Never bolt the sides back onto a computer you're building until you're absolutely, positively, cutting-charge-wrapped-around-a-major-artery serious that it's working exactly the way it's supposed to. Installing a server in the rack before the systemware's installed and patched and the servers are up and running is a sure-fire way to provoke a hardware failure or hard drive crash.
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If you just look at the outside of a piece of hardware you can't tell if it's working or not, but if you open the housing to peek inside you will unquestionably break it.
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During my daily morning mainline injection of news on the Net this week, a couple of electronics projects caught my eye that I hadn't seen before. The first is a project from SparkFun Electronics that uses higher voltage than I'm used to working with - a Geiger counter kit with a USB interface. The kit is constructed around the popular ATmega 168 microcontroller, which means that the basic Arduino development kit can be used to write code that pulls samples from the Geiger-Muller tube (powered by a tiny high voltage power supply) and outputs numerical values over USB, where the 'counter …
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While reading the files in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/usb/ I got it in my head to see if anyone else had spent any time reverse engineering the OCZ NIA, or at least had figured out how to get output from it. I spent some time a couple of days ago playing with it on Windbringer (running Gentoo Linux and all I was able to determine in the short time I worked on it was that it successfully registers itself with the Linux kernel's USB subsystem as an USB Human Interface Device (heh). After collecting some information I put the …
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As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I recieved as a Yule gift an OCZ NIA, a hardware device aimed at gamers which acts as one part EEG and one part biofeedback monitor. The idea behind it, in short, is that the user trains eirself using the included software to generate specific patterns of electrical activity in the brain and facial muscles that the drivers use to trigger certain system events. There's just one thing: there are no Linux drivers.
For the record, I'm using Windbringer as my testbed, running Gentoo Linux 2008.0 and …
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The weekend of the RepRap build-a-thon at HacDC started off simply: Lyssa and I went to dinner at Konami. We haven't been out for sushi for a number of months, due to my getting sick there in 2007. However, the food is still good and we enjoyed ourselves. I was unusually popular that night; my cellphone kept ringing every few minutes for various and sundry reasons. After dinner I dropped Lyssa off at home, loaded my gear into the trunk of my car, and headed to Hasufin's to pick him up because we were off to HacDC to help set …
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I haven't been posting a whole lot lately since Lyssa and I got back from Pittsburgh two weekends ago; we'd gone home to finalize the wedding plans that remained, such as getting hold of the marriage license, agreeing on the floral arrangements, and whatnot. Unfortunately, this involved a lot of driving, totalling out in the neighborhood of twelve hours behind the wheel, a bit more if you factor in actually driving to and from Pennsylvania itself.
The first thing we ran into was the wedding license. To save ourselves some time and energy we decided to go to the Greene …
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A basic maxim of information security is that when someone has physical access to a machine, all bets are off. If someone can touch a box, they can do pretty much whatever they want to it: if the console is unlocked they can poke around at whatever the access privileges of the logged in account will allow (how many of you configure your screensavers to require a password to turn off? how many of you walk away without logging out?), and possibly copy data to a removable storage device, such as a USB key. An intruder can also power the …
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I'm at HacDC at the moment, and I'm trying to figure out
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Following battlefield tales that Hezbollah had compromised the IDF communications network during operations in Lebanon last year, defense contractors have developed Meshnet, a hardware and software firewall appliance to protect the data networks of battlefield equipment, on the chance that someone would figure out how to infect them with malicious agents of some sort in the near future. Meshnet is supposedly based upon the Sidewinder Security Appliance from Secure Computing, but includes specialized hardware that deals with the network protocols and connection gear used in the control systems of tanks, armored personnel carriers, or what have you along with anti-spyware …
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