Category Archives: electronics

Ubuntu on a VIA MM3500 – 2 Terabyte NAS RAID1 server for $350

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Sometimes raw power is the enemy of efficiency. For example, many car buyers opt for powerful engines for their cars, only to get disappointing fuel economy around town, where that power is not needed. A smaller engine that might have to work harder when pushed but runs much closer to peak efficiency in everyday driving would be more suitable. Likewise, many computer buyers get machines with high end CPUs that when doing mundane tasks such as email and web browsing spend more then 90% of their time idle, but still burning 90 to 200 Watts. A less powerful CPU might get the same job done drawing less than 50 Watts. This easily adds up to hundreds of kilowatt hours (kWh) wasted during the computer’s lifespan.

Yes, sometimes less is more. I took this philosophy to heart when I bought a Toyota Prius, which has only a modest 1.5 litre engine, drawing on electric motors and a battery for peak loads. I also recently purchased a sub-$70 motherboard with a 1.5 GHz VIA CPU that typical desktop CPUs will run circles around when running under full load, but at a cost in electricity and money. This board will take over the workload of multiple, more energy-hungry machines that have been sitting mostly idle doing what they’re doing every day. It’s powerful enough and economical, drawing a maximum of about 20W. Typical desktop chips have a maximum power draw of 45 W, 65W or more.

MM3500 - VIA C7-D 1.5GHz, CN896 + VT8237A

(Click here to see a full set of pictures of the upgrade)

Five months ago the largest and most important hard disk on my LAN died after only 15 months. Even though I could still rescue the most crucial data off it before the drive finally went offline forever, it was a very close shave and I lost some data. I realized I needed to move my data to a RAID, a “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives”. It’s a system in which data is transparently written to multiple drives for reliability. If any one drive dies you can still read your data and recover gracefully from the failure after swapping the dead drive for a replacement drive. This is relatively easy to do in Linux, in fact the server that hosts this website uses RAID too.

Last weekend I set up a machine for about $350 in total as a network attached storage server (NAS) under Linux with adequate processing power for other tasks. I equipped it with 2 GB of RAM and twin 1 TB mirrored hard disk drives. The main expense were the two drives (WD10EADS “GreenPower”, 5400 rpm, $110 each), whose cost made up about 2/3 of the total investment. The other parts were the Micro-ATX VIA MM3500 motherboard ($70), two 1 GB DDR2 PC5300 memory modules ($25 each), SATA cables (one comes with the motherboard) and Molex to SATA power adapter cables, as my older ATX SFX power supply (PSU) did not have the right connectors yet. Also, the motherboard uses a 24-pin power connector while the PSU only had a 20-pin plug, but the four extra pins are not required for this board and the plug is keyed to only fit in the proper place.

The case that was to house these components used to be an eMachine 366i, a cheap minitower I had bought in 1999 for about $450 and which had served me well for many years. I once had to replace the power supply for $25 with a FSP180-50NIV-H (dead PSUs are the most common problem in eMachines) and otherwise only upgraded the hard disks, the last one being a 60 GB IBM DeskStar that failed in 2007. By now the 366i’s Celeron 366 MHz CPU was slow, it’s 256 MB (the maximum supported by the board) inadequate for modern operating systems and it neither supported SATA drives nor any drives greater than 128 GB. It also didn’t have any USB2 ports. Still, the replacement power supply was relatively recent and the case big enough for this project.

Since the RAID drives had to be online 24/7 for my spam processing I was looking for a motherboard that used as little power as possible while being adequate for running the file server and spam filter. After considering various Intel and AMD desktop boards (including the Intel Atom processor 230 Intel 945GC Mini ITX desktop board) I finally came across the VIA MM3500. As mentioned above, this board includes a VIA C7-D CPU running at 1.5 GHz.

While that VIA CPU is even slower than an Intel Atom (which is not exactly known for its speed) its price of under 7000 Japanese yen (less than US$70) was attractive and both the CPU and the chipset draw little power. While the CPU on the Intel Atom board only sips power, its chipset is fairly inefficient (which is why the cooling fan sits on the Northbridge heatsink, not the passively cooled Atom heatsink). Like the Atom board the MM3500 has two SATA ports, enough for handling RAID1. 8 USB2 ports provide plenty of expansion capabilities, as does a PCI-E slot for video cards (not available on the Atom). Two DDR2 slots will accept up to 4 GB of RAM, twice the limit of the Atom board which only has one slot and can only reach its maximum of 2 GB by using a 2 GB SIMM. Both boards offer one PCI slot.

The main complication with the VIA board turned out to be video driver support for the onboard graphics (CN986 Northbridge / Chrome9 HC IGP). As soon as Ubuntu switches into graphics mode, the screen becomes unreadable. I got around this only by plugging an old Jaton Video-198PCI-64 Twin video card into the PCI slot (any Ubuntu-supported PCI or PCI-E card will do). I am hoping to find a proper work-around to be able to remove this card again and minimize power usage [done, see UPDATE below!]. I could do away with it by running the server only in text mode (with ssh access) and never using its GUI. That wouldn’t matter for a file server.

I first tried installing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (desktop edition), but after the video problems I switched to a torrent of the Ubuntu 8.10 beta. Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) is due for release on October 30, 2008. The 8.10 beta includes a fix for booting off a RAID1 system with one dead drive, which I may need in the future. 8.04 doesn’t handle this yet.

After installing the PCI video card, the operating system installation (including configuring the two mirrored drives as RAID1 following these very helpful instructions) went very smoothly.

It is a pity VIA doesn’t provide better video driver support for up-to-date Linux versions, otherwise this would be a nice little board that I would find easy to recommend to people who want to build a low-power usage system on a small budget.

UPDATE (2008-10-14):

I now have the motherboard video working in VESA mode and it’s very usable.

Following some pointers in various forums, I tried adding the xforcevesa option to the kernel loader line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that didn’t seem to have any effect in Ubuntu 8.10 beta (Intrepid Ibex).

Then I renamed /etc/X11/xorg.conf to a backup and copied xorg.conf.failsafe to xorg.conf (in folder /etc/X11/). I shut down the machine, connected the monitor cable to the motherboard VGA and removed the add-on VGA from the PCI slot. When I powered up the machine again, it booted fine. I get a 1280×1024 screen, the maximum for the Dell 1905FP monitor I used.

I am still hoping that the Ubuntu developers will manage to get an updated Chrome9 HC IGP driver into the upcoming release, but for now I have a workable solution and am happy with this setup.

UPDATE (2008-11-10):

I got rid of the VESA driver and am using the default OpenChrome driver for the motherboard video after specifying two options to disable features on the driver that cause problems in the current build:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
# Driver “vesa”
Option “XaaNoImageWriteRect”
Option “SWCursor” “True”
EndSection

Also, a couple of days ago VIA uploaded a beta test version of their driver for Ubuntu 8.10 to their Linux support site (a month after 8.10 was released), but I haven’t tested it yet.

Vacuum your PC

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A friend of mine who has been selling PCs mostly to industrial customers for many years long ago told me that twice a year he opens his customers’ computers and gives them a good cleaning with a vacuum cleaner. It prevents many problems, mostly due to overheating when dust builds up on top of computer chips.

I remembered this piece of advice when my wife’s computer started to sound more and more like there was a hairdryer inside. The CPU fan kept running at full speed, even when it was just sitting there with the Windows desktop, not just running any CPU-hungry applications. It hadn’t always been so.

What is it about computer fans and dust? As processors got faster, they consumed more and more power and consequently, produced more heat. Thus the need for fans, which draw in not only air for cooling, but also the dust that comes with it and which tends to build up. As the dust obstructs the airflow, the fan keeps having to work harder and the less effectively cooled parts get hotter, which can shorten their lifespan.

My wife’s machine is a Dell Dimension 3100C, a low-budget machine based on the Intel Celeron D 330. This CPU is a low-end version of the Pentium 4, whose power-guzzling technology has since been abandoned by Intel in favour of the more energy-efficient Centrino / Core architecture that was derived from the older Pentium III.

Even the lowly Celeron D 330 has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 73 W. To cope with this heat output, it has a massive heat sink through which a fan blows air from outside the chassis. When I opened the box I found that the metal grill in front of the air intake of the CPU fan was clogged with a 5 millimeter layer of dusty fluff.

After undoing two screws that hold down the heatsink cover I could flip the hinged heatsink by 90 degrees and remove it, allowing me full access to the inside of the fan, so I could blow air against the dust with a plastic straw from inside. I vacuumed the entire motherboard and both sides of the fan air intake, while brushing and blowing the dust loose. An old toothbrush and a plastic straw or a can of compressed air for blowing away dust can be helpful. Also, put a narrow plastic tip on the vacuum cleaner, for use in tight corners.

When all was done and I put the heatsink back, closed the box, reconnected the power cord and switched the computer on again, it ran nicely quiet – almost like new!

I definitely recommend vacuuming your PC at least once a year, more if you live in a dusty environment or if the fan blows a lot because you like to use CPU-intensive applications such as games.

Eee Box B202 – What happened to Linux?

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When ASUS announced its Eee Box B202 back in May, there were going to be three models:

  • the base model running Linux version with 1 GB of RAM and a 80 GB hard disk for $269,
  • a Windows XP Home version with the same 1 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk for $299 and
  • a Linux version with 2 GB of RAM and 160 GB of disk for $299

Four months later only one of these three versions is available and it’s neither the cheapest nor the best equipped of the three anounced configurations: Only the Windows version hit the stores, at $50 more than previously announced (it’s around $350).

Meanwhile the Linux versions are nowhere to be be found, though rumour has it that they will become available later this year.

Considering that ASUS shipped it trailblazing Eee PC notebook with Linux first, before following it with a Windows version, this turn of events with their desktop is somewhat surprizing. Low prices are a major reason why their machines are attractive, but every Windows machine shipped means royalty payments to Microsoft, which is why the XP version was going to be $30 more expensive than the base model (Linux is royalty-free). By opting for only shipping XP, ASUS is also preventing its customers from buying a 160 GB version, as Microsoft refuses to let OEMs ship XP with machines with more than 80 GB of disk space.

To get a 160 GB Eee Box with 2 GB of RAM and Linux (the configuration I was interested in) you would have to buy an 80 GB model with 1 GB of RAM and XP, only to discard the 80 GB drive, the 1 GB SIMM and Windows XP (which you’ve all paid for) and then install a separately purchased 160 GB drive and 2 GB SIMM and a (free) copy of Linux.

When the Eee PC was launched, I was very excited by the prospect of low-energy, low cost computing, but wanted to wait for the desktop as I would use them mostly as unattended servers and had no need for an LCD screen. Like many other potential ASUS customers, I will keep on waiting now.

I currently use a set of four machines to process external spam feeds for the SURBL Multi JP blacklist. Since these machines are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week I would like to minimize power usage and Intel’s Atom processors with a TDP of less than 5W sounded like a very attractive upgrade path for me. I use some older machines with sub-1 GHz clock speeds that draw relatively little power, but these old motherboards have some drawbacks. First of all they are limited to a maximum of between 256 and 512 MB of RAM, while Atom boards support up to 2 GB. Secondly, their motherboards are 7 to 10 years old and they won’t work forever.

I had a look at Intel’s Atom 230-based Mini-ITX desktop board, which can be found for under $70 and fits existing ATX-based machines like my ancient eMachine eTowers. At first glance that looked attractive. However, even though the CPU is efficient, the Northbridge support chip of the Intel 945GC Express Chipset on that board burns about five times more power than the Atom CPU itself. The Eee Box sounds like a much better choice in the long term, as it uses an Atom 270 with the much more efficient Mobile Intel 945GSE Express Chipset. The catch is, you can’t currently buy an Eee Box without paying the “Microsoft tax”, i.e. a Windows XP license that you pay for whether you have a use for it or not.

The decision by ASUS to push back on the Linux version makes no sense to me. I suspect Microsoft made ASUS an offer they found hard to refuse, in order to establish the Eee Box as a Windows-only machine. It will cost ASUS sales and it won’t make Microsoft any more popular. It’s not good for the planet either if people buy power-hungry desktop hardware instead of one of the more economical computers available.

DD-WRT on Buffalo WHR-HP-G54

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Today I installed the open source router firmware DD-WRT on a newly purchased Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 broadband router. I’m very impressed with its rich feature set and ease of installation.

Months ago a friend had recommended OpenWRT, another open source solution for low cost broadband routers, but following the old “don’t try to fix it if it ain’t broken” mantra, I had stuck with my standard NEC Aterm WR6650S WarpStar router (firmware revision 8.72) .

A few weeks ago I started having random problems connecting to the internet. When I clicked on links in the browser, either it was very slow or it returned an error or timed out on me. When I investigated I noticed that the internal log of the NEC WarpStar was full of error messages like these:

2008/08/24 18:09:29 NAT TX-ERROR List Create Error : UDP 192.168.1.102 : 31320 > 201.29.227.157 : 7701 (IP-PORT=1)
2008/08/24 18:09:29 NAT TX-ERROR List Create Error : UDP 192.168.1.102 : 31320 > 99.227.142.5 : 9205 (IP-PORT=1)

A router reset (briefly pulling the power cord) would cure it for a few hours to two days at most, but then the problem always came back. The router firmware obviously had trouble tracking which entries in its Network Address Translation (NAT) table could be discarded and the table would overflow, making connections to the outside world hit and miss, as NAT entries are essential for replies to requests sent to servers out there to get back into the LAN.

Of the 8 PCs and Macs in my home and office that are sharing a cable internet connection, at least four are on all the time, crunching spam data received from around the world day and night. So you can imagine that whatever router I’m using is always getting a good workout. I can’t afford it to be unreliable.

So I started doing a bit of research on OpenWRT and its cousin DD-WRT and what sort of routers that are compatible with them I could get locally here in Yokohama, Japan.

The Linksys WRT54G was the first router fitted with open source firmware, but Yamada Denki, the biggest electronics store in my part of town, does not sell any Linksys products. They were selling mostly NEC and Buffalo, but none of the models I found on the shelves appeared on the list of supported hardware.

I searched Google for the WHR-HP-G54, a supported Buffalo router, for pages in Japanese and found it on kakaku.com, a price search website. It was available for 6,500 yen from Mr. Direct, a company based in Hiroshima. Less than 48 hours later the router arrived at my doorstep by takkyubin (parcel service), for about $70 including tax and shipping.

Installing DD-WRT on the router turned out to be so easy, it actually took less time to do it than to get my Windows Vista notebook working with the new wireless security keys afterwards!

Here’s what I did:

  1. First I downloaded the firmware (v24-sp1 / Consumer / Buffalo / WHR-HP-G54 / dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic.bin) and saved it on my local hard disk. Update 2009-05-25: Do not use any DD-WRT V24-sp1 builds dated in between 030309 and 051809, these builds have known problem that didn’t exist in the March 3, 2009 version and was fixed in the May 18 2009 version.
  2. Next I verified the router was working with its default firmware. I hooked my notbook to one of the LAN ports by ethernet cable and accessed 192.168.11.1 with the browser. The Japanese factory firmware came up (user: root, blank password).
  3. I added the tftp program in the Windows Vista control panel (Programs and Features / Turn Windows features on or off)
  4. I opened two command prompt windows. In the first I executed
    ping -t 192.168.11.1

  5. In the second command prompt window I went into the folder where I had saved the downloaded DD-WRT firmware and then typed the following, without hitting Enter:
    tftp -i 192.168.11.1 PUT dd-wrt.v24_mini_generic.bin

  6. Unplug the power cable from the back of the router, then reconnect it.
  7. As soon as you see the router responding to the PING command in the first window, hit enter on the second window (tftp command). The diag LED will flash for a number of seconds and tftp will report that the file was transferred.
  8. When the LEDs on the router are quiet, the update will have finished. Renew your IP (or reboot your PC), because the router will now be at 192.168.1.1. Access it with the browser and you’re ready to configure your new DD-WRT router!

Update Manager hangs in Ubuntu 8.04 (and how to fix it)

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Last month I upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (“Hardy Heron”). Since then, whenever I tried tried to install the up to 133 updates that had become available, the Update Manager would hang indefinitely instead of prompting me for the user password.

If you’re in the same situation, the following tips might help you. Edit /etc/hosts with an editor of your choice (e.g. sudo vi /etc/hosts). There should be two entries with IPv4 addresses starting with 127.0.x.x, like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 mycomputername.mydomain

Remove the domain name from the entry starting with 127.0.1.1, leaving only the computer name and save the file. Now try again.

When I made this change I got the password prompt as expected and all the updates where downloaded and applied.

Microsoft does listen to (some of) its users

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Two weeks ago, Infoworld magazine launched a “Save Windows XP!” campaign. Within 5 days, over 164,000 people signed it, demanding that Microsoft do not end OEM and shrinkwrapped sales of Windows XP on 30 June 2008 as announced, but keep it on the market indefinitely. Microsoft did not seem impressed, as the following quote in PC World shows:

The spokeswoman said Microsoft is aware that some customers are pushing for an extension to the deadline — more than 160,000 people have signed a “Save XP” petition launched by Infoworld magazine, for example. But the company has also done its own research among partners and customers, and feels that “the dates are right,” she said, speaking on behalf of Microsoft.

“We feel we’ve made the right accommodations for customers in certain segments who may need more time to transition to Windows Vista,” she said. “But as [Microsoft CEO] Steve [Ballmer] noted, we maintain a constant stance of listening to our customers and our partners. That’s what is guiding our plan, and will continue to guide us going forward.”

I don’t know who Microsoft listens to, but personally I don’t know a single person who prefers Vista over XP. Some of the comments I hear are unprintable. Yesterday, a friend of mine allowed Windows Update to install some updates to his copy of Vista and since then he’s been unable to access the network. Many coroporates still maintain a blanket ban on it and stick with XP.

On the other hand, quite a number of Mac and Ubuntu fans are simply thrilled how much Vista has contributed to driving up interest in their platforms of choice.

Still, I suppose amongst hundreds of millions of Internet users there must be some who are genuine fans of Vista, despite its well documented shortcomings. When Microsoft claims that its death sentence for XP was based on user input, it may not exactly be lying: I suppose most Microsoft shareholder are Microsoft software users too.

Forcing people to buy a more expensive operating system may boost Microsoft’s revenue in the short term. In that sense, it may be in the interest of those users who also happen to be its shareholders. In the long term however it never pays to ignore your customers’ needs. About twenty years ago, IBM tried to force the PC market to switch to its proprietary Micro Channel Architecture (with IBM PS/2 range). The result was that IBM lost control of the PC market place to Compaq and other companies who took over. Microsoft is every bit as arrogant now as IBM was back then and it will suffer the consequences.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS released

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The latest version of Ubuntu, the most popular desktop version of Linux on the market, was released on Thursday, 24 April 2008.

New versions are released every six months and labelled after the release year and month, therefore the latest will be known as 8.04, replacing 7.10. The “LTS” suffix stands for “Long Term Support”, as this version will be supported for three years.

The new version, code named “Hardy Heron” bundles the new FireFox 3.0 web browser, updates to photo management and video and music-related features. It can also install on top of an existing copy of Windows without the need to repartition the hard disk. This lowers the barrier to entry for new users who, if they’re not happy with Ubuntu, can always remove it using the Windows Control Panel, just like any other Windows application.

If you have a bittorrent client such as uTorrent, you can download ISO images of install CDs and DVDs via this page:

http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

Links:

Yahoo! Mail “0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99” bug

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You may have noticed emails from Yahoo accounts recently that include the string “between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99” at the bottom of the email. Apparently it gets added to outbound email only on new emails that were composed.

It’s a bug in Yahoo which crept in on April 15 during an upgrade. It’s an issue related to accessing the MySQL database and a date / time comparison. There is no way for Yahoo! Mail users to fix the problem, but it also doesn’t appear to cause any harm beyond thoroughly confusing everyone.

Yahoo is aware of the problem. Their current statement on it is:

“Please be assured that we are aware of this issue and have escalated this to our Engineering Department for further investigation. We hope to have it resolved as soon as possible”.

First impressions of Vista and Ubuntu

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Last week I was on a business trip to the USA and decided it was finally time for me to buy a new notebook computer. Here in Japan it’s difficult to get machines with US keyboards.

My previous one was a 650 MHz Pentium III whose RAM was maxed out at 512 MB while my main desktops and servers have 2 GB or more. Lack of RAM slows down PCs much more than a slow clock speed does. People who buy entry level Vista machines equipped with only 512 MB would be better off with a sub-1 GHz CPU but a full 1 GB of RAM.

I picked a Gateway M-6750 with a 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, a 250 GB 3.5″ hard disk and 3 GB of RAM. It comes with a built-in microphone and webcam, very handy for Skype-addicts like me.

Every single machine at Best Buy and Circuit City that I looked at came with some form of Vista preinstalled. Microsoft sure does not want to give customers any choice whether they stick with XP. Ideally, I would have wiped off Vista and installed Windows XP on it. Until now I had kept my office a Vista-free zone, but knowing that occasionally I will needed to test some software on it, I stuck with it for the new machine.

I spent some time reconfiguring the Vista desktop to be as Windows 2000 and XP-like as possible. The constant alerts to permit some actions I had requested soon became annoying. Often a single operation results in the user having to agree two or three times. Inevitably, agreeing to anything without giving it much thought soon becomes a habit. Does Microsoft seriously believe that training users to constantly click “Allow”, “OK”, “Yes” will lead to a noticeable gain in security?

So far I have seen little reason for anyone to upgrade from Windows XP or Windows 2000 (my favourite Windows version) to Vista. Sure, there is plenty of new eye candy, but who but the makers and vendors of graphics chipsets, CPUs and RAM benefits from that? Users spent countless hours relearning the user interface and getting old application working (or replacing them). Even for upgrades from Vista to Vista Service Pack 1 there were so many land mines that Microsoft decided to hold off general availability of SP1 via Windows Update for several more months.

One of the reasons I picked this model was its large hard disk, because I was planning to also run Ubuntu. I downloaded the ISO image and burnt it to DVD using the burner software included with Vista. Ubuntu initially boots off a live DVD that includes an installer. The installation was fairly straightforward. The installer shrank the Windows NTFS partition to make space for Ubuntu. After the main installation it downloaded close to 200 updated packages and fixes, then it was all done. The default configuration took up only 2.4 GB of disk space.

I was impressed that I can access shared folders and volumes on Windows machines from Ubuntu, as well as being able to read files in the NTFS (Windows Vista) partition on the drive.

There were two driver issues however, which I have yet to resolve [now partly resolved, see updates below!]:

  • The sound hardware is missing a driver. The loadspeaker symbol in the top right corner of the desktop is showing disabled and I can’t get sound output on the builtin speakers.
  • The builtin wireless card doesn’t appear to be suppported. I can only connect to the LAN and internet by using a wired connection.

In general, driver support in Ubuntu is good, but there are obviously still some rough edges. It would help if Gateway and other manufacturers were to offer pre-configured Ubuntu machines, as Dell already does.

Similar driver issues can occur on Vista. In fact, last week I was helping set up an AOpen MiniPC, which had been upgraded to Vista after a memory upgrade from 512 MB to 1 GB and it also had issues with its wireless, which wasn’t supported until a couple of Windows Update runs.

I think Linux and in particular Ubuntu will become an increasingly serious challenger to Microsoft’s de-facto monopoly on the desktop and not before time.

Update, 2008-03-14:
Ubuntu 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”, released in October 2007) detects the sound hardware on this Intel chipset, but there doesn’t seem to be a driver for it yet. When I enter ” lspci -v” at the shell prompt, it lists this:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
Subsystem: Gateway 2000 Unknown device 0380
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 22
Memory at fa500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [60] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [70] Express Unknown type IRQ 0

I checked the sound drivers for Intel chips listed at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Intel and it appears the ICH8 chipset is not supported yet.

Update, 2008-03-18:
The Marvell TOPDOG wireless adapter is now working with Ubuntu, by following the advice given by others and installing the Windows 2000/XP drivers for the hardware using ndiswrapper. I had first tried the Vista driver, but had no luck with that. The Ndiswrapper project page on SourceForge specifically recommended to avoid Vista drivers and use Windows 2000 or XP NDIS drivers. For PCI device ID 11AB:2A08 you need the NetMW14x.inf file which references the two driver files NetMW143.sys (for Windows 2000) and NetMW145.sys (for Windows XP).

The following threads and instructions proved very helpful, please read them both if you have the same problem as I did:

  1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper
  2. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-575785.html

Here is what I did after installing the Ndiswrapper software and copying over the Windows drivers from a Windows machine where I had run the installer:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i NetMW14x.inf
installing netmw14x …
$ sudo ndiswrapper -a 11ab:2a08 netmw14x
WARNING: Driver ‘netmw14x’ will be used for ’11AB:2A08′
This is safe _only_ if driver netmw14x is meant for chip in device 11AB:2A08
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
netmw14x : driver installed
device (11AB:2A08) present

After that I followed the instructions for Configuring Wireless Network Settings. Voila! Wireless network connectivity under Ubuntu anywhere in the building!

Update, 2008-04-16:
Drew’s advice on how to get sound working did the trick for me too: I can now use the audio on my Gateway M-6750. I ran this as he suggested:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

and restarted the machine. Thanks, Drew!

Our site got hit by a Denial-of-Service attack

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From November 9 to November 19 two of our domains were unter attack by cyber-criminals. Due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS) involving thousands of remote controlled zombie computers directed from a secret control centre, some of our sites were inaccessible for several days.

First we received an automated warning email from our webhost, which gets triggered if a certain amount of traffic per hour is exceeeded. I started blocking IP addresses of hosts with an excessive number of connections using iptables in Linux, but could not keep up: The server became unreachable. I was left with no choice but to pull the emergency brake, i.e. to replace the IP address of the server with a non-routable IP address such as 127.0.0.1 (loopback address).

I then moved the affected website to a backup server and reenabled it there. The new server was running a later Linux kernel than the old one. If you get DOSed, make sure you have Linux kernel 2.6, which is more suitable for reconfiguration to make it more resilient against such attacks.

After a number of days, other hosts names on our server that had not been disabled were also added to the list of attack targets.

As a result of the tweaks on the new server the sites stayed up most of the time, but the bandwidth usage was tremendous. During one hour the attacking bots generated more than 31 GB of traffic. On that peek day the traffic on that server came to 152 GB, even though we added over 4000 different IP addresses of attacking hosts to the blocklist.

Clearly, anyone who doesn’t have an unlimited traffic allowance for his hosting account would be in trouble with such huge numbers, even if the machine and operating system were able to keep up. Once they exhaust their monthly allowance they would either have to start paying for extra Gigabytes or the server gets disconnected, or the network speed gets throttled down, which would make the site virtually unreachable.

After 10 days the attacks started winding down. By that time we knew where the control center of the botnet was located. It was hosted by a company called AbdAllah Internet Hizmetleri in Turkey. Its upstream provider is TurkTelekom. The IP address range used by the hoster is listed by anti-spam site SpamHaus.org as being used for “Ukrainian/Russian cybercriminal hosting”.

During or shortly after the attacks against our servers, the same botnet also attacked the following sites:

  • newgeneration.lv
  • streamingvideosoftware.info
  • www.kety.org
  • anriintern.com
  • datingsoftware.org

This target list ranges from an anti-spam website (ours) over an evangelical church site to sites related to adult videos.

Distributed denial of service attacks are a mortal danger for any website. There are few effective countremeasures, except load sharing with many fast servers connected via fat data pipes, but even that is no match for some of the largest botnets such Storm. Attacks are used to intimidate, to silence or to extort “protection money”. Victims have little hope of getting effective help from law enforcement.

What needs to happen? First of all, the number of infected computers needs to decrease. Unsecured broadband hosts that come under criminal control are a public menace. Webhosts need to take effective action against botnet control centres. Unlike the actual bots, which are mostly running Windows XP, most of the botnet control centres run on Linux servers in data centres. Hosters must not turn a blind eye to this. If they do that because of money from criminals then their upstream providers must disconnect them.