The Cavalry Arrive

Note: this entry is mostly a boring technical update about where the computer project stands. Caveat emptor! Casual readers beware!

With the exception of last Thursday, when Muni’s staff was leaving right as I arrived, today has been the first day with people other than the Sakya family, Sami and me. Bishwa (whose comments you can see elsewhere on this very blog) studied and worked in America (Wyoming, Minnesota and Atlanta) before returning to Nepal. Yogesh is a local Linux guru, who is also familiar with PHP. It’s great working with people who clearly know far more than I do about computers, Linux, troubleshooting, etc. With their help, we powered through a number of problems that have been shunting progress on our computer project. We discovered that the “driver problem” I was having with the WiFi cards may not be a driver problem at all, but an unfixable hardware issue. Both Windows and Ubuntu were detecting the cards, and the chipsets were heating up (indicating use), but there was no way to coax a WiFi connection out of the device.

With Bishwa’s advice, we pinged various websites and IP addresses (including localhost, which I hadn’t thought of). After much tinkering, we checked the router for the MAC address of the WiFi card, which ended in 83:8E. DD-WRT had no record of that card ever connecting (even though Ubuntu and Windows both said it had), meaning even after all the work and troubleshooting we had done, the cards were not even connecting with the router: internet access over these cards seemed futile, so we scrapped the idea.

Luckily, Muni is a Buffalo distributor in Nepal, so he had roughly twenty USB WiFi cards we could use for the prototypes (we only need six for now). The computer cases themselves have two hidden USB ports behind the front bezel. I told Muni we could use these hidden ports to hold one USB WiFi adapter, and one wireless keyboard / mouse adapter; that way the three USB ports on the back are free for external DVD drives, webcams, other peripherals, etc.

We also lost power again today, which was EXTREMELY frustrating. I had the computers hooked up straight to the wall; not to the UPS. One of the computers was in the middle of cloning a hard drive, and I lost around two hour’s work. ARGH! One of the things that Bishwa, Muni, Yogesh and I are going to work on this / next week is converting Muni’s ISP / server room to run on the low power consumption computers.

The current servers are running Pentium IIIs at nowhere near 100% CPU utilization, so we can easily switch them over to the Intel Atom powered computers I brought without fear of maxxing the (admittedly weak) CPU. Plus, because each computer has 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard drive space, so rather than having four servers each running around 150-200W, we can have just one computer with three Ethernet jacks (one on the motherboard, one through PCI, one through USB). This will emulate the four server setup while cutting the amount of power Hi Tech Pioneer’s ISP uses significantly (from around 600W down to around 25W): this way, subscribers can still access the internet when the power goes down. One step closer to an fully connected Nepal…

So what else did I do today? Phew, not much. It’s been an incredibly busy day. Everyone has been at work – Muni, his wife Nani, Sami, Bishwa, Yogesh and I. With the exception of the half hour of lost power, today was a day where everyone here at Hi Tech Pioneer was full steam ahead.

Nani at Work. We're all getting over the post-festival slump!

One thing I’d like to work on tomorrow is finding a command in Ubuntu which only copies hard drive sectors with data on them. The dd or disk duplicate command is excellent because it’s a complete mirror of the hard drive; you can switch them out and the computer won’t know the difference. The down side is that on a 5400RPM hard drive you are only looking at a 10MB/s copy speed between two drives; and with 160GB to clone, you are looking at nearly six hours! Because only 25GB of the 160GB drive has actual data on it, ignoring the blank sectors would be a much more reasonable one hour copy.

So yeah, I’ll try to get out more in the days to come and take some more photos. I know that these tech updates aren’t as interesting as the tales of armed guards and the photos of stunning beauty I’ve found in Nepal, but work also needs to get done. With Bishwa and Yogesh here, we have the chance to get much more work done, and I’ve got a lot to learn from them, so the time I’m spending here is definitely time well spent.

That’s all for now.
Charles