Monthly Archives: June 2012

Google Drive w/ Android

Quick rant:

  • moving files into folders desynchronizes them on the phone (how is this possible?)
  • files are encrypted when stored on the phone (nice, but how do I turn this off?)
  • why can’t I stream my mp3’s from the drive (something I thought that Nexus Q -sphere thingy would support)
  • why can’t I put the mp3 player into background without stopping the playback and losing the decrypted offline file? (well, must be the encryption process, totally unnecessary here!)

New ADSL-modem

TL;DR: Don’t buy ASUS’ DSL -gear.

I lost my previous ADSL -modem as I gave it to friend who had had his Internet connection upgraded from ADSL to ADSL2+, something which his modem didn’t understand (some prehistoric TeleWell). Off I went and bought a ASUS DSL-N12U which turned out to be complete crap.

After finally getting my 12/2 ADSL2+M connection up, ping to anywhere was double the amount it used to be with RR24AP and speedtest.net with nearby servers reported 10/0.1 Mbps. Needless to add you couldn’t have even the lightest network activity while hoping to keep multiple ssh connections from timeouting.

Today I called my ISP, had them check on their end if I had either misconfigured the modem or if it now reported such bad signal values that 12/2 was no go. Both the parameters and signal quality seemed fine on both ends. They promised me a nice discount on their preferred modem, Telewell with very similar specifications than Asus’ one. Now that I finally have it installed it’s working great; ping is even lower than what I got used to with RR24AP and speed test reports 12/1.9.

Trying to get rid of N8

I recently acquired an used Samsung Galaxy SII to replace my horrible N8. Right now I’m trying to backup the phone using Nokia Suite before lending it on to be used as a navigator and a camera.

First attempt: backup everything. After 2 hours Nokia Suite aborts the procedure, telling me that I don’t have enough memory (yes, memory, not disk space) and recommended that I free up some disk space (in contrast to previous sentence about memory). Turns out that my XP VirtualBox image wasn’t so big afterall..

Second attempt: backup everything except “documents” and music/recordings. After 5 minutes Nokia Suite tells me that something went wrong (yes, I’m not simply forgetting what went wrong, the notification was that something went wrong) and that I should restart the phone. I go ahead and restart the damn phone, also doing the “fix” by holding down the power button until the phone vibrates before starting it up again.

Third attempt: same as before. After 10 minutes Nokia Suite is still “preparing backing up”, the whole system is idle and nothing is happening. I cancel it.

Fourth attempt: same as before. Backup finally starts in under 1 minute. Now I’ll have to hope it really completes the backup.

Nokia really knows what’s a great user experience. I can’t wait to get rid of this damn phone. Also, it’s nice to know that the only way to access the damn files inside NBU backup file is to use .NET software, while open-source it still means I have to do it in Windows.

Everyone please, no more talking about salting hashes

After LinkedIn etc. sites had recently their hashes exposed everyone got busy writing YASH (Yet Another Salted Hashes) -articles. This is 2012, you should not be talking about salting SHA-1 hashes.

Why shouldn’t you be talking about salting? Because intelligent people have constructed methods which when compared to salting make it look like a case of plaintext vs. md5.
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Experiences with Smart Array E200i

TL;DR: Smart Array E200i should not be trusted; HP Array Configuration Utilities are horrible, always prefer Linux’s md.

About four years ago we purchased a ML350 G5 server with some SATA disks and a small BBWC, put them into RAID 10 with a spare. Everything went peachy until about a week ago when we had a full server lockup.

Post-lockup, there was nothing interesting in the logs (from cpqarrayd) or any other obvious cause. Next lockup came a few days later, now I noticed that a spare had been activated successfully; replacement disks were ordered and I started preparing a replacement server.
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