Dublin EU Elections: A vote for Eoin Ryan (FF) is a vote for Europe

Posted by Barry O'Donovan on May 25th, 2009

Let be be clear from the outset: I am not a Fianna Fail supporter.

That said, the European elections are about bigger things than giving Fianna Fail a kick in shins. If that’s your motivation in voting, then use the local elections. The European elections are about electing MEPs to represent us and Ireland in Europe. Our choice here is important, even more so since the rejection of Lisbon.

In the Dublin constituency, it’s fair to assume that Gay Mitchell (FG) and Proinsias De Rossa (Lab) will top the poll. The issue is then about the third and final seat. Dublin is being reduced from four to three seats and only one of the two remaining incumbents will take it: either pro-Europe and pro-Lisbon Eoin Ryan (FF) or anti-Europe and anti-Lisbon Mary Lou MacDonald (SF).

In the latest Irish Times / TNS mrbi poll, Ryan is polling at 11% and McDonald on 14% of first preference votes. Ryan will take transfers from his running mate, Eibhlin Byrne, but as a new comer she is unlikely to poll high. MacDonald will also pull transfers from the Libertas candidate, Caroline Simmons.

Polling tells us that the Dublin EU elections is a four horse race. An anti-Fianna Fail vote translates as a pro Sinn Fein, anti-Europe vote. Put you anger aside and look at the bigger picture.

Kubuntu 8.10 and Mobile Broadband (and KDE 4.1)

Posted by Barry O'Donovan on Oct 31st, 2008

I updated my laptop from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 (just released) yesterday. I do 90% of my work on my desktop which needs to just work and, as such, it’s running Kubuntu 7.10. My laptop, however, I play around with.

Most people’s first impression of 8.10 will be based on the upgrade process and post install issues. To date, I’ve always had to fix a lot of problems with the system after an upgrade to make it work. Not this time - it was absolutely seamless.

I was also apprehensive about KDE 4.1 and, to be honest, I was really worried that in a crunch I’d have to fall back to Gnome before degrading back to 8.04. I just don’t have the time these days to follow KDE development as much as I used to and I briefly installed KDE 4 a few months ago and thought it was far from finished.

I’m delighted to report KDE 4.1 is very slick and very polished. I’ve only had it for just over 24 but I have no complaints yet.

However, my main motivation for the upgrade was mobile broadband. Like most people, I use my laptop when on the move and my desktop when in the office. My laptop has an Ethernet port and a wi-fi card which both worked great with KNetworkManager but not mobile broadband. I got O2’s broadband dongle (the small USB stick) about four months ago and rely on it heavily.

I’ve been using Vodafone’s Mobile Connect Client to great effect but there were some issues:

  • setting up the connection was a manual process (change X window access control; su to root; export the DISPLAY setting; and start the application);
  • if I suspended the laptop then I needed to reboot the system to use the dongle again.

While both of the above could be solved, it’s just not plug and play. 8.10 is. With the dongle plugged into the USB port, KNetworkManager discovered the tty port. Configuring it was as easy as right clicking on the KNetworkManager icon and selecting New Connection… icon for the tty port.

The next step requires knowledge of the O2 / provider settings but this is readily available online. For O2:

KNetworkManager - Settings for O2 Ireland

KNetworkManager - Settings for O2 Ireland

After the above, I just accepted the defaults for the rest of the options. And - to my delight - it just worked. And it worked after suspended the laptop. And after popping the USB dongle in and out for the heck of it. By clicking the Auto Connect option as part of the process, it also just works when I pop the dongle in.

chan_ss7, pcap files and 64bit machines

Posted by Barry O'Donovan on Apr 28th, 2008

UPDATE: April 29th 2008

Anders Baekgaard of Dicea ApS (current chan_ss7 maintainers) recommends the following alternative patch. Please note that mtp3d.c will also need to be patched in the same way:

--- chan_ss7.c~ 2008-04-03 09:23:56.000000000 +0200
+++ chan_ss7.c  2008-04-29 08:29:20.000000000 +0200
@@ -249,11 +249,12 @@

 static void dump_pcap(FILE *f, struct mtp_event *event)
 {
+  unsigned int sec  = event->dump.stamp.tv_sec;
   unsigned int usec  = event->dump.stamp.tv_usec -
     (event->dump.stamp.tv_usec % 1000) +
     event->dump.slinkno*2 + /* encode link number in usecs */
     event->dump.out /* encode direction in/out */;

-  fwrite(&event->dump.stamp.tv_sec, sizeof(event->dump.stamp.tv_sec), 1, f);
+  fwrite(&sec, sizeof(sec), 1, f);
   fwrite(&usec, sizeof(usec), 1, f);
   fwrite(&event->len, sizeof(event->len), 1, f); /* number of bytes of packet in file */
   fwrite(&event->len, sizeof(event->len), 1, f); /* actual length of packet */

END UPDATE: April 29th 2008

A quickie for the Google trolls:

While trying to debug some SS7 Nature of Address (NAI) indication issues, I needed to use chan_ss7’s ‘dump’ feature from the Asterisk CLI. It worked fine but the resultant pcap files always failed with messages like:

# tshark -r /tmp/now
tshark: "/tmp/now" appears to be damaged or corrupt.
(pcap: File has 409000-byte packet, bigger than maximum of 65535)

After much digging about and head-against-wall banging, I discovered the issue
is with the packet header in the pcap file. It’s defined by its spec to be:

typedef struct pcaprec_hdr_s {
        guint32 ts_sec;         /* timestamp seconds */
        guint32 ts_usec;        /* timestamp microseconds */
        guint32 incl_len;       /* number of octets of packet saved in file */
        guint32 orig_len;       /* actual length of packet */
} pcaprec_hdr_t;

chan_ss7 uses the timeval struct defined by system headers to represent ts_sec and ts_usec. But, on 64bit machines (certainly mine), these values are defined as unsigned long rather than unsigned int (presumably as a step to get over the ‘year 2038 bug’). Hence the packet header is all wrong.

An easy solution is the following patch in mtp.h:

77a78,90
> /*
>  * The packet header in the pcap file (used for the CLI command 'dump') is
defined so has to
>  * have the two time components as unsigned ints. However, on 64bit
machines, the system
>  * timeval struct may use unsigned long. As such, we use a custom version
here:
>  */
> struct _32bit_timeval
> {
>   unsigned int tv_sec;            /* Seconds.  */
>   unsigned int tv_usec;      /* Microseconds.  */
> };
>
>
>
125c138
<       struct timeval stamp;        /* Timestamp */
---
>       struct _32bit_timeval stamp;        /* Timestamp */

There may be a better way - but this works.

This relates to chan_ss7-1.0.0 from http://www.dicea.dk/company/downloads and I have let them know also. It’s also a known issue for the Wireshark developers (although I did not investigate in detail to see what their resolution was for the future). See the following thread from 1999:

Amazon AWS Keeps Getting Better

Posted by Barry O'Donovan on Apr 17th, 2008

Amazon’s Web Services have just launched a health dashboard which should prove very useful and can be found at http://status.aws.amazon.com.

They’ve also announced paid support services.

An eagerly awaited feature for me is persistent EC2 storage which they are trialling right now and hopefully I’ll get into the beta program. Fingers crossed!

Stargate SG1 - Finishing the Story

Posted by Barry O'Donovan on Mar 14th, 2008



Following up from a discussion on how the series finale disappointed a few people over on Donncha’s blog, Holy Shmoly!, I thought I might point out that a straight-to-DVD movie which actually ends the two-year story arc has just been released.

You can buy a copy (at a great price thanks to the dollar rate) from here on Amazon.

A spoiler-free review and a discussion on the decision to end the series in this manner can be found here on GateWorld. And just to whet you appetite, a trailer follows below.

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