I almost cannot believe I’m going to post this, but so many of my machines don’t have LED’s to blink for hard disk activity it is driving me nuts.
Well thankfully, for windows there is a solution:
So what it does, is it’ll poll  \PhysicalDisk(_Total)\% Disk Time every 30ms, and if it’s doing something it’ll blink the icon colour.
Why is this cool?
It’ll even work with RDP. Â So your server can be on the other side of the world, and you’ll know what’s going on.
It’s cooler than it looks
A fun retrospective on arstechnica.com..  I’m still amazed at the greater leap from a 286 with a 2400 baud modem, to a 486 with a 19,200 baud modem…  It’s amazing we could do what seemed like so much with so little.
I accidentally restored a CPIO on top of my root… oops.
So in case you are wondering why I’m going to be offline for a while, that is why.
So there has been all this talk as of late with NSA and special USB cables that embed microprocessors and wireless transmitters that send out everything that passes through them. Â not to mention video cables, that can do the same thing.
Apparently another favorite thing to hit is the BIOS, as you can load whatever OS on there you want, and the firmware is still active. Â The best of the best must be hacking peripheral firmware. Â Namely storage.
Did you know you can actually load linux onto your hard disk? Â Or that various flash cards have embedded ARM processors on them?
What would this say for a network ‘offload’ mechanism to pass along packets to another host?
To those of you building “secure” systems (ie billing, medical, military) good luck.. It seems in this brave new world you cannot trust anything off the shelf.
Wow this year has been quite a personal ride for me. From a bad 2012, to a seeming uncertain 2013 where I not only found my love but also found a new home in a new continent.
Through it all I’ve kept the blog up and going. I’ve changed VPS providers a few times, to now living out the dream on dedicated hardware.
As this year draws to the end, Id like to thank regular users for sticking around just as I’d like to thank new users for taking a look at my mis-adventures through the years.
I’m really looking forward to next year, and the endless possibilities.
Jason
I built 1.7rc2 on OSX, and I’ve only tested the x86 portion… x86_64 of course still fails on vista & friends… 2003 of course hangs at “starting windows” so no progress there. Â I haven’t tried any MIPS, PowerPC, or SPARC things…
Also the Adlib/SoundBlaster is still broken in this release, there is a source change in adlib.c that has to be made. Â Also I just noticed that IRQ sharing works in ISA mode again, so the Ne2000 can go back to 0x300 IRQ 9.
Also speaking of emulation, I was thinking of shoving a VAX-11/780 into the world for the heck of it. Â Although I don’t think anyone would care. Â I’ll have to dig out the source to 4.3 and give the shell the ability to add new users. Â I wrote it once, and I fear I’ve lost those changes but it was cool for something back then.
Anyways post back here if you want an account on vax.superglobalmegacorp.com !
I don’t get the sudden tick in the netcraft surveys. Â But yeah, whomever you are if you want just ask.
FragReady!
(EDITED)* So it seems that Fragready just knee jerks to bogus virus claims by fly by night idiots like  clean-mx.de because they are terrified of nethack on WindowsCE.  Yes really they deleted my server because of an old game on an old platform.
So here we go. again. Â 2013 seems to be the year of plenty of moves. Â While cruising around LEB, I came across this special on Frag Ready. Â So yeah I’m going to collapse all my VPS stuff (once it is finished copying) and move everything to a dedicated server.
What I’m hoping this will mean is that I can do far more neater things as now I don’t have to worry about CPU limitations, blowing my own quotas or being able to load whatever I want. Â I think I’ll even go back to offering some kind of public UNIX thing, I just have to decide if I want a SIMH VAX running BSD 4.3 UWisc, or whatever. Â I know I’ll certainly bring the Quake 1 server back, and maybe, just maybe hack enough to get a Doom dialup server going (if I can convince it to talk to my fake modems).
Another observation is that using the new ext4 filesystem means things are slower than ever. Â I know this server is two years old but still my seven year old Mac Pro destroyes it running Qemu vs running KVM on this linux box. Â I’ve found the two things help for performance some.
Convert disk images from sparse VMDK to QCOW2
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# qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 -o preallocation=metadata source.vmdk destination.qcow2
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And changing KVM from ‘-hda disk.vmdk’ to
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kvm -cpu pentium -m 256 -drive file=/usr/local/kvm/disk.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=none -vnc :0 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user
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Next was to change the way the volume was mounted. Â First a change in the filesystem
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tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1
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Then changing the options to the following in fstab:
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noatime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,errors=remount-ro
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So yeah, it feels a little better now.
Here we go, again with what is moved over so far:
Or so I think, I got my alert while running some highly productive software..
From their announcement:
CrossOver 13.0.0 also includes numerous other enhancements for your
favorite Windows applications. Â This release includes a new version of
Wine – the open source Windows API layer that makes your Windows
applications run. Â On the Mac, CrossOver 13.0.0 includes several fixes
to our Mac Driver. Â On Linux, we are now shipping multiarch packages
on Debian-based distributions, which should make for smoother
installation of CrossOver.
A changelog for CrossOver 13.0.0 is shown below.
Mac customers with active support entitlements will be upgraded to
Crossover 13 the next time they launch Crossover. Linux users can
download the latest version from http://www.codeweavers.com/.
If Crossover asks for registration use your codeweavers.com email
address & password to register and unlock Crossover. Email
[email protected]Â if you need more help.
Thank you all for your support, and we hope you enjoy CrossOver 13.0.0!
Changelog:
==========
CrossOver 13.0.0 – 11/12/2013
* Games Support:
o CrossOver 13 has our new Performance Enhanced Graphics. Games will run
faster, with higher frame rates! This is a major overhaul of the 3D
graphics processing in CrossOver, and gives significant improvements in
many, many popular games.
o The launcher for Borderlands 2 is working.
o Both the Gem Store and mouse work with Guild Wars 2.
o The mouse pointer in Terraria is now accurate when the window is resized or
zoomed.
o Rendering bugs with RIFT on NVIDIA hardware are fixed.
o Multi-core rendering can now be enabled in Source games.
o Mirror’s Edge now runs under CrossOver.
* Mac OS X:
o Input Managers will no longer cause Windows applications
running under CrossOver to crash.
o When you Command-Tab out of a full-screen program and then back,
CrossOver will restore that program’s display resolution setting.
o CrossOver uses accelerated OpenGL in all cases.
o Added support for Mac-style full-screen windows.
o Enhanced the system tray icon support to handle right-clicks and
middle-clicks.
o Fix a bug which could cause CrossOver to display two mouse
cursors in some applications.
o Lots of window management fixes.
o Fixed scrolling going diagonal when it shouldn’t.
o Fixed certain programs (e.g. Quicken 2013) failing to launch when
using certain keyboard layouts (e.g. US International PC).
o Fixed a bug where the select-bottle section of the Software Installer
window would say Please Wait forever.
o Improved icon extraction from Windows executables.
* Linux:
o Architecture specifications have been removed from our package installer
filenames. That is, our package installers filenames no longer include the
‘i386’ specifier. This is purely a cosmetic change in the filenames we ship
– some customers were confused, believing they needed a different installer
for 64-bit machines, which is not true after the switch to multiarch.
o Files saved with Microsoft Office are no longer marked as ‘executable,’
meaning they can be opened by clicking on them in Nautilus or other file
browsers.
* Application Support:
o Project 2010 will run faster.
o Macros function much better in Microsoft Excel.
o Access 2000 user interaction is smoother on OS X.
o The system tray for QQ is functional now on OS X.
o Kayak Foundry will load files again.
o Fixed a crash in the Chinese version of Microsoft Office Home and Student
Edition.
I’m one of the people who ‘flocked the vote‘ back in the day for a free version, and now I get new versions for something like $30 USD a year. Â I know I could probably build wine on its own, but honestly even back in 1994 building wine was a PITA, and I’m too old to care about doing it now. Â I just kinda want it to work.
First I just found out about the KVM Forum 2013, taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland.
You can find all kinds of information and videos of the presentation on the G+ page!
This is an incredible resource for anyone thinking of deploying KVM (Proxmox/VE!) in a serious setting. Â Unlike VMWare ESX this is a free solution with no insane license restrictions. Â Not to mention that KVM+Qemu is far more flexible than any traditional x86 focused hypervisor will ever be. Â And poor Microsoft still doesn’t yet offer x86_64 solution.
I also got a ping back from Linux Lifestyle, about a challenge to find an ancient version of Linux. Â Although the real credit goes to the excellent preservation work of oldlinux.org .
Personal note, I got the flu (again!) and have been sick.. which is why the lag in the network stuff, but I’ll bang more on it tomorrow. Â I’ll finally get to adding remote sites, routing protocols, and all that fun stuff. Â Internet/NAT/Firewalls afterwards. Â ASA stuff too, as much as I don’t like them.