Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

IPMI Serial over Lan (SoL) on a Dell PowerEdge

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers are quite nice to play with. But they have a nice feature that most people don’t seem to use – the built-in “Base Management Controller” (BMC).
Basically it’s a built-in management card that can be controlled locally on the server, via the serial console or remotely over LAN. Besides reading various system information such as temperatures, fan-speeds, eventlogs etc. it supports power switching functions (on/off/reset..) and a really nice thing, Serial over Lan (SoL).
Using this feature you can redirect serial output over the network. If you run some sort of unix on the server that means that you can control everything remotely, including the BIOS screens, RAID setup screens, the bootloader and your console – even if you mess up the OS’s network configuration. When running some other operating system the fun most likely stops after the RAID setup screens 😉

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Gmail for mobile – direct download

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Google has recently released a Gmail client for mobile phones (Enriques screenshots, downloadsquad review).
I tried to install it on my phone yesterday – but I got an ugly 404 error from google.com. I suppose that happened because it provided me with an internationalized version that didn’t exist. I then decided to visit the installation url with my webbrowser which immediately redirected me to Google Mobile, no chance to download the Java package.
But lynx is your friend!

$ lynx -useragent=Nokia5140i http://gmail.com/app

Using this method I finally got the download links – language code “DE”, but after changing it to “EN” the download worked and I could upload it to my Nokia. Here we go, direct download links for the gmail mobile Java client:

Nokia Advanced-MIDP2 (jad) (e.g. 5140i)
Generic Advanced-MIDP2 (jad) (e.g. LG-LX550)
Motorola V600 (jad)

Googles list of supported phones. If you need other versions try the lynx command line above with some mobile phone version string from this site.

have fun – happy gmailing.