Al Hoang

April 8, 2006

How NOT to design an embedded NTP Client

Filed under: tagme — @ 1:20 am


A number of D-Link products, so far I have at least identified DI-604, DI-614+,
DI-624, DI-754, DI-764, DI-774, DI-784, VDI604 and VDI624, contain a list of
NTP servers in their firmware and using some sort of algorithm, they pick one
and send packets to it.



The correct way, as I have pointed out to D-Link repeatedly, is to query a
D-Link controlled DNS entry like “ntp.dlink.com” and populate this DNS entry
with the list of NTP servers to be queried. That would allow D-Link to add or
remove servers from the list by changing the DNS server files and all deployed
devices would automatically see the update next time.

Poor Poul-Henning (A FreeBSD developer). This incident has been costing
him quite a bit of time and expenses just to sort out something that D-Link
screwed up in the first place. If any D-Link engineers read this blog
entry by chance, please try to get your management to fix this.

Read Mr Kamp’s Open Letter to D-Link

D-Link is not alone in doing this

Try a lighter desktop on your Ubuntu install

Filed under: tagme — @ 1:20 am

How to get Fluxbox
on your Ubuntu install

Summary:

  • Current Ubuntu has an ‘ancient’ (Read: I MUST HAVE LATEST AND GREATEST) version of fluxbox
  • You need to install some extra tools (build-essential checkinstall xlibs-dev) for this howto. Checkinstall looks very useful for people who install
    from source then realize they need to erase it.
  • Do the ./configure; make dance from source but use checkinstall so
    you can erase it

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