Finally fixed the water pump on my boat today

I managed to unmount the pump for the seawater cooling system for the diesel today. I say manged to, because the way the engine is mounted makes it difficult to do, at least the first time around.

Anyway, I disassembled the pump, and saw what looked to me like a perfectly fine impeller. So why did the pump not pump water very well ?

The answer came after consulting with the owner of our local boat gear shop: The central part of the impeller, which is driven by the engine is probably loose so the impeller blades are not turning (or only slowly turning). (This was ofcourse after I had disassembled the pump, cleansed the tube going from the pump to the engine, and remounted the pump while making sure the (danish: kilrem) was properly tightened (my first conclusion was that the kilrem probably was not tight enough, so the pump was not being driven properly), so I unmounted and disassembled the pump once again, and found that he was indeed right, and inserted the old impeller which was worn, but did not have this particular defect. After remounting the pump the pump worked much better than before. I am still going to buy a new impeller (and probably one more in reserve) before the sailing season starts again.

But very nice to know I have an engine I can trust once again.

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Sailing

I took the boat on shore (next to my house) the last week of october this year.

It was my intention at the time to get repairs done,  and outside maintenance (like waxing the hull and painting the bottom and repairing the keel which was breached by a collision with a rock on the bottom while we were closing the shore to tie the boat to a buoy to do some bathing last summer)

But I am only half way done, so the outlook for getting the boat ready for the next season early next year is not as good as I had planned.

And the water pump for the sea water cooling seems to be broken, and I am having trouble finding the time to fix it. And fixing it is necessary because otherwise I cant inject the cooling liquid which will prevent the engine from being split in pieces if we (against all odds it seems at the moment) should get a really cold winter.

This is the boat by the way, the picture does not really do the boat justice, but it was taken just 30 minutes or so before we hit that rock…

My mythtv box is idling at the time being

My DVB-T tuner was garbling the analog tv signal “down stream” from it, with the effect that my TV could only be used to watch tv on some of the frequency bands (perhaps those not used my the DVB-T signal?)

Anyway, last week I tried inserting a T-splitter to the antenna cable for the DVB-T tuner to see if this would improve the signal relative to what I had been doing so far, which was to connect the antenna cable for the tv to the antenna out connector on the tuner.Since then I have been unable to get mythtv to tune to the DVB-T signal. It’s just as though the tuner is broken, yet the drivers seem to load ok. I decided that knowing the software works was enough for me for the time being, and I was really too busy to do anything to fix it, so it’s idling (meaning I am not using it for the time being).

Also even though I am not 100% sure I didn’t break something in the configuration, because around the time just before this strangeness with the tuner I had been modifying the /etc/modprobe.d/tv file to get the cx88_dvb kernel module loaded at boot time so I wouldn’t have to log in as root and modprobe it manually to get the tuner working. (The other kernel modules _did_ load at boot, only this one did not). Anyway the addition of this module to the file seemed to work as I wanted, but I am not sure I actually tested if the tuner worked after doing this untill I did the thing with the antenna cable.

I know, the antenna and T-splitter (which is a passive component) can not reasonably be responsible for the tuner to stop working, but at the time it was the only thing I could remember doing before it stopped working. And again time prohibits me from tinkering with the box for the time being.

Also I am holding back upgrading the box to opensuse 10.2 because I filed a bug report about wlan support with knetworkmanager for my Allnet 0271 (which just works out of the box when I boot with knoppix v 5.01), and I want to see if they need more info from log files or other before I upgrade…

Beginning to use my new mythtv box

Yessss…….

This weekend I finally decided to connect my mythtv box to the tv in the living room, just to see how much still needed fixing, and was quite happily surprised to find that apart from a few glitches it just worked.

I have some tweaking to do though:

• I managed to configure the graphics card and the resolution so even normal text screens (not mythtv ones, but for instance term windows) were almost readable. I could probably improve this still, but I am not sure if this is just because the tv is one with a crt.
• I initially could only find live views in the media library, untill I found (and the config screens for mythtv are not _that_ readable on the tv either) the option to also view default, and standard recording groups in the view filter in the media library.
• I need to figure out how to get the box to turn it self on (and off) when recordings start and stop (if it is not being used) I haven’t looked into this yet.
• I need to set up the IR for my remote so I don’t have to have the wireless keyboard and mouse around to control mythtv
  • Note to self: This might be useful info if I amhaving trouble getting this to work. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV_Nova-T_PCI
• Maybe a second dvb-t tuner instead of one dvb-t and one analogue (the analogue is not connected yet).

But overall I am very happy with my mythtv box so far.

Pictures from my daughters’s school

Just an example..

Building a mythtv box on suse 10.2 rc1

Well I could not figure out how to get wireless working for me in the suse 10.1 install I had on the machine. So in the hope that a reinstall with the wireless nic installed in the machine during installation would somehow configure the network correctly for me I upgraded to suse 10.2 rc1.

But the problem is still the same. Only difference is that the installer suggested to use networking _without_ the networkmanager (which I had seen in the buglist for 10.1 does not work with prism54 which is the driver for my wireless nic unfortunately)

But it did not work (wired ethernet works fine ofcourse)

So I started trying the same tricks I had learned on suse 10.1 ( symlinking /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth2-> ifcfg-wlan……… ) and again I saw using iwevent that I seemed to get my nic associated with the wireless router. But still no dhcp assigned ip address for the wireless interface.

I tried disconnecting the wired ethernet and restarting the network, but no luck with that.

I tried adding a route for the wireless interface to the wireless router manually, but no luck.

I tried setting the ip for the wireless interface manually, and disconnecting the wired ethernet (using the same ip address that was assigned (by DHCP) ) but still no luck.

Despairing for a bit, while I think about how to proceed from here.

Building a mythtv box

So,

recently I started configuring an Athlon 3200+ equipped box, with a sata and an IDE hard disk, a Hauppauge DVB-t tuner, and a Hauppauge 150, and because I would prefer not to draw ethernet cables to the living room where the box should live an Allnet 0271 wlan nic.

I installed open suse 10.1 on it (this was some time before the novell / Microsoft announcement which I still don’t know quite what to think of other than this: I don’t trust Microsoft further than I can throw it so I will not be surprised to learn that Microsoft does something ugly with this to try and damage linux).

I Installed mythtv, and tv_grab_dk (I live in Denmark) and configured mythtv. But I could not get my wlan to connect to my wlan. A lot of debugging later I have learned a few things:

1. A live cd with knoppix v.5.01 allowed me to configure the wlan nic and connect to the wlan (and get an ip address via dhcp) in less than 5 minutes using wep encryption. (I have been fighting it with suse 10.1 for weeks now)
2. Under suse 10.1 if I disable knetworkmanager, and make a symlink from /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifcfg-eth1 to /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pci-0000:05:08.0 I can at least get a connection to the wlan now, but still no ip address via dhcp.
3. A post on suseforums indicate that knetworkmanager (which is a frontend for networkmanager, natively a gnome program I think) seems to be a bit unreliable.

So now I am downloading suse 10.1 to burn a dvd, and try to reinstall it. My hope with this plan is that if the nic is in the machine at install time (which I can’t remember if it were the first time or not) the install program will correctly configure it this time. Otherwise I might switch to ubuntu, although I still like the feel of suse better than ubuntu (Can’t really say why other than having no root login however good an idea seems strange to me).

Today I am struggling to get mythbackend running and connect to it (from the same machine). Maybe it is because I have been messing around with the network configuration a lot lately.

Anyway, I am _still_ waiting for the last 0.1% of the suse 10.1 DVD to finish download via torrent. It has been at 99.90% for almost 4 hours now and it is just stalled. 😦

Update: I started downloading suse 10.2 rc1 as well, also using ktorrent. It also started to go slower and slower and finally grinding to a halt at 93%. I read about some similar problems, and restarted ktorrent as suggested, and both torrents came back to life and finished with no further problems.

Hello world!

Velkommen til Lars Olesen’s blog.

Den er helt ny, så jeg har ikke lige noget materiale klar til at poste. Men vend gerne tilbage senere og se om jeg har skrevet noget.

Lars