Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

After spending few hours (not intensive work, I was doing also other stuff) with duplicty and dropbear, I finally got the idea to enter magic words to Google to find solution.

Those words were excitingly "openwrt sftp" where first link points to sftp with Dropbear howto.

Next time I should start with looking for documentation, most likely somebody already had same issue…

The OpenWrt toy is doing more and more work for me. I just connected USB/LPT adaptor and my printer and setup printing in few seconds. Hardest and longest part was to follow howto and click in windows on correct buttons :-).

Cups also speaks well with this device, so I'm definitely convinced it was a good buy.

Last thing which was missing was to add new router to monitoring using Munin which I use for this purpose. The only reasonable way seemed to be SNMP so I installed it to OpenWrt.

And the rest was incredibly simple! Just add snmp host to munin.conf:

[openwrt.lan]
    address localhost

And run SNMP discovery on monitoring host (the one which runs munin-node):

munin-node-configure-snmp openwrt.lan | sh

It automatically creates symlinks for everything it detects (network interfaces, load, disk space and users) and only remaining thing is to restart munin-node.

I'm starting to love this distribution. After few hours I've setup everything I needed including OpenVPN to other locations. Most of things were pretty easy to configure and basic settings can done as well over web interface.

The only thing I don't understand is that for some reason I don't see WAN IP address settiongs (I'm using static IP) and same way I lost WEP/WPA key configuration. Those parts of dialog simply do not appear on page while HTML is still there. I didn't yet have time to debug, but maybe later.

Today my new toy arrived. I originally wanted to stay with ASUS firmware for a while, but I started to hate it too quickly so OpenWrt was installed just half an hour after unpacking the device :-).

Installation via tftp as described in documentation went smoothly, now I'm looking at web interface and finding possibilities of this box.

I desperately need quiet wireless router. Currently old Pentium does the work, but it's too noisy and power consuming to be still on. The problem is that I use it for another things as backup, file and print server and those things can't be easilly moved to some generic router.

I thought about buying some VIA EPIA board with fanless power supply or some router supported by OpenWRT which could be later expanded to do at least part of jobs currently done by "router".

At the end I've chosen ASUS WL-500g Deluxe which is reported to be fully supported by OpenWRT. For now it will live with generic firmware, later I will start to experiment with OpenWRT to get out of this hardware as much as possible.

If you want to know more about world domination, kernel myths and how to contribute to Linux kernel, Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel written by Greg Kroah-Hartman is good starting point for you. There is not much new information, but nice summary about various aspects of Linux kernel.

Mantis bug tracker has been just updated to latest release 1.0.4. This is only minor update so don't expect much changes. But in case of any new problems, please drop me a message.

I have weather these days. It's seven clock in the morning and here is nice 25°C. How could man sleep in that? And I didn't mention that over day are temperatures around 35°C.

So could somebody there up finally switch off the heater? Thanks a lot.

Users always request support for their latest shiny new phone. But how to manage such support in environment where you can not buy each new phone to implement support for it?

You can try write driver only by using documentation for manufacturers who provide it (like Sony-Ericsson), but there will most likely be bugs which need hardware to be debugged.

For phones where is no documentation available (eg. Nokia), it is almost impossible to support them without having access to actual device (at least through user who has enough interest in improving support).

I'd like to implement full support for Sony-Ericsson to achieve comparable feature set to FMA. However I still have more important expenses than buying phone from them, so this task stuck for long time in my queue. In fact it also holds Wammu development as I'd like to start with more complex feature set than my current phone supports and it's impossible to implement it without phone.

So what now? Maybe is here somebody who would be interested enough in improved tools and will help me buying such phone. But I don't believe this will happen, at least my current experiences tell so…

I finally made local copy of my articles which I made for Linux software server. They were sitting for long time on my disk to be published somewhere under my website, but till now I didn't manage to do that.

You can find original article listing on Linux software and it's mirror is at my server: http://cihar.com/publications/linuxsoft/.

As a special bonus you get there file which is missing in articles on Linux software :-).

As I messed previous upload and half of binaries were built against old gammu, I just sent new upload to my sponsor to fix bug #376486. I'm sorry for inconvenience…

Most of railways in Czechia are operated by Czech Railways. However there are few places where private companies exists such as Railways Desná. When you need to use only one of them, everything works fine, but travelling with both looks sometimes like a big trouble.

You have no problems when starting on private one, they sell you ticket for whatever you need. But Czech Railways only tell you, that there is private railway and you need another ticket. They don't bother to tell that you can buy the ticket by them. So you travel with Czech Railways, switch to private with no time for buying another ticket because Czech Railways are allways delayed and now you have to pay penalty because you don't have your ticket. Funny, isn't it?

When I today first saw this, I really liked that. I saw various useless USB toys, but this one is the best of them. And it even works fine from Linux!

I'm talking about USB Misille Launcher. You can control it using keyboard or even combine it with webcam and use motion together with small script to automatically aim it (no auto fire yet :-)).

After more than week ignoring computers I'm back online. It's horrible to see those hundreds of unread mails, but I promise I will manage them soon, just be patient :-).

Anyway vacation was great, we had nice wheather and Jeseníky is wonderful place. Yesterday we were lucky that we're on correct side of mountains. otherwise we would be in the middle of floods.

And once more I got impression that travelling with Czech Railways is horrible experience. First train had outage and we went with replacement bus. I rued those few who took their bike with them. Next train was of course full of people, nowhere to sit, but it was only three hours way…