phillsacre.me.uk

I’ve been having internet connection troubles again recently. I think I might have mentioned this on a previous post. Anyway, as a lot of people seem to be coming to this blog searching for “Eclipse ADSL MTU Size” (and if you’re one of them, hello! – I hope you find this helpful), I thought I’d post it up here.

The symptoms seem mainly to be problems uploading – sending large emails, uploading stuff via FTP… I’ve even had problems with Facebook and logging into Gmail! It’s all very similar to the last time.

Anyway, I’ve checked the Eclipse knowledge base again, and they recommend an MTU size of 1458 – but say if that doesn’t help, you could try 1430. So, lo and behold, I changed my MTU size to 1430 and everything seems back to normal. Bizarre, non?

Ah well, I’ll bear that in mind for next time.

Just for the sake of posterity, here are a couple of articles which might help:

Changing the MTU size in Linux on Debian based systems (including Ubuntu)

Changing the MTU Size in Windows (Note: I haven’t tested this but it looks like it should work).

Well, Ubuntu 8.04 has been released, and I’ve just upgraded to it! There was one “gotcha” during the installation, which hopefully will help people if I blog about it:

Once I’d completed the upgrade (which I did via the usual update manager), the machine rebooted and came up with the login screen. I logged in normally, but then just came up with a blank screen and stayed there. When I say “blank screen” I mean a screen with the default Ubuntu colour as the background, and the mouse pointer was working, but nothing on the screen. I couldn’t even use Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get to a terminal login. (Having said that, I can’t now so it might be something to do with my setup).

Anyway, it turns out this is a fairly easy problem to fix!

• Reboot the machine
• When you get to the login prompt, select Options -> Select Session
• Select the “Gnome Failsafe” session
• Login as normal
• Once you’re in, open up a terminal window and type in: sudo rm /tmp/.X0-lock

That seemed to fix the problems for me, but I will update if I encounter anything else.

Anyway, my first thoughts are that I like 8.04, although I’m not sure about the decision to include a beta version of Firefox as standard. Most of my extensions don’t work with Firefox 3 yet, so that means I’m stuck without a few extensions I like for the time being. This is my first experience with FF3 as well and it does seem quicker, but I will reserve final judgement until it actually gets a full release in a couple of months.

For Christmas I bought Phil a Logitech Harmony 525 Universal Remote Control (now there’s a mouthful!).

I first used it last Tuesday, but it’s taken me until today to actually get it to work, via various support calls and so on! I don’t really want to bore you with the details, but just get to the meat of what the problem was — I couldn’t find any information on the problem I was having at all, so hopefully this will help someone else who’s having a similar issue.

I had two problems, the first one is more major than the second one. The first problem was that I couldn’t initialise the remote control. Each time I tried, this happend:

Initializing services
Getting remote control information
Logitech Harmony Remote Software version: 7.3.2
Hardware version: Board 2.5.0 (0xFF:0x12)
Firmware version: 2.0
Getting remote control information - Successful
Checking version information
Checking version information - Successful
Waking the remote control
Waking the remote control - Successful
Getting remote control states
Getting remote control states - Successful
Uploading remote control information to web
Initializing the remote control. Please wait...
Uploading remote control information to web : ServiceExceptionServiceFailed - The information was not sent. Check your USB cable and try again. If the problem persists, contact customer service.

Now, I’m not 100% sure what the problem was, but after contacting customer support I was (eventually) told to check none of the buttons were pressed down on the remote. Apparently, buttons being pressed down on the remote can cause the remote to stop responding, so you need to make sure that they are all up and not jammed down.

The reason I’m not 100% sure that this worked is because I also tried using the web-based software at myremotesetup.com (not members.harmonyremote.com). I also set up an HTTP Debug Proxy to check exactly what was being sent to and from the server and if anything was going wrong there.

Anyway, something of the above — and I admit it was probably unjamming the buttons — stopped the problem from happening, and I was able to initialise the remote.

The other problem I was having was not being able to login to the software. I could create an account without any problems, but I couldn’t actually login using the account I created! I just entered my username and password and the software would just hang, until I got a message saying that the connection had been reset (in a message format which looked rather like Firefox – the software you get on the CD basically connects to the website).

By using Fiddler2 (the HTTP Debug Proxy mentioned above) I was able to ascertain that there’s a page on the members.harmonyremote.com website which doesn’t seem to be working properly, however I’m not sure exactly why. It doesn’t really matter as I can use the web-based version of the software without problems.

Anyway, I hope that all this helps someone else!