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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Broken laptop recovered using an Arduino - Hack a Day

Broken laptop recovered using an Arduino

posted Jan 4th 2011 1:00pm by Mike Szczys
filed under: arduino hacks

We see Arduino boards used in a lot of projects but we’ve never thought of using one as a USB crossover cable. That’s basically what [Jack the Vendicator] did to get his broken laptop running. When his video card stopped working he found himself unable to access the laptop. Newer machines don’t have a serial connector, which could have been used for a serial terminal, so he was at a bit of a loss since neither SSH nor VNC were installed. But he thought he might be able to use the Arduino as a serial terminal connector over USB. He plugged the Arduino into the laptop, and connected a USB serial converter from his desktop computer to the Arduino’s serial pins. In effect he’s just taking advantage of the FTDI chip, translating those signals back into USB on either end. Once he booted the headless laptop it took just a couple of blindly typed commands to get SSH running in order to regain control.

tagged: converter, crossover, ftdi, serial

Saturday, January 1, 2011

KVM & Virtio (disk/nic) on Scientific Linux 6 (alpha 3) « Xen Virtualization on Linux and Solaris

KVM & Virtio (disk/nic) on Scientific Linux 6 (alpha 3)

KVM as a “full virtualization” is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualized. However, it’s relatively slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as RTL8139 network cards and the most recent SeaBios emulates IDE interface.This fragment from KVM guest dmesg log is fair enough :-


       [ 0.129740] ata_piix 0000:00:01.1: version 2.13
       [ 0.129802] ata_piix 0000:00:01.1: setting latency timer to 64
       [ 0.129954] scsi0 : ata_piix
       [ 0.130522] scsi1 : ata_piix
       [ 0.130552] ata1: PATA max MWDMA2 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xc000       irq 14
       [ 0.130554] ata2: PATA max MWDMA2 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xc008       irq 15

Virtio is a Linux standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest’s device driver “knows” it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization.
If you want to install a machine with virtio drivers you should add these lines to your virt-install command:


       --os-type=linux \
       --os-variant=virtio26 \

Using this command you enable the virtio drivers at install time on SL 6 (alpha 3)

# virt-install –connect qemu:///system -n UDSK10.10 -r 2048 –vcpus=2 \

Read More...
http://bderzhavets.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/kvm-virtio-disknic-on-scientific-linux-6-alpha-3/

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V - Upcoming Episodes - Zap2it

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All Upcoming Times for 'V'

Show me: All Upcoming Episodes New Episodes

Pilot

An extraterrestrial race calling itself the Visitors projects an image worldwide of its leader as she talks about joining together in peace; Tyler, a human, sees this as a ticket to being a part of something big.

Sat 1/1
7:00-8:00PM
8
WFAADT

Fruition

Someone close to Anna is the victim of a violent attack; Erica and the team look for a scientist who may have created a weapon that the Visitors fear.

Sat 1/1
8:00-9:00PM
8
WFAADT

Red Sky

Val's water breaks; Erica and Tyler are invited up to the Mothership; Chad makes a devastating discovery.

Sat 1/1
9:00-10:00PM
8
WFAADT

Red Rain

NEW

The aliens keep Ryan in isolation on the mothership so Anna can experiment on his baby; Chad wants to fight with the Fifth Column; Erica seeks out a scientist who can explain Red Sky.