{Mikeslab}

An IRC friend and I were looking at getting Appletalk working on our Ubuntu servers so that our Apple IIGS's can talk to the rest of the network for file sharing, etc. Of course this requires a bridge machine in between to get from an Appletalk network to a tcp/ip network.

Since I don't have this bridge machine yet (on it's way soon), I wrote up some instructions for the friend who does have everything but was having trouble with Netatalk. Netatalk in the Ubuntu archives is compiled by default without the old Appletalk network support which is what is needed, therefore doesn't have the atalk daemon. This means we need to compile and install from source. Here are the instructions I have so far. These instructions assume you have build-essential installed (if not, sudo apt-get install build-essential). This also assumes you have some flavor of Ubuntu 11.10 installed.

On to the fun:

Just execute these commands, and all should be well (so far):

Download and install Berkeley DB libraries:

wget http://www.mikeslab.net/linux/db-5.3.15.tar.gz
tar -xvf db-5.3.15.tar.gz
cd db-5.3.15/build_unix
../dist/configure
make
sudo make install

Download and install netatalk (NOTE: The configure statement is all one line!):

wget http://www.mikeslab.net/linux/netatalk-2.2.1.tar.gz
tar -xvf netatalk-2.2.1.tar.gz
cd netatalk-2.2.1
./configure --with-bdb=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.5.3 --enable-ddp --enable-debian
make
sudo make install

Now, this is a work in progress as of this writing. There are no provisions/scripts to make it start automatically and all that yet, but shouldn't be really hard to come up with.

SOPA and PIPA are great examples of what has gone horribly wrong in our government. Special interest groups and over-reaching greedy corporations have bought off our government, and now own us.

If you read ANYTHING about this SOPA/PIPA mess, read this as this is the best article on it I have found: The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas

That site is also listed here, which Craigslist also made a good page about: Craigslist's SOPA Page

I hope you enjoyed services like Craigslist, Facebook, Youtube, etc, since SOPA will end up taking all of those down and more. Maybe this time our absent-minded elected officials will actually listen to the people they are supposed to represent and not pass this madness.

I finally got some free time to play with it. This included taking it completely part down to the bare chassis and clean, clean, clean. Oh, and more cleaning. Some rubbing alcohol, white vinegar, contact cleaner, and water later, I have an almost brand new looking Amiga 4000. I started re-building it with a mix of original parts and some of my own. I wanted to use a CF card from the project I started on with my Amiga 2000 instead of the aging hard drives. I used the IDE CF card reader I had mounted on the bracket of an old PCMCIA PCI card adapter in the expansion slot for now (will eventually be moved to the smaller expansion port closer to the power supply). The biggest problem was getting power over to it as the power supply's floppy cables aren't long enough. Hacking time! Nothing like putting an old PC PSU to good use. I spliced it in with a old fan pass through.

Amatuer Soldering Nite

Like it Never Happened

Now to put her together!

Item list so far:

• A3640 CPU
• A2320 Video Card
• A2065 Network Card
• GVP A2000-HC+8 Series II Rev II SCSI

More fun to come!

Finally! A friend helped ship an Amiga 4000 from a Craigslist ad in his area. I got it for really cheap as the keyboard and mouse didn't work, and it's here!

I hooked her up and booted her up:

As expected, the keyboard and mouse didn't work, and here's the culprit!

Thanks to this awesome site: Amiga Technical Resource, I was able to figure out that the battery damage is exactly what did it. While the previous owner did replace the original Varta battery with a coin cell thankfully, it doesn't appear that they neutralized the battery acid afterwards. That picture was taken after a thorough cleaning with white vinegar and rubbing alcohol. I then re-flowed all of the affected connections in the circuit with my soldering iron, and it worked!

Out of time for now, but can't wait to get her up and running online with a new workbench install and awesome games!

I ran across a Craigslist ad yesterday for an Apple IIGS for sale. I promised myself I wouldn't be buying any more computers, but it sounded like a great deal, considering it came with a hard drive. I emailed the guy and the next thing I knew, the next day I had a date!

It sounded like a great set up, but I had no idea what I was in for. When I got there, the guy had 3 massive boxes of stuff to give me. I couldn't believe it. It came with just about everything! After dragging the massive heavy boxes in, I got to work.

Here's the hardware list:

• Apple IIGS ROM01
• Apple IIGS RGB Monitor
• Apple IIGS 3.5 Floppy Drive
• Apple IIGS 5.25 Floppy Drive
• Apple ImageWriter II
• Kensington SystemSaver IIGS
• Apple Keyboard and Mouse
• A/B Switch (Apple serial)
• A/B Switch (25pin, labeled for IIe connections)
• External SCSI HDD in a DataStor case
• AE PC 3.5 Drive
• AE PC 5.25 Drives
• CH gray joystick
• All original Apple IIGS manuals, including the first technical reference guide
• All of the cables to go along with everything listed above

Inside of the IIGS is even more exciting:

• Apple Computer's RAM expansion card fully populated
• Apple Sandwich II (SCSI for the HDD)
• AE PC Transporter (with ColorSwitch board)
• ALS Printmate card
• Supersonic Digitizer

There's also a bunch of cool software in both 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, as well as lots of different tractor feed paper. I've never owned a IIGS before, so this was a particularly exciting haul for me. The IIGS was always just out of reach as far as cost went.

My IRC friend and resident Apple expert pointed me in the direction of ADTPro, which lets you transfer disk images from your PC to the IIGS (or other Apple) over serial to a floppy. I managed to get it working and the client transferred over to a floppy in time for the 3.5 drive to die. Thankfully that same guy is going to send me a couple more drives, one bare to fix mine, and another one to have as a spare. The 5.25 drive also started sounding really crunchy, so I replaced the insides with a drive from the Apple DuoDisk project I had, and now works beautifully. I also don't have the Applied Engineering drives pictured, but they do work.

I recently received an Amiga 2000 off of Craigslist. Ever since then I have really fallen in love with Amiga. They are such great machines, you can do awesome stuff with them. I have performed many upgrades to mine, unfortunately I didn't do an upgrade log. I'm hoping to change that now, and use this site more in the future. I hate updating on Facebook anyway.

Many people ask what my system specs are, so here you go:

Commodore Amiga 2000

• GVP G-Force 030 @ 40mhz with 5mb RAM
• ROM Switcher with 1.3 and 3.1 ROM's
• Indivision ECS Scandoubler/Flickerfixer
• DKB MegAChip (2MB chipmem)
• A2091 with 120MB SCSI drive and 2MB RAM (External 100mb SCSI also connected)
• HyperCOM4+ Serial Card
• A2065 Ethernet (over 10base2)
• 2 Floppy drives
• SCSI CD/RW Drive (caddy)
• LG 19" LCD Display
• Computer Associates 2.1 Speaker System
• Workbench 3.1

Here are some pictures of the setup:

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I received an old Compaq R3000 and decided to stick Ubuntu on it. Since it's older, I put Lubuntu on it (Light Ubuntu) to see how it goes. This laptop will be replacing the general use of an Apple PowerBook G4, slighly upgrading it by 5 or 6 years.

So far so good. To get the wireless Broadcom drivers to work on it, it turned out to be as easy as the command "sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer" and I was online wirelessly!

Sound works, although the hard sound control buttons don't work right. I will have to look that one up.

Setup was a breeze, this is a winner!

This has quickly become my favorite meal of all time. This was taken from a recipe from allrecipes.com and modified for my lazyness. The biggest difference from what you would expect from Cordon Bleu is the absence of bacon (shock! horror!). Honestly, it was because I didn't have any at the time. I don't really think it would add that much to the deliciousness anyway. I love to grill, so this is one of my many grilling recipes.

Chicken Tenders - 1 Package uncooked

Deli Sliced Ham - Smoked or other (I don't like Honey baked for this)

Buns - I prefer Multi-Grain Deli Thins or other non high-fructose corn syrup breads, go wild!

Shredded Cheese - I have been using mozzarella, but any cheese will work.

Butter - Just enough to make a small puddle in a pan, not a lot. This is the most unhealthy part, so take 'er easy.

Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Cajun Seasoning

1. Heat up the grill, gas isn't as tastey for food, but it's the easiest, and the only type I'm allowed to have.
2. Heat up a pan to medium heat
3. Mix in butter, some garlic powder, onion powder, and light cajun seasoning. I don't measure these. The idea is to have enough to lightly coat all of the chicken pieces.
4. Put some of the chicken tender pieces into the pan and let cook enough to just get the outside done with the seasoning mixture, flip as necessary. Do not cook all the way.
5. Put chicken tenders on the grill and grill until just done in the center of the thickest piece, flipping occasionaly
6. Assemble sandwich. I perfer: Bottom bun, ham slice, 2 chicken tenders, cheese, ham slice, top bun.
7. Nuke in microwave for 25 seconds or so to warm up ham and melt cheese
8. Enjoy the deliciousness!

Not bad eh? I usually end up with enough left over for several lunches for work or enough for a couple more dinners. This probably would make about 5 servings. My favorite sides are cottage cheese and apple sauce, with a nice cold glass of tea or a "Simply" drink.

After finally getting tired of being fat, I decided to try one of those "diets". It didn't turn out well. It worked for a lot of co-workers, but what you had to go through to get there just wasn't for me. If you are curious, it's called the HCG diet, and I hate it. I got very, very sick on it. The one thing it did teach me to do is start cooking! I was getting pretty sick of the same ol' drive through burgers anyway. Since I have started cooking, I have lost 15lbs in a month. I cook delicious full meals too, not any of that salad and carrot rabbit food!

I am a VERY lazy bachelor, so I like quick and easy stuff to make. Anyway, here are my recipes, thoughts, and cooking adventures!

After a while of running FreeNAS on my file server, I decided that it was time to move on. Don't get me wrong, FreeNAS is great, but it's really hard to expand what I can do with it for me at least. It has a great interface, and would work well for someone who just wants to throw up a file server for Windows/Mac/Linux. Unfortunately and fortunately both, it is stripped out as much as possible. This makes compiling drivers and adding new programs very difficult for someone who doesn't know BSD, like me. I kept it for a while because of the great web based front end it has, until I found an even better replacement for Linux.

I decided to jump over to Ubuntu server, as 10.10 just came out, and I was already familiar with it from setting up previous servers elsewhere. I set it up like FreeNAS was set up, with ProFTPd, Samba, and software RAID. I did originally have a hardware RAID card, but found out that it was causing all sorts of problems, and probably was the reason I lost all of my current data when the RAID failed last time. I had a backup but it was several months old.

As for the web interface, I discovered the wonderfulness of Webmin! I can't say enough about how great it is. It provides an excellent GUI front end for managing all aspects of your Linux server.

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There are many, many, many modules. Most of the time Webmin will automatically detect services that are installed when you press "refresh modules". I set up Webmin before ProFTPd, and after pressing refresh, it automatically added the ProFTP module to the list. It makes administration and configuration a breeze.

As far as backups go, I am now using rsync to an external 2TB drive. When the file server was Windows, I was using Carbonite to backup the the real important documents, but they don't have a Linux client, any suggestions?