Monday 25 February 2013

Linux and it's irqbalance service as Hyper-V Guest

I recently had a client's specialist software provider tell them that their network is shafted, really slow and poorly performing. Hmmm. I ran all the tests you could think of between clients PC's and their various Windows servers, everything was fine, yet their software provider maintained their statement that the network wasn't in good order.

After a few simple checks against their server, which ran Ubuntu 11.10 in a Hyper-V 2008 R2 guest, I called their bluff as ping times were staggeringly bad some up to 2000ms and beyond ! I double checked against all other PC's on the network and against their Windows servers, both physical & virtual - everything seemed fine. File transfers between computers on the network were superb for a busy network, transferring files over the internet via their FTTC line was perfectly acceptable.

Yet the Ubuntu guest was still running really poorly. I told them what I'd done so far and that I found after a short search that 11.10 was a bad Hyper-V candidate and they should upgrade to 12.04 or newer. Which they did, and the upgrade broke the Ubuntu server. Fantastic. Now when I say broke I mean as in it had no network connectivity after finishing it's boot sequence, well it responded for a maybe 10-15 pings then stopped thereafter. Oh joys. Contacting the software vendor was futile as they had no clue on where to go from here.

Linux cap on for the first time in, ohhhh 8 years? I'm usually a BSD & Windows guy. Yes, BSD is similar to Linux, but it's not nearly as lame.

After a bit more testing, a few restores into a test Hyper-V guest, some upgrades working some not and examining the logs of those that failed (/var/log/kern.log) I discovered that the IRQBalance service was too blame! How very dare it ruin my day?! So to resolve the issue I disabled it in /etc/default/irqbalance by changing Enabled="1" to ="0" and rebooting.

et voila - they now have a working Ubuntu 12.04 server, which has fantastic ping times. I was shocked to learn that 12.04 was aimed at being Hyper-V compatible after this kerfuffle. Pfft.

Friday 1 February 2013

Keep root access, while being official - Samsung Galaxy S3


Long time, no post, eh?

Yeah, well you know, that's what having another baby does!

Anyway, back to the main topic here, I've figured out a way to keep root on the Galaxy S3, whilst resetting the flash count / firmware status. I've not heard of using this particular method before, I've heard of pulling the battery when using Triangle Away and the phone is rebooting (dodgy imo!)

This post doesn't try to offend or take any awesomeness away from Chainfire - I'm just listing something I found that gets rid of the annoying statuses while keeping root!

I've used Triangle away, which previously worked, however on later versions of the stock i9300 firmware it doesn't seem to reset the custom binary / official  statuses. Long story short, I had installed a load of crud on the phone lately and it started freezing up / rebooting randomly - it's on stock XXELLA and had been rooted using ChainFire's autoroot as I quite like the stock firmware features - AWESOME!

"Great so you're rooted, so are we, now tell us how to reset the counter already while keeping root !" I hear you say. Well, take a good backup of all your apps / data / bacon pictures / porn etc

I also installed Super SU via the market to get regular updates etc
Open Super SU, goto Settings, scroll down to System and tap "Install SuperSU into /system" and reboot - I think this is the most important step as resetting the device will not remove any system apps - ie Super SU when installed in /system *wink* *wink*

Tap Menu, Settings, Samsung Account, tap Backup now if you have a Samsung account, tap back a couple times to get to the main Settings list again, then under the Personal heading tap Back up and reset, make sure you've setup the Google backup which should remember the wifi AP's etc then tap Factory data reset and follow this through.

All being well you should have a fully rooted device when you've completed the initial setup and should notice Super SU still installed / needing an update - check your phone status for flash count and binary status and under Settings > About > Status it should show Device status as normal.

If anyone else could check this out to confirm it works for them too, that would be great - either on stock or custom firmware and let me know, please!