'Upgrade' Killed my ADSL

My ISP upgraded my ADSL to version 2+ and now my router won't connect. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps of rebooting and unplugging the ADSL wire to no avail. Next I got on the phone to my ISP, Demon. Demon ran line checks during which I was disconnected. Humph! Calling back I had to wait in the queue again. Try to be calm. Take deep breaths. Demon persuaded me to buy three new micro-filters which had no effect. Finally they told me that they would have to pass the call to a BT engineer. To top it all they asked me to pre-approve that I would pay £170 if BT found that the fault originated in my house. Naturally enough I declined their kind offer. Only thing now is to wait until Monday to see if they can fix it. Until then we're back to 1993 and dial-up internet.

E61 Mercurial Solution

Mercurial to version control files on my E61 phone. That would be sweet. I could edit text in PED then push and pull changes from my server using SSH. Only problem is that, as of writing, there is no mercurial client for the Symbian S60v3 operating system. Mercurial is a combination of Python and C code. In my dreams of spare-time nirvana I could attempt a port to S60, but realistically that isn't going to happen. I need a plan B.

Engineering Compromise

So, I'm not going to be able to have a command-line like experience of mercurial on my E61. What about the next best thing? My next idea was to use putty to: (1) ssh into a directory on my linux server (2) Update the mercurial repos there (3) Grab all the files from the linux server to the phone (4) Make edits on the phone (5) Upload the modified files back to the linux server (6) From putty on the linux server commit the changes into mercurial I've got this working. The tricky bit was to decide what to use to move the files about. I've ended up with MobyExplorer doing FTP to my local linux box. Inside the firewall I felt the FTP was safe enough. I'm a little nervous at opening up an FTP server on my public facing boxes. I had to set up secure FTP.

Secure FTP Set Up

I installed the Very Secure FTP Server (vsftpd) using aptitude. I made the following changes to the config in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (1) local_enable=YES (2) write_enable=YES (3) anonymous_enable=NO (4) chroot_local_user=YES ...then restart the server with sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Why does cygwin pick up 'f' as my home drive?

I installed cygwin on my new work laptop. For some reason when ever I ran cygwin it said:

mkdir: cannot create directory `/cygdrive/f': No such file or directory
Copying skeleton files.
These files are for the user to personalise
their cygwin experience.

These will never be overwritten.

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

bash: cd: /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory
Your group name is currently "mkgroup_l_d". This indicates that not
all domain users and groups are listed in the /etc/passwd and
/etc/group files.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run
mkpasswd -l -d > /etc/passwd
mkgroup  -l -d > /etc/group

This message is only displayed once (unless you recreate /etc/group)
and can be safely ignored.
cp: cannot create regular file `/cygdrive/f/group.mkgroup_l_d': No such file or
directory

So, I must have got something set up incorrectly. Looking at the environment variables I see:

$ set
...lots of stuff
HOME=/cygdrive/f
...more stuff

So where is HOME set? The work laptop is running Vista and I'm farily new to it. Looked in Control Panel >> System >> Advanced System Settings >> Environment Variables, but there was no reference to HOME. Next stop was Google, obviously. It told me to edit /etc/passwd. Sure enough there was a setting against my username for /cygdrive/f. I changed it to /cygdrive/c/dave and it all worked great.