Stefan Helander

Mobile internet broadband in Latvia

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When I travel abroad I need to stay connected to the Internet, not just for fun but I have to be connected for my work. Relying only on Wifi is not a solution as I recently discovered the hard way on a trip to France. The Hotel advertised "WiFi internet" but this however, turned out to be a connection limited to only web and mail (all traffic forced through a proxy). I needed VPN to work.

The most convenient and cost effective solution is to purchase a prepaid mobile broadband from a local provider. That way I will have 3G Internet connection during my stay.

To not be forced to buy a USB modem with every prepaid mobile Internet, I purchased a Huawei E585 3G/WiFi pocket router which is not SIM locked (works with any provider). This little thing has a battery that last for a couple of hours and I only need to buy prepaid SIM-cards in the countries I visit.

I went on a trip to Latvia and my choice fell on Okarte Internet via computer. They are covering 92% of Latvia for the moment.

There are two choises – a SIM card bundled with a USB modem for Ls 9 or just the SIM card for Ls 4. It includes one week of surf (up to 50 GB) and can then be refilled. According to Okarte’s website it could be purchased on many sales points, for example Narvesen or Plus Punkt kiosks.

The first store I stopped by could only sell refills. The second store didn’t have the SIM card only so I actually bought the package with a USB modem for Ls 9, figuring Ls 5 was a cheap price for not having to run around more stores. The modem was never used, instead I put the SIM card in my pocket router.

Even though Okarte’s website is in Latvian, Russian and English nothing in the package speaks any English, only Latvian and Russian which is of little help for me.

The major problem I encountered was that there was no technical information in the package, especially regarding APN which is crucial. I looked at my network manager in Ubuntu which actually has preconfigured choises for Okarte and found out that the APN is open.lmt.lv.

With this APN set I could surf away from my resort location in Jurmala enjoying download speed at around 4-7 Mbps and upload 0,45-1 Mbps.

 

Stefan Helander

Copy large amounts of data between servers

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There are several methods of moving data between servers in a UNIX/Linux/BSD environment, for example scp, ftp, SMB-shares, NFS-shares or rsync. My experience is that using netcat is one of the faster methods if you have large amount of data to copy.

On the receiving server:

cd /  (or the base directory under which you want to recieve the data)
nc -l 1234 | tar -zxvf -

This will make netcat listen on port 1234 (don’t forget to open the port in the firewall and/or iptables).

On the transmitting server:

tar -zcvf - /data/ | nc -q 1 targethostname 1234  (replace /data/ with the folder you want to copy and targethostname with the hostname or IP-address of the receiving server)

If you have more bandwidth than computing power (i.e. a slow machine) you might want to consider to leave out the "z" in the tar commands on both sides and transfer the data uncompressed.

If you need to move data between physical locations – never underestimate the bandwith of a car loaded with harddisks (quote from a former collegue :)).

 

Stefan Helander

Ubuntu boot hangs with black screen and blinking cursor

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If this happens, check your BIOS setup device boot order. It is possible that some device has been listed before your real boot device.

In my case, my boot SSD drives had been moved below ALL PCI SCSI and there are other drives in the machine which are not bootable causing this problem for me.

 

BIOS setup device boot order

BIOS setup device boot order

Stefan Helander

Ubuntu boot hangs with black screen after GRUB

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It might actually not be hanged, but instead but you might have been kicked into an initramfs shell but it is not displaying on the screen. 

Try to boot in recovery mode or boot on a install CD or USB stick in rescue mode. Edit /etc/default/grub: 

vi /etc/default/grub

Set the following: 

GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text 

If the GRUB timeout is very short it might be a good idea to set it a bit higher so you have a chance to make a selection: 

GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

Save and then execute: 

update-grub

Then reboot the machine and now you may see the emergency shell you are kicked into. Now you can investigate your boot problems further.

Stefan Helander

Facebook has changed my e-mail address

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Recently Facebook decided to hide all other e-mail addresses but your @facebook.com address on your Facebook profile.

After all, Facebook is a free service, so you should consider yourself "the product" rather than "the customer". Facebook’s real customers are their advertisers and not you, so they can do more or less anything with your account and all you can do about it is to cancel your Facebook account if you don’t like it. Annoying but that is how the free services works ("you get what you pay for" and "there are no such thing as a free lunch" and so on).

It is a bit irritating but easy to fix. This is how you do it:

  1. Go to your Facebook profile page
  2. Click on About
  3. Scroll down to Contact details and click Edit
  4. Click on the small circle to the right of your @facebook.com address and select Hidden from timeline
  5. Click on the small circle to the right of your preferred email address and select Shown on timeline
  6. Click on the Save button in the bottom of the popup box
Stefan Helander

Dovado routers with ZTE MF820D 4G modems (Telia)

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To be able to use the ZTE MF820D 4G dongle from Telia with Dovado routers, both units need to have updated firmwares. Unfortunately even in stores, those units seems to have outdated firmwares.

To upgrade the ZTE MF820D 4G dongle – follow this guide (Telia Sweden): http://www.telia.se/

To upgrade the Dovado router, visit Dovado’s homepage: http://www.dovado.com/firmware and follow the instructions in the firmware file.

 

Stefan Helander

System Check virus – how to remove it

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System Check is a virus/trojan pretending to be a system diagonstics tool displaying fake errors. To recover them the user will be fooled to pay for the software. Whatever you do – do not pay for it! When infected, all icons on the desktop will be hidden and the only program in the Start menu will be the System Check tool. 

Computer infected with the System Check virus

I tried to follow the instructions here to remove System Scan virus. However, the virus seems to exist in a newer version where the Run and Search fields in the Start menu are disabled. Because of this I had to take a different approach.  Read more

Stefan Helander

My YouTube videos not displaying in related / suggested videos anymore

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I have a YouTube channel where I post videos from different strange things I am up to. Suddenly I noticed the video shows dropped significantly. The statistics (analytics) showed that the majority of my video views came from "related videos" (also sometimes referred to as suggested videoes). 

Some Googleing on the subject didn’t really turn up with a reason or solution but I found people with similar problems and someone said YouTube has a function to disable your videos from related videos if you view your own videos repead number of times, possibly trying to "boost" your view counter. 

This wasn’t happening in my case but I do use to visit my own channel as it is a quick way to see it’s number of views. The featured video on my channel is on autoplay – so yes, every time I visited my channel I also triggered one of my own videos. 

After that I haven’t visited my own channel for two months and last week the statistics starts to show that the views coming from related / suggested videos are climbing back to the levels two months ago. 

I haven’t been able to verify this with YouTube but my advise is – don’t visit your own YouTube channel or your own videos unless you are logged out from your YouTube account.

Stefan Helander

Windows Vista hangs on Welcome screen

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I had a HP desktop PC running Windows Vista that sometimes hanged on the Welcome screen (displayed after entering the password to login). The problem occured randomly but started to occur more and more often causing trouble for the user. Just waiting for the Welcome screen to dissappear (for hours) didn’t help.

I applied different solutions found on the Internet including registry changes, uninstalling HP credential manager and others. One solution suggested on the Internet forums was to reformat the machine and factory install it. Not a preferred solution but ultimately the only thing left to try. 

The machine ended up in my workshop but before formatting it I opened it while running on my workbench. I noticed this machine had a built in flash drive used for Windows Readyboost (in order to make the machine boot faster and load programs faster). I was a bit curious since I hadn’t seen this solution before. The flash memory was connected to the motherboard through a cable. I accidently touched the cable gently and immediately the flash drive dissappeared and reappered in Windows opening the screen asking me what I wanted to do with the newly inserted flash drive. 

This made me suspect that the cause of the problems has been the readyboost located on a flash drive with a poor connection. I disconnected the flash drive completely and the machine have never again had the "hang on welcome screen" problem. Although it doesn’t load programs as fast as before it is way better for the user to have a machine that doesn’t hang on the welcome screen.