The Gig of Ham

GuruNet Review and Install Procedures

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 14:23:20 +0000

Sorry for this page missing for a bit, I had a hardware failure. In yet another Amiga post, let’s talk about adding networking to an older machine. The “big box” Amiga systems, (2000, 3000, 4000) have the ability to add a Zorro network card. The 600 and 1200 allow for adding a PCMCIA network card, but there are some issues with those (we’ll get to that). But if you have anything else, you’ve been in a much harder task to get some networking. You can use a serial interface and good old PPP/SLiP but instead, we’re going to talk about something else. The PLiP Box and the GuruNet.

Connecting to an Amiga over a serial port using NComm

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 14:23:20 +0000

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with the local Commodore nerds restoring my A1200, A2000, and A4000 systems. We’ve also been developing a piece of hardware to connect classic machines via their Serial interface to modern systems called the GuruModem - but I’ll have a lot more about that in some other posts. In the mean time, I wanted to share how to move larger files without the use of physical or virtual floppies: the magic of NComm.

Procedures for a fresh install on an Amiga with Colanto 3.X ROMs

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 14:23:20 +0000

The last few years, I’ve fallen very far down the rabbit hole of retrocomputing with classic Amigas. I worked with an Amiga 600 (I think) while I was volunteering at community television in the 90s. Sadly we had a very basic install, only a genlock and broadcast titler, but we longed for a full blown Video Toaster setup. I longed for it more than the rest of the volunteers. So, when the opportunity to build an Amiga 2000 with a toaster presented to me I grabbed it with both hands. I learned a lot, but running older machine has been harder and harder as technology advances. Fortunately the Amiga community is still very active so there are some wonderful new toys, but like everything in retrocomputing there are some bumps. Ideally I would just link you to a basic ADF that can have drivers added to suit your needs, but it’s super unclear to me if I can legally distribute that. So, I will instead walk you through the process of making it.

DevOps Days Austin 2018 Audio and Video Postmortem

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 01:23:20 +0000

Now that Ernest posted his thoughts on DevOps Days 2018, I figured it was time to post mine. I’m happy to report that the video recording and audio for DevOps Days Austin 2018 was better than last year. By no means perfect, but better. Let’s dive into the details. For those who don’t care and just want to see the videos, they are posted on YouTube in the DevOps Austin Channel.

Something better than a Rasberry Pi 2Q-2018 Edition

Wed, 23 May 2018 22:16:20 +0000

Ah, the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Loved and hated by many. I fall in both camps. I have at least 20 of them currently, and several are in production use. I also spend a lot of time with the larger ARM community, including the Works on arm project, and 96boards Open Hours. Something that comes up a lot is people wanting something “better” than a Raspberry Pi, and I finally decided to start writing up a comparison of boards I have used and like, that are generally available, and how they are better. The goal is to update this on a regular basis, at least once a year. There is some great stuff coming down the pipeline. But for now, let’s jump in.

Bring up of the LeMaker Cello

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 22:16:20 +0000

Many, many moons ago I pre-ordered the LeMaker Cello. It’s a 96boards Enterprise Edition Single Board Computer based on the AMD “Seattle” Opteron A1100 ARM Processor. I was very excited, because unlike many of the boards I already had it sported three key features: Native SATA ports, a full PCI Express 16x mechanical expansion port, and 2x SO-DIMM slots for memory. After many months of delays, we got some bad news: AMD had discontinued the processor and the PCI Express port didn’t work. LeMaker offered those of us who pre-ordered to swap our pre-orders for a HiKey 960 board instead based on this news, since that had a PCI Express expansion port. Unfortunately for me, the HiKey 960 doesn’t have gigabit ethernet or expandable RAM, so I stuck with my pre-order. I had planned to use them as a pair of Database servers for my hosting company, and the lack of PCI Express expansion wasn’t a big deal. Several months later, the boards shipped and then my adventure began.

I have a post on SysAdvent this year!

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 05:16:20 +0000

I was kind enough to be selected to have a article in SysAdvent 2017. Feel free to go read it over there, and then we can discuss more if folks have questions in the comments here or on twitter!

Carl's guide to buying a Printer

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 01:23:20 +0000

You’ve thought about it, and you have decided you need a printer. Let’s talk about how to pick one.

DevOps Days Austin Video and Streaming Postmortem

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 01:23:20 +0000

I’m not going to sugar coat this, the streaming and video capturing for DevOps Days Austin 2017 was poor. It was also my responsibility. So I wanted to write this for two reasons: to apologize, and to explain what I am doing to fix it for next time.

New Engine for gigofham.com

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 14:30:34 -0600

After a long slumber, I’ve moved the site from Wordpress to Hugo so that I can start eating my own dogfood. I’m a huge believer in static site generators, and Wordpress can be a mess to maintain properly. The only thing missing now is Hugo has no way to auto-post to Twitter when I make a new post. However, I should be able to rub on some IFTTT magic and make that problem go away.

Quick update: Sub $200 Stratum 1 NTP Server with ODROID and Adafruit parts

Sat, 11 Jun 2016 22:19:34 +0000

I was building another one of these, and found some bugs in my previous post. I’ve corrected the post, the biggest being that the kernels in Armbian 5.10 and later include a 1-Wire interface in the DTB which conflicts with the 1PPS pin used by the GPS module. The solution is to either comment out the w1 stanza in the device tree, or move it to another pin. I moved it to GPIOY_7 which is two pins down on the same row of the connector.

Sub $200 Stratum 1 NTP Server with ODROID and Adafruit parts

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 01:23:20 +0000

Time is important. In modern computing, I would say time is second in importance only to good entropy. Unfortunately, getting accurate, reliable time is getting harder. The global NTP pool is under attack, and worse it’s also being used as an amplification vector for DDOS attacks. Primarily because of those two reasons, I’ve decided to block NTP traffic at the border of all Data Center. But this leave a problem: how to get time.

Oculus Rift: My Thoughts

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 19:53:01 +0000

I’ve had the Oculus Rift setup and working for a few days now, and had several friends over to get a variety of opinions, and..well..we’re slightly disappointed. Ergonomics This is the one place where there is very little improvement since the DK2 and in some cases it’s backwards. Like me, most of my friends wear glasses and that’s the biggest problem. Thin framed wire glasses or metal frames are fine but if you have thicker framed glasses like those from Warby Parker just don’t fit well.

Oculus Rift: Initial Impressions

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 06:14:19 +0000

This isn’t a full review, I’ve only played with the Rift briefly tonight and wanted to get some thoughts down before heading to bed for an early morning. I’m planning on a much more complete review later, and a complete review of the Vive I should be getting in a couple of weeks, and finally a compare and contrast between the Vive and the Rift. In the mean time, here are the initial thoughts:

My new ARM goal: hosting

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 22:19:48 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of work on various ARM things. A lot of it has been in support of making community builds of Chef for other folks, but I have a new goal: providing ARM nodes to the Internet at large as a hosting option. I’m not going to go into a lot of details here yet, as I’m saving a lot of that content for my hosting company’s blog.

Mainline Linux 4.4 kernel on a Jetson TK1

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 18:07:01 +0000

I was really hoping this would be easier than it was. Most (all?) of the pieces needed are upstream, with a minor patch for das U-boot needed to make it all work with L4T. I’m going to provide links to my u-boot images and kernel packages, but first I wanted to go over what I’ve done and why. My Jetson TK1 still has L4T installed on the internal eMMC device. I used that to debug and build a few minor tools.

The very overdue ARM update

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 01:04:42 +0000

Lots to get to, so I’ll just jump right in: Uppel CX-R8 I gave up on this device a bit too soon it seems. Someone found these blog posts and reached out about rooting a CX-R8. While I wasn’t able to help him much, he helped me greatly by providing links to a TWRP recovery image which makes it super simple to install a SuperSU update.zip file to the system allowing root access.

Public Keys

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 06:18:17 +0000

Here are my public keys: GPG fingerprint 41EA 4ACD 8B2C FAAA BC7A 4642 BA4C 978B 8356 B775 Enjoy!

The Arcade Project

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:45:06 +0000

I love arcade games. Some of my favorites are S.T.U.N. Runner, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sinistar, and Tempest. I like the fighting games like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, etc but are not very good at them. Ten years ago, I worked for a video game company and my “boss” also very much liked Arcade games. So he brought is personal collection about 30 of them in to work and littered them about the office.

Hacking the Uppel/Sunchip CX-R8, Rikomagic MK68, and Tegra Jetson TK1

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 21:48:36 +0000

Long overdue follow-up from my previous post. Let me dive in by topic: Uppel/Sunchip CX-R8 After a lot of roadblocks, I’ve given up on this particular platform. The primary reason for this was getting the MK68 boxes and being able to compare the two. The CX-R8 is pretty hacker un-friendly. The bootloader does some form of signing the boot, recovery, and kernel images. All of the existing Rockchip tools I could find to make these images say the ones from the device have bad checksums, and the images it creates the device reports as having bad checksums.

Hacking the Uppel/Sunchip CX-R8

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 02:48:42 +0000

As part of my job at Chef, I’m responsible for getting Chef on strange platforms. At the 2015 Chef Seattle Community Summit, I discovered that the community has a lot of interest in getting Chef on strange platforms as well. I was helping a community member get Chef running on an ARMv8 (also known as AArch64 or ARM64 depending on your platform or compiler), but I needed an inexpensive platform to put in the forthcoming community builds CI.

Goodbye, OpenStack

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 22:06:39 +0000

I just removed myself from every OpenStack mailing list and meetup. I’m sure I’ll still use it, but I don’t see myself as part of that community any longer. When I was at DreamHost, I really felt like part of that community and that I could help make it better. However, in the three years since I’ve left DreamHost, I have made zero impact and I’m tired of pouring effort into a community that is primarily Buisness Development/Lead Generation, followed by ecosystem echo chamber development, and thus getting nothing out of it.

I don't think VR is going to be a flop, a rebuttal to RPS

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 21:04:07 +0000

Rock Paper Shotgun, I love you guys. That said, I wanted to write a rebuttal to your recent Editorial entitled “Why VR is going to be an enormous flop” because I don’t think your giving VR a fair chance. Let me start out by saying I am an Oculus Kickstarter Backer, and I own the original Oculus Developer Kit, and the DK2. Let me also say that recent announcements from Oculus have made me really upset.

I thought I knew pain, and then I tried to switch to native IPv6 at home

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:34:23 +0000

For years, I have been happily using a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel for my IPv6 at home. I have had it on five different ISPs and it has “just worked” (with the notable exception of U-Verse[1]) for 5+ years. However, my tunnel terminated in LA, and latency has been an issue of recent. I don’t blame HE, I picked where the tunnel terminated and I live in Austin TX now. So, I decided to finally drop the tunnel and switch to native IPv6 from my ISP (Time Warner Cable) instead.

On spinning rust

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 15:59:58 +0000

It’s that time again, Backblaze has released another report on what’s the best/worst drive. The information is interesting, but I have problems with the widespread “conclusions” and some of the statements made on value. Having worked in several large deployments of hard drives I have a major rebuttal to every Backblaze report: You should not buy the cheapest hard drives possible for use in a Data Center. It’s that simple. Don’t do it.

SSL Labs A+ Certification for Apache 2.4

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 04:44:18 +0000

After gaining some insight from Seth Vargo’s excellent post on doing the same things with nginx, I decided to tweak my Apache 2.4 config to get the same results: At first, I got everything but the TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV support. I did some digging and discovered that I had missed and OpenSSL update. Applying that and then restarting apache did the trick. Here are the relevant security announcements with the required versions of OpenSSL for ubuntu, debian, and RHEL/CentOS.

Google Fiber Gets It

Thu, 22 May 2014 22:48:15 +0000

No whining about liability, or lawyers. No questions about return on investment. Have some power and rackspace, make everyone’s experience better. Posts like this make me love Google. If only I could get it..

OpenStack != Free VMware

Wed, 21 May 2014 18:22:54 +0000

Last week was the OpenStack Juno Design Summit in Atlanta Georgia. I spent a lot of time in the Operations track, and there was a recurring theme: “OpenStack needs more enterprise features”. OKay, fair enough. But what features? “Integration into enterprise authentication?” Sure, we do that now with SAML2 in Keystone. “HA of OpenStack services” Also, available now. Two different methods even! You can run active/passive with corosync, or (my preferred way) run mutliple instances behind a highly-available load balancer.

About The Gig of Ham

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:24:34 +0000

edolnx is Carl. He administers systems, takes pictures, writes code, loves Science Fiction, tries to stay in shape at the gym, plays video games, hacks on hardware, watches movies, and a myriad of other things common to a geek. He lives in Austin, TX and works for Kumulus Technologies. He’s also starting a hosting company focused on Privacy and Security (that would be SphereCubeHost). This site contains things he wants to share with others.

Beginning of the end

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 06:07:57 +0000

Atlantis departed this rock for the final time today, and I was somewhat surprised that it did. On the one hand I knew this was a big deal for NASA that the final mission go off without a hitch, but with bad weather looming I was surprised the safety paranoia didn’t take over. While I am sad that the shuttle program is ending, I’m not as optimistic as Phil Plait that this isn’t the end.

Building an IPv6 Firewall

Tue, 31 May 2011 03:53:56 +0000

As As will gladly tell you, we are rapidly running out of unique IP addresses on the Internet. The good news is we solved this problem in 1998. The bad news is that, after more than ten years, we still haven’t widely implemented the new standard: IPv6. All of the big carriers support it, but getting access to the IPv6 Internet is still very tough. If you are a Comcast customer it is possible to get IPv6 access, and there are a few others who allow access as well.

Someone needs to stop this man

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:09:39 +0000

Please stop developing for CentOS 5

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 05:37:14 +0000

Good gravy, this has been the bane of my existence of recent. I get it, it’s got “Enterprise” in the title and makes you compatible with RHEL. But, your kernel is SEVEN YEARS OLD. Hardware that was common place then is non-existent now and hardware that is common place now was poorly supported then (I’m looking at you, bnx2). We have better options out there now: Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Server LTS release on regular cycles and have much more recent kernels.

Getting things done

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:52:34 +0000

Working between three offices, one of which don’t even have desks, has been interesting. Keeping track of things that need to be done has been downright awful. I hate brush fires at work, and recently I’ve been creating them just because I’ve not been in a constent place with my trusty todo pad around. So, I decided to add some tech to the problem. I have Astrid Tasks on my phone, and it’s nice but adding tasks is not.

Thoughts on TRON: Legacy

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 07:24:34 +0000

I’m going to out myself: I really liked this movie. Yep, I’m one of those: the few and the proud. However truth be told I didn’t like it at first. I walked in to TRON: Legacyexpecting an action film, and the first twenty minutes did not disappoint. Light cycles, light car, disc wars, recognizers, it was all there. Then it just stopped, and that’s when I became confused. It was still a visual masterpiece, but something wasn’t right.

License

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.