So I Bought a New Phone…

…and you guessed it, it’s an iPhone 4.

My previous phone was old faithful: a Nokia 6020 that was, hilariously enough, my first cell phone. My Nokia took many beatings over it’s lifetime including two dips in the ocean and recovered from temporary problems as a result in very short order. It always just worked as a phone and nothing more. It’s battery lasted long enough that I would pretty much forget to charge it after a week or two and realize I have next to zero battery left at inopportune times because charging it was the furthest thing from my mind.

But now it’s out with the old and in with the new. Goodbye Nokia 6020, hello iPhone.

There are huge tradeoffs. Voice + data = more $$$ per month than just voice. But with that increased cost of ownership I get mobile Internet, something that a geek like me has wanted for a long time but had a really hard time justifying. The old phone would go way longer between charges but the iPhone does so much more on a charge. The list goes on and on.

Suffice to say, I’m happy for now but let’s wait for the excitement to die off and then I can really start to asses the cost/benefit ratio of this slick little black and steel rectangular box.

Life Support!

Wow! A whole 2.75 months and nothing new on techslaves… things are getting boring around here!

I’ve been itching to make some new posts but work has picked up lately. I’m working on a new project I started as a collaboration with a large IT group here on campus. There is lots of exciting stuff going on with the project and when it’s all said and done, I’m going to share valuable things I learned along the way.

Just to force myself to finally write about it, I’m going to list the vague project key points and then I’ll just have no choice but to follow up or let everyone (read: myself) down:

  • Setup OpenLDAP w/ TLS, syncrepl, LAM
  • Migrate existing NIS directory to LDAP
  • NFS and Samba (security = user) migration to High Availability w/ Heartbeat/Pacemaker/DRBD
  • iSCSI SAN storage w/ multipath and HBAs
  • Large data consolidation (4TB+) from multiple sources
  • Support Windows XP,Vista,7 and Ubuntu 8,9,10 and Centos 4,5 clients w/ automount in LDAP on all Linux clients.

We’re targeting an end date of August 31st, wish me luck. Beans will be spilled!

Next project down the line might be back with my group going one-up on this configuration by implementing FreeIPA v2 for it’s slick Kerberos, HBAC and (hopefully) sudo policy integration. FreeIPA does raise some new questions but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Stay hungry, techslaves.

iPod Touch Woes – Part Deux

The problems with my iPod Touch haven’t gone away just yet.

I was able to replace the headphone jack without too much trouble, in fact I would say it was a pretty easy fix. The old ribbon cable stub left from the snapping of the old ribbon cable came off the PCB without too much trouble at all. Just applied a bit of heat and up she came. Soldering the new ribbon cable+headphone jack assembly was very straight forward as well. I just made sure to clean the four pads off nicely, add a tiny bit of solder to each pad then put the ribbon cable down on top and apply some heat. From there I added a bit more solder to the top because the ribbon cable pads have little holes in them to allow the solder to flow through from the back to the front. All said and done, I think I did a really good job.

But, and here’s the kicker, I think ruined ANOTHER battery! Arg! These things must be ultra sensitive to shorting out or otherwise because I can’t figure out what else might have caused my THIRD battery to die on me. Yes, I’ve accidentally shorted it momentarily while fixing the headphone jack AGAIN.

Alas, perhaps it was not meant to be. First battery died because I tore the casing by accident, second battery because I got the damn thing wet. And now the third battery because I appearently cannot keep the red and black leads apart at all times…

At this point I’m not sure what to do. Give another battery a short? These things are cheap, so why not?