Category: Computing

Last night I was adding a new wifi device to my home network.  One of the security features I make use of is MAC address filtering (and yes, I know a motivated attacker can spoof a MAC address easily enough, but there are many easier targets in my neighbourhood).  My primary router is a Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT.  If you have one of the Linksys WRT54G* routers, my experience is the stock firmware is terrible – you should either run DD-WRT or Tomato and if you insist on staying stock, at least get the latest version from Linksys.

I’ve been playing with Google Chrome a little bit.  The various “run it under Linux” solutions simply don’t work well enough to bother with.  So until Google gets a Linux version going – I’ve been playing with it under Windows.  There are some things I like about Chrome: the ability to tear off a tab and get a new window; the omnibar; and their process per tab is pretty nifty.  On the downside is plug-in stability (Adobe Reader really sucked in the 1st release, better in the update), general stability (I’ve crashed it a few times) and compatibility (some websites don’t recognize it).  I’m not ready to make it my primary browser, but I do use it regularly.

In order to edit the MAC filter list, I need to navigate some of the DD-WRT administration pages to make some changes.  I was surprised to get an error message from Chrome when trying to save my changes, it turns out I was hitting a bug that was only very recently fixed.  So, no worries – I just switched to Firefox and redid the change.  However, to my dismay – it seems that the partial commit from Chrome caused my router to completely clear my nvram (in all honesty I can’t prove this, but the sequence of events makes sense).

DD-WRT has been very stable for me for quite some time.  I was running v23 SP2 and had looked at the newer v24 version since it had some neat bandwidth monitoring features, but had decided to stall as migrating my configuration would be a bunch of work (and risk if I got it wrong).  Lucky for me I had gotten a dump of the nvram by logging into the router via telnet and issuing a “nvram show” command, having this dump gave me a reference to help move my config over.

Faced with the complete loss of my configuration, I figured it was as good a time as any to upgrade to the latest version (v24 SP1).  The upgrade went smoothly, and the new firmware looks really slick.  In a way I’m sort of glad that I finally got around to doing it.

I run Ubuntu (Hardy at the moment) as my main desktop.  Overall its been a good experience.  The update mechanism has worked well even migrating from one release (Fiesty) to another via the update manager.  For the must have windows apps (iTunes) I run VMWare Player and a virtualized WindowsXP image.

I tend to suspend my desktop (vs. hibernate or full shutdown cycle) as it gives me nearly instant on access.  From time to time a kernel update will cause suspend to fail, the most spectacular being today when my machine would no longer complete its POST.  The solution was to disconnect the power cord for a minute and let the capacitors discharge (a little led on the mainboard went out after 30 seconds) and then it booted fine.

Look for Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex to be released in just over a week.  Linux isn’t for everyone, but as a developer its a nice desktop environment.

So I do regularly change my password, its a good habit to have.  In some cases, it makes sure that I at least once in a while log into the system I have access to – otherwise I might lose access to a remote system and not find out until I need to do that DNS update.

There is a facilty called the GNOME Keyring.  It hangs onto your access credentials so you’re not constantly entering passwords (for example, every time you re-open the email client).  Of course, the thing that holds onto your credentials, needs a password to keep that data safe – but you can link it to your login password.  How to do this is covered in the blog posting Automatically unlocking the default GNOME Keyring.

You may need to delete the previously stored keyring if your user password and your keyring password were not the same.

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring

This is also the same sad procedure I was using to re-synchronize my keyring with my user password when it was time to change my password.  Very annoying that there didn’t seem to be a way to just change it.

Well, it turns out that there is.  The Seahorse application lets you do this.  I found the following blog posting by Ivan Torres that shows you how to do this.  Now changing the password is accomplished by Applications -> Accessories -> Passwords and Encryption Keys, then Edit->Preferences, select default and click on the Change Unlock Password button.

Easy right?  Well, not really.  As is, it works smoothly up to the point where you want to change your password – then its dig around until you remember (or figure out) how to change your password, or simply blow the keyring away and start over.  Ideally, it’d be nice to have a password change facility that did your user password and default keyring in one shot, and I hope it will be installed in /usr/bin/passwd.

Linux, you get what you pay for.

The stock MPlayer that is included with the AspireOne didn’t see to have support for very many codecs. It certainly didn’t handle the quicktime videos (.mov) that our Kodak point and shoot created, nor did it manage to handle a xvid encoded video I had converted from DVD using DVDRip.

Many users of the AspireOne simply install VLC Media Player, there is a pretty long how to thread on doing this in the aspireoneuser.com forum.  There are also plenty of comparisons out there on the web about vlc vs. mplayer – I’m not going to go there.  The reason that I didn’t immediately go the VLC route was that the AspireOne shipped with MPlayer, and it seems more reasonable to ‘fix’ it than simply throw it out and start fresh.  (of course, my end  solution was basically toss the stock MPlayer and install a new more useful one).

I can’t take credit for figuring out how to do this.  Some web searching turned up the answer posted with nice detail on another blog.  I would recommend that you review the comments to the posting before trying to upgrade your Mplayer.  I had some problems, all of which were addressed in the comments (and for the most part have been rolled back into the main post).  The only problem I had that was not covered in the comments, and is likely due to some of my previous hacking was missing dependencies, which was cleared up by issuing a “sudo yum update fedora-release” before trying the install.  Hats off to Mike Silva for posting a great how-to.

This now makes it possible to use the AspireOne to watch movies converted from our DVD collection, handy for when we’re travelling.  The updated Mplayer can also handle quicktime movies created by our camera, giving us another good reason to drag it along on trips.