Stuart's Weblog

I today received an email from Dyn (previously DynDNS), stating:

Starting now, if you would like to maintain your free Dyn account, you must log into your account once a month. Failure to do so will result in expiration and loss of your hostname. Note that using an update client will no longer suffice for this monthly login.

(emphasis theirs)

Now, if this were a service which requires interaction then this would be an unfriendly but potentially fair way to weed-out inactive accounts. This isn’t one of those cases, though – I can happily go for months or even years where my only interaction with Dyn(DNS) is via auto-update clients. And this is the heart of the problem – many routers and embedded devices have built-in DynDNS clients, frequently with no option to switch to an alternative service. Possibly this is worth $25/year, possibly it isn’t. Personally, I’m not paying a penny to a company trying to hold its users to ransom like this. For my usage, there are a handful for hostnames in a Dyn(DNS) domain – and therefore these cannot to transferred to a different provider. I keep them going purely so that historic links will still work.

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For a long time, the only way to get the full functionality out of NICs which use the in-kernel ‘r8169′ driver was actually to eschew using the driver all together! Realtek offered their own driver, somewhat confusingly named ‘r8168′. This is available from their own highly unreliable FTP server, or from Google Code. This meant that whenever a new kernel was released you then had to await an update from Realtek before being able to upgrade.

However, the most recent r8168 release, version 8.0035.00, was released towards the end of December 2012 – and, whilst is builds against Linux kernels up to and including 3.7, it doesn’t work with kernel 3.8 or kernel 3.9.

… so I took a look at the r8169 source, and it looked suspicious as if:

1. It has been updated;
2. It supports to specific Realtek device I’m using;
3. It has full 9k Jumbo-frames support!

Finally, after several years, I no longer need to use a proprietary driver in order to have full-sized frames!

It would, of course, have been nice if Realtek had posted a simple message saying that they were no longer updating their driver as the in-tree driver has now caught up in terms of functionality.

The interesting thing will be to see whether the occasional (every 3-6 months or so?) kernel panic within the networking subsystem will now also have gone away…

The stock Raspberry Pi kernel, as supplied with the default Raspbian distribution, is pretty good – albeit not always especially streamlined. However, building a custom kernel with different options can be an unexpected minefield: many seemingly innocuous changes can cause the Pi to fail to boot – often with the VideoCore system failing to initialise or with USB networking problems.

There follows a list of patches and observations which should hope to make this process less trial-and-error…

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BT ships a variety of modems for its VDSL/Infinity product. There are ongoing discussions regarding the merits of each, but what all do have in common is that they are locked-down and inaccessible. The Huawei HG612 is theoretically the easiest to root, as described – but this does require loading a custom firmware. Additionally, mine re-locked itself and I’ve been unable to get into firmware-recovery mode since

The ECI B-FOCuS V-2FUb/I Rev. 1B can be unlocked via a serial connection without any need to replace the stock firmware – details here.

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https://github.com/srcshelton/gentoo-ebuilds

That is all.

The general consensus amongst distributions is that requiring /var/run to be moved to /run is a good thing(tm) – or, at least, a battle not worth fighting.

I note that the “you have to pre-mount the partition from an initrd” which is now being applied to /usr doesn’t appear to apply to /var (and thank goodness no-one is arguing that /var also has to be conjoined with the root partition)…

One of the greatest strengths of Linux is the ability to do things the way you feel is right – and there’s an awful lot of legacy software with still relies upon the existence of /var/run, and I’m just not keen on having yet another mandatory root-directory entry.

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There’s something about the Raspberry Pi Model B which makes me want to use the word “awesome” like a be-hoodied member of the next US boy-band sensation: the Raspberry Pi is an awesome 85.60mm x 53.98mm slice of 700Mhz ARMv6 awesomeness.

Another thing which is clearly awesome is Lego.

I think I feel a plan forming…

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Recent changes to udev mean that it is now a requirement to have the partition containing the /usr filesystem mounted prior to system boot, requiring usr and root to be on the same partition (which is Red Hat’s preferred solution), or to mount /usr prior to booting from an initrd.

I’ve successfully run Linux systems for many years without needing this additional complication, and I don’t plan to start changing the core boot process in order to comply with Red Hat’s (non-FHS compatible) vision of what a Linux system should look like.

The best alternative right now seems to be Busybox‘ mdev – a very simple hotplug agent and /dev tree maintenance tool which provides identical core functionality to udev.

However, the default configuration files provided with mdev are somewhat outdated and there isn’t much information out there documenting how to make the transition.

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For what must be many months now, my local installation of WordPress has been hassling me to install the Jetpack plugin.

It sounded sorta useful, so I dutifully clicked on Install and was told:

register_http_request_failed

… with a ‘GnuTLS recv error (-9): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.‘ error.

Having looked around to try to find a solution, the only suggestion appeared to be to rebuild PHP or to wait for the stabilisation of the newest PHP development branch. This turns out to be wrong, however, and the solution is both simple and maddening…

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So you’ve got your 3D Vision Kit and your 120Hz Monitor. You hook it all up, and 3D just-works™ – right?

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