Webs’ Random Ideas

So I have been working on some Cisco 871 wireless routers at work lately and I must say I am really impressed. Basically these devices can act as your regular run of the mill wireless router with a 4 port built in switch, but that would be a waste of some dollars as these devices pack a whole ton of features.

The way I am running it is I have an 871 connected to a “head-end” router back at work. The 871 creates a VPN tunnel out of my home network to the head-end router. The nice thing is this tunnel is dynamically created so you can essentially take this 871 anywhere, hook it up, and have a connection to work.

Now the fun part is once you have this connection, not only can you have wired and wireless connections, but you can use these connections to get IP Phone, teleconferencing, and video services all across the VPN tunnel back to work. And with pretty amazing speed and little overhead.

I have a IP phone, an IP wireless phone (a phone that wirelessly connects to the 871 and then acts as a IP phone once the connection is made), and a webcam. I haven’t tested the webcam yet, and will report on it once I have, but everything else works pretty damn smooth. I have run into some problems with the wireless IP phones, but that is because we are using the new “dual mode” phones that can make voice calls on cellular and wireless networks. They are still in first generation and just coming out with the newer second generation ones which should hopefully solve the problem.

I have been beyond impressed with the capabilities of the 871 and I hope to have subsequent posts on more technical topics like 802.1x port authentication… Oh boy!

A Microsoft truck driving down the road on 74. I guess the got a new campaign going on called “Microsoft Mobile Event Experience”. I had trouble tracking down a link and in doing so found a security flaw in a Microsoft Partner’s website. I don’t want to divulge any more information than that, but I did find it midly humorous that a MS site had a major security flaw.

Oddly enough I saw the truck on the road as I was searching up information on Zimbra.

Besides some disabled plugins…

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and the damn Guest Wireless Controller finally works. Since Thursday at 9:00P I worked nearly a weeks worth of work hours trying to fix guest wireless at my company. After getting Cisco on the phone it was finally solved. I will try to write more later, because it’s an issue others could easily run into.

So I have a couple good reasons to celebrate Google’s 10th birthday. For one, they have dramatically changed the way people work on the Internet and do their day to day Internet tasks. Searching on Google is incredibly easy but very efficient. They first time I searched with Google I was blown away. I couldn’t believe the first link that came up was the one I wanted.

Then I remember in the summer of 04 my sister told me about Gmail. I said I didn’t need another email address as I was already using Yahoo and was tired of having people switch me from one crappy client to another. She explained it was different and invited me (one of her friends worked at Google).

I tried it out and fell in love. I was floored that I was only getting a few spam messages a day and they were all going to my spam folder. Not only that none were false positives. When Gmail rolled around  I was instantly hooked with Google’s ability to create easy, lightweight, and blazing fast software. Now Chrome has solidified this opinion…

Now to celebrate go search like it’s 2001…

Time to upgrade Firefox to version 3.03:

Mozilla patched a vulnerability in the Firefox Password Manager feature last week, just days after it released Firefox 3.0.2 to address 11 security flaws. Firefox 3.0.3 was slated to be released this week, but the fix was pushed out late in the day on Friday, September 26. Mozilla became aware of the password problem when, after installing Firefox 3.0.2, some users reported they were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new site passwords.

I just need to do quite a bit more work to get everything up and running. I figured out screen resolution, which took some tinkering… I also restored my PS3 settings. This means I am back to how I was before yesterday, except I also have Ubuntu installed.

I will write more once everything works I am flying high!

I figured out what I was doing wrong. When I was trying to install the bootloader I had the Ubuntu CD in the disc drive. So the boot loader by default was installing off the CD everytime. I started to suspect this as every piece of documentation made it seem like updating the bootloader is incredibly easy and I noticed the PS3 told me the install location was “disc” everytime.

So I finally got petitboot loaded. And now I can’t install Ubuntu. Note… get kboot installed first, then upgrade to petitboot.

Let’s see what happens this time!

Like Fellow Blogger Les, Ubuntu is Giving me Hell…

As previously reported I am attempting to install Ubuntu to Linux. Naturally I am running into some issues. The instructions I am following are pretty straight forward and found here. So I followed everything to a “T” and when I get to the point to actually install Ubuntu  (when you hit “Enter” at the “kboot” prompt) kboot loads the USB drivers, I get some error messages, all the USB devices shut down, and the system freezes. Not good.

Advice said to enter: “boot-game-os” to go back to the PS3 interface or partition. This did not work. Through some hunting I found I had to enter “ps3-boot-game-os”.

After much searching and troubleshooting I found this forum post. The guy made a comment informing the person with the problem to update kboot. I did this and still a no go. Same problem.

Next I tried petitboot instead of kboot. I found this via this link… This still is not working.

If I had to guess I would say the bootloader is not changing each time I attempt to change it. So I am going to try updating it again from my flash drive and see what happens.

So far I haven’t gotten very far. I had to re-install my main computer because I got viruses and crap. Then I had to move files from my USB hard drive to my main computer to reformat it. PS3’s can’t recognize NTFS so I need to reformat the USB HD with a FAT32 volume. Once I get Ubuntu installed I can do this type of work a lot faster on the PS3…

Anyways, so the next step is to backup my PS3 onto the USB HD and then create the partitions, the install Ubuntu, restore the backup, and see how nicely Ubuntu plays…

I will update when I have something juicy