Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Today I had to take a 2.5 hour trip outside of Tokyo, and I knew I’d be totally bored on the train. I have a cell-modem that I’ve mentioned before called “AirH”, which I thought that I’d use today to get some work done while in transit (I’ve done this before).

Friday though interfered with today. On that day I blew away Windows and installed Debian on my laptop (which is a story to soon come). I was really thorough at backing everything up - documents, bookmarks, music, and so on. So I got on the train this morning and whipped out the AirH, expecting to wrestle with the Linux pppd system to get it working. The PPP component was fairly easy to setup - problem was, I had forgotten to copy down the phone number.

Shit. I was going through e-mail withdrawl. I couldn’t call them, since I have no idea what my account number is or any other relevant details (not to mention the support people probably don’t speak English).

I mentioned I installed Linux. Basically, I previously had one big NTFS partition which needed to go. That got split up into a FAT32 partition (/dev/hda1) and a ReiserFS partition for Linux (/dev/hda2). Here comes the sweetness: I knew that the connection under Windows was named “Prin AirH”, so I typed “strings /dev/hda1 | less” and searched for the name. Bingo, I got the number.

I was lucky enough that in the formatting of the new FAT32 partition, and subsequent restoration of my data, that the phone number was there. And on a whim I figured, run strings on the raw partition.

So that’s it. Just a geek-eureka moment.

P.S.: Know what didn’t work? KPPP, the nice GUI-frontend for dial-up connections. It kept sending modem initialization strings that the card did not understand, and the configuration didn’t allow me to stop sending the strings (and I tried hard since I have nightmares from 10 years ago due to setting up connections with pppd).