The Blog Thing

OK, I’ll be the last one to say that security through obscurity is a good thing. But it does have its uses.

In that light, I found this device funny and smart. It’s a 2 GB USB flash drive disguised as a piece of frayed cable.  You’ll still want to encrypt it, I guess, but it will probably be missed if your bags are searched at customs, the police or thieves raid your house, or you lose it.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/ab63/?cpg=81H

So, for some reason I don’t want to know, you want to remove your old network connections from Windows XP, but you can’t seem to find them?
You can see them when you run “netsh interface show interface”, but that’s about the only place they show up? You’ve tried using the device manager and told it to “show hidden devices” and they still won’t show up?

Don’t worry, help is here

The problem lies in the fact that the device manager in Windows XP doesn’t show devices that aren’t connected to your system. So, the old NIC simply doesn’t show up, because it isn’t connected to your system anymore.
The same goes for any other device, by the way. An old USB stick, USB harddrive, your old CRT or LCD monitor, they’re all in there, but you can’t seem to remove them.

Do the following to get device manager to work the way you want:

1. Start a command prompt:
   Start -> Run -> “cmd.exe” <enter>
2. At the command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER:
   set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
3. Type the following command at the same command prompt, and then press ENTER:
   start devmgmt.msc

The device manager will start and when you do “View -> Show hidden devices” , all old and unconnected devices will show up, so you can troubleshoot them, delete them or be amazed at how many devices you’ve had connected to your system but forgot about.

Happy removing

I’ve worked with my new Intel D945GCLF mini-ITX board for a while now, here are some observations:

• When installing the board in any chassis, make sure that your power supply has a 4-pin ATX “P4″ connector. The board needs it and won’t run without it!
• The CPU used on the board, the Intel Atom 230, doesn’t support SpeedStep technology, and will always run at full speed. This is a no-no if you’re trying to build an as-low-as possible-power-consuming device.
• Because of the constant full speed, the CPU gets very hot when simply disconnecting the fan. It didn’t crash within 15 minutes, but I’m sure it will shorten the CPU lifetime.
• The CPU fan always runs at full speed and is quite noisy. Without any modifications, I would not use this board in very quiet environments. Maybe a Zalman FanMate will help here.
• The cooling fins attached to the CPU are quite high. So high that makes the standard cooler to big for a 1U high chassis.
• There is a problem installing CentOS 5.2 or Fedora 9 from the standard ISO’s. See this post.
• When trying to install Windows XP, make sure you’re installing it with SP2 or SP3 slipstreamed in. The install will fail with the original Windows XP or with SP1 (you’ll get a blue screen complaining about pci.sys).

All in all, I like the board, but wouldn’t use it for anything else than (busy) office or home environment desktop applications. But then, that’s exactly what Intel says the board is for

Happy building!

I recently bought a new Intel D945GCLF mini-ITX board (http://www.intel.com/Products/Desktop/Motherboards/D945GCLF/D945GCLF-overview.htm) and had some problems installing Linux on it.
The problem I encountered was that the installation would cause a kernel panic (“Oops…”) early on in the process.

I’ve tested this with CentOS 5.2, and Fedora 9 and both gave the same results.

The problem seems to be the driver for the on board LAN interface. This is a Realtek 8102EL fast ethernet with PCI Express interface chip, but all the installations try to load the Realtek r8169 driver and that’s where it fails.

The solution is to (these instructions work for CentOS / RHEL, for Fedora 9 see below):

1. Download the correct driver (the r8101 is correct, this works for the r8102!) from the Intel web site (which is here at the time of this post: Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I wrote about my problem with the XFX GeFORCE 8800GT cooling fan.
So, I decided to get myself a good Zalman cooler and get that onto the card. I choose the VF1000 (LED).
The process proved to be relatively easy and I’ve taken some pictures that show you how things go.
Click the links to view the pictures.

First, the card with the original cooling assembly removed:

Builtin cooling removed

Next, a detail of the original fan connection. It shows that only power is connected, not the fan speed control:

Fan connection

Third, a picture of the card with the passive RAM coolers in place:

Passive RAM cooling

And last, a picture of the complete assembly:

Complete assembly

As I said, the process is relatively easy if you’ve fiddled with electronics before.

Oh, one thing you DON’T have to do is get the Zalman ZM-RHS88 heatsink. It won’t fit on this specific card. Anyone need one? I’ve got one

I just bought an XFX GeFORCE 8800GT “Alpha Dog Edition” card and installed it yesterday.
Though happy with the cards performance (it’s FAST!), I’m not so happy with the huge amount of noise the cooling fan generates.
The fan runs constantly at full speed and generates enough noise to pass as a small vacuum cleaner.
Using RivaTuner or any other software tuning program has no effect at all, so I decided to take the card apart. For some reason, XFX has not connected the temperature/rpm control of the fan… See the picture I took:

Fan connection

So, now you know, the card isn’t defective, this is by design!

My solution is to get myself a good Zalman cooling assembly as soon as possible!

Dallas Semiconductors (www.dalsemi.com) has developed a very small integrated circuit (the DS2703) for use in rechargable battery packs that communicates with a cell phone (or digital camera, notebooks, PDAs, etc.) and verifies the authenticity of the battery pack. It uses SHA-1 and a 64-bit secret key in the proces of verification.
This way the use of third party battery packs will be a thing of the past. Price and size has prevented large scale use of this technique up until now, but at US$ 0,77 per chip I guess the main cell phone manufacturers will jump to the occasion and incorporate this (or similar) chip in their battery packs to prevent users from using unsafe packs in stead.

My guess is that we will see much more of this kind of device- or add-on authentication in the near future, especially in situations where revenue depends on sales of authentic add-ons (like the mentioned battery packs, but how about ink and toner cartridges and the like) and situations where the safety or regulatory approval of a system could be comprimised by using non-authentic add ons.

Who would have guessed? Battery packs doing complicated math…

Dallas has a nice white paper about this application of SHA-1 on their Maxim site: www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/appnote_number/1201