Roo's View – Page 63 – A clever tagline should go here

Google Android Dev Phone 1

I’m stoked – I’ve got a G1! This is actually a Google Android Dev Phone 1 that I purchased second hand from a friend. Back in January 2009 I had a chance to play around with one of these while in California (borrowed from a Googler who got it from work), my impression then was “ok, neat – but its basically a computer in your hand” – a different reaction than what I had with the iPhone. At the time both were at a premium price and I had only recently bought my Nokia 5310. Between then and now I bought an iPod Touch that I have enjoyed a lot yet had nearly endless frustration with iTunes.

My G1 is running cyanogenmod v4.2.15.1. The hardware is very similar to the iPhone/iPod Touch. CPU is 528MHz ARM 11, 192MB RAM, 320 x 480 capacitive touch screen. One bonus feature is that this version of the phone supports AWS/1700megahertz/BandIV which is the frequency that WindMobile is using in Canada (T-Mobile uses this in the US).

Today my service provider is Fido. I’m on the $15 plan ($16.95 after taxes), this is sufficient for my phone usage as I’m a light user. Unfortunately it doesn’t include call display or voicemail (+$10 option), nor is any data included. The phone had been wiped and reset when I got it, and I needed to get past the “Welcome to T-Mobile G1” screen. Unfortunately the built in menus only provide the option to configure an APN. Not wanting to incur any data charges (last time I did this on my 5310 it was $12 for a few hundred kb!) – I wanted to figure out how to hack around this.

Not surprisingly I was able to find a solution online that allows you to activate your G1 without using any mobile data. I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 (and the phone is running cyanogenmod) so the directions there were not exactly what I needed, so I’ll briefly repeat them here with the changes.

1) Grab the Android SDK. Install it following the directions, which really boils down to extracting the archive.

2) Now we’re going to modify /etc/udev/rules.d to give normal users (ie: you) permission on the USB port the phone will use.
Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules with the contents (permissions 644).

SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″

$sudo restart udev

You can skip this step if you want to run steps 4 and 5 as root.

3) Connect the phone and your PC using a USB cable. The phone does need a SIM card installed. Boot the phone.

4) Now we run <install path>/android-sdk-linux_86/tools/adb devices to check if we’re properly connected to the device

$ ./adb devices


List of devices attached
HTxxxxxxxxxx device

(where the x’s are your actual device number)

5) Now back to the phone, tap on the “Welcome to T-Mobile G1” screen to get to the setup page. Then issue the following command on your PC from the tools directory:

$ ./adb shell

# am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings

The “am” command is actually executing on the phone itself. This should start up the configuration dialog that allows you to setup a wireless 802.11b/g network. After this point it should be pretty self explanatory to get yourself setup with the phone.

The screenshot in this post was done using the Android SDK as well. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Android and this phone soon.

First sale on eBay

It is not uncommon to have purchased something from eBay, I’ve had an account for several years and tend to buy something every couple of months. Most of the items I buy on eBay are low cost and generally hard to find locally. I’d often thought about selling stuff on eBay but just never got started.. until now.

What started this off was a sweep through some of the gadgets and whatnot that we’ve got cluttering up our home office. This stuff has to go, and if it has value let’s sell it – otherwise its time to eCycle it. I initially thought I’d start by selling some N64 games, but the game values (<$5) far outweigh the shipping costs. So I figured I’d move onto the iPod that was no longer being loved ever since the iTouch arrived.

I used eBay to research what the going price was for an iPod in the condition mine was, and priced it on the lower end as a starting point. I set a $10 USD flat rate for shipping since if I shipped to California it would be around $8 shipping + $2 for the bubble mailer. Had someone in Vancouver bought it, I would have lost money on the flat rate shipping (about $4)! Shipping is the first real hurdle you need to get over as a seller, and I think it is worse for Canadians (both as sellers, and buyers).

Lucky me, as a first time seller my first 5 listings are fee free! Cool. Of course, it took nearly 24hrs for my item to appear in any search results (trust me I tried). No worries, it was a 7 day listing so lots of time for people to find it and bid.

Days passed. I watched several broken iPod’s get more bidding activity and a higher price than my item. I could see from the eBay dashboard that after 6 days, only 5 page views of my item had happened (2 which were mine!). Then on the 6th day, the watchers arrived – 8 watchers tracking my item – there is hope. The number of views rapidly climbed.

With less than 6 hours to go in the auction the bidding started. My $30USD start price, jumped up rapidly. 17 bids later it sold for $76USD + $10USD shipping, the winning bid was made in the last minute of the auction from a bidder with no previous bids on my item.

After that it was smooth sailing. Payment was via PayPal (who take a small percentage). A quick trip to the post office and the iPod is on its way to the winner. It has been an interesting experience, one I plan to repeat.

Mirrored Drives with Ubuntu

Mirrored drives are also known as a RAID 1 configuration. It is important to note that running mirrored drives should not be used as a substitute for doing backups. My motivation for running a RAID 1 is simply that with the drive densities today, I expect these drives to fail. A terabyte unit is cheap enough that multiplying the cost by two isn’t a big deal, and it gives my data a better chance of surviving a hardware failure.

I purchased two identical drives several months apart – in the hopes of getting units from different batches. I even put them into use staggered by a few months as well. The intent here was to try to avoid simultaneous failure of the drives due to similarities in manufacture date / usage. In the end, the environment they are in is probably a bigger factor in leading to failure but what can you do?

Linux has reasonable software raid support. There is a debate of the merits of software raid vs. hardware raid, as well as which level of raid is most useful. I leave this as an exercise up to the reader. The remainder of this posting will be the details of setting up a raid 1 on a live system. I found two forum postings that talked about this process, the latter being most applicable.

We will start with the assumption that you do have the drive physically installed into your system. The first step is to partition the disk. I prefer using cfdisk, but fdisk will work too. This is always a little scary, but if this is a brand new drive it should not have an existing partition table. In my scenario I wanted to split the 1TB volume into two partitions, a 300Gb and a 700Gb.

Now let’s use fdisk to dump the results of our partitioning work:

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdd

Disk /dev/sdd: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 1 36473 292969341 83 Linux /dev/sdd2 36474 121601 683790660 83 Linux

Next we need to install the RAID tools if you don’t have them already:

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm initramfs-tools

Now recall that we are doing this in a live system, I’ve already got another 1TB volume (/dev/sda) partitioned and full of data I want to keep. So we’re going to create the RAID array in a degraded state, this is the reason for the use of the ‘missing’ option. As I have two partitions I need to run the create command twice, once for each of them.

$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 missing /dev/sdd1 $ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 missing /dev/sdd2

Now we can take a look at /proc/mdstat to see how things look:

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sdd2[1] 683790592 blocks [2/1] [_U]

md0 : active raid1 sdd1[1] 292969216 blocks [2/1] [_U]

unused devices: <none>

Now we format the new volumes. I’m using ext3 filesystems, feel free to choose your favorite.

$ sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0 $ sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md1

Mount the newly formatted partitions and copy data to it from the existing drive. I used rsync to perform this as it is an easy way to maintain permissions, and as I’m working on a live system I can re-do the rsync later to grab any updated files before I do the actual switch over.

$ sudo mount /dev/md0 /mntpoint $ sudo rsync -av /source/path /mntpoint

Once the data is moved, and you need to make the new copy of the data on the new degraded mirror volume the live one. Now unmount the original 1TB drive. Assuming things look ok on your system (no lost data) now we partition that drive we just unmounted (double and triple check the device names!) and format those new partitions.

All that is left to do is add the new volume(s) to the array:

$ sudo mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1 $ sudo mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda2

Again we can check /proc/mdstat to see the status of the array. Or use the watch command on the same file to monitor the progress.

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sdd2[1] 683790592 blocks [2/1] [_U]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[2] sdd1[1] 292969216 blocks [2/1] [_U] [>....................] recovery = 0.6% (1829440/292969216) finish=74.2min speed=65337K/sec

unused devices: <none>

That’s all there is to it. Things get a bit more complex if you are working on your root volume, but in my case I was simply mirroring one of my data volumes.