I guess we agree on the fact that there’s something wrong on the network. Server? Switch? Client? The former ones are easy to exclude from our calculation due to the other users talking about weather and coffee both being quite tasteless. The common trick of disabling auto neg. at the switch didn’t help – so it’s time to look through the Technet stuff.

A few mouseclicks later and three hours (which did feel as if it was just 15 minutes) I stumbled over some suspect auto tuning of the network which is done by Windows 7 to improve speed. Yes, it should improve the network connection. Please mind the word ‘should’.

Diving into it, I opened a command prompt with admin permissions, checking the TCP parameters:

netsh interface tcp show global

Shaking my head about that output I thought about disabling the tuning features all together:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

That was it: The network connection is as fast as it should be. In other words, the tuning logic was too intelligent for itself…

The problems root must have been somewhere else. Peeking into stuff I found the problem in /etc/pam.d/system-login which is clearly PAM related:

session         optional        pam_lastlog.so

The fix is easy. Just append ‘silent’ to that line:

session         optional        pam_lastlog.so silent

… that’s all folks. Hope to save someone trouble that way.

Another problem of the smartphone world is that there’s pretty a wide field of different hardware floating around – Regarding Maemo, there is the N900 and that’s it. Developers are focussing on ONE device.

Speaking about end user stuff, there are a couple of things I cannot do with modern smartphones. One big flaw of nowadays phones is the missing QWERTZ keyboard which made typing a breeze. Also the NX Client for offloading apps to a terminalserver was quite useful…

The scanner software recognizes money and refuses to process it, to make it harder for the kids to produce counterfeits. Does anyone out there know since when this functionality is being implemented?

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

If there are packages kept back, remember, there’s “apt-get dist-upgrade”. The next step is modifying the sources.list: Replace ‘squeeze’ with ‘wheezy’. That’s how mine looks like after the changes:

deb http://debian.inode.at/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.inode.at/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

# wheezy-updates, previously known as ‘volatile’
deb http://debian.inode.at/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.inode.at/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

Next step – Updating as usual:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

apt-get update is needed to fetch the new sources. Next step: getting the kernel done. In my case, I am using a 64 bit system, so I’d use the matching kernel:

apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64

Better safe than sorry: doing an udev upgrade before should prevent most breakage there. Then, the kept back packages:

apt-get install udev
apt-get dist-upgrade

In my case, I had to rebuild the vmware modules due to the new kernel – an update-grup finalizes it all and we’re ready to reboot, keeping our fingers crossed. After the reboot, a short gance into the syslog:

cat /var/log/syslog

That’s all, folks.

In the end, it’s the customer who’s fooled and pushed into the SSD direction to be able to work. Honestly, in many cases the 7200 RPM disk would have done the trick.

To save me some headache, I usually start by replacing the disk in the PC first and wiring up the old one via USB to get the data moving.

No matter what you do to move the files, it works best with linux in my opinion. My tool of choice is the System Rescue CD booted via USB stick. Now we’re starting the actual move of files. I’m using dd here as it doesn’t waste cpu time with GUI stuff:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sda bs=64k

sda is the internal disk, sdb is the USB stick while sdc is the old disk running as a rather big usb stick there. As soon as you start the move, sit back get out and do something else as this takes a while.

The final work would be extending the partition(s). That’s easy with gparted in case you don’t want to mess with the bundled tools of your OS.

I have to admit, Microsoft did a few new good things with Windows 8, but all in all it’s too early to get things working completely. Besides that I miss the old start menu.

Back to Windows 7…

system(“kill -9 `ps -ef | grep Acrobat | awk ‘{print $2}’`”);

In theory, this should find any process named Acrobat and hand its PID to the kill command. Bottom line: Acrobat gets terminated. Theoretically. Practically, it did survive as the shell command got executed

As it was a fresh install, the Safari update was missing and I did that thing, rebooted and did not change a single line of my php code and during the next and following tests, Acrobat got terminated correctly. My reply was pretty much like “WTF?!?”

Where’s the logic in there?

Bad tires means bad grip, a pretty long stopping distance and maybe even hugging a tree with the vehicle. Honestly guys – can’t you just look after your stuff?

As you might remember, I did buy a new car a few weeks ago – True, I didn’t even write much about it by now, but I promise you a nice review.

What I wanted to say is, that I was playing with the idea of getting new tires. Mine are still ‘okay’ but won’t survive another season. Citroen recommends Michelin Tires, for my car. Pretty easy for the lazy ones: You can even buy them online. And that’s where I start to wonder again…