Simon MottAll about me
Simon Mott - All about me
Simon Mott

Category Archives

14 Articles

UN2400 Mobile Broadband on Ubuntu 11.10

by Simon

un2420I have a HP Compaq Mini 311c-1030SA netbook with ION. I decided to encrypt it the other day just on the off chance it was stolen that way I would be happy that none of my data would be lost.

It had the orignal OS (Windows XP Home) and Kubuntu Linux in a dual boot configuration. Windows encrypted nicely with TrueCrypt and I decided to start fresh with Linux as the version I had installed was fairly old and as far as I am aware there is no way to on the fly encrypt a currently installed distro.

Lets just say that due to a slip of the hand I somewhat destroyed my encrypted Windows partition! (Foolishly, one of the first things I did when i got the netbook a few years ago was remove the recovery partition for more HDD space too)

This isn’t really a big problem for me as I hardly ever used the Windows install. Here is the clincher though, the netbook has a Qualcomm UN2400 Mobile Broadband chip which requires the firmware to be uploaded to the chip based off what country/carrier you plan on using. This firmware and some of the ppp configuration scripts are installed onto the Windows partition… which I had just destroyed!

VPN Bonding

by Simon

This page details step by step how I accomplished aggregating two separate internet connections into one, seemingly single, connection to the Internet. This “single” connection has a greater bandwidth capacity that either of the individual connections could yield. As a side affect this also nicely doubles up as a redundant connection. This method can be used for achieving link aggregation for both home and business users alike for a fraction of the cost of commercial connections / aggregation units available that do the same thing and in theory could be expanded to as many links you like however be warned, the more links there are, the more overheads there will be with tunnelling; thus potentially noticeable drops in speed.

For this demonstration I am using two Virtual Machines via VirtualBox. This enables me to experiment with without cutting my servers off from remote administration. Both machines are running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS (Lucid) however there is no reason this wont work for other distributions as long as you modify the steps accordingly.

Office 2010, KMS Activation and Domain Relationships

by Simon

Whilst this seems trivial to some people, not only did this issue affect my office, but one of our branches in India too so I figure its worth noting somewhere!

My current employer has many operating companies (OpCo’s) dotted around the world, all under one brand. Because of this structure, our OpCo in the UK has a two way trust relationship between our domain and the parent company’s. For arguments sake, lets call them UKNET and CENTRALNET.

At the end of last year we were told to use a Microsoft KMS server hosted on CENTRALNET to install Office 2010 on some of our workstations. Easy.. or so we thought.

Logical Volume Manager – LVM

by Simon

This page covers some of the basics of using LVM. Please ensure that you back up any important data on any had drive or partition you wish to use for LVM.

I take no responsibility for any data loss if you choose to use any of the commands on this page

Installation

For the purposes of this guide, I am using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and the package manager apt but this should work with any installation of LVM