, but the presentation had probably as many people in it as had stopped by the booth all day, so it was better than expected. My random public speaking is getting better, certainly teaching classes has helped that, since it might as well have been a class. Except that I was talking about what I thought, more than how I’ve seen things work. I guess they’re pretty close.

I’m sitting here drinking a beer trying to decide if I should goto hack night. Eric said nobody’s really showing, and since “nobody really showed” last time either, I think my tiredness and continuing cold is going to aim me towards the couch and a movie instead. Come by ITEC tomorrow and make things interesting.

One of my housemates, ken and his classmates at the commercial photography program at seattle central are showing their final projects and work today and tonight at Pravada Studios on capitol hill. Stop by 1406 10th Ave (Corner of 10th and Union), Suite 200 (Second floor) on Capitol Hill and keep him company tonight. It’s not all commercial photography, I promise.

ERROR: no H1 line pagetop property in whatever section

Really mans that you have no PageTop: in your mrtg.conf, which is what it uses by default to determine the section names (the little name on top of each graph on the index page). Instead try:

indexmaker –section=title /etc/mrtg.conf > index.html

Recovering Exchange 2003 from Offline Backup without a Recovery Storage Group

1) Dismount the store.
2) Replace the .edb and .stm files for priv and pub with the copies from backup.
3) Mark the “let the store be recoverable” check box in the store properties.
4) Mount the store.

Who needs recovery storage groups anyways?

I was setting my computer up and realized my Microsoft remote was pretty useless. It’s one of the ones destined for Media Center Edition, the version 2. It says Microsoft Model 1039 on the back. It kind of works in XP, volume seems to work and some keys work in Windows Media Player, but not a lot. I found a program called HIP that allows mapping between remotes and keys for different programs. There’s a pretty good faq for using this with the mce remote available here. Most important step is to use the driver in C:\Program Files\HIP\MCEIR after the hip install (be sure it installs the mce plugin) to replace windows driver. This shows up under “ehome” in the usb section of device manager. Once this is all set, you can using the configuration wizard in HIP to setup the input configuration.

Then comes the programming. I realize you use one hip config for multiple programs. You select the executable and hip detects which program is running and uses the different key mappings for each program. At first I had thought that these were some sort of interface program as the defaults pointed to ehshell.exe, which I couldn’t find.

Once you get all this figured out, it’s not really that tough to stumble through. Just remember to save your configs as it takes some time getting the keys set up for each program.

On the cool side of things you can make keys load other programs, do things with the mouse, etc, so you can really do almost anything with HIP, even blast IR to control other devices.

I haven’t caught up with Chris from Cascade Link to finish up the wireless mount on the TP 600X yet, but when I was moving today I ran into Rob and he said he knew someone from Seattle Mind Camp who had a couple dozen friends on this side of the hill that might be coaxed into participating in Seattle Wireless. I talked about the idea of SWN a little with a couple house mates tonight, so I’m excited to see if we can make a nice little mesg over here. I’m close to a couple nodes, so I’ll go scouting soon to see if they’re really there. I just need to finalize the connector on that laptop. There are a lot of access points in the area though. DD-WRT picked up a couple dozen.

I’m getting settled into my new room in my new house tonight. I’m living with four other people and a couple house guests. It’s like learning names in class, there’s so many new ones! But it’s cool, they seem to endorse dork, so maybe that will fuel some projects.

I finallly got the /lib/modules/*/build link onto the ubuntu machine. linux-source wouldn’t do it and I had to install linux-headers. I’m not sure exactly what the deal is here yet, as everything linux-headers has should be in linux-source. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. I hate this problem though.

I discovered at the last hack night that Joe has a novatel and sierra wireless card from cingular that he picked up for testing that nobody has really played with. Figuring on this being a good reason for being at hack night he let me borrow the sierra wireless card for a bit and I played with it in linux. it appear that card services was detecting it as a serial device but I couldn’t figure out what terminal it was going to. I look in sysfs and threw at commands at some ttys to no avail. I tried modifying the pcmcia config per a knowledge base article. But it didn’t appear to be using the line I added. I saw some notes about having to load usbserial, but didn’t get a chance to try it as Joe had to go. Hopefully I’ll get more time to play with these cards, but I’m getting together with Morgan next wednesday around the time for hack night so I’m not sure what time I’ll be there.

Matt n00bed me at the last hack night about using blogger, so finding where I left the blog software on this unixshell box is on the list of priorities. Since I’ve moved, I’ll probably have more time for projects again so I should reasonably be able to get this done, although I have to do some VoIP testing for work and Matthew.

So. It never crossed my mind that the winmodems in the 570 and 600X were in MiniPCI slots. Thanks to Matt for pointing this out, and selling me some hardware at 12:30am via wireless out in the shadows. That has got to be the coolest sale ever, even if it was totally legit.

So the ThinkPad 600X has a CM9 in it with an N-type hanging out the side. It seems to work, even though I can’t get my own access point at the moment. Although I can hit someone elses. I’ve got two wireless cards in (didn’t think I’d ever do this) and it’s the same with the orinoco so something must be randomly wrong with the wrt54g. surprise.

I’ve got all this done on the fly to go do some testing first thing at a clients in the morning, so I really should sleep. It didn’t take too long as the minipci on the 600x is accessible through a panel on the bottom. I managed to push the wire out through the side by ripping a little piece of plasic out. now if I can make some mount right where the N connector sits so it won’t rip apart the pigtail, i’ll be all set.

Check out this photo too, from the columba tower. I haven’t got a chance to post it, but it reads: “Notice to the gentlemen: We appreciate your interest in the ladies room; however, please respect the privacy of our female guests. Should you wish a tour, contact a Club employee.” Yeah…

The soekris is still running strong and I haven’t had time to play with the queues again. Later this week for sure. For now, rest.