Hi fellow geeks!

For sometime now, I’ve been looking forward to acquire an embedded system that would become my home router and testbed for some networking stuff I’m working on. The requisites are the following:

• Noiseless, cause I want to sleep with it right next to me
• Very small
• x86 architecture, cause I want it as a testbed for my networking applications and don’t want to fiddle with architecture vs compiler/libraries issues
• Two or more Ethernet devices
• USB and mini-PCI are pluses
• Cheap!!

Thanks to my friend João Barraca, I went for a PC Engines Alix ALIX2D3. And must I say, it’s great!! And only 104Euro + 26Euro (customs taxes).  I’m not showing the unboxing process, but here’s a picture of the board.

ALIX2D3 board

I did some things wrong though, on the rush of getting a new toy (don’t you geeks know this feeling?!). First PC Engines is based in Switzerland, and therefor non-EU, and therefor customs taxes and a long wait for the delivery. Then I ordered the board and a black case only, so at arrival, I missed a DC, a Compact Flash card and a null-modem serial cable. I went to one of those big electronics market and bought the following:

• Vivanco universal DC 7v-24v (I recommend setting it for 18v, depending on the number of devices you’ll be using, such as USB and mini-PCI stuff). Oh and be careful with the polarity of the board which you can find by looking down the FB18, and using the correct connector size, 2.1mm.
• Sandisk CF Ultra II 4GB;
• Null-modem serial cable (female-to-female);
• Serial-to-USB adapter.

As I said, I also ordered a black case and I had an issue while assembling the board into it. The serial port hex nuts wouldn’t fit the case! Well, just remove them, insert the board, and attach them again. In the end, this is the result:

Board in the case

Front of "the machine"

Size compared to the E71

I recommend you install everything you need and test it before you put the board into the case, so you can avoid repeating the screw/unscrew process.

Now, let’s head for the installation.

1. First, grab the alternate installer for the latest Ubuntu i386 (9.04 iso). Burn it.
2. Plug your CF card into a USB card-reader and punch it in your PC/laptop.
3. Boot from the CD and press F4. Select text-only system installation.
4. Install Ubuntu into your CF. I recommend setting only one partition and not using swap as you don’t want to “burn” lifetime from your CF.
5. Don’t install grub into the MBR of the first disk, but on the MBR of the CF.
6. Reboot.
7. Boot into your CF Ubuntu system and log-in.
8. Install an ssh server. sudo apt-get install openssh-server
9. Edit your /etc/network/interfaces and configure your network devices as you see fit.
10. As you’re using your PC/laptop for the installation process, udev has persisted the currently existing network devices. You must remove all entries before putting the CF into the ALIX2D3 board, so that all Ethernet devices there are correctly named (eth0, eth1, eth2). Just issue echo “” > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
11. In order to protect the CF once more, edit your /etc/fstab and change relatime to noatime in the root line (/). Also, add the following lines:

none /tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0
none /var/tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0

Power off. Now, put the CF into the board and have fun through ssh. Enjoy

Hi fellow geeks,

Been 2 months since my last post, I know. I have been quite busy at work! And I guess it’s time I talk a little bit of what I’m doing since November.

Well, for a start I left Nokia Siemens Networks for PDM&FC (I know the website is old, and not trying to excuse the inexcusable, let’s say that people there are actually busy working on real stuff). Anyway, leaving a corporate for an SME was a refreshing decision! I didn’t feel productive anymore, and that was something I couldn’t stand. People were great, though

Arriving at the new company was nothing as I had in mind. In the initial couple days, it was hard to find someone who could spare some time pointing me what to do and where to start. Soon, I realized everyone was so very busy working on their projects. Nonetheless, I was kindly received by my new coworkers, and I was eager to start showing what I’m able to do.

I started with some minor tasks like writing some Python + Gstreamer code for video-transcoding stuff; then some PHP spaghetti; ending with architectural design discussions for a scalable web service-oriented platform. But the true thing I was recruited for was yet to come, the EU-funded project (FP7) HURRICANE.

HURRICANE aims at delivering a framework to enable and execute seamless handover between heterogeneous radio access networks like 802.11, 802.16 aka WiMAX, DVB-H and 3GPP (UMTS). Let me throw some major concepts so you can better understand what I’m doing..

• Handover – process of transferring an ongoing call or data session from one channel connected to the core network to another (see Handoff);
• IEEE 802.21 – aka Media-Independent Handover (MIH) Service, this emerging standard is the base for this project, comprehending the facilitation of handover analysis procedures. The resulting decision process and execution is out-of-scope of the standard.

And this is what HURRICANE proposes: to provide an implementation of the .21 standard, some handover-decision/execution modules on top of it, and also the lower-layer access to the identified RATs (Radio Access Technologies).

My main function on this project is to implement the proposed framework. Starting on the .21 generic service, the MIH Function (MIHF) and going through several stages of the link-layer (I hope to skip the real part on this), we’ll end by having, I hope, a real seamless handover between 802.11 and 802.16 – there are some more scenarios defined, but due to hardware access limitations, I don’t believe they’ll be fully deployed – powered by HURRICANE. Also, I’m the responsible to study (done!) and implement a PMIPv6 module to IP-mobility on top of this architecture.

A lot of work has been done, but there’s much more to do! I’m thrilled to see what we’ll achieve by the end of this year. In the meanwhile, I’ll be posting about casual stuff I shall be working on

Cheers to you all, and cya soon!

Yours truly

Oh yeah, just got “my” MIPv6 testbed up and running. It’s a work task actually, but some material is mine like the Asus EeePC and the Nokia N810. Well, just wanted to share with the world how wonderful it is :-p

Super-cool MIPv6 testbed

Enjoy you geeks!

While on my MIPv6 quest, I needed to define two IP addresses to a single ethernet card. Well, I thought the usual aliases thing would suffice, but I guess I was wrong since that didn’t work, complaining something like:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot assign requested address

So I remembered that, at least in Linux, you can have multiple IPv6 addresses in one single NIC just by issuing the command:

ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:a::1/64 dev eth0

This worked out! But now I wanted to add it to my /etc/network/interfaces so that the changes would be permanent. After some googling I found out that all I had to do was to add the previous command like follows:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:db8:f:1::1/64
netmask 64
up ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:a::1/64 dev eth0

Then just reboot or execute:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

And there you go! Multiple IPv6 in one single NIC the easy way

Recently a relative of mine bought an Asus Eee PC 4G (I believe it’s aka 701) with Windows XP. It’s a sweet device for any geek to have around, btw

Oh well, some cola over the keyboard made it unusable.. at least for the previous owner. That’s right, “previous”! Why? Well, there it was, this beautiful black toy, thrown to a dark and cold corner as if dead and I couldn’t resist to ask for a look. We agreed that if I got it to work, it would be mine. And so it was.. Now I only need to test if the built-in keyboard is really dead or if it’s a controller problem. Anyway, I’m using my Apple USB keyboard for home fun.

Asus EEE PC 701

After the hardware issues I got to the software part aka replacing the bundled Windows XP with Linux. As I was in a hurry I looked for the default Linux distro that comes with these babies, Xandros Linux, just to find out that it’s not freely available. Oh well, it actually sucks anyway compared to the distro I’m using right now, eeeubuntu. As a strong Ubuntu user and supporter for some years now, I am biased here of course, but it truly suits my needs without any hacks. First of all you have to select and download one of three versions: standard – a full blown desktop; nbr – Netbook Remix says it all; base – for disk space paranoids. I went for the nbr flavour and I’m quite happy with it!

The .iso file can be then processed into a CD that you’ll read using an external CD/DVD drive or simply by going the Ubuntu way, building and using a bootable USB stick. And so, after something like fifteen minutes I had my shiny new operating system up and running

After some adding/removing software, I wanted to start hacking this little bitch to get MIPv6 working on it, meaning I had to recompile the kernel which in this distro is obviously compiled with some external modules. I once tried it in a Xandros installation, and it was quite trivial, but now I wanted to package my changes into a .deb file I could replicate for others, like eventually yourself. I found out that there are already very good instructions to do so, and not wanting to add more noise to the web, I’ll just document the steps I took.

First, you’ll need some packages. I believe the following command package “list” is incomplete as I’ve used this machine before for compiling other stuff like OpenWRT. Still, you should be able to easily identify the missing parts

sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper fakeroot git-core

Update (thanks to _trine @ freenode):From now on, I assume your user has got write-permission for /opt.
Get the tailored kernel source from array.org git repository (in my case I’m using Intrepid Ibex).

cd /opt
git clone git://git.array.org/array/ubuntu-intrepid.git

Now, manage a .config file which in this case is a bundle of default config and config.eeepc:

cd ubuntu-intrepid
cat debian/config/i386/config debian/config/i386/config.eeepc > .config

Define your kernel options as you see fit:

make menuconfig

Prepare things and package up:

cp .config debian/config/i386/config.eeepc
debian/rules updateconfigs
make mrproper
fakeroot debian/rules binary-eeepc binary-headers
cd ..

Now copy the packages into your machine and install them. Reboot and be happy

Update: I’ve received hundreds of thousands of billions screenshot requests from all over the World, the ISS and even someone who I believe is from Mars. Well, you didn’t have to wait much, now did you?

megatron running eeeubuntu

Hi,

I just updated Eclipse on my MacOS X using Eclipse updating wizard. After updating I get the following: “The eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library“. Here’s what I’ve done to track and fix the issue:

1) Run eclipse from the console and check the output:

dhcp5:~ ppires$ /usr/local/eclipse-ganymede/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse
dlopen(../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800, 2): image not found

2) Check if plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800 exists:

dhcp5:eclipse-ganymede ppires$ ls plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon*
org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.101.R34x_v20080731/

3) See the difference? OK, so now let’s fix it! Edit your Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini and make the necessary changes.

4) Run it and be happy!

I’m trully disappointed that this kind of issues still happen on this so amazing product that so many people are using nowadays. Not everyone has the experience to trial and solve these errors, and that’s very negative for Eclipse, as developers will look somewhere else, like Netbeans or others.

It has been some time since I last posted, but well, I got good reasons for that.

Firstly, I moved (again) to a new place. It’s bigger than the last one, more equipped and it’s around the same rent I used to pay. Not to mention the sightseeing. Photos won’t be posted as there are a lot of maniacs around here. I know. I’ve been there.

Also, I’m no longer working at Nokia Siemens Networks. Even that it was a short-term – only two years -, I learned a lot and made some friends which is all very positive. But, sometimes in life things don’t go as we expect them to and so I felt it was time to get along and grab a new challenge. And so I did..

As for now, I won’t give you much details as everything is still very fresh, but I can say that I’m still in the Software Development department oriented at Telecommunications, but this time focused on the Mobile scene. Terms like “mobility”, handover”, “cellphone carrier services” and “java me” will be strongly read in this blog from now on.

Oh and btw, for all of you geeks out there, check out my latest acquisition, Nokia E71. This baby rocks hard and beats the hell out off IPhoda-se (IPhuck in English). A review shall be made available soon…

Nokia E71

Hi fellow geek,

I’ve got an ASUS barebone, V3 P5-G965 which goes up to a maximum consumption of 300W. Also I’ve got two Samsung 20″ Wide TFT LCD, 205BW reaching 75W tops. Now, I want to protect them from power-outages and, if possible, keep working for one hour. Could you give me some advices on what UPS to buy?

Thanks

Seguindo o desabafo do José Silva, não posso deixar de expressar também o meu especial desagrado para com a Universidade de Aveiro, que tendo sido criada com base no Centro de Estudos de Telecomunicações, hoje em Aveiro conhecido como a sede da PT Inovação, não conseguiu até hoje proporcionar cursos nocturnos para este departamento.

Já lá vão sete (7) anos desde que concluí o secundário. Já trabalhava, mas foi por esta altura que me dediquei a um emprego full-time, uma vez que tinha, e obviamente ainda tenho de me sustentar. Infelizmente o sonho, sim porque é um sonho, de ingressar na universidade, especificamente na de Aveiro, no curso de Engenharia de Computadores e Telemática, foi por água abaixo!

Este não é um país, em termos de educação, mas noutros meios também, que defende o mérito. Não é um país que apoia quem é produtivo, e muito menos quem o é e ainda quer estudar. Não é só um problema de política de educação, das universidades, mas também das entidades patronais que falam muito e fazem pouco, ou nenhum..

Um dia talvez ganhe o EuroMilhões, e aí, quem sabe, se não ficar excêntrico, desisto de trabalhar e vou estudar!

Finland

Is there anybody on my readers list that has or is living and working in Finland? I’d like to know more about the day-to-day life and life-cost in Helsinki/Espoo:

• How much for renting a flat with 1/2 rooms (monthly rent);
• Public transportation – train and subway;
• Monthly expenses: Power, gas, water, broadband internet connection and cable-TV;
• Etc.

Also I’d like to know the monthly wage range already with taxes in the Software Development area. So please, help this fellow geek

Any tips you may have for me will be surely highly appreciated.

Cheers,

PP