The Fedora logo

Anyway, this drive is a SATA drive – SATA2, but it has a jumper setting for backwards compatibility with SATA1; my motherboard (an old-ish Asus A8N5X) is a SATA1 board. I brought it home, burned my openSuSE 11.1 installation DVD, shut the system down, plugged the hard drive in, and booted back up. I noticed that the drive wasn’t listed at the BIOS POST screen. I booted from the DVD, went to install it, and found that the drive wasn’t listed in the partition manager. Not really a surprise, since it wasn’t listed in the BIOS.

I shut the system down and tried my other SATA ports – none of them worked. So it’s looking like either the hard drive is bad, or my motherboard is screwed up and the onboard SATA controller isn’t working. I got a PCI SATA controller (some no-name card based on the VIA VT6421A chipset) from a friend, hooked it up to that, and the installer was able to see it. Additionally, my motherboard supports boot from PCI – sweet. So I run the installer, set up my /boot/, /, /home/, and swap partitions, and tell it to install GRUB to the MBR on the SATA drive.

Once it’s done getting all the packages installed, it falls to a black screen. No terminal, no GUI, no power save mode on the monitor, just an empty screen. I wait a little while, and there’s no indication of activity, so I do a hard reset. It tries to boot…no luck. So I tried it again, this time installing to the MBR on the old PATA drive and setting GRUB up with an option to boot from the new hard drive’s root partition. Again, no luck.

At this point I’m sick of screwing with it, I figured that the installer hanging with that black screen was screwing up the GRUB install – so I tinkered for a little bit until I got it to boot from the old openSuSE 10.2 installation, downloaded the Fedora 11 installer, and went to town. I still couldn’t get it to boot from the new drive. So I looked online and found that a lot of people have had trouble booting from these VT6421A-based cards, and decided to look through my BIOS for some PCI boot options.

Lo and behold, my onboard SATA ports were all disabled. I shut the system down, removed the card, plugged the new drive into the port marked “SATA 1″ (out of 4) on the motherboard, and booted from the Fedora 11 DVD…again. BIOS showed the new drive this time. When I got to the installer’s partition manager, I saw that the new drive was still being considered the second drive – sdb. Well, I planned on removing the old PATA drive, and when I did, the identifier would switch – that would be a problem.

So I shut down, pulled the old drive out, and reran the installer. It went through everything without a hitch – while it did this, I dug out my USB enclosure for PATA drives and stuck the old 160 in that. When Fedora was all up and running, I just copied everything off of the old drive, and I’m in the process of going through and dealing with it all. Some things are being deleted, the music that was freshly downloaded is being compressed further (LAME ABR112 for the win), etc.

It’s taking me a while to get Fedora 11 configured the way I like it. KDE4.2 takes some getting used to when I’ve been on 3.5 for years. Compiz is pretty much totally out of development, so after using it for a while and seeing some of the stability issues, I gave that up pretty quickly. I finally got MediaTomb and my P2P file utilities fully functional when I realized there was a firewall and disabled it. I still can’t get the Samba server running though – when I try to run /etc/init.d/smb start or /etc/init.d/nmb start it fails, outputting the following to the log:

[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] smbd/server.c:main(1256)
  smbd version 3.3.2-0.33.fc11 started.
  Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2009
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] lib/messages_local.c:messaging_tdb_init(96)
  ERROR: Failed to initialise messages database: No such file or directory
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] lib/messages.c:messaging_init(204)
  messaging_tdb_init failed: NT_STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] smbd/server.c:smbd_messaging_context(101)
  Could not init smbd messaging context.

I can’t, for the life of me, figure that one out. It can connect to Samba shares fine though, and that’s good enough for now. The last thing that I was having problems with was finding a good media player – I always loved Amarok, but Amarok 2 sucks. It’s got a laundry list of missing features – no software equalizer, no collection management, severe lack of configuration options, etc. So I figured I’d install good old Amarok 1.4 – I enabled a Fedora 9 yum repository that contained an Amarok 1.4 RPM, and tried to install it – no go. First of all, removing Amarok 2 was a chore (PackageKit and its KDE front end, KPackageKit, aren’t all that great). Then, the Amarok 1.4 RPM required a bunch of older packages that would have just been completely infeasible to get going.

However, googling "amarok 1.5 fedora 11" and clicking the first result got me to another blog post – "Amarok 1.4 for Fedora 11" on "On the third side" – apparently this person had some issues of his own with Amarok 2, and decided to forwardport 1.4 to Fedora 11. Thank you very much, my friend~

And that’s the…experience…that this has been. I’m planning on trying openSuSE 11.2 when it’s released, so we’ll see how that goes. At least this time, switching from one operating system to another won’t take several days.

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Apparently the kid who was robbed is one of my stepsister’s friends. This is a pretty ridiculous story of Internet tough guys – sounds like Anon’s kind of justice to me.

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So, I opened up my service manual, figured out exactly how the sound got from the head unit to the speakers, and went outside to get started. First things first; I disconnected the negative battery terminal and pulled out the head unit – nothing new there. I also pulled the back speakers out, which was real easy; took a look at the connections on the left rear speaker, noticed some loose aluminum leads sticking off one of them, and pulled it off. Then I came upstairs and copied down the diagram for the head unit’s wiring harness – where each wire goes and what it does.

Went back down, investigated things a bit, and noticed that there was some speaker wire running into the driver side door. Hmm, that’s a little odd, that should be in the stock wire housing, rather than next to it. Look over toward the center, by the pedals, and there’s some identical wire. I pulled on it a little bit and found that the other end didn’t lead anywhere. Hey, maybe that’s part of the problem.

The passenger side of my car, minus one seat

Go down, yank the seat, get the amp off (also real easy, it’s mounted on two bolts and held on by two nuts), and take a look to make sure all the wiring looks solid. It does. So I come back up, copy down the wire harness diagram for that as well (26 leads instead of 20, that’s 33% more fun!), and go down to see if I can find any obvious issues. I can’t. Then that purple wire that’s pigtailing off of the brown one (lead #1, switched power) behind the head unit catches my eye. I’d really like to know what that is.

The path that this mystery purple wire follows

At this point I decided to go for a drive without the passenger seat in – just for fun. I plugged the head unit and amplifiers’ harnesses back in, reconnected the battery, and went. I found this odd side effect that my blinkers didn’t work, but I think that was because I didn’t reconnect the hazard light switch (it’s mounted on the head unit’s facade), because they work fine now.

When I got back, I decided it was time to do something about the extraneous wiring going throughout my car. In the back, near the sub, there was a fairly heavy-duty white cable that grounded against one of the screws under the back seat – except that it was cut roughly two feet from the end. So it was just a useless piece of aluminum and rubber. Pulled that out. There were also four pigtail connectors (with no wires leading off of them) connected to four of the amplifier’s wires – pulled those off and wrapped the spots they were connected to with electrical tape.

That white grounding cable that was cut a couple feet from the connector

Under the back seat, I discovered that it was ziptied together with this thick silver cable. I reasoned it out that this couldn’t be serving any useful purpose either and I wanted it gone. So I got the pair of them out from under the back seat, up front through the floor, and out from under the carpet. Finally, these damn things are gone. I’m decently confident that the purple wire may have been the cause of my battery drain.

White and purple cables, showing the white cable's connectors

The bits of silver speaker wire that were visible before removing anything

Finally, I decided that it was time to call it a day. I pulled out the vacuum, got the trunk rug real good (it’s still a bit discolored from boxes of cat litter, but I’ll get it taken care of), got the entire passenger side floor since I had the seat out, everything. Then I remounted the amp to the bottom of the seat, reconnected all the wire harnesses, bolted the seat back in, and finished up. Just for fun I took a picture of the resulting pile of extraneous bullshit that came out of my car, and of the nice clean passenger side with the seat back in place. I didn’t manage to get the speakers working, but at least I got some garbage out, and possibly fixed the drain.

After eight hours of fun today, I leave you with these beauties

The passenger side (taken from the driver side) after vacuuming everything and bolting the seat back in

The pile of extraneous shit that came out of my car today

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Well, it was pretty nice out today, so I decided today was the day. I went outside, popped open the hood locks, pulled the socket off the passenger side low beam, connected the negative battery terminal, turned them on, and stuck the volt meter in the socket. Lo and behold, it’s definitely got juice. So I pull the whole bulb-and-socket assembly out (a pain in the ass with the stupid X clip setup they have going on…even worse putting it back in), pop in a new bulb, and connect it before putting it back in the lamp housing – turn it on, and it works. Son of a bitch, that’s two bulbs at $20 each (Sylvania Silverstars – 4100k) that lasted maybe a month and a half.

So, I’m going to end up switching to HIDs as soon as I get a check in. I’ll be buying them from Retro Solutions, LLC – recommended by the vast majority of Club RSX members. Obviously, low beams will be first – I’m thinking 5000k for those, then when I do the high beams, 4300k. Eventually I’ll also do the fog lights with 3000k bulbs.

Anyway, I’m posting this here in the hope that if anyone else buys and RSX and has the same headlight issue, they’ll find this and know that the real issue is, the RSX goes through halogen low beams like underwear. Even if they’re very new bulbs, even if they both went out at the same time – at least try switching the bulbs.

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Sea Foam - a deep clean for your engine

Yep…I’m back again this time I’m here to post a series of videos me and Chris took when we Sea Foamed the Acura. When we did it to the Nissan, it was both a really cool process and it yielded impressive results (as far as power/economy are concerned), so we decided to take videos of it this time – both to document it and to help instruct people who desire to try it themselves.

Keep in mind that we don’t pussyfoot around. The Sea Foam manufacturers recommend only doing it in the crankcase (to treat your oil) and fuel tank (to treat fuel system and upper cylinders) for the average consumer. However, we do it the way the mechanics do it for a tune-up – both of the above, plus direct induction to the cylinders for a nice, deep clean. This is a bit more complicated – not to mention fun – so if you’re not good with cars or, at least, technology in general, I don’t recommend this. However, if you are, and you’re simply looking for help on how to do it, view on.

Note that I accept in no way whatsoever any responsibility for damages that result by the viewing of this series of videos.

Seafoaming a 2002 Acura RSX Type-S (Part 3) – hosted by MetaCafe
This is the fun part. The Sea Foam has been induced into the engine via the brake booster line, and allowed to sit for fifteen minutes or so. It got dark pretty quickly at this time of year

In this one, I start it up, and rev it up and down for a while until the Sea Foam has been burned out of the system. All the white smoke is completely normal; in fact, we thought it was pretty cool the first time we’d done it, to the Nissan, which is what inspired us to record this one.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the whole thing – and I hope it helps if you’re planning on Sea Foaming your own car, especially if it’s an RSX. Also, if you really enjoyed them, click the links below each video and rate them high

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For those of you who don’t know, net neutrality is the name that (basically) the collective Internet community has given themselves in the battle against broadband ISPs. ISPs feel that they should be able to charge other service providers (most notably, website owners and/or web hosts) what basically amounts to an extortion fee in order to provide their service either at all, or at full quality.

One option that the ISP coalition tried to pass off as “fair” was that services who didn’t pay the fee would simply get dial-up level bandwidth. Yeah, real fair. They already make entirely too much money from their subscribers; they can’t be charging service providers as well and getting it from both ends.

And another thing, they don’t seem to realize that having the Internet be a freely usable trade medium is good for the world as a whole. When people spend money, it helps the economy. Not to mention everybody involved is happy; the purchaser has something he didn’t have before, and the seller has money that he didn’t have before. There’s no reason for the megacorporations to cash in on every fucking thing that happens in the country.

Anyway, here’s the link: SaveTheInternet.com. It has all sorts of resources, ranging from simple information up to a link to E-mail your senator. Check it out if you weren’t already aware; this effects you.

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Holy shit, fuck Comcast’s customer service. In a study done, they were rated lower than the IRS’s service, and now I can see why. The reps are (mostly) nice people, and are generally pretty good about providing you with at least semi-correct answers in a somewhat timely manner, but the overall service is just appalling – take a look at “Service’s Sorry State” to see what I mean. How, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

Let’s see, three Saturdays ago (May 31 as it were) I stopped receiving E-mail, for some reason. I wasn’t really sure why, at first I just talked it up to a slow Saturday evening, but then I realized I wasn’t even getting any spam. And, while my spam filters are good, they’re not perfect. Then, pretty soon, I realized I was only getting my Logwatch, crontab, and other locally-supplied E-mails (such as notifications of pingbacks on this blog).

So, come Tuesday or so, I realized there was in fact a major issue. I called up Comcast, and they told me they had blocked port 25, incoming and outgoing – which I had surmised on my own using some fancy (or, rather, very basic) nmap work. The first (and, of course, most obvious) proposal was that there is spam being sent out of my network by some spyware/adware. This is, of course, impossible, due to my lack of Microshaft and even Apple products, but they told me I could switch my outgoing port to 587 on the relay and the system would pick up on my lack of attempts to send out spam within a couple days and unblock me. I was fine with this, I figured a couple days wasn’t bad, and I could still send an E-mail to all my customers, telling them I couldn’t receive and to call me with any issues they had.

Well, a couple days went by. And it wasn’t fixing itself. So I called them up again and got a much more helpful tech – he said that I was receiving too high a volume of E-mail for residential service, so port 25 was blocked. I naturally requested a manual unblock, which they said was impossible. Long story short here, they roped me into upgrading to business class – actually a pretty good deal, $12 more per month for 24/7 priority tech support, free house calls, no blocks, and doubled upstream bandwidth. Yes, doubled upstream.

So they told me I’d have to upgrade to a business-class modem, which had a built-in router. I was alright with this, I figured I’d just put it in front of my normal WRT54G (v8, yay dd-wrt) and either do a global TCP/UDP port forward or just throw it in the DMZ. Seems simple, right? Well, let’s see, first they came out and didn’t knock loud enough, then (when I called back a few days later) claimed to have left a message on the landline telling me to reschedule. They did not, however, leave that message – apparently I was just supposed to pull this information out of the ether using my necromantic divining powers.

Anyway, I rescheduled, and figured all was well. They set me up with an emergency appointment and whatnot the next morning, since I hadn’t gotten E-mail in about two and a half weeks. Nobody shows up. They had specific instructions to call my cell phone number when in the area, but I didn’t get a call, nobody showed up, nothing. So I call them up again that afternoon, even more pissed off than before, and as it turns out they never assigned the job to a field agent. Hey, that’s cool, how about you give me one now asshole. They were real swamped and “couldn’t get anyone out till the next morning”, so he gave me an appointment for 0700-0900.

Well, he (a little old Asian dude who’s been here before – very cool guy) finally shows up at like 1530. I don’t need him to install it, of course, just to drop it off and call in to activate it. All goes well, the guy drops off an SMC8014, and I get it up and running one I make a call to activate it (had to do it myself, no big deal), so I decide to do a little poking and prodding to find out the default admin username/password (cusadmin/highspeed in case you’re looking for it) so I can do the port forwarding/DMZ deal.

Well, I find it, and try to take care of it, but it won’t do the forwarding properly. Or the DMZ. And for some reason, my internal router (the WRT54G) won’t show up in the “list of connected computers”. WTF, right? Well, I find out that the box you want to forward to has to have a static IP – and that for it to show up in the list, I’d have to set the thing to stop ignoring ICMP – forgot I’d had it set to, and it makes sense, so I did both of those. The SMC8014 defaults to a class C 10.1.10.0/255.255.255.0 network (lolwut? 10.* is supposed to be class A personal address space), with a DHCP range of .10-.199. So, I gave the router .200, figuring that would be fine, the extra space was reserved for static IPs or VPNs or something.

It didn’t work. I tried going below the DHCP range, expanding the DHCP range (which returned an error saying I was overlapping the VPN range, which was completely hidden, more on this later), and going at the top and bottom (inclusive) of the DHCP range. None of it worked. No matter what I did, this damn thing just wouldn’t do double NAT forwarding – and the DMZ was just completely nonfunctional. So I called up the 24/7 number. Again. And after running some tests, he figures the SMC8014 is probably malfunctioning. So they arrange to send out another one. Set me up with an appointment and everything.

Mind you, now my server is completely down. Websites aren’t available. DNS isn’t available. FTP isn’t even available. And, in addition, during this process they log into my new router. Yes, they have a higher-level administrative password for it. No, you don’t have complete control over the router running in your own home or office. And no, you can’t find the superuser login. Period. If you can find it, I commend you. This secret is better-guarded than the fucking holy grail, I swear.

Well, once again, no call, no show. So I call in…again. And set up an appointment…again. The guy comes and swaps it out, tells me the new one is a tech support one – another SMC8014, but they use it for diagnosis, so it should work fine, and it’s already activated. I get an IP address, and all goes well, so I try the port forwarding again. No luck. So now I figure I’ll just try putting the server behind the SMC rather than both routers. I didn’t want to do this – I wanted guests’ boxen to connect to the SMC and have myself still protected by the Linksys in case of spyware/etc. But I figured I had no choice now.

It still doesn’t forward. Port forwarding, DMZ, static routing, you name it – none of it works. So now I call them up and tell them I want a standalone modem. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it doesn’t protect me. I’m a fucking technician, I have other firewalls and security in place. So they arrange to come out today. This morning, in fact, another 0700-0900 dropoff. Well, they show up, and they tried to call the landline again. Even though I can clearly see on the receipt they left on the door, it said to call my cell phone, and included the number. So I call up again and tell them I want a fucking dropoff. Today. This is ridiculous.

They give me a 1300-1700 dropoff. The techs arrived around 1630, within the bounds, and recommended that I not do a self-install because the time I’ll spend on the phone activating it could potentially be quite horrendous. They said having them stay and activate it wouldn’t be any charge to me, so I was fine with it. Ironic, though, that they suggested activating it themselves – and you’ll see why in a minute.

They come upstairs, I give them the standard “watch your head, it’s a midget house, hey watch your head again” spiel, and as soon as they walk in my bedroom they’re moderately awed – one of them said “hey, this is my kind of room”, and the other said “hey, this looks like my room”. I lulz’d. So I hooked up the new modem, which supports both the phone service and the 16Mbps service, so my Comcast-supplied hardware won’t have to change any time in the foreseeable future. And then they call in to activate it.

For 45 minutes we sat there and shot the shit about hardware, games, you name it – again, very cool techs – while the one guy was on hold. It was, in fact, horrendous. Finally, he had the other guy call in through the front end (the same number I’d call) and 10 minutes later it was registered to my account and all I had to do was call in to do some MAC authentication so they could leave. I can’t blame them for wanting to leave, Christ, a simple dropoff turned into an hour-long ordeal.

So I called in and activated it, all went smoothly, and now I’m finally back up and running. Finally. Twenty-four fucking days without E-mail. About a week without any server capabilities at all. And that, my friends, is why I say, fuck Comcast’s customer service.

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The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 which includes more than 200 new features specific to openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install, faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, and KDE 4, GNOME 2.22, Compiz Fusion, and much more.

I’m downloading my ISO now – it looks totally sweet. I should have my box running this by the end of the weekend.

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