The only haproxy load balancer package for the NSLU2 is really, really old, and is installed as “optware” in /opt. With that in mind, here’s the 1.3.15.3 package, installed in root.
Package : haproxy_1.3.15.5-2_armv5b.ipk
Source : haproxy-1.3.15.5.tar.gz
Instead of having to deal with an entire Perl installation on an NSLU2, I compiled a readily available urlencode binary, which takes piped input and encodes it for use in a URL.
Tarball : urlencode-armv5b.tar.gz
For all those fans of the venerable NSLU2 (or “slug” as we like to call it), I have another package for OpenSlug/BE. This time it’s remserial, a Linux equivalent to the BSD “netfwd” software, allowing serial ports to be redirected over TCP.
Package: remserial_0.2000-1_armv5b.ipk
Source: remserial.tar.gz
For those enterprising people who would like to use my armv5b-softfloat-linux cross compilation toolchain, I have made it available on mediafire as well. It was compiled with Ubuntu 8.04.1 i386, so that’s the safest bet to use for compilation. I had used the NSLU2 “master makefile” to build it, since the vanilla crosstool had provided me little in terms of usable toolchains for the NSLU2.
Before a friend clued me in to the embedded gmetric project, I had needed to strip out just the gmetric binary for use in monitoring a process on the NSLU2 I was using.
So, for anyone who is interested, I have posted both a binary ipkg package for OpenSLUG/BE and a source package containing all of the pieces I yanked from the ganglia 3.1.1 distribution to create it. (Graciously hosted by mediafire.com…) Hopefully this can be of use to someone.
This past week, I stumbled on a strange problem with Dell “PERC” RAID controllers in certain rackmount servers, where they would suddenly just stop working for no apparent reason. The nice people at Dell did actually have firmware available for the PERC 3 and 4 controllers to fix this problem, which was pretty nice.
The part that *wasn’t* nice was that they were some stupid Windows binaries which required a floppy disk to be inserted.
First of all, who has a laptop with a floppy drive anymore, and second of all, what if you, like other sane people, don’t use Windows? Thirdly, how often does a floppy disk magically fail to work in a floppy drive?
I ended up doing the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1440 to create a floppy image, which I mounted in the VirtualBoxmkisofs -pad -b floppy.img -R -o cd.iso floppy.img to create a CD imageDell, I hate you. Your laptops overheat and suck out loud, and your stupid Windows-only disks and defective RAID controllers bother me. I’m not buying any more of your hardware. You can subsidize Microsoft some other way.
I finally got around to getting a 12VDC power supply for the car (15 USD, cheap!), so my WRT54G3G-ST is mobile, and I got to enjoy trying out Skype while doing 65mph on the Mass Pike.
There’s some sort of gee-whiz factor in all this, but I guess it’s just another way to become more and more endlessly connected.
Another day, another project …
A few days ago I put together an NSLU2-based load balancer using haproxy to do the load balancing.
If you don’t have an NSLU2, go get one. Those things are incredible, and ridiculously useful. I’m using OpenSlug/BE, but any distro is awesome on these things.
Hint: It takes some manual hacking of the haproxy.conf file and the init script to get it working from the optware packages. Of course, you have to tune it for the application you’re running…
If you’ve ever been stuck booting an old machine with a bad CD drive, or worse yet, *no* CD drive and an old enough BIOS not to properly boot a USB drive, you’ve experienced the wallbanger I have today. (and no, PXE boot wasn’t an option)
Fortunately, it appears that there is a nice boot floppy which allows booting via network or USB, which is available at http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html… Direct link to the zipped floppy disk image is http://download.plop.at/plop/bootmngr/plpbt50rc11flp.zip.
I’ve had a Sprint Motorola RAZR v3m for a while, and when the time came to move to a Blackberry (for work), getting the information off of it would have been a horrendous process.
Instead, I present a pretty simple way of doing this using the Subversion version of opensync’s sync-moto script. Note that I did this under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon):
• Get the id by using lsusb:
$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2110 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 22b8:2a64 Motorola PCS
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 046d:0a02 Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
• Add the following definition under /etc/modprobe.d/somethingorother :
alias cdc_acm usbserial
options vendor=0×22b8 product=0×2a64
• Plug in the phone and issue a:
sudo /sbin/modprobe cdc_acm vendor=0×22b8 product=0×2a64
• Download the Subversion copy of the opensync moto-sync plugin from:
https://svn.opensync.org/plugins/moto-sync/
• Issue the following sync command:
./mototool -d /dev/ttyUSB0 –backup –file mybackupfile.csv
If you’ve got an old junky XBox around, and would like to put something, well, *useful* on it, like XBMC, then I’ve got a great link for you which allows soft modding without having a copy of any of the exploitable games.
Patched xboxhdm 1.9 with exploits will allow you to boot another PC while hotswapping your XBox hard drive into that machine. It has all of the known exploits on it, I believe, so you don’t have to have your XBox connected to another machine or anything, nice and simple. After that, use a fully automated installer like Auto Installer Deluxe to do everything else for you.
So, don’t throw that XBox out, make it into something much better.
