David R. Heffelfinger

  Ensode Technology, LLC

 

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on an HP dv6000 laptop


Ubuntu 9.04 (aka "Jaunty Jackalope) was released earlier this week.

Today I set away some time to install it on my laptop, an HP dv6810us, part of the Hewlett Packard dv6000 series.

Almost everything worked "out of the box", unfortunately the wireless still takes some work to set up.

In the past I had been using ndiswrapper
to get it to work. This time it wasn't necessary, but it still took
some effort to get it going. It would be nice if the wireless would
work out of the box.

In any case, lspci -v returns the following information for my wireless card:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 137a
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
    Memory at f6000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
    Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Mask- TabSize=1
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting <?>
    Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel <?>
    Kernel driver in use: ath5k
    Kernel modules: ath_pci, ath5k

I googled around to see if I could find a solution, and bumped into this thread in the Ubuntu forums. The thread is for Intrepid, but I thought I would adapt the solution to Jaunty and see if it worked.

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

Rebooted and... nothing!

Since
the solution didn't work, I uninstalled the above package and, lo and
behold, like magic and for no apparent reason, the wireless started
working!

I suspect that one of the dependencies on that package
did the trick, I'm not sure which one (I can't even remember which
dependencies were automatically downloaded), but installing the above
package, then uninstalling it did the trick. Weird, but it worked.

Now wireless is working without ndiswrapper.

Other
than the wireless, the installation was very smooth. Ubuntu
automatically detected my Nvidia card on the first boot, and asked me
if I wanted to install the restricted drivers. I did, rebooted and the
driver "just worked".

Also, boot time is amazingly fast, which is very nice.

 
 
 
 

Preventing Trackback Spam in Apache Roller


This morning I woke up to find 150+ comments in one of my blog entries. I have email notification of comments set up in Roller, so the 150 emails notifying me of comments in my blog indicated that something was obviously not right.

I logged in to my blog to see what is going on, and sure enough, I had over 150 bogus trackbacks in one of my blog entries.

I googled around, and found a way to prevent trackback spam in Apache roller, going to "Main Menu", then clicking on "Server Administration", then checking "Enable verification of trackback links?" and "Enable referrer linkback extraction?" seems to have taken care of the problem.

Roller should really have those two settings checked by default.

Also, I noticed all the bogus trackbacks were coming from the same IP address (83.233.30.32). I googled around, and it looks like many others are having problems with spam from that IP address as well. Just to make extra sure, I dropped any incoming traffic from that IP by configuring IP Tables:

iptables -A INPUT -s 83.233.30.32 -j DROP

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Hopefully the problem is taken care of for good.

 
 
 
 
 

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© David R. Heffelfinger