Rick Baker's Personal Website

So, over the weekend I decided to upgrade my home debian fileserver.   A couple of new drives running software Raid 1, more memory and a wireless card.  With wireless I figured I could get the fileserver out from behind my desk and stick it into the garage.  Being in a small town, my selection of hardware is pretty much limited to a Walmart and Staples.  The only card I could come up with was a the Netgear WG311 rev3.

Started out trying to use madwifi, only to find out that doesn’t work with rev3 of the card.  So, I switched to ndiswrapper and just downloaded the windows xp driver.  All good so far, it detected my card and I had my wlan0 interface.

I try to keep my wireless network secure unlike my neighbors who freely broadcast so I run WPA and do not broadcast.   So this was going to take a bit more work.   Installed wpa_supplicant and fought with this for some time.  Finally I was able to manually bring up my wireless using a wpa_supplicant.conf file but I could never get it to come up with the standard ‘ifup wlan0′.  So after trial and error I came up with this in my network/interfaces file

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.0.10
gateway 192.168.0.1
dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
wpa-driver wext
wpa-ap-scan 2
wpa-ssid MySSID
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  xxxxxxxx

This finally worked and I now had a wireless connection that would come up on boot.  So after struggling with this over the course of Saturday and most of Sunday I happily moved the server out to the garage, booted up only to find a signal strength of 7/100.  Needless to say that wasn’t going to cut it and locally I couldn’t purchase any type of range extender.   So, after all that I’m back with my debian box in it’s original location.

I figured I’d post this just in case anyone is struggling with this card and the proper configuration.  You’ll find all sorts of solutions via google,  others might work for you, but the above is what finally worked for me.

This error or the equally frustrating ‘ Incorrect integer value: ‘ error seems to bite quite a few people in the butt that are running MySQL 5.   If you’re getting one of these errors then MySQL is running in strict mode and you are trying to run a query that isn’t inserting a proper value into one of your fields.  For example, you have an int field and the value you are inserting into that field is blank.

The proper thing to do would be to go through all of your queries and make sure you are always inserting the proper values, ie. some type of integer for an int field.

There isn’t always time for the proper way however.  If you need a quick fix you can run the following MySQL command from your favorite MySQL command prompt, the shell, phpmyadmin, etc.

SET GLOBAL SQL_MODE=''

Here’s how I make Buffalo wings in our house.  Wife and kids don’t like spicy so these are VERY mild.

Ingredients

• Chicken Wings – However many you want
• 3 sticks of sweet cream butter
• 1 16 oz. bottle of Kraft Honey Barbeque Sauce
• 1/3 cup of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
• Vegetable Oil

Directions

Preheat oven to 325.  Heat an electric skillet to 375.  Put a light coat of oil in the skillet, how much depends on the size of the skillet, just need enough to coat the bottom.

In a sauce pan, mix in the hot and barbeque sauces and throw in the sticks of butter.  Heat on medium low until butter is thorughly melted.

Chop your wings in half to make the drumlette and the wing.  Give them all a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Once the oil is hot, cook the chicken for about 4 minutes per side.  Transfer to a plate with paper towels to soak up the extra grease when finished.

Pour the sauce into a large bowl and then throw in the chicken and make sure all of the chicken gets a good coating.  Put some tinfoil over a large cookie sheet and then place the sauce coated chicken on top.  Throw in the oven for about 15 minutes and you’re done.

Ok, so I had been neglecting this site for quite awhile.  Had somewhere around 2000 spam comments I had to wade through.  Since I’ve decided to get active on this site finally I’ve made a few changes.  First, I’ve turned on Akismet and secondly I’ve installed reCaptcha.

I hate having to manually approve people that are posting legit comments, so with those I’m going to go ahead and open up comment posting without approval and see how it goes.   If it is still a headache then I’ll adjust from there.

Ingredients

• 3-4 Boneless Chicken Breasts
• 3-4 Roma Tomatoes
• 1 head of Romaine Lettuce
• 1 Bottle of Creamy Ceasar Salad Dressing
• 2 6oz cans of sliced olives
• 1 package of parmesian cheese
• 16 oz of Rotini noodles

Directions

Flatten the raw chicken breasts so the entire breast is fairly even in thickness.  Season to your liking and broil or grill them until 165 degrees.  Grilling is always better, but sometimes weather doesn’t permit.  Broiling time may vary on your oven.  I normally broil them about 6 inches from the burner for about 6-8 minutes on each side.  Check temperature to make sure they are done, but don’t overcook.

Once the chicken is cooked you can slice it into small strips or chunks, whichever you prefer.

Bring some water to a boil and cook the Rotini for about 7 minutes.  While that’s cooking, dice up the Roma Tomatoes, shred the lettuce and drain the olives.

Drain the noodles and run them under cool water to keep them from cooking any further.

Mix up the noodles, chicken, lettuce, tomatoes and olives.  Slowly mix in the Caesar Salad Dressing and the Parmesian Cheese.  How much you add is up to you, but I usually end up using about half a package of the cheese 8oz and the full bottle of dressing, sometimes more.

So occassionaly I like to try my hand at cooking.  I’d rather grill it if possible, but weather doesn’t always permit.  My problem is, I’m horrible at writing stuff down, so I can never quite remember exactly what I may end up using for ingredients, etc.  So, I’ll be posting some things here.  Mainly for me to reference when needed, I have no big dreams of people actually using my recipes, but if you so choose, it’s your funeral

Gotta thank Joe Siegler for sending this my way.  Funny stuff!

So my anniversary is coming up, and for the past month I’ve been considering asking the wife for an iPhone, but I’m a bit torn.  If I buy now I’m pretty much locked into the hardware that it comes with.  Software upgrades will come no matter when I buy, but I’m just not sure if I should wait for the next generation.

I don’t have an iPod, my cell phone won’t hold a charge, and when I’m out it would definitely be useful to be able to get on the web or check email.  But does that justify buying an iPhone.  Just can’t decide.

Working on our hosting webserver the other day and came across an issue that took me a while to figure out.  When trying to restart apache I was getting “No space left on device”, yet we had plenty of hard drive space.  It turns out that we actually had no semaphores available.  Using the following little script run from bash cleared it up.

ipcs -s|awk '{print ipcrm sem  }' > SCRIPT
ipcs -s -t | cut -f 1 -d " " | egrep "^[0-9]+$" | xargs ipcrm sem

I routinely work on small linux boxes that basically run off of a small flashcard as the hard drive. We use these for out client-side network monitoring boxes. The problem with these is they can very quickly run out of drive space, if there is anything being written to the drive at all.

Here’s a very useful command that can be ran from the command line. This will give you a list, starting from your current directory, of files and their modification dates in descending order. So anything recently modified will be at the bottom of the list. Comes in quite handy.

find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort