The whole summer I’ve been planning a major overhaul of the servers I’m running in the cellar, and this last week I’ve been working hard on effecting these changes. Shutting down a server that has been running continuously for 480 days is never easy, but there was no option because of the extremely serious sock_sendpage vulnerability recently found in the Linux kernel. The updates I’ve done have been the focused around security, and since I’ll be abroad for the next year everything needs to work with minimal need for maintenance.

The new setup is a combination of one server running the very secure operating system OpenBSD spiced with additional measures such as chrooting and intrusion detection, and one server with six virtual computers running Ubuntu through Xen. All machines are protected with an advanced intrusion detection system and a separated logging server, hopefully making any intrusion attempts detectable and void. But no-one can achieve perfect security, and I won’t say I’m immune to attacks though I hope I’ve made the systems robust enough. In the process I have learned a new operating system, OpenBSD, and I’ve almost fallen in love with it I must be a strange person.

Now everybody back home knows enough to keep the servers running when I’m away, and I’ve specifically asked them to make sure things stay afloat in the event of a power failure. The battery backups are cheap and not very reliable, but they protect against the minor outages and prevent the most annoying sub-second power spikes.

Enough of this technical mumbo-jumbo, here follows a picture of these new computers that will be working hard to serve you these web pages! (Nothing would work without that typewriter.)

Note 2: This guide is obsolete! Use at your own risk. This guide is a lot better!

My father and I recently bought a Hauppauge Nova-T 500 TV card to extend the functionality of our current TV computer. The nice thing with this card is the fact that it contains two tuners in one card, allowing two simultaneous TV recordings or watchings at the same time.

We unpacked the box and plugged the card in to our computer. The manual recommended the card to be put in PCI slot #1 or 2 for unknown reasons, but it felt best to comply. When we booted, however, I got confused.

We had indeed installed a PCI card, but there was no TV card in the PCI listing (given by the ‘lspci’ command). We thought there was something wrong with the card at first.

When inserting the card into a Windows computer, we understood where the problem was. At first, Windows recognized a new USB root hub on the computer, and only after that came the TV card. Hauppauge had made the ingenious decision of having two USB TV receivers on the card, controlled by an internal USB hub. The reasons for that I can guess is to save costs using the same chipset for both their external USB cards, and the internal what-seems-to-be-PCI cards.

So, back with the card to the Linux box, and discovering that there actually were a lot of new entries in the PCI listing, USB controllers. A quick glance on the USB listing (‘lsusb’ under Linux), showed a happy Hauppauge card.

After discovering the inner workings of the card, it was time to configure it. Apparently, the drivers were not included in the Linux kernel before version 2.6.19, and the most recent stock kernel for the Ubuntu system was 2.6.17. Time to go back and compile your own kernel from kernel.org.

If your system has at least kernel version 2.6.19, there is no need for compiling your own. The kernel version is checked with the command ‘uname -r’. In the kernel, you need to enable modular support for the “dib0700″ chipset, which is somewhere under Device Drivers > Multimedia. Make sure the dialog says “(M)” and not “(*)” for the specific driver.

After compiling and installing the kernel (providing those instructions is outside the scope of this document) you must reboot and then find a firmware file for the kernel to use. For this specific card I needed the file “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw”, which I couldn’t find anywhere on the net at first. The primary mirror for this file was offline, but after one hour of searching I luckily found an RPM containing several firmwares, along with this one.

To make the path easier for everybody else, I here provide these files on my server here.

NOTE: The above files are very obsolete, and should not be used. linuxtv.org has newer files.

So, extract the file named “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw” and copy it to the directory /lib/firmware. Then load the module dvb-usb-dib0700 using the following command:

modprobe dvb-usb-dib0700

(many systems require that you add “sudo” to the command line before the “modprobe” command.

You just loaded the driver into the kernel. Felt something? That was just the feeling of being one step closer to a working dual TV tuner card. Note that the “modprobe” command should return nothing if it works. If you get outputs like “FATAL: Module dvb-usb-dib0700 not found.” you have to make sure that you compiled in support for the TV card into the kernel.

If modprobe worked, check the output of the command ‘dmesg’. If it works, you should have something like this in the last few lines:

[ 47.706381] dib0700: loaded with support for 2 different device-types
[ 47.755845] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 47.831894] dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw'
[ 48.004945] dib0700: firmware started successfully.
[ 48.106970] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T' in warm state.
[ 48.107568] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 48.107929] DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T).
[ 48.191285] DVB: registering frontend 1 (DiBcom 3000MC/P)...
[ 48.192903] MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220)
[ 48.657038] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 48.657373] DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T).
[ 48.661165] DVB: registering frontend 2 (DiBcom 3000MC/P)...
[ 48.663158] MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220)
[ 49.129041] dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T successfully initialized and connected.
[ 49.129071] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700

Basically, what it says is that the firmware gets loaded (“dib0700: firmware started successfully“) and that the frontend gets registered (“MT2060: successfully identified“) and finally gets the card to work (“dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual DVB-T successfully initialized and connected“)

If this is your case, you can happily go on and set up MythTV or <insert your favorite PVR system here>.

Otherwise, let’s do some debugging. Most often, you forgot to provide the system with the correct firmware file. Extract the file “dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw” to /lib/firmware, nothing else. Make sure you got support for your dib0700 in the kernel configuration and that the kernel is really 2.6.19 or higher. If you get stuck, post a comment in the form on the bottom of the page, and I or one of my many readers will probably help you.

Your TV card should show up in the directory /dev/dvb (might vary on other systems than my Ubuntu installation) as two entries; adapter0 and adapter1 (This might also vary if you have more TV cards in the computer).

Now, configure the DVB card as you would with any card. I use MythTV, and those instructions can be found here. I don’t feel like writing another MythTV guide here, there are so many out there already.

Happy tuning!

Note that I never tried connecting the remote control, many readers have commented that the remote doesn’t work yet. You will need a third-party remote or do as I am doing and use another card with a remote control.

As a conclusion, I find the Nova-T 500 an excellent card with good support under Linux except for the remote control. The driver seems pretty new, though, so there are probably improvements and bugfixes on the way in new Linux versions. Still, with our computer, a 1.8 GHz with 768 MB of memory, we can now record three DVB-T streams simultaneously (using one Nova-T 500 and one older Nova-T card) without any problems at all.

I can only recommend this card, although it still requires some compiling to get working. I believe Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (in beta at the time of writing) has support for the card out of the box (but you still need the firmware).

If this guide was helpful, I would appreciate you leaving a comment here. Also comment if something doesn’t work or if you have additional suggestions. Thank you!

1. Ubuntu Linux 6.10 “Edgy Eft” First and foremost, there is a new version of Ubuntu Linux, the Linux distribution I use for my machine. Ubuntu releases a new version of the operating system bi-anually, so even though this was not any surprise to me, it is always fun to get a new system on your computer.
2. Firefox 2.0 This whopping new version of the web browser everybody should use, with a great new look and many new features. I remember back in 2003, when I first made the switch from the big, bloated Mozilla web browser to the then-called Firebird 0.6 web-browser. Great work, Firefox team! Oh, and if you still are using Internet Explorer 6, or even worse, version 7, switch to this web browser instead. Just click here!
3. MPD (Music Player Daemon) 0.12 Being my favourite music player for the Linux platform, the developers of this trusty platform have finally put together a new release. Horray for the included icecast support, which means that putting up a private internet radio station will be very easy. Read about setting up an internet radion station in my article.
4. MythTV 0.20 I use MythTV for my family’s TV computer setup. It is an almost complete system for watching and recording TV shows and easily managed from a remote control. The new version brings MythArchive, a program that I have high expectations on.

And for the more tragic release:

• Internet Explorer 7 Ugh. Use Firefox instead and make this world a better place!

That was all for tonight.

First, change all occurences of “breezy” to “dapper” in /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update

apt-get dist-upgrade

(20 minutes of waiting)

Now I could install Zope 2.9, which was only available in Dapper. All ubuntu users wanting to use Plone 2.5, switch to dapper!

I have replaced the router/webserver/dns box with a brand new Ubuntu installation, which will be easier to manage than the old gentoo system. That system had been running for about two years, but had become almost unmanagable as time went on. Ubuntu is a lot easier to upgrade, thanks to apt-get and binary packages.

So if you have seen this site as offline the last days, this was the reason why.

The new modem was a breeze to install. The manual said that I needed to configure IP addresses, DNS servers and everything, and I was prepared to edit a lot of settings on the router/webserver machine. I unplugged the old modem, and a couple of seconds later the new modem was installed instead of the old one. Immediately the traffic indicator started to flash, showing that internet traffic was coming through. I was surprised to see that it seemed to work, and couldn’t really believe it.
I logged in to one of our computers and went surfing. To my great surprise, the modem actually worked! It is now located in the cellar and chugging all the internet traffic very happily. For the first time I am actually impressed by D-link, but let’s see during the next couple of weeks if it will work.

Recently I bought my computer I have been using at school, a Compaq Evo with a Celeron 1,6 GHz processor, to use as my primary desktop machine, “lysboj”. Even though it was equipped with 512 MB of SDRAM memory, it did only cost 500 SEK (that’s about 55€). Now this machine is located under my desk and works just the way it should. It is a bit loud, though, but I think that I can replace a fan or two to hush it down.
The purchase of this machine enables me to start replacing the webserver with a new computer. I have had the gentoo distribution on it for a long time, and as a router/webserver I have not felt this as being the optimal solution. Gentoo is still too much bleeding-edge to be used as a mission-critical server, and I have for a long time needed to reinstall the software bottom up using Ubuntu. My old desktop machine, a Dell Optiplex with 1 GHz, is the same type of machine that broach is now, and I can therefore install an identical system on that box to later on transfer the hard disk when the install is completed. I cannot risk having the server go down more than 24 hours, so I must do some paralell testing of the machines before I continue.

I feel that I need to give a presentation of all the servers we have at home, that is on its way.