Dreambox 7025 Timer Edit Bug

With the DM7025, you can add a timer through the TV by selecting the ‘info’ button when watching a programme. Once this is stored, if you go to the web server, and try to edit it, you get the error message: “Please only use the characters …. in the name and description field”. You get this message even if the name & description field appear to have valid characters.

This appears to be due to the add timer mechanism through the TV puts invalid characters into the recording entry - these characters look like spaces in the web edit page, but are not actually spaces.

I suspect that these characters are unicode control characters.

The answer, therefore, is to replace anything that ‘look like a space’ with a space.

FSG3, SMF, Visual Verification Headache

I am running the Simple Machines Forum software (php) on an Freecom FSG3 Network Storage Box, and have been banging my head on the table because I cannot get the visual verification function to work - all I see is the randomised dots, and no letters in the middle.

The server is Apache, so I checked that it could do graphics - I ran httpd -l to get a list of all of the included modules, and didn’t see the ‘gd’ module, which is needed for the graphics - I though that was it, and wasted a long time trying to cross-compile Apache (that’s a different story). Eventually I found that if you create a php file as follows:

And access if from your webserver, it tells you everything you need to know, including the fact that the gd modules are, after all, included.

Configure Command: ‘./configure’ ‘–prefix=’ ‘–target=arm-linux’ ‘–host=arm-linux’ ‘–build=i686-pc-linux-gnu’ ‘–with-mysql’ ‘–with-apxs=../apache_1.3.33/apxs’ ‘–with-config-file-path=/usr/local/apache/conf’ ‘–enable-mbstring’ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-png-dir=/lib’ ‘–with-jpeg-dir=/lib’ ‘–with-zlib’

Knowing that it was after all supported, I started to delve into the php code for the server, looking at each function in turn to check if it was supported. The only thing that was not supported was the true-type-font functions, but this didn’t matter as the code checked for it.

Eventually, I looked at the manpage for the imageloadfont, and saw the following:

“The font file format is currently binary and architecture dependent. This means you should generate the font files on the same type of CPU as the machine you are running PHP on.”

It all became clear. The FSG3 is a big-endian system, whereas (I presume) the SMF software was tested on a little-endian system.

The simple act of replacing the font files with big-endian versions enabled the visual verification system to work.

If you just see random dots and no text in the SMF visual verification image, and your system is big-endian, simply replace the gdf font files with big-endian versions.

My Windows Vista Machine cannot access my NAS Shares

After falling over in the house, and pushing my crutches through the screen of my laptop, I’ve replaced it with another one - this is running Vista.

The very first problem I encountered was that I couldn’t see any of the network shares that I used to see on my old XP machine. After a lot of searching, it seems that Microsoft have beefed up the network file sharing security, and made Vista incompatible with old file sharing system security features by default.

There is a registry hack to re-enable this old mode (Using regedit to set the LMcompatibilityLevel to 1).

I have since found that my PC is very slow copying files on the network - to copy 400 files, totalling just 1Mb from a zipfile onto a network drive took 50 (yes Five Zero) minutes.

The real solution is to upgrade the server software at the other end to be compatible. I’m running samba on a Freecom Network Storage Box (FSG3), and upgrading to the latest firmware, which includes samba version 3, has allowed these shares to be seen again.

This may not be the end - at the moment, the machine seems to be running OK.

There is a hotfix available from Microsoft (Knowledge Base Article 931770 - The copy process may stop responding when you try to copy files from a server on a network to a Windows Vista-based computer), but I’ve not applied it at the moment….