Canon specifies a safe trigger voltage up to 6 volts using the hotshoe on their digital cameras. If it’s higher, it might damage the camera. So I have measured the trigger voltage on two older flashes I have lying around, since I didn’t get (m)any hits searching the interewebz.

Pentax AF-330FTZ has a trigger voltage of 3.14V
Hanimex 325AZ has a trigger voltage of 110V

So the Pentax AF-330FTZ should be safe. Hanimex 325 however, isn’t. What’s kind of scary is that I have used the Hanimex on several occasions on my 350D. Luckily no harm done (as far as I can tell).

Up until now, Linksys firmware has been working great. I didn’t need more than a simple wireless router. But recently I’ve started playing with VMware ESXi, which led to a few virtual servers. And with a few virtual servers, there was also a need to make them accessible from the Internet. With the only way of opening up ports on my router was through my ISPs web page, and that every change needed to be accompanied by a reboot of my router, I decided it was time to set up my own firewall.

Support for VLANs

OpenWRT support VLANs, and this is one of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade to a third-party firmware. Running a firewall with just one network adapter isn’t really possible, unless you can split networks within the same physical medium. And that’s when VLANs come in to the picture. This technology makes it possible to have several different networks within the same physical medium. Even the with the same network addresses.

The firewall, which is a virtual machine, doesn’t know that the host it’s running on only has one network adapter. I gave the firewall three adapters, all connected to different virtual switches. These switches tag their traffic with VLAN data and sends it to my Linksys router, which in also was configured the same way. One port on the router could hand out data for VLAN1, the next port for VLAN2.

In my setup, the traffic coming from Internet is connected to a port in VLAN2. This is sent, along with data in VLAN3, via port 4 to the ESXi host. Here the traffic is divided into virtual switches. One switch for each VLAN. So my firewall is connected to both the switch for VLAN2, and for VLAN3. VLAN2 is being labeled as WAN, while VLAN3 is labeled LAN. I also have a VLAN4 named SERVERS.

Installing OpenWRT

This is easy. If you haven’t installed a third-party firmware on your Linksys, you can use the web interface from Linksys to upgrade. Just as you would if you were to upgrade the original firmware. Download the correct image from OpenWRT, select it in the web interface and click the upgrade button.

After the new firmware is installed, the router will reboot and ready for configuration. By default the routers IP-address is 192.168.1.1. You can log in via telnet with no user name and password. It is advised to set a password at first log in. Doing so, telnet will be disabled and ssh enabled instead.

If you manage to lock yourself out, it’s possible to restart OpenWRT into a safe mode. Just take the power, when it starts up, press any button just when the DMZ light is lid. Now you can access it via telnet at address 192.168.1.1 again, no matter what address you have specified earlier. In safe mode you can change password and reconfigure firewall rules, if you have enabled a rule you shouldn’t have.

Setting up different VLANs (and trunking them)

First you should be aware of how the WRT54GL hardware is mapped internally. It is essential to understand the logic when configuring the router. The image shows the default configuration where port 1 – 4 is a regular switch on VLAN0, and the WAN port is separated on VLAN1. If you only want a dumb switch with 5 ports, you could put the WAN port into VLAN0 as well.

The configuration file can be found under /etc/config/network. Here we can set the IP-address of the box, but also configure the ports. I only need a dumb switch with VLAN capabilities, so I won’t set up any fancy routing rules in this post.

config switch "eth0"
   option vlan0 "0t 5"
   option vlan1 "0t 5"
   option vlan2 "0t 4 5"
   option vlan3 "0t 3 2 5*"
   option vlan4 "0t 5"

In this setup I have created five VLANs, three of which are unused at the moment. VLAN3 is the default VLAN, as marked by the asterisk (*). Port 5, the internal, has to be included. Data on LAN port 4 (which is internally mapped as port 0), is tagged, which basically means it’s a trunk. If a port isn’t tagged, it can’t belong to more than one VLAN (except the internal port 5). If a port is tagged, it can’t be used by a computer which doesn’t support trunk or tagging.

My Internet connection is connected to the WAN-port on the router, also known as internal port 4. It belongs to VLAN2, and is tagged on LAN port 4, which is known as internal port 0. On the other side of LAN port 4 is my ESXi server, which supports trunking (surprise). VLAN2 then goes into my firewall, on the other side of my firewall is VLAN3, which goes over the same cable back to the OpenWRT box, which in turn distributes it to my main computer and media center on LAN port 1 and 2.

Conclusion

Linksys WRT54GL is a great product, and with third-party firmware such as OpenWRT, it’s even greater. This box can be transformed from a boring wireless router, to a full blown firewall if needed.

For all we know, this might just be a PR stunt. But if so, it’s a bad one. I predict that if the sales go through, it will drive most of the users away and over to other file sharing sites. Just the idea of a corporation owning the TPB-user database is scary.

It’s been a nice 5-and-so years at The Piratebay, but I think I’ll go for a swim now, and I’m not sure if I ever will return. Also, this blows my “The Piratebay Preferred Partner”-joke I’ve been doing in the company for the last few years.

Both clients is written in Adobe AIR, which is a big bonus since it means I can run it both on my office Windows machine and my Linux machine at home. I think Adobe AIR is one of the most interesting technologies right now for web applications. Although all that come out of Adobe is slow and sluggish, it’s far better than the last “cross-platform” language that promised a trouble free world. Java. Java was also slow and sluggish, but unlike AIR, Java didn’t seem to work. If you got a application running on one machine, you could be sure it didn’t want to run on your next computer.

Back to the topic; Twitter is still going strong, and with the right tools it can continue to grow. The only question they have to sort out is how to make money. I don’t really see the Ad business as the right move right now. And as long as everyone can create a third-party client, such rubbish can easily be removed before it hits your eyes.

You may follow me on Twitter and read my rubbish. It’s mostly in Norwegian, but that might change.

If the string we were looking for first would appear, it would most likely show up somewhere between 5 to 50 times within an hour.It’s hard to guess, really. But we are looking for a problem that won’t solve itself, and the program checking for this problem will continue to write to the log file upon each encounter with the problem.

The way to solve this kind of problem, where we want to ignore the timestamp, is to understand how NimBUS handle incoming alarms. If it receives the same message two or more times, it would just upper the count, instead of creating a new entry in the alarm window.

Lets say our log file looks like this:

Mar 14 14:55:35 ErrorCheck: Oh noes, error detected in A51
Mar 14 14:57:32 ErrorCheck: Oh noes, error detected in A51

We only want to get one alarm, but with a count of two (actually one), not two alarms which is identical except for the timestamp. First, set up logmon to detect the correct line in the log file using regular expressions. The logmon probe supports both pattern recognition and regular expressions, so make sure to use the right one. Regex starts and end with a forward slash, otherwise it assumes pattern is used.

In this case we can use the following simple regex:

/.*ErrorCheck.*/

Of course my regex where more advanced since I had to detect other parameters as well, since the output of our program also had to be checked.

Now, with this regex in place, we are at the point where every entry will be treated uniquely. But logmon also give you the possibility to construct your own message, and to define variables. And that is what we have to do.

We can construct variables both by row or column number. Since this is a single line, we will use the column offset. So, let us create the variables:

prog = column number 4
error = column number 10

This is only a simplified view. The logmon probe has a user interface for this. Right click, add new variable (or something like that).

When this is done, add your own message text in the field saying so:

$prog: Error detected in $error

When this is set as the outbound message, NimBUS will count it instead of creating a new entry in the alarm view each time, since the message now is identical. If the error code changes, a new alarm will be sent.

Short version:

Create your own output message when using NimBUS logmon probe on a log file which has a timestamp.

(This short version was a lot better and could have saved me some time)

From his blog:

Macify me is an attempt to document my first year as a Mac user. The idea is to try out some of the many myths and (mis?)conceptions around Apple, Mac and iEverything. I’ve decided to put myself in the role of the guinea pig and let all the good, the bad and the ugly of Apple Mac get into my life.

In short – macify me !

StatPress is a plug-in for WordPress which allows for real-time statistics about visitors. It reports most popular posts, browsers, search terms used to find your blog and also which search company visits your site most frequently.

In these 7  days I’ve had StatPress installed it has collected the following information about the search companies indexing my site. The results are in percentage of visitors recognized by StatPress as spiders:

• Baidu – 34.2% (344 visits)
• Google – 14.7% (148 visits)
• Yahoo! – 11.4% (115 visits)
• MSN – 7.7% (77 visits)
• Radian6 – 7.5% (75 visits)

The latter one I haven’t even heard about, but apparently they’re working on social media. Or in their own words:

“Radian6 created tools to help remove the barriers to effective social media monitoring and analysis.”

This list may not be 100% accurate since StatPress only lists spiders which is know to it. At least I think that’s what it does, because I have yet to see a single entry from any Norwegian search engine. But then again, maybe they’re not aggressive enough to get onto the list?

The reason for this is most likely that VMware Server is installed as an application on top of an operating system. This underlying operating system might very well use the default SSL port number, 443, for its own web service already.

However; If you’re running VMware Server exclusively, it should be possible to change the port number of the web interface to 443, thus avoiding this issue all together. At least my guess is that this will work.

If you want a free hypervisor, but don’t want the trouble of maintaining an underlying operating system, I would recommend taking a look at VMware ESXi. I’ve written a blog post about it. The only reason, as I can see, to run VMware Server is the hardware support, since the operating system takes care of this. VMware ESXi has limited hardware support by default. But there are ways to get support for SATA controllers, among other things.

Also; You might want to check out Citrix XenServer, which also has been released for free. This is a bare-metal hypervisor, meaning you don’t need an underlying operating system. But I don’t have any experience with XenServer, so I can’t really give any advice or tips yet.

Credit:

[1] http://www.desktop-virtualization.com/2009/02/25/use-infrastructure-client-to-manage-vmware-server/

Apparantly the big money isn’t in the hypervisor anymore, but the technology to manage them. Giving away your product is the best way to get more customers.

Citrix says their hypervisor, XenServer, has a couple of features not available throught VMwares ESXi, at least not without opening your wallet. For instance, ESXi is a 32-bit bare-metal hypervisor, whereas XenServer is a 64-bit bear-metal hypervisor. XenServer can also handle up to 8 virtual CPUs, while ESXi only handles 4.

Citrix has released a list of features included at no costs on their site.