It's official, I am out of love with my Q

This damn bloody thing is absolutely useless. I have never before felt so strongly about a gadget I bought for a ton of money.

So here are the major drawbacks about the Motorola Q on Verizon:

• battery life just simply sucks. Not kidding, 12 hours on the standard battery you consider yourself lucky. I thought the notion of a cell phone was to be able to cut the cord, not be in the charger the whole time. I find myself sweating for any opportunity to charge it.
• the UI freezes completely when it checks for mail. Checking three acounts results in wait times of up to 90 seconds before you can actually see reaction to key input - hope I won't have to dial 911 in an emergency when it checks for email!
  
• CDMA. Need I say more. It won't roam anywhere but continental USA.
  
• no ssh application
  
• no RDP client
  
• it crashes. What the heck?! Why does a phone crash? It's a tested GSM stack, isn't it? I never had a phone before that simply freezes. Aweful!

So it's going up for sale on ebay. No kidding. I'd rather pay 175 dollars in termination fee than to continue on this path of misery and despair.

It took me only 15 minutes to go into the T-Mobile store to get a 30 bucks a month, unlimited Blackberry plan for my 7290 I brought from England. Now I am back to BB it just works. The damn thing just keeps on ticking. Four days no charge, no problem. Now we are talking. I am one with the world again.

Weihnachten 2006

 

Leni ist drei!

 

Ripping CDs

I am going thru stacks and stacks of CDs ripping them to MP3s. I have some quite exotic CDs in my collection and it is great they turn up all of a sudden. Imagine my surprise when I found Steve Winwoods 'Refugees of the Heart' still taped up from the last move. The last move I taped my CDs into blocks was in ... 1995. Yep. That's how long I have not listened to this album. Will I do now? Not sure - but at least I can ;-)

In other late breaking news, it's the holiday - birthday season coming up. Leni's birthday, mine, Thanksgiving, Christmas and then in January more birthdays - Jonah and Donna. Looking forward to some nice parties...

Vom Wert einer Garantie

Auch wenn es 10 Tage gedauert hat, der Volvo hat ein brandneues Getriebe und gekostet hat es nichts. Wie angenehm 3100$ nicht aus eigener Tasche zahlen zu müssen.

"Transmission service - urgent"

How annoying. As if things were not complicated enough, the transmission of our car blew up while driving home from the Salmon festival this saturday. Two hours of waiting for the tow truck and then the suspense of wether the warranty will cover the repair or not. Mind you, those trannies are expensive. Very.

As if that were not enough, our container is nowhere in sight. So the moving company did some sloppy business. Three boxes they just labeled "odds". So US customs were not happy with that. So our stuff is in limbo while they sort it out. How utmost annoying !!! Meanwhile, we are basically still camping in our new home. I have not sat in a sofa or anything comfortable for six weeks. I am starting to question wether this was the right move :-(

Almost there.

OK, last stop enroute to Portland is San Jose. So I learned two new airport codes, PDX and SJC. Many more to come, I am sure.

I kind of indulged myself a bit. Boys need toys, so my new toy is the Motorola Q. One of the nice things, if not the nicest, is EVDO connectivity. In Deutschland, we call it UMTS. Elsewhere, 3G. At any rate, it's the answer to my prayers. Well, not quite, but short of. It gives me my Internet dialtone on the road. But the story is complicated. First of all, my provider Verizon does not want you to use the phone as normal techies would, which is to "tether" it to your PC. So new word learned, "tethering" mean to hook up your phone to your laptop as a dial-up modem. So that is disappointing news. But, 35 bucks later, PDAnet to the rescue, I have a dial-up connection wherevever I have a signal on the phone. We'll see how it performs. So far, I get the promised 700-800 kbit.

For voice, I gotta say it is really bad. You get hilarious voice quality. I'd chuck it right away for that, but I can't. The other reason why I'd like to thrust the Q into the orbit is battery life. Blimey, this thing sucks out a battery pack faster than you can say "charger". It comes with a battery that last, well, not quite a day. The extended battery lasts, well, almost 24 hours. What is up with that?! Can you guys at Microsoft and Motorola please figure this out? My Blackberry 7290 ran FOR A WEEK without charging. Get with the program, guys. This is horrible. At least the phone charges on the USB while connected.

So anyway, this phone hooks me up while we get our life sorted. Which brings me to the next point, a nice home we found. This brings to an end three weeks of living in and out of hotels. So here it is.

What else. Well, half an hour to kill while waiting for my flight. I figure this is going to be a regular occurence. I am back in the field. "Field Consulting Engineer" it says on my new business card. Alright, off to collect frequent flyer miles.

So my boss told me today we have a new customer in Germany with offices in the US and Germany. Guess what I need to do. Yep, go to Germany for the install. Why did I migrate to the US? Only to fly back to Germany to work? I don't know, but it will be fun.

P.S.: Notice the wet concrete in the picture? ;-) Oregon is supposedly rainy. I'll see.

Leaving England

The Siekmann bunch is hanging out at the Marriot hotel at the airport for one night only. We thought it is much better to catch a plane from Heathrow at 6:30 in the morning if you hang out at a hotel close to the airport instead of vacating the corporate housing apartment in a rush. Notwithstanding the potential excitement of a taxi may or may not showing up.

Homelessness is only fun with money. And even then, I prefer having my own home anytime over having a hotel room or two. Anyway, the curtain is closing. We will be leaving England for good tomorrow morning. I wish I could say I am exhilarated, but I am mostly worn out. I bet when I smell that San Francisco air I'll be in better shape soon.

Thanks for being nice to me, England. And thanks for not burglarizing my place. Thanks for clotted cream. Ale. Fish and chips. Thanks for Hatch Ride, my colleagues and the nice people we met. Thanks for an outstanding experience that none of us will ever forget.

Good bye, England.

Standing guard for the Queen

Windsor castle in August. 

Das Haus ist leer.

Drei Monate Vorbereitung kulminierten diese Woche an zwei Umzugstagen. Als Resultat der Arbeit ist der Haushalt verpackt und in einem 20ft Seecontainer verstaut. Alles, wirklich alles, was nicht in Kisten ist, ist in Luftpolsterfolie eingewickelt. Und der Container ist absolut voll. Bis zu den Türen.

Dann ist der Container verplombt worden. Den sehen wir frühestens in sechs Wochen wieder.

http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=DGTX

Da ist unser Zeug drauf. Hoffentlich geht das Schiff nicht unter.

... und er ist weg...

Viele Menschen werden ja recht sentimental, wenn es um ihre Autos geht und ich werde den Verdacht nicht los, ich bin genau so einer. Ich hab den Volvo jetzt sechs Jahre gefahren und er ist mir schon mit seinem Character ans Herz gewachsen. Nichtsdesdotrotz, er musste weg. Er passt schlicht nicht in den Container, braucht US-emissions, neues dies und neues das und das ist es alles nicht wert. Also bin ich aller Voraussicht nach ab September wieder VW-Fahrer.

Wie verkauft man heutzutage ein Auto, dass zuviel Sprit verbraucht? Auf ebay. Anders geht es nicht, vor allem nicht, wenn man fuer den Verkauf weniger als eine Woche Zeit hat. Also habe ich eine Auktion auf ebay gestartet, bin mit dem Auto nach Wuppertal gefahren und was soll ich sagen, am naechsten Tag kam jemand mit einem kleinen Sack voll Geld und nahm das Auto mit. Kein Aerger, kein Theater, hier ist das Geld, hier sind die Schluessel und Papiere, Danke, Wiedersehen. Wenn das ein Zeichen ist, dass jetzt alles einfacher wird, ich nehms gerne als solches.

SIX!!!

For a good half a year we got one question : "When is my birthday, how many days?!". Today was her sixth and she thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Happy birthday, darlin'. 

T-30

Soviel Tage noch, dann sitzen wir im Flugzeug nach SFO. Der Monat wird spannend.

 

Unsere ersten Erdbeeren

Selbst gepflanzt, zum ersten Mal. Keine überragende Ausbeute. Hat mich an Asterix und Obelix erinnert. "Der Kelch" war es glaube ich, Miraculix ließ sich Erdbeeren für den Zaubertrank bringen und dann ... :-D 

Der Countdown ... läuft wieder weiter

Die US-Botschaft in London ist ein Hochsicherheitstrakt. Das Gebäude ist ringsum mit Betonbarrieren abgesichert, ein Zaun sichert das Gebäude, Zugang nur mit gutem Grund, das ist alles ziemlich paranoid. Man fühlt sich aber dadurch nicht sicherer, irgendwie. Die einzigen englischen Polizisten mit Waffen habe ich in London, in der US-Botschaft gesehen. Aber ich schweife ab.

An einem "guten" Tag gehen da 800 Leute rein und raus hat mir ein Wachmann gesagt. Gleichzeitig sind sicher immer gut 300 Leute in der Wartehalle, wo ein topmodernes Nummernsystem mit x-Plasmaschirmen die Nummern aufsagt. Trotz modernem System redet man am Schluß aber immer noch mit einem Menschen. Merkwürdige Fragen gab es aber entgegen meinen Befürchtungen nur eine. Wer denn "Sascha" sein, wurde ich gefragt. Einigermaßen verduzt ich: "Me."

Die Staatsangehörigkeit im Visum ist jetzt GER, der Umschlag ist auch wieder versiegelt, alles wieder gut. Es kann weitergehen. Schwitz.

Bike gang

 

English summer

 

Der countdown läuft...

Schockschwerenot. Letztes update vom Mail, ohje. Es passiert viel.

Seit Januar diesen Jahres läuft meine greencard application. Zunächst einmal war das "auf Vorrat" angeleiert worden, der Prozess läuft nämlich in zwei Schritten ab. In meinem Fall "sponsort" meine Frau meine Bewerbung, das erleichtert die ganze Sache natürlich enorm. Was nicht heißen soll, es wäre dadurch einfach gewesen. Ich schreibe später nochmal ein bischen darüber, wie das alles abläuft, aber jetzt, auf den letzten Metern vor dem Ziel passierten zwei Dinge, die so nicht hätten passieren dürfen: Auf dem Visa ist meine Staatsangehörigkeit als "GRBN" angegeben worden. Da hätte bestimmt sowas wie "GRMN" hingehört. Das allein wäre ja schon ein Grund gewesen, zurück zur Botschaft zu fahren, aber nein, leider, ... Wenn nämlich das Visa vom Kurier angeliefert wird, dann sollte man das gelieferte Paket besser NICHT aufmachen. "IMPORTANT NOTICE to be opened only by the Unites States Immigration or Public Health Service Officer." Tja, nächste Woche fahre ich wieder zur Botschaft, um den Umschlag wieder versiegeln zu lassen. Wieder fast ein ganzer Tag verschwendet. Noch ca. einen Monat bis zur "Ausreise".

23 minutes of fame

Donna & Jill were interviewed for BBC Radio Berkshire about Breastfeeding. Check out the audio!

Leni.

 

The three beauties.

 

Heisser Cocoa muß gelöffelt werden

 

Open smile.

 

London Museum, next to Barbican.

 

Cake display.

Mikado.

 

Undivided attention.

 

Julia's first permanents - before and after

Update: lower left #1 is gone as well! 

Fun with Linux and 1&1

Warning: There is absolutely no point in doing what I did other than for the fun of it ;-)

Warning: Repartitioning a server remotely may not be sound advice, foobar your system and foul up your language

I am hosting some servers at the german hosting provider 1&1. Naturally, over time servers age and they run out of steam and are being decommissioned.

So one of these aged servers running Windows 2003 Web Edition was ripe for experimentation. I run Windows servers for historical reasons, and this proved to be a good opportunity to replace it with Linux.

Now, this server sits somewhere in a datacenter in Karlsruhe, Germany and I have no local access to it. In fact, I am writing this as I am at home in Crowthorne in the UK. So I have no USB. No CD. No keyboard. Not even a floppy. So how on earth can you install Linux on a PC running Windows that you don't have access to?!

The answer turned out to be surprisingly easy (although it took me yesterday night until 1AM and half an hour this morning to figure out why GRUB was not redirecting the output to the console). The only piece of remote management that I had access to was a serial console. That was enough.

Remote installation of Opensuse 10 on a 1&1 hosted Windows 2003 server

Installing GRUB for NT

First, you need to grab a copy of GRUB for NT, which can be found here : http://grub4dos.freespaces.com/

You need to unpack the archive and copy

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 149000 2005-12-14 01:44 grldr

to the root of your first disk / first partition (that should be c:\ normally). We want GRUB to be available to the Windows boot menu, so we need to create a menu.lst and modify boot.ini. This is a system, read-only, hidden file, so you need to attrib -s -h -r \boot.ini to make it writable. Once you did that, use notepad.exe to add an entry to the menu like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
redirect=COM1
redirectbaudrate=57600
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /fastdetect /redirect /NoExecute=OptOut
C:\grldr="Start Sascha Siekmanns GRUB"

Create the Linux /boot directory as c:\boot

Now, we need to create the Linux /boot directory. This is where Opensuse comes into play. You need to locate the first CD of the Opensuse ISOs, namely SUSE-10.0-CD-OSS-i386-GM-CD1.iso. Mount the ISO to extract the boot directory if it, e.g.

mount -t iso9660 -o loop /media/usbdisk/suse10iso/SUSE-10.0-CD-OSS-i386-GM-CD1.iso /mnt

So, copy the content of /mnt./boot and its subdirectories to the primary partition (typically, c:\boot).

Now you probably wonder how the heck did he copy those files over and the answer is CYGWIN. I had installed CYGWIN on the Windows box and therefore had sshd running on it. So from my Linux box I just scp'ed the files over. In case you do not have that installed (very likely ;-) you can install daemon tools, a freeware CD emulator that can mount ISOs under Windows. You can find it at http://www.daemon-tools.cc

Thinking about it further, I realized how much of a pain this is - a much easier way to read ISOs under Windows is to install WinRAR, which happens to be able to open ISO files ;-)

Creating the GRUB menu.lst

Anyway, now on to the GRUB menu. We will have to create a valid menu.lst entry for GRUB in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The /boot/grub/menu.lst entry should look like this:

serial --unit=0 --speed=57600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal serial
default=0
timeout=5

title linux
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/linux console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600 ramdisk_size=65536 acpi=off noapic manual=0 insmod=via-rhine ssh=1 sshpassword=opensuse! install=nfs://212.227.76.210/home/root/suse
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/loader/initrd

A couple of things to note here. First off, one could use VNC for a graphical setup. Security of VNC is weak (non-existant) and this would be an initial compromise of the system you would not be able to recover from. So that is why I opted for ssh based setup.

Obviously, you also need a network based source containing the installation images, in my case I run my own NFS server on the network and serve the ISO this way. You will need to modify the install= line to something of your choosing.

You may have noticed I did not add any network parameters such as IP address and gateway above. This is unneccessary as the DHCP server at 1&1 is MAC address based, so I will always get my primary IP they have on record for me.

More information about the setup line can be found here: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Remote_Installation_of_SUSE_LINUX

OK, quick checklist here:

GRUB for NT installed and copied to c:\

c:\boot copied over from Opensuse /boot

boot.ini modified to include GRUB

menu.lst in c:\boot\grub\menu.lst configured

Booting up for installation

Right, ready to hit the road! Connect to your server local console using the "Serial console", so ssh to sercon.pureserver.info with your username and password and using putty or plain ol' ssh and reboot the server. Magically, this should appear:

Please select the operating system to start:


Windows Server 2003, Web [EMS enabled]
Start Sascha Siekmanns GRUB

Use the up and down arrow keys to move the highlight to your choice.
Press ENTER to choose.











For troubleshooting and advanced startup options for Windows, press F8.

Select option two ...

After a moment of silence ...

GNU GRUB version 0.97 (640K lower / 515008K upper memory)

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| linux |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Use the ^ and v keys to select which entry is highlighted.
Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the
commands before booting, or 'c' for a command-line.



Woohoo! Hit enter...
Booting 'linux'

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/linux console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600 ramdisk_size=65536 a
cpi=off noapic manual=0 insmod=via-rhine ssh=1 sshpassword=opensuse! install=nf
s://212.227.76.210/home/root/suse
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1e00, size=0x176657]
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/loader/initrd
[Linux-initrd @ 0x1f108000, 0x6d7854 bytes]

Linux version 2.6.13-15-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.0.2 20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 Tue Sep 13 14:56:15 UTC 2005
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 00000000000a0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000001f7f0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000001f7f0000 - 000000001f7f3000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 000000001f7f3000 - 000000001f800000 (ACPI data)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)

lotsa output ...

>>> SUSE Linux installation program v1.9.16 (c) 1996-2005 SUSE Linux Products GmbH <<<
Starting hardware detection...
Activating usb devices... done
Searching for info file...
Sending DHCP request to eth0...
Loading Installation System (65750 kB) - 100%
starting udev... ok
starting hald... ok
starting syslogd (logging to /dev/tty4)... ok
starting klogd... ok
sshd found, prepare remote login
generating SSH keys ...
Generating /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.
Generating public/private rsa1 key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.
Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
fe:88:03:17:c4:7d:9e:fc:47:d5:ac:94:5d:b8:b6:35 root@82.165.39.125
Generating /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.
Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
42:b8:d4:72:19:37:e5:b5:8f:2c:90:58:e9:b5:74:f3 root@82.165.39.125
Generating /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.
Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
f8:fd:dc:3e:36:5c:cd:29:9c:24:e6:e8:0c:ad:9a:c7 root@82.165.39.125
setting root pwd to 'opensuse!'
Starting SSH daemon ...

eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
link/ether 00:40:ca:73:97:50 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 82.165.39.125/32 brd 82.165.39.125 scope global eth0

*** sshd has been started ***


*** login using 'ssh -X root@82.165.39.125' ***
*** run 'yast' to start the installation ***

Connect from client to finish install

OK, off to connect using ssh and check it it really worked...

galadriel:/mnt # ssh demucmail01.scon.de -l root
WARNING: RSA key found for host demucmail01.scon.de
in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:52
RSA key fingerprint 98:6f:f2:9c:c5:89:20:a3:c1:11:ec:17:aa:c5:a4:b6.
The authenticity of host 'demucmail01.scon.de (82.165.39.125)' can't be established
but keys of different type are already known for this host.
DSA key fingerprint is 42:b8:d4:72:19:37:e5:b5:8f:2c:90:58:e9:b5:74:f3.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'demucmail01.scon.de,82.165.39.125' (DSA) to the list of known hosts.
root@demucmail01.scon.de's password:

SUSE Linux Installation

Welcome to the inst-sys...
Linux 82.165.39.125 2.6.13-15-default #1 Tue Sep 13 14:56:15 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
/root
Probing connected terminal...

Initializing virtual console...

Found an xterm terminal on /dev/pts/0 (135 columns x 60 lines).

run yast to start the installation

inst-sys:~ #

All finished

Fantastic. It worked. Have fun installing Linux over Windows remotely ... Another one bites the dust...

:-)

Some really nice wallpapers : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Featured_desktop_backgrounds

I am currently looking at sunset on Mars. Awesome!!!

Just checking out drivel... Looks really nice.

And supports formatting, as well. Good job!

Fat happy smile.

 

Jonah's 8. Geburtstag

Alles Gute, mein Sohn.