In a nutshell, the HTC Desire won’t send an MMS message to a contact number containing spaces, and Outlook forces a space immediately after the country code in any contact phone number.  Thus, when you sync with Outlook, your contact numbers contain spaces and you can’t send MMS messages to them.

The solutions I mentioned were:

1. Reformat all your contact numbers to remove country codes and spaces
2. Download and use Handcent for all outgoing MMS messages

But I have found a third: download the latest version of the HTC Sync software (v3.0.5422 at the time of writing).  You need your device serial number to be able to access the download link (available on the HTC Desire from Menu->Settings->About phone->Phone identity), but it’s well worth it.  Don’t forget to uninstall the old version of HTC Sync first!

HTC Sync v3 not only syncs music from Windows Media Player and iTunes, but it also ‘fixes’ the phone numbers in Outlook by removing any spaces that may have been shoe-horned into them by Outlook’s own formatting logic.  And there you have it, possibly the world’s creakiest fix for a bug!  Having said that, it works.

Interestingly, after emailing HTC Support regarding this issue, the help I received, albeit very quickly, was:

We would advise that all contact numbers are saved without spaces, as this can prevent messages from being sent. At present we do not have a downloadable fix to do this automatically.

Having already found and installed HTC Sync v3 and seen my space problem disappear, I decided it wasn’t worth explaining the impossibility of removing all spaces from Outlook contacts which have country codes.

I won’t lie, I like Microsoft.  I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available.  And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.

But I also run a Linux server.  It is a modest beast.  It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM.  It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN.  It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.

I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.

About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason.  I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the Linux box would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.

So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.

I had recently updated Samba from v3.3 to v3.4 using yum, assuming it to be a bug-free release which wouldn’t break anything.  How wrong I was.  From v3.4, Samba has been changed to use a different authentication mechanism by default.  It used to use smbpasswd up to v3.3, but now uses tdbsam.

Ok, no problem really – until the upgrade from v3.3 to v3.4 changes your smb.conf without leaving an smb.conf.backup or something similar sitting next to it.  So without knowing it, your Samba installation now uses tdbsam.  Now, the problem with this is that there is a known bug whereby Windows clients become unable to authenticate and connect.

It was disappointing to have to find this out the hard way – by which I mean trawling around the web.  But still, it should be easy enough to edit smb.conf and change the authentication back to smbpasswd, right?  Wrong, because it seems the upgrade deleted the file containing the smbpasswd credentials (/var/lib/samba/private/smbpasswd).

Redhat’s Bugzilla entry explains how to convert smbpasswd account credentials to tdbsam format, so presumably you can do the reverse.  Well, technically you can – but only if the tdbsam credentials file (/var/lib/samba/private/passdb.tdb) isn’t empty!  That’s right, the upgrade failed (or didn’t even try) to convert the smbpasswd account credentials to the tdb format.

The solution is to run smbpasswd -a username for every Samba account you lost.  I’m glad I only had two.

This is why I think Linux is a long long way from being ready to take over the world.  I don’t think the Linux community appreciates how much help the average desktop user needs when they encounter problems.  This is demonstrated by the fact that Linux gives you no help at all; even the noddy ‘How do I…’ help topics in Windows destroy the assistance Linux offers.

From the very start, Linux makes it very clear you’re on your own.

While I admit that the change to Samba was publicised in the Samba release notes, I simply do not have the time to read through the release notes of, and perform impact analysis upon, every update I install.  I want to be confident that each update is the best thing for my system – much like Windows Update.

For now, I will stick with the majority of users, and keep current with Windows updates for the advantage of not having to enter the root user’s password whenever I want to do something.

There are several RAID configurations.  RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time.  The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity.  RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks.  This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.

I’ve only ever used RAID 0.  For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.

The only down-side to RAID that I had found was that drivers need to be provided during the installation of Windows.  Linux is slightly better in this respect because it has native drivers for the most popular RAID controllers, usually providing basic functionality.  Windows, however, asks that you provide the drivers on installation, presumably so that you benefit from all the features that the RAID controller offers.  With Windows XP you were required to hit F6 during the installation, and provide the drivers on a floppy disk (which was a real pain, since floppy drive usage died out shortly after the discovery of fire, and RAID drivers often came on a CD anyway).  With Vista and Windows 7 the installer is slightly more intelligent.  It will recognise the presence of a RAID array, but it will still require drivers to be provided.

This is all fine; once you’re familiar with the quirks of the Windows installer it’s plain sailing.

But RAID 0 has its own special drawback, especially when you’re not expecting it.  If you take a disk from an old RAID 0 array, install it as the main disk in a PC and try to install Windows 7, you’ll have a nasty surprise.  Usually the Windows installer will acknowledge the presence of a drive, even if it can’t do anything with it.  But not with an ex-mirrorred array disk.  The Windows installer doesn’t even recognise the disk as being present.

Presumably this is related to the fact that the RAID controller had written its own form of partition information to the disk; while the Windows installer can partition and format a raw disk, or one that is already partitioned, it cannot do anything with a disk whose partition information is present but apparently corrupt.

And the icing on the cake?  You can’t repartition the disk without it being partitioned..!

Yesterday I made the decision (read: mistake) to update my Netgear DG834G router (hardware v4, firmware v5.01.09) to firmware v5.01.14 – and, as is the way with these things, it brought trouble.  After the upgrade I couldn’t reach www.nikrivers.com from the LAN side of the router.

The problem is caused by the way the router handles traffic coming from an internal IP address and destined for the WAN (i.e. external) IP address.  In this situation it requires that the router first transfers the traffic from the internal network to the external network, and then immediately passes it back whilst applying any firewall or routing rules that are relevant to incoming external traffic.

This behaviour is called ‘NAT loopback’, and it seems the vast majority of routers built for the home market have this ability turned off, or do not have the ability at all.  It can be a big problem if you host a website and wish to access that same website using its domain name.  The domain name will resolve to the WAN IP address of your router, and any traffic headed there (such as an HTTP GET request on port 80) from the internal network will be ignored by the router.

There are a few ways to solve this, but none of them are ideal.

1. Use the server name instead of the domain name to access your website
2. Modify the list of known network hosts on each client to point your domain name straight to the server in question.
3. Run your own DNS server, using a view to return the server’s local IP address to requests for your domain name originating from your network.

Of course, the situation gets more complex if you’re also using your router to send TCP traffic on port 80 to your webserver and UDP traffic on port 8668 to a game server.

The solution is to get NAT loopback working on your router.  With some routers, such as the Touchspeed 535 as provided by Be Broadband, this feature can be enabled using a simple CLI command.  For other routers, such as the Netgear DG834G, it’s not quite so easy.

For the purposes of this post I’ll assume the internal network is on the 192.168.0.x range, the router is 192.168.0.254, and the web server is 192.168.0.1.  You will need to modify these IP addresses according to your own network setup.

The first thing to do is to enable debug mode on the router.  Simply go to http://192.168.0.254/setup.cgi?todo=debug and you’ll be rewarded with an appropriate message, “Debug Enable!”.  Nice.

Now connect to the router with ‘telnet 192.168.0.254′ to gain access to the router’s cut-down installation of Linux.  All that is required is to add one additional entry to the router’s iptables (which is a standard Linux feature; Google it or more info).  Type the following, amending any IP addresses according to the network setup:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -d 192.168.0.1 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -p tcp –dport 80 -j SNAT –to 192.168.0.254

This adds a rule to the POSTROUTING chain on the nat table which applies to all TCP traffic on port 80 (HTTP) coming from the private network and headed to the router.  The rule redirects the traffic to the server, and then processing jumps to the SNAT chain.

If the server is more than just a simple web server, such as an NTP server or mail server as well, the above step needs to be performed (changing the -p and –dport parameters accordingly) for each port and protocol combination you require.  Alternatively, those parameters could be omitted altogether, which will allow all traffic types on all ports through:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -d 192.168.0.1 -s 192.168.0.0/24 -j SNAT –to 192.168.0.254

If you do this, I recommend you run a firewall on your server, with only the appropriate ports opened.

There is more information in section 10 of Rusty Russell’s Linux 2.4 NAT Howto.

Unfortunately, the iptables change isn’t retained when the router restarts, so it is necessary to go through the process every time – which is a pain in the backside.  Fortunately, however, the Netgear support website has a download link for previous firmware versions, so I downgraded my router back to firmware v5.01.09 and everything worked fine again–including NAT loopback–with no iptables hack required.

A robust solution with DNS

Simply put, proper DNS is the best way to get around a router’s lack of/poorly implemented NAT loopback.

If you have the resources to host a website then you most likely also have the resources to host a DNS server for your internal network.  Simply create an ACL list describing all the clients on your internal network (probably as simple as specifying the CIDR block for your network, maybe something like 192.168.1.0/24).  Then create a view whose clients match that ACL, and define that view as a master DNS server for your website domain.  You then need to create a zone file for that domain – but instead of using an external IP for your webserver, use its internal IP.

All requests for other domains will be routed to the DNS forwarders, but requests for your webserver’s domain will be handled locally, and internal IP addresses will be returned.

The benefit is that you avoid traversing your gateway router to simply come back inside your network.  It doesn’t make sense that you rely on your gateway router to access a website within your own network.  In addition, the firewall on your router can be hardened to a much greater degree: for example, you needn’t leave FTP ports open on your router if you’re only connecting locally.  Or, to put it another way, you’re likely going to want to give yourself more access to your server than you want to give to the outside world; configuring a router’s firewall rules for this kind of conditional logic is simply asking for trouble.

There were no serious problems, but these failures started becoming regular.  I realised it was because I was running Fedora 9, and many packages seemed to be getting updated for the latest version of Fedora, without retaining 100% compatibility with Fedora 9.  And while Fedora 9 is not particularly old in OS terms, it’s no longer a recent version – Fedora 11 is the current release, and an alpha of Fedora 12 is currently available for download.

So I decided now was a good time to upgrade to Fedora 11.  I considered Fedora 12 Alpha, but thought I’d best stick to an RTM release since I didn’t want to spend 4 hours a day every day for a month fixing it.

And so, what I learned was: back up your personal data.

After religiously backing up all the config files for everything I was running on the server, backing up all database, all websites, and making a list of everything installed, I went ahead and performed a clean install of Fedora 11.

And then I realised I had also been using Samba to provide file storage to our Windows machines.  Not only that, but I had previously decided to move (not copy, but move) all my photos from my desktop hard drive to the Linux server.  I have no idea why I didn’t notice them when I went through my list of things to back up, but miss them I did.  And now they are no more – apart from those in the gallery, every single photo I have ever taken was exploded into ones and zeroes for ever.

I don’t know who They are, but why did They have to say it? Why not twos? Or “bad luck comes accompanied by no other instances of bad luck whatsoever”?

Anyway, following the tragic and catastrophic failure of my UPS, and the terminal affliction suffered by my wing mirror (oh yes, terrible times indeed), my computer has now decided things were still going too well for its liking, and a further helping of drama was required in order to provide some kind of counterpoint to the general wellness from which I was suffering.

So it died.

Not the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the Black Screen of Refusal To Even Power Up (BSORTEP). I’m hoping that acronym will catch on. I’m going to submit it to urbandictionary.com later.

I love working in IT. I really do. It’s something I understand, and mostly enjoy. You can’t ask for much more from a job. But sometimes it feels like I spend all my time fixing things that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first place, instead of making new things to go wrong.

What upsets me most is that I had ripped all my CDs onto that computer as WMAs, and then ‘archived’ (read chucked) my now-redundant CDs in a load of boxes ready for ‘long term archiving’ (read chucking) into the loft.

If I have to rip all my CDs again, I will be well miffed. Yes, well miffed.

Needless to say, I hadn’t heard the beeps because there hadn’t been any. And there hadn’t been any beeps because there had been no power cut. The UPS was faulty, and about to die.

The first symptom was the UPS constantly trying to charge it’s batteries, and clearly failing. The second symptom was its inability to maintain power to the protected circuit when it was disconnected from the mains. The third symptom was the rather nasty smell that woke me up the other morning – a sulphury smell not unlike that of someone having their hair highlighted at the hair stylist.

The three symptoms are expressed in the past tense, because they no longer exist. They have been deprecated by a fourth; the UPS’s refusal to do anything at all, even to switch on.

So, it’s getting replaced. Annoyingly I’ve only had it for a year. Even more annoyingly, we’ve not had a power cut in that time…

Much like being able to tell (but not necessarily care) when I’m boring someone with a particular conversation, I use website analytics to see where website visitors come from, what they look at, and how frequently they return. Yes, some people come back. In fact, most people do. And the most popular pages are actually the NSLU2 guides which describe how to configure a very small, low-power Linux server based on a Linksys NAS device.

I have no delusions about the overall importance of nikrivers.com; nobody knows about it, it doesn’t appear very high up in any Google results unless you search for my name, and even my mum keeps forgetting how to find it (though she also has to keep asking me how to find the Internet, because “it’s gone from my desktop”).

That said, 101 different people have visited my NSLU2 guides in the last 20 days alone, about a third of which are visitors who have never been to my website before. Even after Linksys has discontinued the NSLU2, it still remains popular as a web and mail server.

Specifically, “The Bluetooth Radio failed to turn ON due to insufficient driver memory available”. Hmm. Fortunately we were only 1/2 a mile from home when we realised it wasn’t going play ball, so we went home. “It will only take 2 minutes to fix”, I claimed.

I was wrong.

A Google search only resulted in pages that seemed to think that the problem was the order in which software gets loaded into memory in Windows Mobile 5.0; the Bluetooth drivers always get loaded into a specific memory address, and if this address is already in use, the drivers don’t load and the Bluetooth stack doesn’t work.

But uninstalling everything from the iPaq and performing a million hard resets didn’t work. I decided that the Bluetooth hardware had broken, and Windows was giving the above error message by default.

So I resigned myself to buying a new PDA, because I lost my iPaq restore CD in a previous incident, and had no way to reinstall the OS from scratch.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a page for the 2790 on hardreset.eu, which describes the way in which the 2790 can be restored to factory settings; just hold the Calendar, Messaging, and power buttons, and then press the reset button until the iPaq reboots. It will then reformat its internal storage, and (presumably) copy the factory configuration from a neatly tucked away back-up ROM.

And now it works. Bluetooth, I mean. It works. It wasn’t broken, it just had an unidentified problem (which may or may not have been accurately described by the error message it caused).

I can now safely venture past the end of our road without the risk of getting lost.

But after changing blog themes the other day, I realised the NSLU2 pages were actually quite dependent on the underlying CSS – and for some themes, this means that they looked rubbish.

So I went about reformatting the pages. There are only half a dozen of them, and only one or two are of any considerable size – but this was enough to find exactly how annoying the WordPress WYSIWYG editor can be. I ended up with inconsistent newlines (although the HTML was consistent), weird closing tags that didn’t match anything else in the document, and random behaviour whereby the editor would say something along the lines of “hey, I can’t figure out exactly what you’re trying to do, so why don’t I double-space half of this here single-spaced text, indent the whole document from this point onwards, and completely unformat all your headings?”

There’s a little feature on the WordPress.org website called Kvetch!, which allows users to anonymously vent their annoyance at WordPress’s quirks and bugs. I had seen that several people don’t like the built-in HTML editor that WordPress has, but I myself had only ever needed to write a few paragraphs and make a couple of words bold, nothing more – and for this it is fine adequate.

But for decent formatting capabilities, the built-in editor just doesn’t cut it. It is what I have decided to call a WYSINWYWBYWJHTGWI editor. Yes, a What-You-See-Is-Not-What-You-Want-But-You-Will-Just-Have-To-Go-With-It editor. I’m going to register that as a trademark so that the WordPress people can’t thieve it from me when they release their next iteration.

So, there was else nothing for it. I cracked open Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and used that as my editor to reformat everything. I didn’t use the WYSIWYG designer, I just wanted something that would give me syntax colouring.

I was fully prepared to go so far as to use notepad – but I think that would have been a little too hardcore for my liking.

But at the weekend it refused to upload anything successfully, complaining about PHP and web server upload limits – things over which I have no control. So I went back to using the clunky web interface to upload my photos, only to be greeted by the useless “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” page on each attempt.

Things didn’t look good. So I decided to download a cleaner-looking and simpler gallery application (Plogger) to give it a go. Still no luck.

Having ruled out the problem being Gallery2, I decided my website host had changed some things on their side. A quick Google later, and I realised that I couldn’t upload anything more than small text files to any server. So it’s not my website host.

Good job I didn’t send them that email.

But wait, I can upload files to the gallery using a machine on the other side of the corporate VPN… which uses the corporate Internet connection. So it must be my ISP. It must be. Surely? After another quick Google, I read that a number of ISPs have been caught sending fake TCP reset packets to their users so that ‘undesirable’ connections (ie. file sharing applications) are disconnected.

Knowing how to troubleshoot this kind of problem, I proceed to download Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer (formerly Ethereal). Sure enough, each time I try to upload a .jpeg or .bmp or… in fact almost any type of file, I receive a TCP RST message – surely the fake reset message sent to me by my interfering ISP!

However, it seems that my ISP is blameless after all.

It turns out the latest firmware for my Draytek 2800 router adds an innocent-looking option called “Drop non-http connection on TCP port 80″ which is enabled by default. I feel it should be more accurately called “break everything”. Disabling it fixed the problem, but it took an entire lunch break.

When I built it, I decided it should have a 64-bit processor. Of course, that’s 32 bits more than anyone actually needs at the moment, but it’s the way forward. Allegedly.

I also decided I should try out Windows Vista. It looks great, it performs brilliantly, and, again, it’s the way forward.

Those two decisions obviously weren’t risky enough, because I threw in a third; to run the 64-bit version of Vista.

As if Vista’s lack of maturity alone wasn’t enough–with prolific reports of hardware manufacturers failing to release stable Vista drivers in time–I had added that extra 64-bit dimension to the situation. Maybe I was hoping manufacturers hadn’t released Vista drivers because they were concentrating on the 64-bit versions of the Vista drivers…

Anyway, Vista 64-bit is a bitch. It’s soooo beautiful, but… such a bitch.

Vista 64-bit will sporadically crash/fail to boot with 4GB of memory installed. The biggest hardware advantage of a 64-bit system is that it can use more than 4GB or memory. How could Microsoft possibly overlook this bug? It can’t possibly be down to lack of testing, surely? Fortunately Microsoft knowledgebase article 929777 fixes it. Ironically the problem occurs with 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Then, of course, MSI decided not to develop 64-bit drivers for my motherboard; specifically, for the on-board audio. The motherboard supports a 64-bit processor. I know this, because it’s doing so right now. Clearly, it being a 64-bit motherboard, and this being the age of the 64-bit processor, there is no reason why MSI should even contemplate the laughable notion of developing 64-bit drivers.

And then the icing on the cake: Office 2007. Considering it costs more than an office suite should, I was disappointed to learn that several Office 2007 features aren’t available on a 64-bit operating system. Really obscure things are missing, like the Send to OneNote print driver, the Office Clean-up wizard, and Internet Fax. Not a catastrophe, but bloody annoying.

Last night I discovered Windows XP will happily install onto a USB hard drive.

Without warning.

Well, I claim “without warning”, but I think I really mean “the warning was there, but I knew what I was doing so I ignored it”. Yes, that’s what I mean.

After having finally transferred all my stuff to my new PC, it was time to rebuild my old one and give it to Charlie, as promised. But a series of events conspired against me–including my failure to disconnect the external drive–and the Windows XP installer didn’t recognise the RAID array; so it decided to install on said USB device instead.

The drive was nearly full, and I lost it all.

I suppose it buys me some time before I have to decide what to do when the drive runs out of space.

It took a little while to unpack all the parts, throw the packaging into the corner of the room, and put it all together. And then I was ready for that nervous moment, the first power-up of a freshly-built computer! I pressed the power button, and… nothing. Bugger.

All was not lost, however – a little diagnostic accessory on the motherboard promised insight through its four little LEDs. Each LED can glow green or red, and the combination of lights indicates the stage at which the start-up process failed.

It’s basically a shining diagnostic thing. A shining, LYING, diagnostic thing. Except I didn’t know it was lying at the time. It was pointing at the RAM, saying “Ummm, I’m telliiiiiiiiing”. All the while, the CPU chuckled at getting the RAM into trouble.

After the purchase of a small (and thankfully cheap) stick of different RAM, I cottoned on to the shining diagnostic thing’s game, and stumbled across the CPU’s troublemaking. The bastards. In frustrated anger I did something–I really don’t know what–and it started playing properly.

A few more niggles later–Windows Vista 64-bit blue-screening with 4GB of RAM, the on-board audio causing lock-ups, and having to RMA one of the hard drives–my computer is up and running. I daren’t think how many times I reinstalled Windows!

And it only took two weeks(!)