With the blustery winter weather comes the occasional power outage. Most of which are just a few seconds. I’m a well prepared techie, so I have 8 UPS Battery Back Ups in house to protect; my computer, another computer, database server, cordless phone, alarm clock, internet modem, router, wireless router, Tivo, etc. All very good, and it’s a nice feeling that my equipment is all protected against power failure…. Until the power actually goes out and the whole house starts beeping buzzing & alarming. Usually at night when I’m sleeping!

Why do I need to know the power is off? I don’t. Really, I’d rather stay sleeping unless it is an actual emergency. A power outage of less then a few minutes is certainly not an emergency around here, especially because I have all these UPSs. The biggest problem is the beeping!

Some UPS models can be adjusted in software to not beep, but that is less then reliable, and sometimes it needs to be reset after a power outage. When I tell something to not beep, I expect it to always not beep until I tell it to beep! Not all UPSs have this feature, and we have a variety of UPS units, made by different manufacturers.

Sufficiently annoyed, I set to remedy the situation by physically disconnecting the beepers in all 8 UPSs. Originally I was going to just clip the beeper wires to permanently disable them, but I thought that it would be even better if I could occasionally turn the beeper back on to hear what it had to say. Disabling the UPS beeper is fairly easy if you know what to look for.

After opening the UPS, look for a round thingy with a hole in it, usually about a half inch diameter to 1 inch diameter. That will be the beeper. Usually there is nothing else that could be mistaken for the beeper.

There are times when it might be useful to hear the little communication from the UPS, but so far I’m not impressed with the language. I especially don’t like this model of Belkin UPS because during a power outage long enough to use 80% of the battery, it completely shuts down power to the protected devices to save the battery. Lame! Wrong priority! Even worse, it won’t turn back on when power is restored until you push & hold the power button for 15 seconds. Really Lame! Oh, and even though it has a dedicated indicator light to communicate when it is time to replace the battery, that apparently doesn’t work. I didn’t know that it needed a new battery until the power blinked off for 15 seconds and this Belkin UPS died and wouldn’t turn back on. So if it is not even going to beep nicely when it needs something, I really don’t need to hear it beep to wake me up. That was the last straw.

What you want to do is unsolder the 2 legs of the beeper from the circuit board, then attach a pair of wires to a switch so you can reconnect the beeper on or off easily & positively. (See diagram). Mind the polarity of the beeper, usually it has a + at one leg, and a matching + on the board. Re-solder one leg back to the board, and run the wire from the other leg to the switch, and back to the board where that leg formerly connected to. With the switch open (off) the beeper isn’t connected to the board and therefore simply can not beep. HA!

The white junk on the side of the beeper is glue. I had to use a razor blade to carefully disconnect before de-soldering the beeper.

Here is the beeper reinstalled. Note I rotated the beeper slightly so there would be a little more room underneath for the wire, and to give physical space to prevent any unintended connections.

Run the wires to the switch. My that’s a big yellow transformer!

And mount the switch so you can get to it easily. I drilled an oval hole (2 holes next to each other) in the plastic or metal housing and screwed the switch in place. In choosing the location for the switch I considered the orientation of how that particular UPS usually sits where it lives. I want to easily see the switch too.

Hooray! Now I won’t be unnecessarily alarmed!

Apparently I’m not the only person bothered by unnecessary UPS beeping!

I use a dual G4/1000 running the Mac OS X Server software to provide TimeMachine services over our home network. There is an external firewire hard drive connected for the network users and their TimeMachine virtual back up disks.

This has been working out pretty well (as far as I knew) until this week when an iMac G4 crashed and was not able to start up again. When I looked at it, the iMac did actually boot up – once. I saw the desktop, saw the icons, and that is when I checked to see when the most recent TimeMachine back up was (last night at 7:42 pm). Because the user of this computer uses Entourage 2004 for her email, and Entourage 2004 keeps all it’s mail and attachments in one huge database glob, and it probably does not get a good backup of that glob unless Entourage was quit/closed during backup, I was concerned that we might not have a good backup. So I pulled the TimeMachine menu to get that started.

And within a minute, the iMac had kernel panic-ed. Oof! That can’t be good. Tried booting from a firewire hard drive, which also kernel panic-ed right away. Could be the internal hard drive is really corrupted, or maybe the computer is toast.

“Oh well” I said stoically, “At least we have hourly TimeMachine Backups!” … Except we apparently didn’t.

Because when I booted up an old G4 eMac with the Leopard installer CD to “Restore System from Backup” it was not able to mount her TimeMachine backup. Something about “operation not supported on socket” which did NOT sound good. Disk Utility was completely unable to fix anything. Even more scary – when I went to the Xserve & looked at the TM Sparsebundle file it was not openable there and the size was reported as 0, ZERO MegaBytes. I also did not like the “date modified” as June was several months ago!

Oh man! This is getting worse all the time!  It is days like this that make me question why I do tech support professionally, much less as a hobby. But otoh it’s not like anyone else around here is going to do any better than I do. But it physically hurts me – pow- right in the lower gut, when things are not working well and I might have to deliver bad news. I really like it when things are working well. Luckily for me, things usually do go well, and I rarely get that painful feeling. (And as it will turn out, the modified date of the sparsebundle file apparently does not get updated by TimeMachine – so that is not to be worried about).

So, I searched the internet for “operation not supported on socket” and “time machine sparsebundle error“. i also tried using “get info” to give myself permmissions to that sparsebundle, but although it seemed like it ought to work, it did not.
The winning answer was a combination of several things I read, plus a couple of necessary additions of my own.

Here is what I did to fix that damaged TimeMachine SparseBundle file, so I could restore it to a different Mac that does work.

Begin by going to the XServe and disabling TimeMachine to prevent it from trying to mount this unmountable volume while I’m working on it. The rest of this also takes place at the Xserve keyboard.

Open Terminal and type;
hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite /path/to/Louise123456.sparsebundle
(Substitute the path & name of your own sparse bundle of course.)
In my case this did not work. It failed as not being possible.
Tried again as SUDO without success.

Rebooted, (not just logged out/in… Rebooted to release the damaged volume which may have still reported itself as “busy”).

Opened Terminal, login root

While logged in as ROOT, then tried that command again, Hey! Here we go! It returned:
/dev/disk1              Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk1s1            Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2 Apple_HFSX

So I now knew the unix name of the disk volume that needs fixing; disk2s2 (the one that is not the partition map nor scheme). Yours may be different.
So now type;
fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk2s2
(substituting your disk’s unix name at the end there).  R&F are to “Force” the repair on a journaled system, and “Rebuild” whatever is broken.
and expect to wait 5 to 55 minutes for the repairs to take place. (That time over 10bt for a 120gb TM volume). What you’re hoping to see is:
** /dev/rdisk2s2
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
** Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
** Rechecking volume.
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
** Detected a case-sensitive catalog.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
blah blah blah…. And then -

** The volume Backup of Louise was repaired successfully.

At this point – if you’re really lucky, you can double-click the sparse bundle file open. But I couldn’t. It gave me that same old dumb error we started with; “operation not supported on socket“. And the stupid thing still said it was zero mb in size. But after seeing that it knew some names of files inside the sparsebundle, I wasn’t fooled.  But I ran the repair command again while I considered what to do next.
fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk2s2

I logged out of the XServe, and logged in as Root. Some people will be quick to tell you that sudo is a better way, but I tried sudo and it did not work. But logging into the effing machine as root did work. Once logged in as ROOT, I was able to see that this file was 120GB (better than zero!), and simply double-click open that SparseBundle file which opened…. after several minutes. *WHEW*!!!  and HOORAY!!!!  I looked in there, and sure enough, it looks like a TimeMachine back up is supposed to look like.

Ok, so moving forward! I have a spare eMac that wasn’t doing anything important, so it is going to be her replacement Mac for now. I booted it up from the Leopard install DVD, (actually an external fw drive with a SuperDuper clone of that Leopard installer dvd – runs faster), selected my favorite language, and
Pulled the “Utilities” menu to “Restore from Backup“.
It asked what backup I want to restore from, and
I choose the Xserve volume, providing the username and password.
After several minutes of “checking” it finally comes back with the correct name of her backup volume (another good sign!) After informing me that this operation will completely erase whatever drive I select in the next step, I select the eMac’s internal HD as the destination and proceed.

As I write this, the replacement eMac reports that the “System Restore” with all user data will be finished in 19 hours or less. Wonderful. Everybody is going to be happy.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a network is only as fast as its slowest hub. So that is wired 10baseT speeds. I’ll be sleeping while the computers are working tonight!

Epilogue:

The Restore from Time Machine Backup went just fine, working from 10pm Sunday evening to 3pm Monday afternoon. So it guessed 22 hours, and only took 20. This on an eMac 1.42Ghz 1.5 Gb ram, over 10bt wired Ethernet, getting it from the firewire400 external hard drive attached to a Dual G4/1000 Tower running Leopard Server & TimeMachine services.  When the eMac was restarted, everything was just as expected, even Entourage is ok.  *Whew*  and double *whew*!    What a relief. Btw, her sparsebundle file on the server never did update its modified date, and I guess it never will.

At some point I’ll take apart the errant iMac G4 and see if replacing its hard drive makes is useful again. I will also be putting a larger hard drive into service as the network TimeMachine Server. Moving a TimeMachine backup to a new hard drive is another article – (hint: Turn off TM, then use DiskUtility to “Restore” the old hd to the new hd, disconnect the old TM drive, and enable TM). Link

I have a 6 year old laptop with Windows XP and 512mb ram. I would say it is running XP, but that would be a generous statement. It has XP installed (at factory default settings), but it is painfully slow. Not running anything. Maybe walking. When I do try to use this thing, it usually needs at least 90 minutes of intense hard drive activity (virus checking?) before it has time to do anything that I’d like to do.  So it has been basically useless to me. Unless I really, really need Windows XP, I’ll just hop onto the Mac and get something done.

But I am a granter of second chances (and sometimes 10ths), and recently I noticed that this laptop does much better when the “Themes” are either disabled or set to “Windows Classic”, an appearance reminiscent of an older version of the Windows OS. However ugly, it is beautiful in the sense that it resolved several video display problems, and really made a major difference in perceived speed. If you have a similar problem you might try disabling the fancy theme and see if that helps. To do this; Start Button -> Control Panels, Appearance, & select Windows Classic Style. Apply.

While I was mucking about, looking for an reason as to why this particular pc was so dang slow, even though it was pretty much at factory defaults, I got annoyed enough to try something radical….

Ten years ago, I tried to install Linux on an old Mac (a Performa 6400 with a PowerPC 603e cpu). It was not easy and it was not very successful. So I left that alone and moved on. I don’t mind a good challenge, but I like it when things work (and that did not work).

Well, it seems that Linux has moved forward an enormous amount, and it is so easy now that you don’t even have to install it. Knoppix offers freely downloadable bootable CD & DVD disk images of a specialized GNU Linux OS including all the basic applications you might want. It is by far the easiest way to try a new OS on your computer, and it does not even change anything on your hard drive, so it is very safe to play around with. And if you are not ready to make the switch, your Windows is waiting for you when you decide to reboot from the usual hard drive.

I’m definitely no Linux expert, but here are some observations I can pass on:

Even though Knoppix boots up from a read-only cd or dvd, it is possible to save your preferences, configurations & work to a usb memory device, network drive, or elsewhere. Look for a menu item to “save a persistent ram disk”.

After you have set up that persistent ram disk, you’ll need to activate it at boot time. Knoppix will find it, and ask you if you want to use this disk image as your home folder. It may be obvious to frequent Knoppix or Linux users, but you’ll need to press the left arrow to select “ok” then press return. Merely pressing return will select “cancel” and your saved settings will not be used. Not what you wanted.

Some people prefer Knoppix version 5.1.1 over the newer 6.x versions. It seems to be a personal preference, but I did notice that Knoppix 5.1.1 (circa 2007) was able to correctly set the screen size to 1024×768, when 6 was not (800×600, leaving an unused margin). Small beefs for sure, but for a Knoppix beginner, these can be an important part of the experience.

The Knoppix CD includes a ton of stuff pre-installed, such as email, web browser, Open Office (word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentations, etc), disk utilities, screen saver, and a lot more. The Knoppix DVD contains all that and more. However, don’t assume that you will need the dvd, because the CD is very useful, and does have a lot of built-in software you can use right away. The DVD does have a whole lot more additional software that you may want to to check out later (and support for more languages).

I was impressed how easy it was to set up a printer & print to it. Printing worked the first time(!), and I was able to set up and print a test page to the printer in less than a minute. Even though this is a new OS for me, and I also had to find my way around. Gates & Co could learn a few things from this. It is not always so easy to set up a printer in Windows.

All the basic functions are ready to go, right at boot up. Some functions will not work until you enter a password for the Knoppix user or Root user first.

I wasn’t able to get a Netgear MA401 wireless pcmcia card to work, although I hear it is a common (but old) card well supported in Linux. I may look into “hostap” as it may be the ticket.  On the other hand, I guess wireless internet doesn’t matter too much, this old laptop has a 10 minute battery life anyway.

I have been quite impressed with this little foray into an alternate OS. If your proprietary OS is bogging you down, it is free & easy to try out Knoppix.

UPDATE:

Ubuntu 10.04.1 also works really well as a bootable cd disk.

So does Lucid Puppy Linux 5.1.0  “LuPu” is designed for speed, and it is really quick! These are all free downloads, and free to use.

Update #2: Another alternate OS that some people are liking:  Google’s Chromium on USB memory stick.

For those of you who have a Tivo, and also have a Sony AV Receiver model STR-DE597 this is for you. You may have noticed that none of the Tivo provided remote codes are able to control the volume on your Sony STR-DE597. Of course there is a trick. It is possible (and easy!)

On the Sony AVR Receiver model STR-DE597- the command mode must be changed on the receiver to AV1. The receiver and the remote are factory set to AV2. Unfortunately, the Sony remote can not speak AV1. The side effect of this change will make the receiver not listen to the original Sony remote anymore. No big deal, you can always swap this back if you really need some special function on the remote, even temporarily. But the good news is that after you do this, your regular Tivo remote will be able to control the volume & mute on that Sony Audio Video Receiver.

How To Change The Receiver To AV1 And then use a preset code from a universal remote.

1. On the Sony STR-DE597 receiver press I/O to turn the power OFF.
2. Then on the receiver hold down ENTER and press I/O this will switch Receiver to Av1.
That’s the whole trick! You can now use your Tivo remote or universal remote to adjust the receiver’s volume.

If you need/want to change this back, just repeat to toggle between the AV1 and AV2 command sets.

Note: Other Sony AV receivers may have a different but similar trick. On some you substitute the “input Mode” button for the “Enter” button mentioned above. Some other universal remotes may use code 1058 instead of 1059 to control this Sony after switching it to AV1. Or you can use a learning remote instead.

To program the Tivo remote to control your Sony receiver:

1. Press the Tivo button and the mute button at the same time for 5 seconds, until the red light on the remote stays lit.

2. On the Tivo remote, enter the code for your device.
For the Sony STR-DE597 code 1059 worked for me.
Wait a couple of seconds for the remote to stop flashing, then
3. try the volume up/down buttons, and mute. With any luck, you’re in charge!