I was building my VMWare server this weekend and ran into quite a few issues with my Realtek on-board gigabit adapter. I tried both Suse 11.1 and Fedora 10 but continued to have the machine drop off the network. The weirdest part is that it would work fine for about 10-15 minutes after initial boot and then suddenly stop responding to pings.

I did some research and found that it is a bug in the kernel module and is yet to be fixed. The one workaround that I saw mentioned was to manually remove the module and then reload the module after boot. This did fix my issue so I entered the following into my /etc/rc.local file. I added the delays since I was having troubles without them. I also start vmware server at the end so that the bridged networking loads correctly after the modules have completed loading.

sleep 10
/sbin/rmmod r8169
sleep 10
/sbin/modprobe r8169
sleep 10
/sbin/service network restart
sleep 7
/sbin/service vmware start

Whenever I install Fedora in text based mode I never seem to get an option to disable SE Linux. In order to do this after the installation do the following:

• Open /etc/selinux/config with vi
• Edit your text so “SELINUX=disabled”
• Save your file and reboot your system.

# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
# enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
# permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
# disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=disabled


We recently moved to a new town and although we have the same cable provider, the channel numbers have changed. In order to fix this without having to reschedule all of the shows I watch I performed the following steps. My installation of mythtv is running on a Fedora 8 server.

• The first step is to login to your Schedules Direct account and update your channel lineup.
• Make sure to backup your mythtv database before performing these steps
• Login as root and shutdown your mythbackend: “service mythbackend shutdown”
• Exit your root session and login as your mythtv user to start the setup: “mythtvsetup”
• Enter the Video Sources section and remove your previous channel provider.
• Create your new channel provider and name it appropriately.
• Enter the Input Connections section of mythtvsetup and assign your new provider to each of the tuners that you will be using it on.
• Exit mythtvsetup
• Login as root again and start the mythbackend: “service mythbackend start”
• Run the following command: “mythfilldatabase –do-channel-updates –refresh-all”

The last command may take a few minutes as it will be updating your previous scheduled recordings to match up with your new channel numbers/call signs as well as downloading all new guide data. I performed these steps last night and have verified that the recordings previously setup are now updated and recording on the new channel lineup.

The site is back up running on a virtual machine until we can find a permanent home. Let me know if you see/find any issues with it

I would like to start off by first giving credit where credit is due. This page had some good tips on how to get started with the Projection 4Di unit.

I also found that following the manual to the ‘T’ saved us a lot of headache as well. We started off with the Chev454 map that was provided with the Holley Tuning software.

The first problem we had after the newly puched out 461 (previously 454) were the headers turning bright red after reving the truck in the garage. This over heating was first thought to be a lean condition but after throwing more fuel at the problem it didn’t help. We then decided to check the Timing. At idle the Projection unit was reading between 9 and 11 degrees while checking the timing with an actual timing light showed 0 degrees at idle. We also found that as the engine RPM’s increased the amount of timing that the ECU was off got closer to actual timing of the engine. For example when the ECU read 24 degrees the actual timing was at like 17 or 18. It took a little guess work to get the timing dialed in to an acceptable level. We called Holley support and if you have ever called them you know that they want nothing to do with their older systems and just tell you to buy the Commander 950.

The part that took the longest was dialing the fuel table in so that it ran 10-20% rich at all times. The user manual does a good job of explaining this so I won’t bore you. It just comes down to the fact that the engine will run better and the ECU Oxygen Compensation will be under that 20% mark to save fuel economy.

I didn’t explain earlier but this system was purchased used with a tune already in it and one of the big problems was the truck would pop and sputter and certain times in the RPM range. The screenshots of the original tune are below as well as what I came up with for now.

Original Fuel

Original Timing

Here is what he is running now.

Current Fuel Map

Current Timing Map

I meant to post this like 6 months ago but forgot and lost the link to the page that explains how to get this done painlessly. This will allow you to add network folders to your Windows Media Player 11 library that you can stream to a Xbox 360.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and Preferences.
3. Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

I found this information on Microsofts site here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/faq/sharing.mspx

The site was upgraded today and required 0 downtime.  Another seemless upgrade provided by the WordPress team.  Well done.

I have found another MythTV issue which seemed big at the moment but only turned out to be a formatting problem in Mythweb .21. What I was seeing is pictured here:

Mythweb .21 Formatting Issue

As you can see things are out of line and may of the links are strung together instead of being in a table like format. I tried the SVN version of Mythweb and things seemed to clear up…until I changed my theme to Grey…and it was broken again.

The actual build of Mythweb .21 is perfectly fine, the grey theme however is not and shouldn’t be used.

I recently upgraded my MythTV machine to Fedora 8 so that I have active repositories for the upcoming mythtv update. After the upgrade I noticed that full screen video playback seemed to be tearing on some frames and overall just a little slow. I tried every single driver from the atrpms repository from 96.xx to 169.09 and all of them yielded the same results.

My next step was to adjust the settings in mythfrontend under Utilities/Setup->TV Settings->Playback. I tried every single deinterlace filter that was available as well as each of the mpeg decoding libraries with each of the deinterlacers…but the problem still was there.

After looking on the internet a while I found that a lot of the repository drivers for some reason didn’t work well. I did the following to resolve my issue and get back to normal video playback.

1. Download the latest linux drivers directly from Nvidia’s site
2. Open a console window and su to root.
3. Execute ‘init 3′ without the quotes to drop out of the X window system
4. Login as root again and execute ‘yum remove nvidia*’ to get rid of all nvidia drivers
5. Execute the downloaded Nvidia installer file, in my case it was ‘./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-169.12-pkg2.run’
6. Follow through the installer so that it can build the appropriate kernel modules.

After I had rebooted the machine still didn’t boot X properly so I had to run ‘nvidia-xconfig’ as root so that it could build the xorg.conf file properly.

I now have perfect video playback as well as fans that quiet down a lot sooner than before.

I have been sharing media from WMP11 on my Windows XP Pro machine for well over a year with no issue until today. All of a sudden my Xbox was not detecting my XP Pro box at all even though the service for media sharing is up and running. The only thing that did change was I upgraded my processor and video card 2 days ago.

How would that have anything to do with media sharing? …is the question I asked myself but apparently in Microsoft’s world it’s a big deal. Remember, this is XP Pro and not Vista or Media Center. It happens that the WMP sharing creates it’s own digital rights management and if the hardware changes it stops sharing.

Here is the solution I found to fix this…even though it has nothing to do with WMP directly. It has you reset your DRM settings by renaming the current DRM folder and then updating some media player components. Follow the steps exactly and it should resolve your issue like it did mine.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/929642