Steve Glendinning

Good call Lenovo!

Google have finally integrated AdSense and Analytics, so you can see advertising revenue fully integrated into your analytics reports.  It’s something people have been asking for for a long time, it’ll be *really* valuable for tracking which pages generate revenue.

Now… what to spend this month’s $1.50 revenue on?!

Yesterday, Lenovo (with no prior warning) turned off the single biggest advantage of the Thinkpad software offering: ThinkVantage System Update.  What were you thinking?!

I’ve just reinstalled a fresh copy of Vista on my T61 (luckily on a new larger disk, so I still have the old install).  Two days ago, all I’d have to do now was download and run ThinkVantage System Update, which would find and install all the individual bits of software, drivers etc that make the Thinkpad offering so great.

Now to have the full “ThinkVantage experience”, I’d have to trawl through the lenovo support site, download and individually install over 20 separate components. Many of them insist on a reboot, so this would take a very long time.

Lenovo recently asked on their blog which of the ThinkVantage utilities they should concentrate development on moving forward. Lenovo: if you kill ThinkVantage System Update:

1. You may as well not bother developing ANY of the other ThinkVantage applications any more
2. I may as well buy a Dell at half the price

I don’t have the time to find and install all these individual components now, never mind regularly reading your support website to manually determine if I need to upgrade them.

Because I have work to do, without ThinkVantage System Update I’ll be running a standard install of Vista.  Just like I’d be running on any of your competitors laptops.

I’m not the only one to be disappointed by this:

• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=367950
• http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_Utilities&thread.id=4397
• http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=74929

Update (1st June 2009): After listening to the mountains of complaining customers, Lenovo has reinstated system update.

I just applied a hotfix to my XenSource virtual servers, which caused all the virtual machines to be suspended & resumed (while the xen host rebooted).  This caused a problem on the VMs I’ve upgraded to Debian Lenny: These messages were repeatedly logged:

clocksource/0: Time went backwards: ret=18f26176a5 delta=-8292949932632971 shadow=18e9e0b4b9 offset=880c4ce

This message wasn’t “harmless” - it caused TCP connections to break, so ssh was practically unusable.

The immediate solution: using the XenCenter console, forcefully reboot the affected VM. That’s “force shutdown”, followed by “start”. I tried the simple “reboot” option, but it wouldn’t shut down (probably because it was confused over the time). VMs are now back up and there’s no sign of time going backwards.

It seems this was triggered by suspending & resuming machines running the Debian Lenny kernel. Other VMs which are still running the 2.6.18 based XenSource kernels survived suspend/resume ok.

The actual cause is documented here, here, here & here. I think I’ll be following that advice and decoupling my VM clocks from the host (using NTP to keep them all in sync the old-fashioned way).

I just upgraded my Cisco 877 to the latest 12.4(24)T IOS, so I thought I’d have another go at getting WCCP to work.  Good news: it works!

Here’s my working configuration on the Cisco 877:

ip cef
ip wccp web-cache

interface Vlan1
ip wccp web-cache redirect in

This tells the router that web traffic coming into the Vlan1 interface is a candidate for caching. With WCCP, web-caches register themselves with the router, then the router forwards requests to them. This means that if the cache disappears, the router will forward web requests directly to the internet.

I’m using Debian, so I added this to /etc/network/interfaces (replace 1.2.3.4 with the router identifier shown on the cisco by “show ip wccp”. In my case this is the external internet-facing IP address):

auto gre1
iface gre1 inet static
address 127.0.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.255
pre-up ip tunnel add gre1 mode gre remote 1.2.3.4 local 10.0.20.1 dev eth1
post-down ip tunnel del gre1

And I added this line to my firewall script. You could add it to rc.local if you don’t have anywhere else to put it:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i gre1 -d 0/0 -p tcp –dport 80 -j DNAT –to-destination 10.0.20.1:3128

The only thing left now is the squid configuration. I specified the internal address of the cisco 877 here (10.0.20.254):

wccp2_router 10.0.20.254
wccp2_rebuild_wait on
wccp2_forwarding_method 1
wccp2_return_method 1
wccp2_assignment_method 1
wccp2_service standard 0
wccp2_address 10.0.20.1

Useful links:

• http://www.usenet-forums.com/squid-users/247645-wccp-gre-redirect-target-failed-solution.html
• http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/InterceptionProxy
• http://www.cisco.com/public/news_training/itsnews/tech/chalktalk/200806.html

Debian Lenny has been released, so I’ve started upgrading some of my Xen virtual servers.  For Etch, Xensource shipped their own modified PV kernel package (2.6.18 based).  With Lenny the same kernel can be used, or the standard Debian xen kernel (2.6.26 based) can be used instead.

Upgrading the userland is identical to a physical server - instructions are contained within the Debian Lenny release notes.

To use the Debian packaged 2.6.26 kernel, several minor changes have to be made as per this form post:

1. Install the linux-image-2.6-xen-686 package (which depends on the latest xen kernel)
2. Re-order the kernels in /boot/grub/menu.lst so the Debian 2.6.26 kernel is the first (and therefore the default)
3. Add “console=hvc0″ to the end of the 2.6.26 kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, so it reads “kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-xen-686 root=/dev/xvda1 ro console=hvc0“
4. edit /etc/inittab, find the line that looks like “1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1″ and add another line: “0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 hvc0″

Then reboot the system, it should boot the new kernel.

Xensource doesn’t display the grub menu, it just seems to boot straight into the default option (even though I have “timeout 10″ specified in the config).  There must be a secret keypress or something to make it show the menu, but I don’t know what it is because the last step just worked for me!

Edit: Theoretically you shouldn’t need to use the -xen kernel variant, as the -686-bigmem kernel also supports running paravirtualised in domU.  With Xensource 5.0 this boots fine, but Xensource’s xen-tools refuse to start so XenCenter reports the status as “unknown”.  With the -xen kernel xen-tools start fine.

I just discovered the Complete PC Backup feature of Vista, and I’m very impressed!  This is included in the  Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions (not the home editions).  It takes full drive image backups which can be restored by booting a standard Vista install DVD.

There’s a simple GUI to kick a backup off (backup and restore center), but unfortunately it’s rather restrictive.  It only lets you backup to a directly attached hard disk (e.g. USB) or to DVDs.  Fortunately the underlying engine DOES support backing up to a network file share.

To kick off a one-off backup, start an elevated command prompt (Start menu, Accessories, right click “command prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”) and type the following:

wbadmin start backup -allCritical -backupTarget:\\SERVER\SHARE -include:C: -vssFull

replacing \\SERVER\SHARE with the path to your network share location.  It’ll ask if you’re sure and then display its backup progress.  When it’s finished you should see it’s created a folder called WindowsImageBackup\MachineName on your backup share.  If you dig under this folder you can find it stores the entire backup in a .vhd file (virtual hard disk, also used by Microsoft’s virtualisation products).

You can schedule backups to run regularly using the task scheduler to call the command above, and adding “-quiet” to stop it prompting.  There’s a full guide to scheduling complete pc backups here.

EDIT: Apparently this is all fixed in Windows 7.

One of the features of Vista that I really like is it’s “sleep”.  Unlike XP, which usually used S1 sleep, Vista puts the system into the much lower power S3 state.  On my Core2Quad workstation, this takes the power usage down to 3W (from ~62W running at idle).  To put this into perspective, the power usage when the system is fully shut down is ~2W, but wakeup is MUCH quicker than a full boot.

Vista allows you to configure which hardware sources can wake up the system from sleep, so for example you can enable or disable Wake On Lan.  It also allows software to schedule a wakeup, and Media Centre is one such beast.  Ever since I started playing with Media Centre, the system has randomly woken up from sleep (and not returned to sleep afterwards), which kinda defeats the purpose of sleep!

It’s quite easy to find out the source of the most recent wakeup (powercfg /lastwake), but this lists all software sources as “RTC”.  It doesn’t identify *which* process (or scheduled task) was responsible.

I found one solution over at thegreenbutton (thanks to mxcrowe):

If you do this, your computer will not auto-wake for any reason (s/w reason - I suppose WOL etc. will still work).  This info was given to me by another poster here on the Green Button:

1. Open a CMD prompt
2. powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
3. powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
4. powercfg -setactive scheme_current

This changes and applies a new power scheme that stops the machine from being woken from sleep. In my case, I have a desktop system and probably didn’t need to set the DC option, but I did both anyway.

Vyatta 3.0.3 (and its community equivalent VC4) boots fine on Virtual PC, which is really handy for firing up a “test” router.  Unfortunately, the latest subscription release 3.1.3 (and probably VC5) fails shortly after the bootloader prompt with this error:

Vyatta Virtual PC boot error

The solution is to pass the linux kernel boot argument noreplace-paravirt.  This is done on the live CD by typing “live noreplace-paravirt” and pressing enter (instead of simply pressing enter or waiting for the CD to automatically boot).

When you’ve installed to the virtual hard disk (using the install-system command), you’ll find it displays the same error.  To boot the first time you’ll need to press Escape to access the grub menu, then press “e” to edit the default entry.  Add the word noreplace-paravirt to the end of the line (after “console=tty0″) and press ctrl-x to boot.

When you get the login prompt, you can log in as root and edit the grub config file (nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg) to add the option to the command line permanently.

I’ve had an Orange Samsung i200 (running Windows Mobile 6.1) for just over a week now, and I have to say I like it! It’s noticeably more responsive than the Nokia N73 it replaced (TBH i think that mostly illustrates how sluggish the N73 was), and I’ve *nearly* got used to the different keypad. Honestly, why do all the different manufacturers use a different key for “space”?!

Being a Windows Mobile handset, it came loaded with all the expected Microsoft applications… except one! It seems Orange have decided to remove the MSN Messenger client, presumably because they’re worried it’ll dent their extremely profitable SMS revenue. And Microsoft no longer makes the client available for download (”ask your operator for MSN access”).

After several hours of trawling through forums, I found the nice chaps at xda-developers have many builds of the mobile msn client available for download (although you need to register to get access). Most are for the full PocketPC (PDA) OS, but the file attached to post #202 works on SmartPhones like the i200.

As expected, Pocket Outlook’s Microsoft Exchange synchronisation works seamlessly, so I now have real-time push email, contacts and calendar sync. And it’s actually usable as a phone too!