bma's blog

O Happy Day

Thank you New York Giants! It's as good as you can get to the Steelers winning SB XL :)

vpnc now works with Cisco VPN concentrators with Hybrid auth

After running into some issues with the Cisco VPN client on later amd64 kernels, I spent some time working on getting the latest vpnc to work.

Here is a template file of what I used (our connection details have been replaced with generic variables). You need to make sure the root certificate you use is in X.509 format. I also had to fake the version string to what the Cisco VPN client sends (or close to it) for our concentrator to accept it :)

Also, I had to recompile vpnc under Debian with OpenSSL support, since OpenSSL is BSD+Advertising and vpnc is GPL. You can find the amd64 deb I built here or the i386 deb here.

Best. Sticker. Ever.

Even though brocolli is good for you, it's not for me.

Christmas Lights

So this year my brother-in-law Andrew did the christmas lights at my parents' house. He used some computer gate arrays and Lights-O-Rama software to drive them to six songs. I videotaped them and am putting them up on youtube. I am still working on some of them, I will update this post with the youtube links when they are done. I also plan on taking some pictures of the "infrastructure" in the house, it looks pretty impressive.

For inspiration and technical guidance, he suggests PlanetChristmas.com.

For Sale...

Trying to sell my Dell 1905FP and Samsung 940BW. If you're interested, let me know and I'll give you the blog reader discount :) Update: Sold. Craigslist rocks.

Pictures!

Ok, so I finally have gotten a bunch of pictures off the camera and up in the photo galleries! Here are the new ones:
Pictures of the Kids, July-October
Trip to Cox Farms
Steelers vs. Bills
Deep Creek
Florida/Disneyworld

Useful utility of the day

Ever want to verify an installed Debian package against the original md5sums, ala rpm -V? In Debian, use debsums(1).

Attention Retailers

Attention Retailers:

It is not Christmas.

It is not Thanksgiving.

It's barely Halloween.

So stop playing farking Christmas music in your stores in OCTOBER!

More xorg.conf changes

So I don't know what happened, but my xorg.conf stopped working again. I found a new trick to get it working, adding the following lines to the Screen section:

Option  "metamodes"         "CRT: 1920x1080 +0+0"
Option  "TVStandard"        "HD1080i"
Option  "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

Full xorg.conf can be found here.

Updated xorg.conf for MythTV

I updated my MythTV box for the first time in a while (to support the new SchedulesDirect program guide source). After the upgrade, the new 100.14.11 Nvidia drivers' 1920x1080_120i built-in modeline stopped working properly with my TV. I found a new modeline that works pretty much the same and updated my xorg.conf and all is good again. I've also disabled the glx driver as it was causing troubles with LiveTV and HDTV.

Other changes to my setup include using the builtin NIC (8139too driver) now that I have an ethernet jack near the TV (thanks, Steve :)

Here's the diff to xorg.conf if you just want the changes:

--- xorg.conf.20070130  2007-01-30 22:11:09.000000000 -0500
+++ xorg.conf   2007-09-01 10:14:03.000000000 -0400
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
         Load  "dbe"
         Load  "extmod"
         Load  "fbdevhw"
-        Load  "glx"
+#        Load  "glx"
         Load  "record"
         Load  "freetype"
         Load  "type1"
@@ -87,11 +87,11 @@
         HorizSync    33.75
         VertRefresh  59.94
         Option     "dpms"
-       Option      "ModeValidation" "NoVertRefreshCheck"
+       Option "ModeValidation" "AllowNon60HzDFPModes, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoEdidMaxPClkCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck"
        Option      "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
        ModeLine "720x480" 27.000 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync
        ModeLine "1280x720" 74.25 1280 1390 1430 1648 720 725 732 752 +hsync +vsync
-       ModeLine "1920x1080" 148.35 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1085 1090 1125 +hsync +vsync
+       ModeLine "1920x1080__60i" 74.18 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1094 1124 +hsync +vsync interlace
 EndSection

 Section "ServerFlags"
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@
         SubSection "Display"
                 Viewport   0 0
                 Depth     24
-                Modes    "1920x1080_120i" "1920x1080" "1280x720" "720x480"
+                Modes    "1920x1080__60i" "1280x720" "720x480"
         EndSubSection
 EndSection