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I tried out USAA’s check deposit via iPhone last night. It wasn’t too surprising that they did this, they’ve been letting people deposit checks with scanners for quite a while. What surprised me was that the application actually appears to work better than the computer version. I had to retake the photo a couple of times – mostly because I needed a darker background, but the error messages were clear: ‘Place the check on a darker background’ and taking a photo with the phone is far quicker than the old scanners. The PC version suffers from some obtuse messages like ‘Sorry, we couldn’t process your check, please try again – a 5 minute process that’s really frustrating to repeat.

Final take: It works, it’s faster than driving by the bank, and it wasn’t frustrating to use. (and their app is even faster to use than Bank of America’s iPhone app.)

Right now I’m heading toward Montana, but we took a day off from driving around Mount Rushmore… The day before the Sturgis rally starts. In a nutshell, this means that the local towns are already full of Harley riders (and other bikes). Lucky for me, there are quite a few sales tents that are up here just for the traffic – I picked up a new pair of leather chaps (My past dinks have involved rashing my knees.) And have been plotting the restoration of my 1980 Yamaha XS 850 – a unique bike for the three cylinders it sports. Check out this 750 cafe racer conversion, it’s just gorgeous.

This is a 750 conversion built by a German fellow named Hernrik. I’m interested in the exhaust routing, the black mags and the silver tank. I’ve been leaning towards a silver tank on mine, but I really like the way this bike looks. Mine will stay a cruiser, but I’ll probably replace the bars with some better geometry and the stock exhaust really bugs me for some reason…

Netscreens are fun. Allright, actually they’re just really, really flexible. I’ve been very impressed with netscreen firewalls, the SSG5 is a fantistic device – just keep in mind that you’ll spend some time learning the ropes if you delve into a screenOS based device.  Dynamic DNS is pretty standard these days, but netscreens actually make y0u install the proper SSL cert before you can access a service like DDNS via an encrypted channel. If you just want it to work, just select the clear text option when you configure the usual options.

Sometime in the near future, I’ll have a Juniper SRX to play with. Now that’ll be interesting.

When I posted the goggle mod, my web server started crawling. After I took a look, I found that the box had been swapping. (This wasn’t a big surprise)  I’ve been running on a dedicated virtual machine at slicehost.net with only 256MB of ram. One way to improve things is to run nginx instead of apache to reduce the server’s footprint. After checking out my machine for a bit, I decided to simply upgrade to a 512MB slice. I’ll probably put nginx on as well, but I was getting low on disk space anyway.

Upgrading my slice can be best described as a piece of cake. The boys at slicehost have done a great job of building their slice management tools – and they don’t even charge you for the upgrade until you confirm that the upgrade worked to your satisfaction. And personally, I really don’t mind paying an extra $18/month for double the ram, disk and bandwidth.

Before my last ski trip I wanted a helmet-cam. I bought an Oregon Scientific ATC3K digital video camera, but the mount was just too bulky for a helmet rig. It’s great for mounting on a kayak or mountain bike, but totally unsuitable for a real helmet mount. (It’s just too big.) Obviously, it was time for a bit of modding.

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After realizing that I’d been lazy about it, I upgraded my hosting machine last night before I went to sleep. I managed to make Apache2 angry. You won’t like it angry, cause it won’t even give you a 404.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

If you have a netflow capable router, you can gather information about traffic that’s passing through your netflow collector. Here are a few notes about getting it to work on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 machine – some of the code has gotten a little crusty, but with some work you can get it to compile.

Robert Galloway has put together a nice netflow how-to here. Once you get through the perl module issues (I had to manually place some modules and their directories into the site-perl directory on the machine.)

flow-tools hasn’t been maintained by the author in a while if it compiles for you great, but if not, you can grab a different branch that will compile on modern boxes here.  It’s a new branch, I used version 0.68.4 and it compiles fine.

The biggest problem is compiling CFlow – which can be found in the contrib directory of the flow-tools bzip. It looks for libft.a, which has since moved inside the flow-tools build. At first I tried linking against libft.la, but it turns out that you need to link against libft.so.

In my case, it’s found here: /usr/local/flow-tools/lib/libft.so

I created a symbolic link:

ln -s /usr/local/flow-tools/lib/libft.so /usr/local/flow-tools/lib/libft.a

Then I edited Makefile.PL inside Cflow-1.053 and replaced this:

sub find_flow_tools {
my($ver, $dir);
my($libdir, $incdir);
if (-f ‘../../lib/libft.a’) {
$dir = ‘../../lib’;
$incdir = “-I$dir -I$dir/..”;
$libdir = “-L$dir”;
}

With this:
   if (-f ‘/usr/local/flow-tools/lib/libft.a’) {

Then run perl Makefile.pl and build/install as usual.

After that, I’ve found that the Table perl module kicks out an error, but it’s not actually an issue – all the output works fine.

Just thought I’d throw in a view of the server that’s running things at home now. It’s  a poweredge 2650 – you can get them dirt cheap despite having dual 2.8ghz cpus, 2GB of ram and onboard remote access. This one once served the military – they removed all the drives, but left an IP address assigned to a military base in Arizona on the management card. (Really, they used real IP space for internal management. Sigh.)

I tossed in some ultra320 drives and installed ubuntu. I had to update the firmware on the raid controller, but now it purrs like a 2u rack mount server. Now I’ve got redundant power supplies, a raid 5 system drive, a mirrored data drive and I’ll add some e-sata or usb drives for larger storage needs.

Soon I’ll be racking it under one of the worktables in my lab/workshop for easy access.

The eye-fi is pretty sweet. However, the built in client connects to the eye-fi manager, which hands off your data to the eye-fi servers. In order to keep my data home, I had to cut out the manager. Using the afore mentioned python script to act as an agent on my ubuntu server, I added in a call to gup – a python based command line gallery2 uploader. The script would probably suffer from performance over a choked internet pipe, but I’ve got a local gallery2 install on the same server. Now I can take photos, they’re immediately uploaded to the server via EyeFiServer.py. Each time EyeFiServer gets an image, it calls gup.py and uploads the image to an ‘incoming’ gallery on my server. It’s a bit of a rube goldberg, but it works really well.

Now I can take a photo, and within 10 seconds or so, it’s been added to my personal Gallery2 server – ready for storing, sorting and editing.

You can grab my modded version of the EyeFiServer here.

I can’t count how many times I’ve forgotten to download pictures at home, then wanted to access the data that was firmly locked away on my camera at home on the following days. Enter the Eye-Fi: a SD memory card that contains a wireless chip-set and an on-board client that uploads your photos as you go along. Since my wireless network is segmented from my home wired network, the built-in client doesn’t work from my powermac – but there is a nifty python script that’ll act as a server for the card, so I’ll probably stick the script inside a chrooted environment on my home server and attach that to a dedicated network interface on a private vlan to a dedicated wireless network. (My home wireless setup involves some previous generation enterprise class gear, so I can run all the ssid’s I want with private, tagged vlans at will.)

The card itself is an interesting piece of hardware. There’s a tear down here. The RF chip might be an interesting piece to build for an Arduino module…