The New Age Vigilante

Wow. Check out Stolen Sidekick. The story so far… Girl takes a cab ride and leaves her Sidekick behind by accident. Someone steals the Sidekick and starts taking pictures and logging into AOL. Girl gets new Sidekck, and when the SIM card is installed, all the pictures and AOL passwords from the other Sidekick get downloaded to the new Sidekick. Girl’s friend decides to make a public fool out of the thief by posting the pictures and all email correspondence with the thief. The “Internet Vigilante” effect kicks in and people start posting tips about who the people pictured are, where they live, etc.

I can’t wait to see how this soap opera ends…

Compaq DL360 Multiprocessor Problems

As I blogged before, I’ve been having some fun with some Compaq Proliant DL360 servers we recently acquired. After fixing the Fedora Core 5 install issue on the first server, my second server installed correctly, but upon booting up, it only recognized a single processor. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t see the second processor. I even tried taking the drives from the working machine and putting them in this one. The problem stayed with the hardware.

After attempting BIOS upgrades, BIOS downgrades, system partition re-creates, etc, I finally broke down and did a systematic line-by-line comparison of BIOS settings to see if there was anything going on. There’s a BIOS setting labelled “Operating System”. On the working machine, this was set to “Windows 2000” (I never bothered changing the setting from when I acquired the machine). On the broken machine, it was set to “Other”. I have no idea what deep underlying changes this setting makes, but for Fedora Core 5 on a Compaq DL360, it needs to be set to “Windows 2000”. Crazy.

Bell Doing the Right Thing

As a followup to my recent posting about Bell violating the GPL, I received a followup call from Mark at Bell. He said that the issue had been sent up to their legal department, and the decision has been made to publish the GPL’d code on the Bell website. mark told me that it would be the same code as published on the Dish site, and that it should appear within a week. As soon as I spot it on the site, I’ll post a link.

I am a bit suspicious that they’re going to post the same code as posted on the Dish site, because I believe that since the original Dish posting, there has been additional work performed on GPL’d areas, such as the SATA drivers. Once released, I’ll do a diff to see if it’s indeed the same code base. The best way to tell if Dish and Bell are being above board is to extract an image from the 9200 and compare strings with the released source code to see if there are any obvious differences.