Firmware

One of the tv cards in my mythtv backend requires the driver to load firmware at boot time. The driver for this card was crashing repeatedly so I have been keeping an eye out for updates. The firmware received an upgrade a few months ago but it was still crashing and it was weeks before I realized that the old firmware was still being loaded. It turns out that you have to actually remove the power from the system before it will reload the firmware. A reboot is not sufficient. This really needs to be in BIG letters somewhere on the linuxtv site.

Anyway I now have a whole month of uptime on the backend. This is only the second time I have had the system so stable in the 3-4 years I have been running mythtv.

libpcap on OSX

The other day I was playing with libpcap on my MacBook Pro. Every time I tried to run the code my wireless network connection was disconnected.

After a bit of playing around I also found this was happening with tcpdump. It appears that running tcpdump -i en1 where en1 is the wireless network interface works fine. I guess the problem is something to do with the call to scan for interfaces.