Tomato Firmware

After listening to the discussion regarding wireless routers n the TWUUG list, I finally decided to buy a WRT54GL. About 4 years ago I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 with the intention of replacing it's bios with one of the custom firmware releases. I never got around to it and I didn't want to brick my only router. So I bought the WRTG54L since it's the only one of the WRT54G/GS models that you can put Linux on now. All of the others have limited memory and only run VxWorks.

I installed OpenWRT. It installed without a problem. I wanted a nice webgui, but the latest didn't have one or I didn't find it. Instead, I used Tomato.

Tomato's webgui is nice. I set it up within a few minutes and replaced the old router with the new. The network statistics are cool. It provides a realtime graph that can be viewed in the browser and it maintains a daily, weekly, and monthly log.

I've turned on QOS, but I don't know how well it is working. This week should give me an idea of how well the QOS works. I set my Vonage voip device to have the highest settings.

I need the extra router for a trip to the beach later this month. After that I'll play around with OpenWRT. There are some interesting things that can run on the router. I want to play around with Asterisk. I've got some actual voip phones that I can use.

CC licensed images

Here's an interesting post about the usage of Creative Commons material available on the internet.

Google C++ Style Guide

Here's the Google C++ Coding Style Guide. I looked for other languages but didn't find any.

Processor support for 64 bit?

While chatting with a friend online the other day I became curious how one would determine if a processor supports 64bit and if the kernel is 64bits. Know the answer to first question could have helped me out a few weeks ago when I tried to install the x86_64 version of Fedora 9 on my wife's laptop. Unfortunately when I booted the install disk, the installer message stated that it was not 64bit capable.

To determine if you processor supports 64bit mode in Linux, the easiest thing to do is:
grep lm /proc/cpuinfo

The lm stands for long mode and it's in the cpu flags section. If more than one line is returned with the same information, the processor has multiple cores.

To determine if the OS kernel what instruction set it is running use:
uname -m

A value of x86_64 indicates that it is running the 64 bit extensions for Intel/AMD.

Could not chdir to home directory /home/xxx

I recently installed Fedora 9 x86_64 on my home machine. This is the first time that I've run the 64 bit version. I didn't disable SELinux this time either.

I've got most things working well on the machine. The most annoying issue that I've had is when I used ssh to access my machine from somewhere else. Everytime that I logged in I would get the the following message and get dumped to the / directory.

Could not chdir to home directory /home/xxx: Permission denied

I could type cd and it would take me to my home directory. I could read files in those directories. Looking around I found that others were having problems but usually it was a pam problem or something else related to authentication. Eventually I decided that it was a SELinux issue.

Since I've never run SELinux on my machine, it stands to reason that none of the proper contexts were ever applied to the home directories. After digging around with google and figuring out what I needed I discovered the problem. Below is what my context looked like:

> ls -Zd * 
drwx------  xxx  xxx system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      xxx

I created another user and discovered that what it should look like is this:

drwx------  aaa aaa system_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 aaa

To change the context to be that I used:

>chcon -t user_home_dir_t xxx
> ls -Zd * 
drwx------  xxx xxx system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      xxx

SELinux tended to be difficult to use. Fedora and the other distributions are working hard to make it easier to use. Consider leaving it enabled when working with newer distributions. It could prevent a zero day exploit from taking over your machine.

New Railing and Storm Doors

We decided to put up railing last year. It's not required by code but we figured that it would help improve the look of the house and prevent any unwanted accidents. We wanted it to last but didn't want to spend a fortune for it. We finally settled on ColorGuard railing. Each piece of railing comes with everything that you need.

Some of the original posts had some rot on them. They looked nice but were not pressure treated. Two of them would have need to be replaced this summer no matter what. The posts were replaced with pressure treated 4x4 posts that had a vinyl sleeve placed over them.

New Larson Tradewinds storm doors were installed. These have the retractable screen. The door on the front of the house is a full view and the one on the back is a mid view. The retractable screen is nice since you can open the door at any time and pull down the glass to reveal the screen. There's no mess with the removing glass and installing the screen.

Here's the before pics.

The new look:

Family and Cancer

Lee Ann's cousin's wife has cancer. She has been documenting her progress on her MySpace site. She and her family are doing as well as can be expected. I can't even imagine what it must be like to deal with it.

The brother of my best friend from high school had his son diagnosed with Leukemia a couple of years ago. He's made it through the chemo and I believe that they have stated that it's in remission. Again, it's not a situation that's easy to imagine. There is a good documentary called A Lion in the House that appeared on PBS a couple of years ago that deal with children and cancer. It's probably one of the saddest things I've watched.