Dogging laptop in Ubuntu
My personal laptops have underwent quite a change over the last couple of months. First, I left all since of reality at the door and purchased my first Mac. One of the little 13 inch white versions. I went in with the assumption that if I wasn’t a fan of the OS, I could always load Vista over the top of it. Second, my older laptop which was having a hard time running vista was finally loaded with Ubuntu 8.1. I’ll discuss this in a later post.
The older laptop is a 1.7 Centrino with 1GB of ram. Even with Ubuntu, the machine felt like it was lagging. I installed the CPU monitor and noticed that the CPU never reached above 600 MHZ. Add, I read many, many, many web pages discussing how to turn on cpu scaling, none worked. Many stated that issues like this were usually BIOS related. I booted into the BIOS and checked settings, verified that I had the latest BIOS from the Toshiba website, and reset the BIOS to defaults. Still no help. I then went and checked my Wifes system using CPU-Z. Lo and behold, her’s was also stuck at 600 MHZ. It was an underperforming Toshiba epidemic.
During some freetime at work today, I did a little troubleshoogling. I came across an a 45+ page thread on tabletPCBuss.com. This thread was started in 2004 by people looking to update their older CPUs to Dothan based CPUs on Toshiba laptops. While the CPU was pin accurate, after installing the CPU, it would never reach above 600 MHZ. After a considerable amount of playing around, the thread participants were able to tweak the BIOS using Toshiba tools and a modified file for the BIOS. A pparently, after about page 20 or so, other readers started reporting the same issue of the 600MHZ cap after receiving their laptops back from Toshiba maintenance. By using the same tools needed to replace the CPU, their laptops immediately reached the full potential of the CPU. In the thread, one of the readers posted links to bootable floppy image files with all of the tools. I downloaded the image files onto a USB drive and went back to work.
I get home and now I have to get the image file onto either a CD or a USB flash drive. As I didn’t want to overwrite my flash drive, out comes a CDR and back to Google to learn how to convert an ima to bootable CD. I found that mkisofs is my friend. The page BIOS Flashing with a bootable CD-ROM, has you doing a few other steps, but as the IMA was built specifically for this purpose, you can skip and go straight to the mkisofs command:
sudo mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b pom1150.ima -c boot.cat ./pomt150.ima
on my laptop running at 600MHZ, it still took less that a minute to complete. Now I opened the folder holding the bootcd.iso, right clicked it and burnt to CD using the default Ubuntu CD burning application. Again, less than a minute, CD complete.
Now reboot the laptop, and boot to the CD. The bat file has three options 1,8,9. it looks like option 1 is what does the work, 8 and 9 are verification. On my laptop, step 1 took a couple of minutes and automatically rebooted the laptop. Booting into Ubuntu, My CPU monitor applet now reports anywhere from 600 MHZ to 1700MHZ. Ubuntu is much happier. I am even able to install Virtualbox and Windows 7. Now it could use more RAM, but the system is much peppier now.
Now that the system is running quicker, I’ll write later on my thoughts about Virtualbox. I’ll also write about Mac OS X and Vmware Fusion 2. Like I said in the first paragraph; Lots of changes.
Error occurred while downloading file sitestat.xml
Ah, another day ahem, night in the life of a systems admin. What was supposed to be a quick 10 minute change ends up taking 3 and half hours and running until 3AM in the morning. The change was to upload the patch 6 package for Mcafee 8.5i Virusscan into EPO 3.6. After importing the package, EPO stated the package was successfully installed. I then when and tried to do an update of the McAfee and was greeted by “could not find valid repository.” The logs stated it couldn’t download the sitestat.xml file. I looked at the repository and even though the package was for the entire 8.5i binaries with patch 6 integrated; the repository still showed the previous patch as current. I tried deleting the patch, but gave me access denied. A little more Google searching and it stated that sometimes, the repository sitestat.xml doesn’t get successfully upgraded when moving items from current to previous. So I decided to delete the current 8.5i package and then the previous patch. Now clients could connect to repository, but there wasn’t any VSE package to install. Back I went and uploaded the 8.5i with integrated patch 6 package; again, successful. I went to a client, and could still connect to the repository, but when I checked VSE’s version, it was still the previous patch. It wasn’t until I uploaded the actual patch 6 packagecatalog.z binaries, and ran an update from the client, did it actually change, to VSE patch 6.
It appears that while Mcafee integrated the patch 6 binaries into the VSE package, they did not update any version numbers. The client and EPO service does not know that it is a newer version. And they get confused and just quit playing well together.
About mordtech
Experience:
I’m an IT professional with over ten years of Microsoft Server support. I’ve also supported Checkpoint and VMware. I’m currently employed by a large IT outsourcing corporation in the US.
I’ve implemented Windows Active Directory, Checkpoint VPN/Firewalls, VMware Infrastructure, Sharepoint/Project Server amongst others.
Personal:
I’m married and a father of two boys, which is by far the most trying job of my life: the boys, not the marriage. We reside in the midwest and aren’t looking forward to the fast approaching winter.
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