GoGetAuro

This write-up explains:
• what is firmware and how to tell what version you have
• the advantages and disadvantages of the different firmware versions
• how to change the firmware (flash) on your phone.

It was created by combining and summarizing the information provided in the dozens of threads on this forum and then rewriting it as easy-to-follow steps that new users can print off and have all the information that they need in one place to (hopefully) easily and successfully flash their phones.
WARNINGS

Flashing your phone to a different version of firmware should be fairly straightforward, however, please read the following cautions before you start:

• Always find out what your current version of firmware is before you start (instructions below) and write it down! - so if issues then you will know what you started with.

• Make sure your battery is fully charged before beginning a flash

• Back up your contacts and files using Motorola Phone Tools before doing any flashing as flashing will delete all of these and return your phone to a “vanilla” state. Data on your SD card is not touched.

• Give yourself plenty of time to complete the flashing. Never disconnect your phone or turn off your PC until the flashing is finished or you may make it unusable (i.e. “brick” it!!). There are ways to recover using a tool called radiocom (described in the threads) - but they are fairly complex.
1. What is Firmware

The E6 runs using a special Motorola version of the Linux operating system (MONTAVISTA Linux CONSUMER ELECTRONICS 3.1). This is known as the “firmware”. There are several different versions of “firmware” that will run successfully on the E6. Think of firmware as being equivalent to different versions of the operating system (just as there is Windows 98 versus Windows 2000). Every so often Motorola releases a new version of firmware with new features and enhancements. All firmwares come with both English and Chinese languages (except for the Spanish version released in Latin America - up until now it’s the only firmware that doesn’t come with Chinese language).

2. What version of firmware does my phone have?

To determine what version your phone is currently running do the following:

• Go to your Dial Pad and dial: WWW008W. To make the W hit the menu button while in the dial pad, then hit insert->insert wait to make the W .

You should see something like:
R533_G_11.12.08P
BP: R533_G_11.12.08PB
PFlex: GSZMCAUT678SW016
DSP: 63343400 TECHNOLOGY

Look at the numbers at the end of the first line for the version. The version shown here is .08P.

3. China Mobile versus Generic (Unbranded) Firmware

Some of the firmware versions are generic (straight from Motorola) while others are China Mobile branded. This means that the Chinese mobile operator “China Mobile” has added their stuff to that firmware, like modified icons, wallpapers, startup and shutdown animation of their own brand. Some of the main differences are:
• Startup screen is a red China Mobile one.
• web browser is called Monternet
• additional icons for a customer service program and ‘China Mobile In” (whatever that is!)
• additional icon for kodak app in Chinese (removable) and a bowling game
• No MSN
• File Explorer is called “My Favorites” which includes a bunch of MMS cards and the folders are named a bit differently. There are a lot of Chinese settings for e-mail, internet etc. Some can be removed, some cannot.

You can also tell if your phone was originally China Mobile branded if has a “CM” printed on the back of the battery cover.

4. Advantages/Disadvantages of each E6 Firmware Version

Each version of the firmware has a number of advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately at this time there is no version that has everything - so you have to pick which best suits your needs. The main enhancements/bugs that the various versions fix are:

• Voicemail bug - in some versions a blank fax and/or a blank text message is sent to the phone every time voicemail is checked.

• Network time bug - in some versions the network time function does not report correct network time

• New Features - Such as Screen 3 and the EQ for Real Player ( read through the whole thread to see which firmware includes these features)

Firmware Versions

There are constantly new versions of firmware being released so you should check the threads for the latest. However following is a summary of the versions that were available as of September 2008 - along with their advantages and disadvantages gathered from user’s posts - so you can see where you stand with your current version. [Most important versions marked by ]

The Following are all Generic Firmware

R533_G_11.12.02P

R535_G_11.81.03P

R533_G_11.12.06P

R533_G_11.12.08P

R535H10_G_11.87.22P

MonsterPacks

There have also been a number of modified versions of the firmware (aka “monsterpacks”) posted to the forum. These are usually debranded versions of ChinaMobile versions (ie the mod had removed the Chinese icons and other CM added stuff). As of now, there are quite a few variants of the generic firmware, with many of them having applications adn new themes inbuilt. :

E608P_Hybrid_ahman_v1 ( Hybrid Firmware)

E6_11.12.10P_06R by AHBN

DAGr8 Modded 07p

Shadow_Cruiser Modded 07p

E6e_07P_DAG_final + Multi LP _ F I N A L !!!

E6_E6e_BPE6e07P_APE610P_20071221_asmotoe2 DAG ‘ s Version

asmotoe2_E6_E6e_BPE6e07P_APE610P_20070909

Asmotoe2_0930_DAG and Multi_theme Fully translated

R533_G_11.12.08P neil’s mod

Modded 08p by aksd

Yukycg’s Unbranded 11.12.08p

R535_G_11.81.09P_R92_NewLinux_Vietkeymap10_Workingman

11.12.09P with Autorun_linkSys_Silent camera_SmartAss

R533_G_11.12.10P~09P_The_Beast_Supermod

Prasannars 09p

Lamborghini ARABIC LP 09P

R533 G 11.12.09P Lamborghini TLPDA

E6_11.12.09P Bangkok DualStart by AHBN

AHBN_11.12.09P by shadow_cruiser

E6 11.12.09P Perfect by AHBN

E6_11.12.09iP by QiShi

R533.G.11.12.09P - english/french/portuguese/spanish

R535_09P_22P_10P_NEWROKR from motofunvn

E6_11.12.10P_Speedup_Steady_QiShi

R533_G_11.12.10P_EnG_† Nik †_RoKr_RokXX™

FW R535_07P_R533_10P_newstarwar

Rokr !!.’Musix’.!! Firmware - based on 10p Beta

E6_11.12.10P Speedup by AHBN

XIBEI_R533_G_11.12.10P_20080306

533 G 11.11.10P (Vista)

R535H10_G_11.87.22P_Konig_v1

E6_r533_g_11.10.54r_e2vn_02

E6_11.10.54R DualStart by AHBN

5. Which Version of Firmware should I Use?

That is really up to you, Most people stay with a Generic firmware. But Lately the most popular firmware is ahman’s hybrid firmware.

6. What is Flashing?

Flashing is the process by which you can change the version of firmware running on your phone. (Just like you can upgrade your Windows software). The process takes about 10 minutes. Generally you can flash from any version of firmware to any other – and then flash back again if desired.

Flashing to a different version of firmware should be fairly straightforward if you follow the directions carefully – but if you have any problems then there are many threads devoted to resolving flashing problems.

No harm will come to the phone from too much flashing, however, there is a small chance you could “brick” your phone if something goes seriously wrong - so the more you flash it, the more chances are that something might go wrong! Depending on your carrier you may also void the warranty! That said I have successfully flashed my phone 5 times now to try out different versions.

IMPORTANT - before you begin flashing:

• Make sure your battery is fully charged before beginning a flash
• Back up your contacts and files using Motorola Phone Tools before doing any flashing as flashing will delete all of these and return your phone to a “vanilla” state. Data on your SD card is not touched.
• Give yourself plenty of time to complete the flashing. Never disconnect your phone or turn off your PC until the flashing is finished or you may make it unusable (i.e. “brick” it!!). There are ways to recover using a tool called radiocom (described in the threads) - but they are fairly complex.

7. How to Flash your Phone

All the files mentioned can be obtained from the Downloads section

Click here to download the following files.

1. Download the file Motorola_USB_Driver_32_v2.7.6 to your PC and unrar it to your desktop so you can easily find it.

2. Install a program called “RSDLite” on your PC. To Download RSD lite Click thread for the file. For trouble free installation, if you are running Windows XP, you should have Service Pack 2 installed.

3. Download the firmware file that you want to flash to and unrar it to your desktop.

4. Start up RSDLite on your PC. You may be asked to install a number of drivers (5 or 6) to your PC. Point it in the direction to the motpcsdrivers folder you unrared.

5. Put the phone in Bootloader Mode - MBM mode by turning on phone while also holding down the Camera Button and the On/off button (These need to be all be held down together). The phone should start up with a red screen and say its in MBM mode.

6. Plug phone in using usb cable.

7. RSDLite should list the phone (this may take a minute or so. If it does not close down RSDLite and restart it). Start the flash process, by clicking the button on the top with the ”…” and select the firmware file to install then click “Start”. The process will take several minutes so be patient, the screen on you phone will turn off, but RSDLite will still show progress.

8. When the “Found New Hardware” screen pops up, select “NO” for “Can Windows connect to Windows Update?” then select “Y” for “Install Software from a specific location” and point it to the motpcsdrivers folder you unrared. Once the driver has installed, click on “Finish” on the “Found New Hardware wizard” to continue the process.

9. You will need to install quite a few drivers – so just keep repeating. It may ask you to manually restart the phone – if so, unplug the cable from PC, remove the battery for 5 seconds (make sure unplugged first!), put battery back in then turn phone back on.

10. Once its fully on, go to Setup –> USB Mode and change mode from “Mass Storage” to “Modem”.

11. Plug phone back into the PC using the cable. RSDLite should say “complete” or “PASS”

12. Unplug the phone again, turn it off and on. All should be complete.

You can now restore all your contacts, calendar and tasks back to your phone using MPT. (Be sure to remove the SIM card before doing this as the recovery function from MPT deletes any contact on SIM for some reason!)

8. What to Do if Problems

If you have any problems then don’t panic – the best thing is to close RSDLite, unplug the phone, take out the battery, replace then try again from the start.

1. If you get any of the following error messages that have been reported by users, then it appears most have been resolved by starting the flash process from the start:
- The “secure_motorola_flash” interface could not be found the super-file is secure and for re-flash, the phone needs a super-file that is not secure and for reflash. (0×7066)
- “flashing couldn’t be complete because of licensed data”
- “error jumping to RAM downloader”
- a red line across their battery after flashing

2. Try a different USB port – a lot of users have stated that changing the USB port they have their phone plugged into helps, this is most likely because windows will reinstall all the drivers.

3. Try a different version of RSD Lite.

4. Make sure you put your phone in to USB MODEM MODE before plugging it back in. If you do not do this your system will not install all the devices correctly.

5. Try a different version of the firmware.

Problem: Phone can not read SIM card or has no signal after flashing

Some users experienced problems with the phone reading the SIM card or not getting a signal after flashing (ie it searches and finds nothing). If this happens to you then try the following:

1. Tap on status bar in home screen. Switch off antenna tap ok on the bottom. Then switch on antenna again. (You may need to repeat this a couple of times)

2. If that doesn’t work, change the network band [dial pad–>menu button (at bottom left)–>setup–> network setup–> menu button–> search setup–> After that close all those things and you should have service again. Once you get your service back, repeat the steps and put it on automatic again.

For more information, refer to this thread .

All of the information presented in this write-up was obtained from user’s postings from the various threads on this forum. A best effort was made to ensure it is complete and accurate including performing all of the steps presented on my own phone - but there are no guarantees there are not errors!!

This Guide took many hours to research and put together. If you found the information useful, perhaps you would consider donating a few dollars to keep the Motorolafans site funded as it costs $60 each month in hosting fees. See the announcement at the top of the E6 forum for details on how to do this.

Good Luck

For the growing trends of modding phones or flashing phones to make it customized for you i am getting too much requests for giving a tutorial on this. So i am writing a short and brief tutorial so that everyone can get help from here to mod their MOTOROKR E6/E6e/A1200(for those who doesnt know let me tell you MOTORKR E6 and A1200 havinf the same firmwares with some different).

Firstly, to mod your E6 first you have to flash it with some firmware where PKG, LIN type of setup files can be executed(by default in MOTOROLA phones only MPKG files and JAR files are executable and thats also needs GPRS for installing). While deciding about flashing you can have to follow some important instructions from here.

Before starting keep a backup of your original firmware or find the original firmware from somewhere and keep it. You can download the original 22P firmware from here or you can download the modded 22P firmware where the PKG LIN installations are possible from here. For flashing you will need RSDLite and you can get that also from here. Now after you are successfully done with the flashing you can now go for installing new applications aka apps, Skins, Themes and all other superb things you want in your phone like me. Best archives that i got for my E6 is here.

If you need any other guide please feel free to contact me. I referred most of the links from MotorolaFans as i love that site and i learnt a lot of things from there.

MotorolaFans Rocks!!!

Hi Guys!! For since somedays i was busy with my newly bought MOTOROKR E6e aka E6 EDGE. I was too curious to mod it by as you know for modding and installing apps you have to flash your firmware to some firmwares which supprt modding. Like I have 22P firmware installed by default and these firmware is only available in indian phones, as far as i know. So i was eagerly waiting for the 22P firmware to come on internet as i have the alternate way if it doesnt work. After i got the original R535H10_G_11.87.22P aka 22P firmware. Now what should i do. Suddenly i got to see in motorolafans forum that there some modded firmware aka f/w is available which can install MPKG and LIN files. For your information MPKG(or PKG), MTF and LIN these are basically the formats of teh Motorola apps available everywhere. Without hesitation i get that modded firmware and flashed my phone with RSDLite with the USB cable. The steps are available in motorolafans forum or you can ask me also. After that its like the whole world opened up in front of me. I installed the iPhone theme, changed the bootscreen and gone mad about this. Let me share a video i have uploaded in youtube recently. I am going to share the video with you in my next post. I am sharing some of the screenshots i have taken by the eCap app which is basically used for capturing screen within your phone.    

I think you will enjoy the video though the pictures are not so clear. If you want to know more or want any specific screen capture or good quality video please do not hesitate to ask me for that.

Intel to cut 1,000 managerial jobs worldwide…HP to cut 24,600 jobs following EDS takeover..Satyam Computers to axe 4,500 employees…TCS, Wipro recast hiring plans…Wipro Tech puts 3000 staff under scanner…Where is your skills rated??? The long term trends for the first 10 languages (programming) are…….. The other languages in the list of top 50 are….more(aurosblog)

Have you yet heard about Google Chrome (beta) which is a new web browser just released recently? IF you are not, you shall try and see it in action. Some of the greatest features included are(as described by Google here):
* Dynamic Tabs - Drag and Drop tabs to arrange or group in any combination of multiple tabs or windows easily.
* Crash Control - Tabs are running independently. If one app is crashed, there is a task manager to close it without affecting other tabs.
* Incognito mode for private browsing.
* Application Shortcuts to put on desktop, start menu or quick launch bar.
* Import settings - It is pretty easy to import bookmarks and passwords from existing browser.
* New Tab page which shows recently visited websites, search engines and recent bookmarks.
* Memory Usage - You can check memory usage for every tab page.
So what are you waiting for: Go and download.

You can share your experience in this new browser by commenting here.

You can easily hack windows XP System:

1. Go to command prompt.

2. Type “net user” or “net users”

it will show you a list of users currenlty have account in the system.

3. Then choose a username among them and type: “net user <username> *”

4. Enter and confirm with your new password and you are done. You can watch this video also here.

N.B: If you do not have access to the system start the system with pressing F5 key and start it in safe mode there you can do this trick quite easily.

If you are not quite satisfied with this then you can have a tool also to hack the system with a bootable CD but for that you should have that CD access in your computer. You can do the trick the one showed in TechRepublic ItDojo Videos. In that IT Dojo video, they demonstrate how to quickly and easily reset local account passwords, including Administrator, on most Windows systems. The Offline NT Password and Registry Editor is a Linux-based utility that can reset passwords on Windows-NT based systems that use NTFS, including Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. The tool creates a boot environment through which you can reset passwords via a series of text menus. The Offline NT Password and Registry Editor isn’t the most polished utility, but it is effective.
There are also plenty of legitimate, work-related reasons to reset a Windows password so dont starts flaming me in this post’s discussion for sharing “Cracking advice”. But remember:
Use the tool at your own risk!
Now you can get a detail howto on this tool here.

Now you can ask me “net user *” how this work. I dont even know this you should ask the Microsoft guys probably then could answer your question. What i know about this is:

It is basically a command prompt tool which basically used by Windows Administrators. From this you can add/delete users groups and so many things that a admin can do.

Sysntax

Syntax

net user [UserName [Password | *] [options]] [/domain]

net user [UserName {Password | *} /add [options] [/domain]]

net user [UserName [/delete] [/domain]]

Parameters

UserName : Specifies the name of the user account to add, delete, modify, or view. The name of the user account can have as many as 20 characters.

Password : Assigns or changes a password for the user’s account. Type an asterisk (*) to produce a prompt for the password. The password is not displayed when you type it at the password prompt.

/domain : Performs the operation on the domain controller in the computer’s primary domain.

options : Specifies a command-line option. The following table lists valid command-line options that you can use.

net help command : Displays help for the specified net command.

Remarks

• Used without parameters, net user displays a list of the user accounts on the computer. You can also type net users.
• A password must satisfy the minimum length set with net accounts /minpwlen. It can have as many as 127 characters. However, if you are using Windows 2000 or Windows XP on a network that also has computers using Windows 95 or Windows 98, consider using passwords not longer than 14 characters. Windows 95 and Windows 98 support passwords of up to 14 characters. If your password is longer, you might not be able to log on to your network from those computers.

Examples

To display a list of all user accounts for the local computer, type:

net user

To view information about the user account jimmyh, type:

net user jimmyh

To add a user account for Jay Jamison, with logon rights from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., Monday through Friday (no spaces in time designations), a mandatory password (jayj), and the user’s full name, type:

net user jayj /add /passwordreq:yes /times:monday-friday,8am-5pm/fullname:”Jay Jamison”

To set johnsw’s logon time (8 A.M. to 5 P.M.) using 24-hour notation, type:

net user johnsw /time:M-F,08:00-17:00

To set johnsw’s logon time (8 A.M. to 5 P.M.) using 12-hour notation, type:

net user johnsw /time:M-F,8am-5pm

To specify logon hours of 4 A.M. until 5 P.M. on Monday, 1 P.M. until 3 P.M. on Tuesday, and 8 A.M. until 5 P.M. Wednesday through Friday for marysl, type:

net user marysl /time:M,4am-5pm;T,1pm-3pm;W-F,8:00-17:00

There are whole lot of other feature also which you can use for Administration purpose like: net accounts, net computer, net config, net continue, net group, net help, net file, net localgroup, net name, net pause, net print, net send, net session, net share, net start, net statictics, net stop, net time, net use, net view.

These all tools have their own relevent importance. Try to learn about them. Please let me know if you found something good.

One of the nicest things in firefox is you can add plenty of extensions and add-on as you like. Some do little more than alter the aesthetics. But you’ll find others out there that you can’t browse without. No matter what your purpose in browsing, there is a killer-app extension just waiting for you. Lets take a look at this:

#1: Morning Coffee

This extension allows you to set a group of Web sites that will open (each in its own tab) with the click of a button. I use this extension to open up all the Web-based admin tools for sites I administer. You can even set sites up to open only on certain days (or every day). So news junkies or overworked administrators rejoice: This extension will make your browsing life a little easier.

#2: NoScript

This is one of the best tools for making sure your browsing experience is secure. With NoScript, you can disable active content from any site you don’t trust. Unless you configure it to allow JaveaScript, Java, and other executable scripting to run from a site, NoScript will completely block the script, keeping you browser safe from known and unknown exploits. And don’t think because you are using FireFox in Linux that you’re perfectly safe! Use this extension regardless of platform.

#3: ColorfulTabs

If you’re like me, you generally have a LOT of tabs open in Firefox. Sometimes this isn’t a problem. But there are times when the tabs can get a bit overwhelming and need a bit of organization. To help with this, ColorfulTabs gives each open tab a different color, making it easier to distinguish between them. With this simple extension, you can color-code tabs either randomly or according to URL. You can also set tabs to fade. Another fun feature is that you can set a background image for tabs.

#4: BBCode

This helpful extension adds BBCode, HTML, and XHTML symbols and formatting to the context menu. BBCode also allows you to add up to 10 custom tags to your menu. This extension shows itself when you’re in a forum and you right-click a text area where you can select the tag you want to add from the menu. This extension will make your forum work quite a bit easier, as well as faster.

#5: Buggybar

This extension is invaluable to Bugzilla power users. With this extension, you will have a Bugzilla Chrome sidebar available which will readily show all bugs that relate to a bug list you have created. As of version 0.2, Buggybar works with all instances of Bugzilla.

#6: Clear Cache Button

I don’t know about you, but I always set up my browsers to clear their cache at exit. But what about those times you want to clear the cache but not exit the browser? Instead of navigating through the menu structure, you can add this simple extension. It provides a button that gives you complete cache clearing with a single click.

#7: TimeTracker

Okay, this is not really a tool that will aid or better your browsing experience. In fact, this little extension will remind you how much time you spend browsing. I have found this little gem useful in a number of circumstances. Whether you are in need of a quick five-minute break from number crunching or you just need to know how much time you spend on a specific Web site, TimeTracker will keep track of how long you browse. What is nice about this is that the tool times across sessions. So when you close the browser, the timer stops, and when you open the browser back up, the timer starts again. You can reset the timer by right-clicking the status bar timer and selecting Reset.

#8: iMacros

This extension automates pretty much anything you do in Firefox. From opening up sites to filling out forms and even administration work — you can automate it with iMacros. The iMacros extension has a sidebar that shows favorite macros. It also has a record feature that allows you to create macros by simply clicking Record, going through the motions of the macro to be created, and clicking Save. These macros can be as complex as you need them to be. When you want to run them, you simply navigate to the macro in the iMacros sidebar and click the Play button. The only downfall I have found with this tool is that you can’t assign key combinations to run macros. Other than that, this extension is a must-have for power browsers.

#9: Fasterfox

This extension does one thing: It makes Firefox load pages faster. Speed of page loading can be increased by allowing simultaneous connections and prefetching. This extension is currently in the experimental stage because of the release of Firefox 3. To install it, you have to log into a Firefox account to download. The extension is worth the hassle. The speed increase is noticeable.

#10: BlogRovR

We all read blogs. From my aurosblog, aurolive, GoGetAuro or your loved one Blog4aurobindo to the countless other blogs available, we all read them daily. And this takes time. Instead of wasting time going to the blogs, let this handy extension fetch them for you. You do have to sign up for an account using this extension (they promise they won’t spam you.) and you will be asked to install another sidebar (Stickies), which is not necessary. Once you have this installed, you just enter the blog URL, and BlogRovR will begin fetching the information for you. Warning: If you have NoScript installed, you have to allow the BlogRovR page to run scripts or it won’t be able to fetch pages for you.

#11: BugZilla

If you are into web development then this is one thing you can like the most. With this you can do amazing things like editing, debugging, and monitoring CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of your live websites. Isn’t it amazing!!!

With this i also use S3Fox for my Amazon S3(Simple Storage Service) account to access my data and Google Gears to offline editing my files.

Share your experience what are the extensions you are using.

Installing software in Linux is nothing like it used to be, but there are still some pitfalls to watch out for. If you follow this little guide, your Linux life will be made simpler and safer.

#1: Installing from source when your system is primarily an .rpm or .deb system

Many new Linux users don’t understand that both rpm and apt (or dkpg) keep track of everything installed on the system. However, those systems (rpm, apt, and dkpg) can keep track only of packages they install. So when you find that obscure package that comes only in source and you compile it yourself, your package management system will not know what to do with it. Instead, create either an .rpm or .deb file from the source and install the package with the package management system so that system will be aware of everything you have installed.

#2: Neglecting the many graphical front-end package management applications

Most people don’t even realize that there are graphical front ends that take a lot of the guesswork out of installing packages in Linux. For yum (the command-line package management system for rpm), you can use Yumex for yum (installed with yum install yumex); you can use Synaptic or Adept for apt (installed with apt-get install synaptic or apt-get install adept).

#3: Forgetting to update the list of available packages

When using apt-get or yum, make sure you’re updating the list of available packages. Otherwise, your system will not remain updated with the latest releases of installed packages. To update with apt-get, you issue the command apt-get update. To update with yum, issue yum check-update.

#4: Not adding repositories for yum or apt-get

Both yum and apt-get use a listing of repositories that tell them where to locate available packages. But the default repositories (often called “repos”) do not include every Linux package known to Linuxkind. So if you run the command to install an application, and yum (or apt-get) can’t find the package, most likely you’ll have to add a repo to your sources listing. For yum, the sources are in /etc/yum.conf. For apt-get, they are placed in /etc/apt/sources.list. Once you have added a new repo, make sure you run the update so either apt or rpm is made aware of the new source.

5#: Not taking advantage of installing from a browser

Just as with Windows, when your system sees you are attempting to download an installable application, you’ll be asked whether you would like the package management system to attempt to install the file or just save it to disk. In both instances, you will be asked for the root password (so you must have access to said password for this to even work). One thing I’ve always like about this method (be it in a yum-based or dpkg-based system) is that it has almost always been good about locating and adding dependencies.

Naturally, this method works only when you are downloading a file that’s applicable to your system. If you attempt to download an rpm file on a Debian-based system, you won’t have the option of installing the file.

You can take this one step further and select the Always Do This… check box in the Firefox popup so that every time you download a file associated with your package management system, it will automatically prompt you for your root password and continue to install the package. This streamlines the process quite a bit.

#6: Forgetting the command line

Let’s say you’ve installed a headless server using Ubuntu or Debian (a common setup for Linux servers) and haven’t installed any of the graphical interfaces or desktops. To do any maintenance, you have to log in via ssh (because no admin would log in via telnet) and are limited to the command line only. Even so, your ability to keep your system updated or install new applications is not limited. You can still use yum or apt-get to manage your packages.

With a Debian-based system, you have another option: Aptitude. From the command line, issue the command aptitude and you will be greeted with a nice curses-based interface for apt. This system is easy to use and gives you an outstanding option for maintaining a gui-less server without losing functionality. Aptitude lists Security Updates, Upgradeable Packages, New Packages, Not Installed Packages, Obsolete Packages, Virtual Packages, and Tasks. As you scroll through the list, you will not only get the installed vs. the new package release numbers but also a description of the package. After using Aptitude, you will quickly see how simple updating Linux packages can be, even from the command line.

#7: Blindly unpacking tar files

I can’t tell you how many times I have downloaded a source package and without thinking, untarred the package not knowing its contents. Most times this works out fine. But there are a few times when the package creator/maintainer has failed to mention that the entire contents of the package are not housed in a parent directory. So instead of having a newly created directory housing the contents of the tar file (which can contain hundreds of files/directories), those files are blown up into the directory you unpacked them into.

To avoid this, I always create a temporary directory and move the tar file into it. Then, when I unpack the tar file, it doesn’t matter if the contents are contained within their own directory or not. Using this method will save you a LOT of cleanup in those cases where the creator didn’t pack everything in its own neat directory.

#8: Deleting those make files

When you’re installing from source, you’ll probably run make clean to get rid of all of those unneeded source files. But if you get rid of the Makefile, uninstalling will be a hassle. If you keep it, you can usually uninstall the program simply by issuing make uninstall from the directory housing the Makefile. A word of warning: Don’t dump all your Makefiles into one directory. First rename them so you know which application they belong to. When you want to uninstall the application, move the Makefile to another directory, rename it to its original name, and then run the uninstall command. Once you’ve uninstalled the application, you can delete the Makefile.

#9: Installing for the wrong architecture

You might notice that many rpm files will have an i386, i586, i686, PPC, 64, etc. There is a reason for this. Unless the rpm file has noarch included in the filename, that rpm file was created for a specific architecture. And when those files were created for that architecture, they were optimized for it, so they’ll will run better. Does that mean you can’t install an i586 on a standard 386 machine? Of course not. But it will not run as efficiently as it will on the indicated architecture. Now, you can’t install a PPC rpm on an x86 architecture. The PPC architecture is for the Motorola chipset. Nor can you install the 64 bit on a 32 bit. You can, however, install the 32 bit on a 64 bit (as in the case when you want to get Firefox running with Flash on a 64-bit machine).

#10: Failing to address problems with kernel updates

It used to be that updating kernels was a task left to the silverback geeks. No more. With the new package management systems, anyone can update a kernel. But there are some gotchas you should know about. One issue is that of space. With every update of a kernel, your old kernel is retained. If you continually update kernels, your system storage can quickly fill up. It’s always a good idea to check to see what older kernels you can get rid of. If you’re using rpm, issue the command rpm -qa | grep kernel to see what you have installed. You can remove all but the last two installed. It’s always best to keep two in case the one you are running gets fubar’d.

So guys who are using Ubuntu or any other distros please keep this things in mind while installing anything in your distros and you will never be in any problem.

One feature that ranks up there on most people’s iPhone wishlist (somewhere between Copy and Paste and MMS) is video recording. Now there are two options for recording video on the iPhone – the only caveat is that you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use them.

iSmashphone posted a review of the two video recording apps, Cycorder (free) and Video Recorder (US$20).

Cycorder features real-time compression but doesn’t have audio recording. Video Recorder features audio, portrait mode and YouTube sharing but no real-time compression (”it took over 2 minutes to encode a 30-second video.”)

Screen shots and video samples are at iSmashphone.com.

Amazon Web Services said today that it is enhancing its Elastic Compute Cloud by adding block storage.

Amazon Elastic Block Store allows applications to store data in EC2 without having to send it to Amazon’s other storage service, Simple Storage Service (S3).

“EBS starts out really simple: you create a volume from 1GB to 1TB in size and then you mount it on a device (like /dev/sdj) on an instance, format it, and off you go. Later you can detach it, let it sit for a while, and then reattach it to a different instance. You can also snapshot the volume at any time to S3, and if you want to restore your snapshot you can create a fresh volume from the snapshot. Sounds simple, eh? It is but the devil is in the detail!” writes the RightScale blog in another post.
In the sense for reliability rightscale blog pointed that “EBS volumes have redundancy built-in, which means that they will not fail if an individual drive fails or some other single failure occurs. But they are not as redundant as S3 storage which replicates data into multiple availability zones: an EBS volume lives entirely in one availability zone. This means that making snapshot backups, which are stored in S3, is important for long-term data safeguarding.”

For defining Volume Performance rightscale blog explained some extreme features like; “EBS volumes are network attached disk storage and thus take a slice off the instance’s overall network bandwidth. The speed of light here is evidently 1GBps, which means that the peak sequential transfer rate is 120MBytes/sec. “Any number larger than that is an error in your math.” We see over 70MB/sec using sysbench on a m1.small instance, which is hot! Presumably we didn’t get much network contention from other small instances on the same host when running the benchmarks. For random access we’ve seen over 1000 I/O ops/sec, but it’s much more difficult to benchmark those types of workloads. The bottom line though is that performance exceeds what we’ve seen for filesystems striped across the four local drives of x-large instances.”

Now come the most simple to use and hard to understand feature come up that is Snapshot Backup. Here is the explanation given by the rightscale blog:

Snapshot backups are simultaneously the most useful and the most difficult to understand feature of EBS. Let me try to explain. A snapshot of an EBS volume can be taken at any time, it causes a copy of the data in the volume to be written to S3 where it is stored redundantly in multiple availability zones (like all data in S3). The first peculiarity is that snapshots do not appear in your S3 buckets, thus you can’t access them using the standard S3 API. You can only list the snapshots using the EC2 API and you can restore a snapshot by creating a new volume from it. The second peculiarity is that snapshots are incremental, which means that in order to create a subsequent snapshot, EBS only saves the disk blocks that have changed since previous snapshots to S3.

How the incremental snapshots work conceptually is depicted in the diagram below. Each volume is divided up into blocks. When the first snapshot of a volume is taken all blocks of the volume that have ever been written are copied to S3, and then a snapshot table of contents is written to S3 that lists all these blocks. Now, when the second snapshot is taken of the same volume only the blocks that have changed since the first snapshot are copied to S3. The table of contents for the second snapshot is then written to S3 and lists all the blocks on S3 that belong to the snapshot. Some are shared with the first snapshot, some are new. The third snapshot is created similarly and can contain blocks copied to S3 for the first, second and third snapshots.

There are two nice things about the incremental nature of the snapshots: it saves time and space. Taking subsequent snapshots can be very fast because only changed blocks need to be sent to S3, and it saves time because you’re only paying for the storage in S3 of the incremental blocks. What is difficult to answer is how much space a snapshot uses. Or, to put it differently, how much space would be saved if a snapshot were deleted. If you delete a snapshot, only the blocks that are only used by that snapshot (i.e. are only referenced by that snapshot’s table of contents) are deleted.

Something to be very careful about with snapshots is consistency. A snapshot is taken at a precise moment in time even though the blocks may trickle out to S3 over many minutes. But in most situations you will really want to control what’s on disk vs. what’s in-flight at the moment of the snapshot. This is particularly important when using a database. We recommend you freeze the database, freeze the file system, take the snapshot, then unfreeze everything. At the file system level we’ve been using xfs for all the large local drives and EBS volumes because it’s fast to format and supports freezing. Thus when taking a snapshot we perform an xfs freeze, take the snapshot, and unfreeze. When running mysql we also “flush all tables with read lock” to briefly halt writes. All this ensures that the snapshot doesn’t contain partial updates that need to be recovered when the snapshot is mounted. It’s like USB dongles: if you pull the dongle out while it’s being written to “your mileage may vary” when you plug it back into another machine…

While explaining situations generally arise in our systems like:

• You create a volume, mount it on an instance, format it, and write some data to it.
• Then you periodically snapshot the volume for backup purposes.
• If you don’t need the instance anymore, you may terminate it and, after unmounting the volume you always take a final snapshot. If the instance crashes instead of properly terminating, you also always take a final snapshot of the volume as it was left.
• When you launch a new instance on which you want the same data, you create a fresh volume from your snapshot of choice. This may be the last snapshot, but it could also be a prior one if it turns out that the last one is corrupt (e.g. in the case of an instance crash or of some software failure).

By creating a volume from the snapshot you achieve two things: one, you are independent of the availability zone of the original volume, and second, you have a repeatable process in case mounting the volume fails, which can easily happen especially if the unmount wasn’t clean.

Now, of course, in some situations you can directly remount the original volume instead of creating a new volume from a snapshot as an optimization. This applies if the new instance is in the same availability zone, the volume corresponds to the snapshot that we’d like to mount, and the volume is guaranteed not to have been modified since (e.g. by a failed prior mount). The best is to think of the volume as a high-speed cache for the snapshot.

Estimating the costs of EBS is really quite tricky. The easy part is the storage cost of $0.10 per GB per month. Once you create a volume of a certain size you’ll see the charge. The $0.10 per million I/O transactions are much harder to estimate. To get a rough estimate you can look at /proc/diskstats on your servers. This will include something like this:

3    0   hda 446216 784926 9550688 4382310 424847 312726 5922052 19310380 0 3376340 23705160
3    1   hda1 35486 38030 38030 38030

Now some help to understand the above segment:
if you look at /sys/block/hda/stat, you’ll find just the eleven fields, beginning with 446216. If you look at /proc/diskstats, the eleven fields will be preceded by the major and minor device numbers, and device name. Each of these formats provide
eleven fields of statistics, each meaning exactly the same things. All fields except field 9 are cumulative since boot. Field 9 should go to zero as I/Os complete; all others only increase. Yes, these are 32 bit unsigned numbers, and on a very busy or long-lived system they may wrap. Applications should be prepared to deal with that; unless your observations are measured in large numbers of minutes or hours,
they should not wrap twice before you notice them. As described by rightscale blog,
you should sum the first number (reads completed) and the fifth number (writes completed) to arrive at the number of I/O transactions (9847+1912664 for /dev/sdk above). This is not 100% accurate but should be close (I believe subtracting the 2nd and 6th numbers gets you closer yet, but I prefer an over-estimate). As a point of reference, our main database server is pretty busy and chugs along at an average of 17 transactions per second, which should total to around $4.40 per month. But our monitoring servers, prior to some recent optimizations, hammered the disks as fast as they would go at over 1000 random writes per second sustained 24×7. That would end up costing over $250 per month! As far as I can tell, for most situations the EBS transaction costs will be in the noise, but you can make it expensive if you’re not careful.

In the conclusion we can say, All in all it’s amazing how simple EBS is, yet how complex a universe of options it opens. Between snapshots, availability zones, pricing, and performance there are many options to consider and a lot of automation to provide. Of course at RightScale we’re busy working out a lot of these for you, but beyond that it is not an overstatement to say that Amazon’s Elastic Block Store brings cloud computing to a whole new level. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: if you’re using traditional forms of hosting it’s gonna get pretty darn hard for you to keep up with the cloud, and you’ve probably already fallen behind at this point!