Hardware – The wrist band was a little bit snug for me, but has relaxed more as I wear it. Its a bit bulky when your not used to sleeping with something attached to your wrist. I also have not had any issues with it connecting to my Droid X phone. The main computer in the wristband comes out easily for washing. It has a standard mini USB plug which worked with a USB charger I had kicking around.

Software – The software is extremely easy to use. The App installed without issue on my Droid X. I quickly setup the alarm and was able to start my sleep cycle. The only beef I have about the App is that if you go to another program or switch to the homescreen, then when you come back to the app, it is as if you opened it for the first time. It should be able to run in the background like other alarm applications. The included ring tones are quite pleasant.

Success – This product works by measuring your body’s movement through the accelerometer and transmits via Bluetooth to your phone. Once you wake up it uploads the entire nights data to the cloud for analysis. I have had a number of nights where I needed to stay up late working on a project and then wake up only after a few hours. After a few times of using the Wakemate, I was able to get nearly the same quality of sleep, but with alot less time actually asleep.

One night I went to sleep at around 3:30 am and had a meeting at 7:00 am. I set the Wakemate and it woke me up at 6:45. I didn’t feel the same groggy that I would normally feel because it woke me up from higher levels of sleep and not from within REM. The coolest part of this system is that it attaches a number to the result of your sleep. 100 being the best, 1 being the worst. It calculates the amount of time you were in REM, and each level sleep to determine how quality of a sleep you had. My average is 80 which isn’t too bad. You can also add tags to your sleep to describe your sleep so that you can further analyze your sleep pattern given certain tags. For example, I have the tag “Working Late” which I attach to any of my scores where I go to bed right after I finish work. I can go back and see if I get as restful of sleep when I fall asleep directly from work or when I have some down time.

Final Thoughts – This system is a great system if you are consistent with it. My biggest problem is that I forget to charge the device when I leave for work and then am unable to use it the next night because the battery is low or dead. The next problem I have is leaving enough time each night to set it up with and connect the Bluetooth. It is literally 2 steps to do this so this is pure laziness. I recommend this product to anyone looking to get more from their sleep, or that is a nerd and loves stats.

Cheers,

Mike

I initially started following a system where the theory was getting up was a conditioned behavior. The idea was to train yourself to jump up at the sound of your alarm. Like any good habit, after a few days of sleeping in, my ability to jump up on subsequent days was completely gone.

After frustration my research lead me to a scientific way of waking yourself up. It is WakeMate. This system is based on an accelerometer worn around your wrist that communicated via bluetooth to your Android or iOS device. I researched it and read the reviews and finally bought it. The 30 day money back guarantee finally sold me on the deal, because if there were any problems, I’d ship it back and be right where I was when I got it.

Tonight is my first night of using it. I pulled it out of the package, charged the battery. I synced it to my Droid X, which people on the reviews said was not possible. It is possible and it worked seamless. I was able to log in to my account and was able to set all the settings. I am ready to go to sleep now. Everything looks like it is working properly. Now all that is left to do if push the sleep button once I finish this write up.

I am going to try and log my results with this system since my goals are to sleep less while having more fulfilling sleep. About 80% of my mornings are a fight with myself and my determination is starting to falter. Hopefully this system gives me the edge I need to avoid waking up during quality sleep. Wish me luck!!!

Cheers,

Mike

Now you should be thinking, how can I take that list and then unlock the whole server? I too faced this same problem. This is how I dealt with it. First don’t mess with svnadmin rmlock… I couldn’t make it work to save my life. The setup is like this, we are going to grep out some keywords from the svnadmin lslocks to get only paths, then we are going to use awk to help us build perfect paths, then we are going to use the svn client to finish the job. And it all fits on one line.
*Important: Make sure your local copy is updated to the latest revision.
svnadmin lslocks /usr/local/svn/repos/[repo-name]/ |grep Path | awk '{print "file:///usr/local/svn/repos/[repo-name]" $2}' | xargs svn unlock --force

Thanks to some nifty piping, you have just unlocked your whole SVN. Let me explain some key points here, “Path” next to grep will draw out something that looks like this:

Path: [Path to locked file]
Here is a really quick run down of awk, basically it takes any white space and then seperates the information into variables starting with $0 being the whole line, $1 being the first, $2, the second, etc. $1 would be the word “Path:” and $2 is our path. But that is not enough because we have to make it a qualified repo path, and since I am doing it on my local server I can use the “file:///” prefix. After that we send it to xargs and then use svn unlock and xargs will apend the argument to the end of the line. –force is also important because that will make sure you steal the lock in the unlock process.

FINE PRINT aka Caution: SVN locks were designed to protect files while a person is working on those files so no one else could over write them while they were developing on those files. The idea is that someone can get exclusive access to the files, change them, commit them, and then release the lock when the work is completed. If you are using this type of idea for your system, please send the list of locks to all of your developers and then have them manually unlock the locks they set. Otherwise you can ruin and destroy work in progress if you are not careful. Now if you do not care about locks and know what is being developed, by all means use the function above.

If you have a better way to unlock your svn repository I’d love to hear it, I created this method from my own knowledge of the shell. If you need some help or have questions, post a comment and I’ll get back with you.

Cheers,

-m

Begin by first setting up an access-list for interesting traffic. The world interesting in the Cisco context means any traffic that is bound for the VPN. Then you will configure any other ACL rules that you want. After that you must define your crypto maps. Crypto maps are the instructions for how the VPN work. They include encryption, hashing, who their talking to and what access-list rules to use. After that you define tunnel-group attributes which are the pre-shared key if one is used. This first code block will feature the use of a static NAT example. Static NAT is used in the situation of a single host mapping to a single outside IP. For example, if you had a local server at 192.168.1.2 and you wanted outside to inside access to this server from its 1.1.1.9 outside IP address on all ports, then you would define a static NAT rule in the ASA to accommodate this. If this is foreign to you and you want a blog entry on it specifically, drop me a line in the comments. In the following example, here is the break down of IP’s and locations:
Site A is a Pre-configured L2L Vpn that you need to connect to. At site A, they use a local Subnet of 192.168.7.0/24. They have given you a NAT IP address for your outside interface of 10.2.2.2. Their Outside IP address of their ASA is 1.1.1.7. Your internal network is 192.168.1.0/24. Your server that needs to talk to the other side is 192.168.1.2 What you are trying to accomplish is to get to 192.168.7.0/24 resources by NATing through 10.2.2.2 while giving Site A access back to your server at 192.168.1.2

! Access list for our interesting traffic. This is traffic that goes from the NAT to the other side of the VPN.
access-list vpn1 extended permit ip host 10.2.2.2 192.168.7.0 255.255.255.0

! And now for the tunnel-group configuration
tunnel-group 1.1.1.7 type ipsec-l2l
tunnel-group 1.1.1.7 ipsec-attributes
pre-shared-key [Match Pre-shared Key]


Now if everything went well you now have a functioning tunnel to Site A. Test it by pinging. I am going to write an article on advanced VPN troubleshooting one of these days because Cisco is quite cryptic and difficult to troubleshoot if the VPN doesn’t come up. For now I’ll assume all went well.

Now it is time to program the second VPN. This VPN will be much the same as the last, but instead of seeking local access to only one machine, we want the whole subnet to access resources across the VPN. But we do not want the other side of the VPN talking back to our local machines. This is made possible by a Global NAT or Dynamic NAT policy. This is much the same as the policy on your home generic wireless router. It provides you NAT to the internet, but it is difficult for traffic to come back to your network unless you allow it. The IP’s for the local network will stay the same, but the remote and NAT address are different. The remote side of the VPN has a local subnet of 172.16.4.0/24. The remote side has provided you a NAT address of 10.10.10.4. Their Peer address is 2.2.2.4.

There are a few caveats that I am going to save you alot of trouble I found out the hard way. The first deals with crypto maps. You can not define a new crypto map name for a new VPN, you must use the same map name as you used previously, but you must change the priority (the number next to the map name). The second is creating a NAT rule to stop traffic from going to the internet across the ASA. When doing this, if you already have existing NAT rules (besides 0.0.0.0 default rule) then you must use that ACL to define it. Only one NAT rule ACL will work, all others drop. If you need clarification on this, type show run | in nat and if you see more than 2 lines of NAT listed and you are not sure what you are doing, then you are doing it wrong. Remove one of the NAT lines and combine access-lists. The rules are very similar to our previous one, I’ll give the play by play again:

! Access list for our interesting traffic. This is traffic that goes from the NAT to the other side of the VPN.
access-list new-vpn extended permit ip host 10.10.10.4 172.16.4.0 255.255.255.0

! And now for the tunnel-group configuration
tunnel-group 2.2.2.4 type ipsec-l2l
tunnel-group 2.2.2.4 ipsec-attributes
pre-shared-key [Match Pre-shared Key]


Now if everything has gone well, then you have got yourself 2 functioning L2L tunnels to two separate networks. If things didn’t go well, then you’ll have to wait for my trouble shooting guide which will be coming shortly. Or you could leave me a message int he comments and I’ll get back with you.

I hope you have enjoyed my guide to setting up multiple L2L VPN’s and have found this useful. Good LUCK!

Cheers,

Mike

The issue is that when the server looses power, and then during boot it looses power again, it throws a “Recordfail” flag that can be used to change the way Grub2 boots. In the default configuration of Ubuntu 10.10, they have chosen to display the boot menu without a timer when there is a record fail. It is much reminiscent of Windows when it fails to boot properly and gives you the boot menu for different modes.

In a desktop environment, this would be fine because I could choose to run recovery, run normally or whatever. However, in my configuration, I want this thing to boot even it if is on fire. If it doesn’t boot, it should be cause some hardware needs to be replaced. After some digging, I found the solution. Edit /etc/grub.d/10_linux and commment the following lines like so:

# recordfail=1
# save_env recordfail

Save the file and then run sudo update-grub to generate a new grub.cfg file. Viola, no more stalled boots.

Cheers,

-Mike

First, open an ssh session to the radio in question and do the following:

#vi /tmp/system.cfg

Next add users.1.homedir=/etc/persistent and type the following:


#cfgmtd -w -p /etc/
#reboot


Next do ssh-keygen to generate a new RSA key. You will be asked for a directory and a passphrase. Make sure you leave passphrase blank, or you will have to enter that key each time.

Now you will need to make a directory and copy the public key to the AirOS system:

#ssh username@x.x.x.x 'mkdir /etc/persistent/.ssh/'
#cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@x.x.x.x 'cat >> /etc/persistent/.ssh/authorized_keys'


If you changed the directory during the ssh-keygen process, make the change in the command above.

Now make your changes persistent with this command:
#cfgmtd -w -p /etc/

You should be able to login without a password!

Cheers,

Mike

The first place to look is the logs. Read the logs, know the logs, they will help you. Here is a command that will take the non-human readable date code and make it readable for better understanding:
cat /var/log/qmail/qmail-send/current |tai64nlocal |less

There are 2 major logs to check when dealing with qmail:
/var/log/qmail/qmail-smtp/current
/var/log/qmail/qmail-send/current

Here is a sample of a bounce message log entry:

2010-10-08 11:04:05.068209500 starting delivery 280: msg 1328309 to local dump@maul.com
2010-10-08 11:04:05.075688500 status: local 1/10 remote 0/120
2010-10-08 11:04:05.141754500 delivery 280: failure: Sorry,_no_mailbox_here_by_tha
t_name._(#5.1.1)/
2010-10-08 11:04:05.146678500 status: local 0/10 remote 0/120
2010-10-08 11:04:05.155633500 triple bounce: discarding bounce/1328309
2010-10-08 11:04:05.158451500 end msg 1328309
2010-10-08 11:08:06.159425500 new msg 1327108
2010-10-08 11:08:06.159435500 info msg 1327108: bytes 1025 from qp 5008 uid 0

The important thing to follow here is the “delivery 280.” That is the delivery number that will allow you to follow the message. In this case we can see it was a local delivery that failed and now is bouncing.

It can be daunting to dig through the log files, but they will have the answer if you look.

Cheers,

Mike

I have had this problem before where I look for a problem at the core, when really it is something on the surface. I am talking about an instance where there was a perl script on Cron that was sending email at given intervals. I thought the problem was with the database or with data communication, when really it was with an issue with syntax. I had originally looked through the source file, made some changes, changed them back and then screwed myself.

The important thing to remember is that when a problem seems overly complex, get back to basics and you might find the problem. In the networking world, you would adhere to the OSI 7 layer model. In programming I would say stick to the things you changed first and then double check those items first.

To some of you, this will sound obvious, but I think it is worth saying. Well, good luck with programming and debugging.

Cheers,

Mike

First determine where you USB device is located. You can ls /dev/ and look for it… Since there are 700+ items there, I’ll give you a hint: ttyUSB is what it should start with. Mine was /dev/ttyUSB0.

I found a tutorial of a little program called minicom. Minicom is a lightweight terminal client that is quiet cool in my opinion. Start minicom with the following:

minicom -s

This will put you in interactive configuration mode. Change your port information to what you discovered above and make sure to set the baud rate and other parameters. Now choose to save the config as dfl (default) and away you go.

Thanks again Linux for being awesome!

-Mike