I recently ordered a Buffalo Terastation Live from eCost for around $260, which seemed like a pretty darn good deal. Of course, it was ‘Factory Reconditioned’, whatever that meant…

…Turns out that means it arrives in a plain brown box, with no manual, and completely hosed. I naively thought I’d be able to plug it in, browse to the admin website, set it up, and in a few minutes I’d be copying all my data to my new RAID system. Nope.

To make a long story short, after many “E04” boot errors and all sorts of other crap, I ended up ripping all the disks out of the sucker, deleting the partition tables on them, and slapping them back it.

It looks like once that was done, the Terastation would boot over TFTP and I could then do a firmware update.

Unfortunately, these seems to be a problem with the zip extractor on the version of the software my Terastation originally shipped with, so it wasn’t able to extract the /boot/hddrootfs.img file (which is really a zip). What is supposed to happen is that this file gets extracted to /boot/hddrootfs.buffalo.updated, which is a tar.gz image of the root file system. On boot, if that file exists, it is used to overwrite the root file system, but since the boot system couldn’t extract the zip, I was stuck.

My solution was to extract the hddrootfs.buffalo.updated file onto a ext3 formatted USB stick, mount the stick on the Terastation, and copy it to /boot. I had to use a USB stick because the Terastation didn’t have an of the standard file transfer apps (ftp, tftp, scp, etc), or at least, I couldn’t find them. You’ll need root console access to do this, so make sure you have a copy of the acp_commander.jar file.

The only trick is you’ll need the password for the zip file, which I found here.

I found the Resetting To English invaluable as well, because once the new firmware was installed, the damn thing started up in Japanese!

Update: Everything was going swimmingly, and I had been able to setup the box and have it start building a RAID5 Array across all four disks. A few minutes after the RAID started building, the website stopped working, and the next morning, when the RAID was finished building, the box was completely inaccessible.

Now the box reboots to Emergency Mode. When I try and flash the device with firmware again, a few minutes after the disk starts formatting the box throws off all sorts of bells and alarms and displays “DISK1 signature fail”. I called Buffalo Tech support (yeah 24/7 tech support!), and the tech support guy walked me through a firmware update again, and when I got to the “DISK1 signature fail” for a second time, he disappeared for about 5 minutes. I started to think he had hung up on me, but I stayed on the line and eventually came back and told me I’d be getting RMA information in the mail.

So now I’ve got to pay to ship the sucker back and I’ll get a new one. Ugh.

Oh well, despite all that, I’m pretty excited by the product and I’m looking forward to finally getting it up and running.

I’m constantly having trouble with getting the backspace and delete keys to work properly in OS X. Whenever it works right on the Mac, one or the other key is broken when I  SSH to a Linux or FreeBSD box.

After some searching, I’ve found this solution, which seems to be working:

1. First, got to the Terminal menu, and choose Preferences… Under the Settings section, choose the Advanced tab. Make sure Delete sends Ctrl-H is checked.
2. Then, in the same window, go to the Keyboard tab (right next to Advanced). Find the line for forward delete, and set it to this value:
   \033[3~
3. Lastly, you need to run the following line at the terminal. The trick with the line below though is that you need to type the ^H by pressing Control-V and then Control-H. You can not just cut and paste the line below, you need to type it:
   echo -e "stty erase ˆH" >> ~/.bash_profile

For further reading on this topic check out these two links:

• Linux Backspace/Delete mini-HOWTO
• Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration

This problem, and various solutions are documented all over the net, but I found and used this page most recently.

Ubuntu isn’t a supported platform for installing Lotus Notes 8, but the installation is surprisingly easy, once you know a few tricks. Before you begin, make sure you have the proper fonts by installing the “ttf-xfree86-nonfree” package:

sudo apt-get install ttf-xfree86-nonfree

If you don’t, your fonts will be horribly ugly, and in many places, down right unreadable.

Next, you need to run the regular setup.sh install script:

sudo ./setup.sh

The installation creates a directory called ~/lotus, (in your home directory) but owned as root. I guess it assumes you logged in as root to run the install. I had to remove that (you could also probably just chown the directory, but Notes recreates it, so either way works):

sudo rm ~/lotus -r -d

I also had to make the binaries readable and executable by every user:

sudo chmod o+rw /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/*

Then I ran this (not sure if it is needed, but I saw it on another website):

sudo chmod -R 755 /etc/lotus

Now you should be able run Notes and everything should be fine:

/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/notes

You should also find an icon under the Applications->Office menu.

Good luck.

I’ve had this problem sporadically with iTerm on my Mac, and I seem to remember this happening recently on my Linux machines as well. If you have this problem, try this:

$ export TERM=linux

If this works, on a Mac you can set it in your .profile:

if [ "${TERM_PROGRAM}" == "iTerm.app" ]
then
export TERM=linux
fi

On Linux, you can do the same, but leave out the if and just do the export line.

A while back
I reported on an obscure problem when compiling applications against the dnssd library that comes with Apple’s mDNSResponder.

This post is just to report that these problems persist in mDNSResponder 108.4. As I reported before, here is what you’ll see when compiling your program:

hidden symbol `__stack_chk_fail_local' in /usr/lib/libc_nonshared.a(stack_chk_fail_local.oS) is referenced by DSO /usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Nonrepresentable section on output

As you can see, its all very intuitive.

Life is full of surprises. Some, like the sliver of plastic you find in your half-eaten sandwich, aren’t very pleasant. Others, like escaping a visit to the dentist without having a cavity filled, just remind you how much more stressful your day could have been

This week I installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on my company-issued HP-Compaq tc4200. It was definitely a surprise of the latter variety. I gritted my teeth, prepared for the pain that is a Linux install…. and nothing happened.

Let me just cut to the chase: it just works.

At work I use everything from Gentoo (my desktop machine) to Redhat, Fedora, and SuSE on our servers. Ubuntu, at least in terms of getting up at running quickly and painlessly, blows them all out of the water.

Ubuntu installed on my tc4200 in about, oh, 6 clicks. Power management just works. CPU Frequency scaling just works. Wireless… just works. THE PEN…. just works. Jaw dropping I tell you. And I didn’t have to set anything up, edit any files in /etc, or slog through pages and pages of configuration tools.

There are a few things that don’t work, but they pale in comparison to what does work: xrandr doesn’t work, so I can’t flip the screen closed and be off and drawing. Suspend mode doesn’t seem to resume correctly, but I don’t think it works in Windows either, so I’m not really complaining. And finally, there is no Wireless Manager like the Mac’s Airport tool or even Window’s horrible wifi network browser. But the networking control panel is so easy to use, I don’t really care. Oh, switching network location profiles seems a bit spotty and slow, but really, it works well.

If you are going to try Ubuntu, I would highly recommend reading Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide as soon as you get it installed. Which won’t take you long at all.