Month of November 2007

Very nearly finished putting my new bike together. It still doesn't have

• bar tape, nor will it have until I've tried riding it to find out if the brakes are in the right place
• anything to stop rain running into the steerer. I do have a star-fangled nut, but am decidedly unimpressed with the concept - it requires significantly more brute force to make it go in than I think is consonant with good engineering - and will probably instead be getting one of those expander bolts that carbon steerers require.
• a front derailleur. The plan up until about an hour ago was to borrow the band-on mech from the old bike, but it turns out they have different seat tube diameters. That should have occurred to me already.
• wiring for a computer, mount for the rear light

The first and fourth of these are, I think, essential for Saturday. The second, only if it rains. The third, well, for a mostly flat course I reckon that if need be I can stick it in the big ring and leave it there.

ww.telent.net is temporarily down, as we've cancelled service on the machine that used to host it. Backups exist and sooner or later I'll restore them somewhere, but in the meantime you may notice that my old blog is offline, and probably there are some missing images here and there on this one.

Or more accurately, a letter from my MP, yesterday - a reply to my email two weeks ago . On actual paper and everyfink.

I'm not going to type the whole thing, but here are some quotes

• "In conversation with London Cycling Campaign representatives and [...] Emily Thornberry MP, I have been interested to learn that helmets can dehumanise a cyclist and there is some evidence that motorists are more careful if they see a cyclist's face"

• "... I will always stand up for cycling interests. I do not conside that compulsory helmets are necessary, although on the road they are advisable"

• "I am unable to comment on Peter Bone MP's preparation for the debate [...]"

The first quote is a little odd, but I suspect it's a reference to the work done by Ian Walker As for the rest, all sounds fairly positive and it's good to know the LCC (which I recently joined) is doing its thang.

An uncomfortably long time - comprising, in part, an uncomfortable long time - between the attempt and the writeup of my first go at a 200km Audax. It was all going great until about 70km, at which point I descended a steep hill and rounded the bend at the bottom on a nice wide line, only to see one of the group I was riding with take a slightly tighter line and slide out across my path. Managed to avoid him, but only by means of a sideways jinking-too-tight maneouvre that made me crash. Damage to bike: bent gear hanger, small dent in top tube, munged headset bearings. Damage to me: gouge out of my elbow, bruised knee. Further damage to bike occured a few km later when I changed down not realising the gear hanger was bent, heard spoke pinging noises and came to an abrupt halt with half the rear mech wrapped in the back wheel. This, I felt, comprised enough of an excuse to retire from the field with honour intact, so I walked to nearest village, taxi to nearest train station, and home. Pity, really, it was a very nice ride up to that point ,and at 25km/h including control stops a respectably fast one too.

I found the next day that the crash had stirred up my chronic groin strain thingy (some adductor-related muscle/tendon problem probably caused by vigorous T-stopping when cold) to the extent that walking hurt. I found out the following Thursday when Condor had had a look at the bike (wait, this is the good news coming up now) that the dent in the top tube was not serious enough to worry about i.e. I didn't break my new frame on its first outing. And not only did they fix all the bits I'd broken in the crash, but they also finished the bits I'd never quite got round to when building it in the first place (crimpy end things on gear and brake cables, handlebar end plugs) and somehow, I know not how, managed to apply sufficient force to the plug in the end of the steerer tube that it's actually doing a useful job. So, nice one Condor.

Since then I tried skating once, but (see groin, above) it hurt - and stopping hurt double, therefore I (1) am waiting until that calms down a bit, then (2) will go and see a physio in the hope of getting some useful exercises for it before I resume. In the meantime, London->Hertford->Cambridge on the bike last Saturday, first third on my own at reasonable pace, second two thirds accompanying skaters at "if I had known we would go this slowly I'd have worn shoe covers" pace. It was cold and wet and somewhat lacking in traction for users of small plastic wheels, so progress was not fast.

In something of a "we appear to have come full circle" moment, I recently did what I should have done last spring: researched Shimano/Campagnolo combinations properly. A Campag 10 speed shifter pulls the same length of cable on each click as a Shimano 8 speed mech/cassette expects to be pulled to shift one sprocket, so as soon as my latest Parker order arrives I'll be in a position to put the winter bike back together using pretty much all the original parts that I took off it in the first place. Plus, I rather suspect, a rack and mudguards, just to make sure it's unfashionable enough to not be a theft magnet. Maybe even panniers. Still, now I have a fastish bike as well I don't feel compelled to worry about the compromise.

Oh yes, and yesterday I received a Magistrates Court Summons for non-payment of council tax. Which is on the face of it not the nicest way for Tower Hamlets to remind me I really ought to claim back my council tax overpayment from them (seems they'd lost any record of my moving out of the borough) but it's still pleasant to think I have a few extra quid that I'd forgotten about. So, I'm thinking "turbo trainer", on the grounds that (a) for indoor training, well, it's that or a slideboard and nobody I know with a slideboard has ever mentioned that they actually use it, (b) my choice of music is bound to be better than anyone else's spinning class, (c) even if I don't use it regularly for actual training, at least it'd be useful for getting the !@#$ing derailleur indexing right...

(And I never thought I'd say this, but kudos to LB Tower Hamlets for replying to my email within 24 hours of it being sent. Certainly beats Hackney's 3 week lag)

Some notes on the LTSP setup in Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutless Gibbering" or whatever tf it's called) which may be valuable to anyone else trying to set up a Dell Vostro 200 as a client given that the whole thing is a triumph of packaging over pragmatics and the documentation is infuriatingly crap. If you arrived at this page via Google you presumably knew that already or you wouldn't have been reduced to trying random web pages.

I assume a certain familiarity with Unix, but I think that's more robust than assuming you're an idiot with exactly the same hardware as whatever the person who packaged it had. If you have, of course, then it already works for you and why are you reading this anyway?

• The client boot sequence: address from DHCP, kernel and initramfs from TFTP, then the "proper" root image seems to be served over nbd (network block device)

• General principle seems to be that the "master" for the client root image is in /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ - but in general, changing files in that tree doesn't change anything until you run some magic copying script or other.

• The DHCP server config is not in /etc, it's in /etc/ltsp (check /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server for the entirely undocumented override that makes that be true). If you have the hardware for it, use a dedicated ethernet device for the clients and configure it as 192.168.0.1 - then you won't need to change the dhcp config except to make it ignore your other network.

• Once an address is assigned, the client will load kernel and initrd from /var/lib/tftp/... One appears to be expected to populate this by running ltsp-update-kernels, which basically copies files of the same names from /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot

• So, if you need to remove the boot splash screen because it's drawing a progress bar and then hanging with no progress and absolutely no indication of what the problem is, you edit /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot/pxelinux.cfg/default and do the preceding.

• Or if you need to change the initrd contents (e.g. to add modules) you first maltreat /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/boot appropriately, then you chroot into /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ and run update-initramfs -u, then (outside the chroot) ltsp-update-kernels.

• I mention this because if you have the same Vostro 200 hardware as I have, you will need to make it load e1000-ich8 (network card driver) on boot, and you do this by adding said module to /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then following the preceding steps.

• And the same may apply if you want the keyboard and mouse to work - let me tell you, even after removing the dumb user firewall^W^W^Wsplash screen it required significant guesswork to establish the problems here without scrollback. After booting the client off a Ubuntu CD and running lshw, I added usbcore,uhch_hcd and uhci_ecd - don't do usbhid, it makes the keyboard horribly laggy.

• Once it's got the initrd it will try and get the full root, which is served by nbd. This is /opt/ltsp/images/... which is created by ltsp-update-image from the contents of /opt/ltsp/$ARCH/ - so, whenever you touch the latter, run the former.

• Note that you can ignore the messages you see about nbd being unable to find its config file, it's optional. Which is lucky as nbd is yet another daemon whose error messages don't include the full pathname of the file it's failing to find.

• Eventually it will reach a gdm-like graphical login screen (ldm). When you supply a username/password to this it will ssh to the server, so at this point look in /var/log/auth.log for Stuff. ltsp-update-sshkeys is apparently relevant at this stage, I think it's for use when you change the server IP address but I haven't run it yet except in the course of "I give up, let's run everything that looks vaguely relevant" Big Hammer debugging.

• and then if it appears to hang on a blank screen (it did when I tried it), look in ~/.xsession-errors for relevant error messages. I found that installing compiz (wtf? opengl widow manager over a network?) and metacity seemed to help, but didn't actually get me to the point that it opened any windows. Easiest fix is to run tasksel and ask for the 'Ubuntu desktop' package, which you'd think would be a dependency of something in this whole mess, but no.

• Ctrl-Alt-F1 will get you to a text console, but the login process there doesn't auth against the server, so presumably you'd have to look for or create a local user account in /opt/ltsp/$ARCH if you wanted to explore the system in text mode.

Which as far as I've got so far.