Adding information to a WePay Button transaction

The community association I help out with has been using Google Checkout Buy Now buttons for a couple of years, but Google is pulling the plug next month.

The closest similar provider I have found is WePay. However, they do not explicitly support dynamically adding information to Button transactions, like Google Checkout Buy Now (and Paypal buttons).

There is a reference_id property of the Button widget Javascript object that is available for use, the value of which appears in the order records, and a little spelunking showed that it can be accessed as:

window.WePay.widgets[0].widget_options.reference_id = "1-2-3-4-5-6-7";

I hope this helps someone else with a similar issue - the information is not on the WePay knowledgebase that I can find, and WePay support seemed uninterested in the issue.

Restoring Buffalo Linkstation Live v2

Next step was to open the box, remove the old drive and prepare a new one.

I decided to take advantage of the Debian Linkstation support, so I chose to install Debian Squeeze.

I followed these steps to partition the new disk: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Custom_Partitions_on_the_LS_Pro , but I think it is only necessary to create a /boot partition, because everything gets re-done by the Debian installer.

I copied config-debian initrd.buffalo and uImage.buffalo to the /boot partition using these instructions: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Install_Debian_on_the_Linkstation_Pro/Live#Download_the_installer

I reinstalled the disk, connected the LS to the network and powered on, getting a green power light and a flickering green LINK/ACT light. 'nmap -sP' showed that the LS had acquired an IP address and was ping'able.

Using these instructions (scroll down to "The Installation"), I used ssh to login as 'installer' with password 'install'. I entered 'sh config-debian', and the Debian installer started up, and proceeded normally.

After package selection and installation, the installer eventually rebooted. I was able to ssh-login using the user and password I had chosen. So far, all looks well.

Linkstation woes

While investigating why the backup process stopped working (using duplicity with S3 backend), it seems like the root partition "lost" some important files (like "grep", for example). Rebooting the system caused a loss of SSH access, so, since the warranty has expired, I removed the HDD and backed up to another machine.

'xfs_check' showed a good number of errors, so I think I will follow the procedure for installing Debian Squeeze, using another disk. I'll stick with ext3 this time! Good information at http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Custom_Partitions_on_the_LS_Pro

MBZ SLK230 (R170) manual

This took more steps to find and download than seems necessary. Here's a clean link:

MBZ SLK230 R170 Owners manual

More on Backuppc on the Linkstation

I found that the default setup is woefully short of swapspace. Fixed it by making a swapfile:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/disk1/swapfile bs=1024 count=524288
mkswap /mnt/disk1/swapfile
swapon /mnt/disk1/swapfile


It's humming along nicely now!

I reduced the number of simultaneous jobs earlier, but I think I can increase that again.

Backuppc on the Linkstation

A primary reason for purchasing the Linkstation was to be able to automatically backup the computers on the home network.

It turned out the version of BackupPC that gets installed with the Freelink Debian revision is ancient (2.1). I had to add the 'etch-backports' repository to the apt config file, then I could install the latest stable release (3.1.0).

Buffalo Linkstation with Freelink

Purchased the Linkstation Live v2, and installed Freelink. Made the mistaking of updating to the latest Buffalo firmware before installing Freelink - had to downgrade to the previous version - took many iterations, including use of the tftp recovery package.