Chris Osburn

Who am I?

I am the Network Administrator for the Speakeasy Cafe and Network an internet cafe, full service web house, and small office Internet integrator.

Netwinder topics I'm thinking about

In the internet cafe portion of the business, we are placing public access terminals in various coffeehouses and other locations around Seattle. Currently, these are either single dumb terminals modemed back to our main site, or terminal clusters served by small Linux boxes acting as terminal servers. The Netwinder has obvious potential in either of those roles. About the only thing I could wish for was some sort of multi serial port device. Perhaps there's a parallel to 8-port serial converter out there.
In our main cafe, the Netwinder may make a fine firewall/access server, letting travelling folk have a place to plug in their laptops and providing security.
In the office integration portion of the business, the Netwinder may find use as a firewall or router. Its two ethernet ports are a big bonus in the routing department. (Even the Cisco 2501 just has one :-))
Use of a 'winder as a quickie temporary {DNS|Mail|News|Web|Etc} server in case of emergency. Also the potential for use at public venues where a temporary Internet drop is handy. (trade shows, fairs, etc.)

Netwinder Issues

(These aren't meant to be slams. They're problems I'm having that I have neither the interest nor talent to fix. Anything you think I should know, do drop a line. As I can flesh out the problems, I'll update below until I get something solid enough to submit as a bug.)

Hey! I only see the X drawing errors when I start with startx. Starting with xdm doesn't show me the problem. Am I high on drugs?
The clock loses time like a sieve. About 4 minutes/hour. xntpd doesn't seem to be doing the job, and I'm running ntpdate once an hour
sshd runs all right, but the 'winder is refusing to give up a pty for login. I can telnet multiple times, so there are plenty of pty's to go around. I get the following errors:
error: setlogin failed: Function not implemented (from ssh)
error: openpty: Exec format error (from sshd)
/var/run/utmp gets corrupted. Perhaps we aren't all using the same utmp.h. I've just removed the file for now.

Solved Netwinder Issues

X crashes after about 10-15 minutes operation. Looks like a memory issue. I see short vertical lines in the top inch of the X display just before the server dumps its core. Message:
fbdevUpdateColormap: FBIOPUTCMAP failed (Invalid argument)
Following this is the regular complaints from the clients about the X server dying.
NOT A PROBLEM: I finally got the clue about the screensaver killing X. xset s off did the trick and I'm very relieved.
Trying to track down a bug in the 64-bit ssh math library that causes an infinite loop during key generation.
FIXED: configure ssh with "./configure --disable-asm". Thanks to Rick Niles <niles@axp745.gsfc.nasa.gov> for the tip.

Contact Data

Web Page One: http://www.speakeasy.org/~chris/
Web Page Two: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~chris/
Mail: chris@speakeasy.org
Cash and Donations:

Chris Osburn
Speakeasy Cafe and Information Trading Post
2304 - 2nd Ave
Seattle, Washington 98115