Welcome to Gadget-Freak.com!

This website is dedicated to the geeks (or wanna-be geeks) of the world that are into taking on projects just "because they can" and for the network administrators that actually care about what they do (it sure ain't easy, is it?  Here are some suggestions that may help).  Since this site is perpetually under construction (and long winded), any feedback you can provide in making this a better site is always welcome.  Take care, I hope you find this place useful!

     - Ed Hagihara

(Last updated 3/24/03)

News from 3/24/03

New Document:  Setting up the SecuRemote VPN client on Windows

Actually, this was a little write up that I had made at a previous company for the rest of the IT department to decipher, so I decided to stick this up on my documents page.  All relevant company information and IP addresses have been removed.

New Document:  Redirecting a Solaris Print Queue to a Windows NT/2000 queue

This was from some information that I found on the newsgroups when we were moving away from Novell to NT/2000 at a previous company.  Our Sun box was sending print jobs to a Novell print queue and we needed to move it over to a Windows NT/2000 print server.  This document is a quick description outlining how to do this.

New Document:  GFS Backup Rotations

This document briefly outlines what is known as a GFS (grandfather – father - son) backup rotation which considered a common backup practice among many companies.

News from 3/23/03

New Document: Using Solaris x86 as my Samba PDC

I've been using Solaris on my Shuttle SS40G as my Primary Domain Controller for a little while, I've just documented it. It's the first time that I've gotten the printing to work however, and that was thoroughly obnoxious!!  I spent a few hours really making this one work - the hardest part for me was trying to get it to load the printer drivers automatically.  This should not have been that hard.  It took a ton of Google searches before I could compile enough information to really make this one work right.  Anyway, I'm going to add it to my documents page.

News from 3/22/03

New Documents:  Setting up Solaris as a cd-rom server and Setting up Linux as a cd-rom server

Do you ever lose your valuable original CDs?  Me too ;-).  This is a quickie guide to setting up a cd-rom server.  All you're essentially doing is copying a CD to an image file and remounting it making it accessable to the network while keeping your original discs locked and hidden away.

News from 3/17/03

Installing Red Hat 8.0 on my PC notebook...

I performed a full Red Hat 8.0 installation on my notebook computer this past weekend, wiping off XP Home off of it. I have a tendency to be kind of minimalist in my installations installing only the stuff I want on it, and not much else since I think most OS default installations are kind of piggy.

I thought this was neat enough to ask the creator of the document, Jay Berkenbilt, for permission to use it, and he graciously has.  Thanks, man!.

During this process, I found a really cool link on how to create a Red Hat 8.0 bootable DVD from the .iso image files that one can download.

Anyhow, I installed it. I usually do a server installation with the Gnome desktop only and all of the development stuff only - I think KDE is really cool, but most of the software I use requires all of the GTK+ stuff from Gnome and I really don't want to keep around 2 desktops on my system.  Ran into a couple of minor snags, though.

Snag #1 - When I tried to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader, it whined with the error:

Warning: charset "UTF-8" not supported, using "ISO8859-1"
Aborted

After doing some searches, I found that Acrobat can't handle unicode character sets.  The solution was to modify the following lines in /etc/sysconfig/i18n:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

and changed it to:

LANG="en_US"

after that, Acrobat worked out just fine.  Incidentally, YES, I know NOW that this is in the Red Hat 8.0 release notes on the first CD.  Egad. I don't personally mind fixing this stuff, but it's this kind of niggling detail that I think really keeps Linux from becoming a mainstream desktop OS for most users.

Snag #2 - A little more complicated - I'm having a hard time finding a good web authoring tool for use under Linux so I can wean myself from FrontPage. I've tried Bluefish, but it wouldn't even open up this page saying it wasn't a valid format or somesuch.  I also tried the trial version of the IBM WebSphere Homepage Builder software, but when opening up the URL directly, it would segfault, and if I opened it up from my local computer, it skewed the page completely.   Still looking for the perfect solution, but haven't quite found it yet.  My friend Lisa recommends Quanta Plus, but I don't use KDE which it requires.  I suppose if I have to, I'll install it, but it cries against my minimalist nature. ;-)

I installed SAMBA 2.2.8 on it so I can share my stuff out from my notebook, but in the process found some information about a new exploit that affects versions 2.2.7a and below.  Time to upgrade my Solaris PDC and my other linux boxes including my Playstation 2.:

"A flaw has been detected in the Samba main smbd code which could allow an external attacker to remotely and anonymously gain Super User (root) privileges on a server running a Samba server. This flaw exists in previous versions of Samba from 2.0.x to 2.2.7a inclusive. This is a serious problem and all sites should either upgrade to Samba 2.2.8 immediately or prohibit access to TCP ports 139 and 445. The Release Notes are available on-line.

In addition to addressing this security issue, Samba 2.2.8 includes many unrelated improvements. These improvements result from our process of continuous quality assurance and code review, and are part of the Samba team's committment to excellence."

Incidentally, I realized that I left some stuff out of my document for DOS Junkies that I'm going to have to add. Namely setting permissions and running executables.  I may add a CDRom server quickstart for Linux, too.  Yes, I do know that there's a more in-depth (and probably better written) document kind of similar to this over here at www.linuxdoc.org.

News from 3/12/03

My iBook dvd/cdrw combo drive dilemma - it fails to write 16x, will only write at 4x:

Okay, this has been sticking in my craw for the past several months, and I've got to get this off my chest.  I'm really ticked off at Apple now.  Apple appears to be completely ignoring this problem without any kind of resolution.  I purchased a new iBook 800mhz sometime last November that had a 16x cd-r/dvd combo drive built into it.  Well, the problem is that it will only burn at 4x, and I'm CLEARLY NOT the only person having this issue, either.  For some history concerning this, you can check out the Apple discussion boards about the iBook cd-r combo problem and the people that are very unhappy about the way Apple is trying to shove this problem under the carpet.

There's a link from macnn.com about this issue here.
There's a link from the macaddict forums here.
And one from xlr8yourmac.com here.

The ONLY statement that Apple has given towards this is in this document which essentially says that the failure for the drive to not burn at 16x is due to the media - which is completely a bogus statement.  I wouldn't have a problem with this if it wasn't for the fact that Apple doesn't even mention what media will burn reliably at 16x.  When I got it back from repair on Jan. 15th as outlined below, I bought a pack of 48x Verbatim media at the Apple store in Newport Beach BEFORE I LEFT to try it out there with the same problem.

1. People are saying that name brand media from even within the same batch will have this strange issue. I've tried misc. brands of 16x, 24x, 32x, 40x speed media myself as well, so brand and speed of media appear to make no difference.
   
   
2. I was going to install linux to determine if it were an OS problem, but I saw another post in the discussion boards that someone else managed to beat me to it. Since it is also happening under linux, this pretty much means that this is definitely some sort of hardware issue and is not software related.
   
   
3. There are two different brands of combo drives that Apple is using in their iBooks - the Sony CRX820E and the Toshiba SD-R2212.  They both exhibit similar problems but with slightly different manifestations, and when they "fixed" my iBook, all they did was replace the Toshiba unit with a Sony one and made a total of zilch difference.
   
   

Either way, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in even doing anything about it as this poster wrote:

"...I had my case escalated as far as it will go. Apple does not take it in for replacement anymore and they have no solution. I wrote an angry letter to customer care, suggesting them to solve it one way or another, or lose me as a customer (who spends around $3000 a year on Apple equipment). After some discussion, it came out that they would not solve it."

I had also taken my iBook in for repair in in the beginning of January, and on the 15th, I got my iBook back from Apple from supposedly fixing it.  I posted this on the Apple discussion boards:

"Now I'm angry. REALLY angry. I just got home from the Apple store after I took my unit in last week (it had a Toshiba combo drive), and all they did was replace it with a Sony combo unit.

Before I left the store, I purchased a pack of media to see if the burn would still have the same problem... AND IT DID - time to complete burn: 16 minutes. Another tech came out to tell me that he knew about the issue, and that Apple probably knew about the issue, and tha6t they'd probably come up with some sort of workaround, be it a firmware or software update. He went on to mention that even IF he knew WHEN they'd produce some kind of fix for this that he wouldn't be able to tell me. He then tried some workaround involving putting in the disc before the burn, and of course that didn't work either. He indicated that he'd written down my iBook serial # for some sort of case history or something.

So essentially, Apple replaced my drive, it didn't work, and has now left me with an unresolved problem which they MAY or MAY NOT fix. The only other thing I walked out of there with was a statement from him that I should contact Apple customer service if I was unhappy. "

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple gets to control both the hardware and the software.  Sheesh.

News from 3/10/03

Anyway, it sounds like my latest 'gadget' (if you can call it that) is going to be a new baby!!!  My wife announced last Friday that we're going to have our third child (or maybe potentially fourth, if you count on the fact that twins run in both sides of our family. YIKES).  We won't know for sure yet, since it's still way too early to tell and she's only about two and a half weeks pregnant..  Either way, this is some really great news for us that we're really excited about!  Like our last two children we'll probably wait 'till it's born to find out what gender it is.