DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

There ain't many pictures showing innards of B593u around and even less ones with any details. This obviously needs to be fixed.

I think ethernet switch and wireless aren't supported by opensource drivers so even with OpenWrt booting on Huawei B593u-12 it's not much use. USB connected LTE module is not detected, my guess is that some GPIO needs to be toggled to enable it. PCA9555 GPIO expander would need some work too. Also 256MB NAND-flash is missing, only 16MB SPI flash is found.

CFE> boot -elf -tftp 192.168.1.100:openwrt-brcm47xx-mips74k-vmlinux.elf

Open new excel sheet. Select desired paper size (A4 or A3... of course), orientation and set margins. Open View tab. Click Page Layout under Workbook Views. Press Ctrl+A. Open Home tab. Click Format under Cells. Select Row height and enter desired size with mm suffix (or "in" for rednecks) Click Format under Cells Select Column width and enter desired size. Open View tab. Click Normal under Workbook Views. Done.

Last steps with fixing SID history.

File servers are easy thanks to Microsoft tool.

SQL server logins may have old SIDs. This doesn't fix them (because we didn't have this particular problem at work) but shows if there's any that need to be fixed.

Dumping my notes about fixing SID history at work. Use at your own risk. These worked for me but won't work for you without some adjustments.

Adding aufs support to 3.16-rc5 is little different than what is was for older kernels. Below works for Ubuntu LTS 14.04.

This post is just to let everyone know old process described here in my earlier post still works and also survives upgrade from older Ubuntu version to 14.04 LTS.

This exports list of BitLocker recovery keys from AD. Found it somewhere from web.

Quick and very dirty export out-of-office (OOF) autoreplies from Exchange 2010 with Powershell.  get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | get-mailboxautoreplyconfiguration | where {$_.autoreplystate -ne "disabled"} | select identity,autoreplystate,starttime,endtime,@{NAME='InternalMessage';Expression={$_.InternalMessage -replace ("`n") -replace("</p","/<") -replace("<.*?>") -replace("&nbsp;","") }},@{NAME='ExternalMessage';Expression={$_.InternalMessage -replace ("`n") -replace("</p","/<") -replace("<.*?>") -replace("&nbsp;","") }} | Export-Csv -Encoding unicode -NoTypeInformation outofoffice.csv

Many vbscripts use old Outlook / Exchange CDO components for MAPI access. Without CDO you'll get "ERROR: ActiveX component can't create object (MAPI.Session)" error message. Unfortunately CDO works only with 32-bit Outlook 2007. If you're running 32-bit Outlook 2010 or 2013 in either 32-bit or 64-bit OS following might come handy.

You're supposed to be able to use "BBB-eMMC-flasher" images to flash new OS directly from SD card. For whatever reason this sometimes fails to work. People blame power supplies which probably is one reason but not this time. In my case when trying to use BBB-eMMC-flasher image BBB started flashing all four user leds in sync without ever even attempting to flash image to eMMC.

How would FEC (Forward Error Correction) enabled TCP/IP stack for Linux sound like? Yep, I know you're interested and want it. Start by checking these two links. http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/87/slides/slides-87-tcpm-8.pdf http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-flach-tcpm-fec-00

There's annoying problem with Digi RS232 - Ethernet products (also sold BlackBox branded). Many if not most telnet clients are incompatible with their server implementation and treat single enter press as two enter presses. Incompatible clients are at least SecureCRT, Putty and one Microsoft includes with Windows. Teraterm works ok.

I'm using OpenWrt with following customizations to send temperature readings to EmonCMS. Hardware is noname Ralink RT3052 router (WR512-3GN) and Dallas DS9097U compatible USB 1-wire adapter. Main reason for going with Image Generator instead of compiling custom firmware was to keep binary and API compatibility with packages from stock OpenWrt repository. Package selection below leaves 168kB free on JFFS2 filesystem. Drop editor, Luci etc. and you'll have a lot more free. If you don't need to patch init scripts like I did due bug in WR512-3GN support you can simply install packages and apply scripts over top of official OpenWrt release flashed to your router.

My attempts to update Samsung 840 EVO to new EXT0BB6Q firmware kept failing with "WDOSX Win32 subsystem: Abort from unhandled exception" error message. This seems to be due outdated FreeDOS Samsung uses. Old version is probably incompatible with newer motherboard or something.

Can't access Tvheadend "Client specific settings" to enable on-the-fly transcoding on XBMC 12.3 Frodo? 

After replacing incredible slow Sandisk SSD Samsung ships this model with Crucial CT240M500SSD3 and doing clean bloatware free Win7 install I noticed I couldn't connect to my Onkyo TX-NR626 using bluetooth anymore. Reason was that Microsoft doesn't provide required drivers for A2DP bluetooth profile required.

Install Ubuntu 13.10 x64 Server version with default settings and try to follow Emoncms docs . Didn't work that well, right? Well why don't you follow these instructions instead.

Pretty much any Linux should be fine as long as you have suitable scratch partition for temp Ubuntu install, in this example we're re-using 6GB swap partition. Process is two step, first we do minimal 32-bit Ubuntu install over swap partition, boot system, hack it to 64-bit and finally do final 64-bit Ubuntu install over old CentOS rootfs.

I needed to change colors of Windows 7 taskbar and window decorations from command line. Quick Googlioplaza search revealed AutoIT3 example , but it was bit lacking. See updated version below.

This is so great I'm shamelessly copying command lines for my own archive (aka this blog) - but also providing link to original .

Aufs included in Ubuntu kernels is broken, what a surprise. In addition it has been dropped from newer kernels with claims that overlayfs does exactly same thing. It doesn't and everyone knows it except that one developer who decided it does and can't admit he made mistake. It seems aufs (and overlayfs) in Ubuntu is not really supposed to be used but only be part of install process. If so you guys shouldn't include it outside installer.. WontFix you too.

Add "ohci-pci" to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and run "update-initramfs -c -k all". This problem occurs because unlike other USB drivers ohci-pci is compiled as module.

Some time ago I purchased external 3TB USB 3.0 hard disks, TrekStor DataStation maxi light 3TB to be exact. It seem disk models and manufactures used by TrekStor vary, which is no surprise. Therefore I have externally identical disk enclosures with three different models of disks due making three separate purchases over few months.

Depending on why you're encrypting your SSDs it might be acceptable to enable TRIM (aka discard). With this configuration observing raw content on SSDs will reveal which blocks are used and which aren't. Doesn't matter for me, but might not be same for you.

My original plan was to boot from ZFS, but combining it with encryption and especially with mirrored disks turned out to be too troublesome. Yes, I did get it working and booting, but resulting configuration required manual fixing each time new kernel was installed. And don't even think about doing upgrade to next Ubuntu version.

After realizing that LSI SAS1078 based controller wouldn't do what I want I ended up purchasing card from eBay, 65€ including shipping for unused, new in box Dell PERC H310. Prices are bit higher than I like, but this was acceptable knowing it will do exactly what I need. Despite trying hard card will still show up as DELL after making these changes but it's in IT-mode and accepts generic LSI firmware.

While VMware Workstation supports passthru of USB storage devices BIOS used for virtual machines is not USB boot capable. As a workaround download Plop Boot Manager , extract plpbt.iso, mount it as CD on your VM, boot from CD and then select boot from USB. Blah. Spinning media is so yesterday.

I wanted to use Fujitsu OEM (D2516, "LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS PCI Express(TM) ROMB") of LSI MegaRAID 8708ELP in JBOD mode, which apparently is not possible . Out of MegaRAID products only 9240-4i and 9240-8i support true JBOD. Also 9260 and 9280 series can apparently do it via MegaCLI which is another beast to master. Rest of models can only do single disk RAID0 which isn't the same thing.

For whatever reason after updating my Intel X25-M G2 SSD to latest firmware (dated 2011) option to do secure erase disappeared. Yes, I know all about tricks of hot plugging disks etc. Secure erasing another identical X25-M G2 on same PC visible as /dev/sdb works fine. One with latest firmware simply no longer supports it which is also confirmed by hdparm -I.

Updates IP on your BGInfo managed desktop background image when new network connection is detected. Notices also Cisco AnyConnect VPN connections. Import XML file with SchTasks.exe.

Quick dump of notes showing how to use Linux for creating bootable freedos usb stick with required files to upgrade HP elite 8200 bios.

Huawei B593 has "few" security issues. If you want to play around here's some tips.

To avoid damaging filesystem with files to be undeleted I created image of entire hard disk by booting live linux on source PC from USB and then making 1:1 copy of HDD with dd.

Did P2V for old CentOS 5.5 i686 install and it failed to boot. Recreating initrd helped. Also see thread on VMware support forums .

There's bug in some Microsoft hotfixes that causes show desktop button to disappear from Win XP / Win 2003 quicklaunch bar. Run " regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32 " and logoff+logon to get it back.

Same as old post except with updated patch for fresh Handbrake SVN version. Handbrake does good job auto-cropping black bars from source and calculating resulting aspect ratio. However if you're encoding digital TV recordings it's common to have channel logo on otherwise black portion of image.

Please see updated version:  http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/07/smartmontools-v64-and-ubuntu-1204.html

Some process was spinning my suspended USB disks back up every few minutes which is bad, mmkay. To monitor processes accessing disks I used following commands

Intel Core i5-2400, 4GB RAM, 11 x Seagate 3TB USB hard disks connected via 4 x D-Link USB3 hubs to StarTech PEXUSB3S400 PCIe card. Ubuntu 12.04 with ZFS 0.6.1. Disks were configured as RAID-Z3 (triple parity). write: 137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 250.822 s, 548 MB/s read:  137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 197.451 s, 696 MB/s

I have remote Linux server and needed to run some Windows-only utilities. Since Wine is as great as always I decided to virtualize Win7. Since remote Linux is headless not only I needed headless Windows but also headless virtualization.

While burn-in testing my new USB 3.0 ZFS RAID array on Ubuntu 12.04.1 I wanted to fill disks with random data. Not zeroes from /dev/zero, but random data to catch any flakey disks or USB cables. Well it quickly turned out that reading from urandom was slowing process down a lot. Since quality of randomness doesn't matter much in this case frandom was easy solution.

XBMC has addons for various geolocked services, Hulu and iPlayer being among most popular. Switching between VPN connections manually gets boring quick so I hacked following script that will automatically connect and disconnect VPN to US / UK on demand. Tested with XBMCbuntu and XBMC 12.0 Frodo.

Enabling extroot on OpenWrt 12.09-rc1 is bit tricky. Likely reason you're trying to enable extroot is lack of free space i.e. router with 4MB flash. Problem is that unless you're interested in creating custom firmware images there's no space left for tools to enable extroot using old procedure. Following has been tested with TP-Link MR3220 v1. It's ar71xx with 32MB RAM and 4MB flash being lowest end of currently supported OpenWrt compatible devices.

Some years ago patch for OLSRd v0.5.6-r2 surfaced that added support for loadbalancing single flow over multiple paths. Documentation on how to set it up is scarce. I did get it working to some extent. It's somewhat unstable and doesn't really like single mesh node having multiple network interfaces, but it does loadbalance traffic over multiple paths as promised.

Ping can tell you round-trip or two-way latency, but if you want to know if it's upstream of downstream that's slowing down you need something else. You need OWAMP (One-Way Ping).

Compiling ntp v4.2.7 for Ubuntu 12.10

Sometimes when troubleshooting misbehaving applications having complete dump of process memory comes handy. Here's small script that does exactly that on Linux. Run it with pid of process you're interested as parameter.

Atheros WLAN card on my hack laptop HP nc6000 died sometime ago. No problem I thought as I had unused Intel 2200BG. After swapping card I was greeted with 104 unsupported wireless network device error. While 2200BG was one of original options for nc6000 one I installed had wrong PCI subsystem ID. Quick googling showed multiple people killing their nc6000 after flashing hacked firmware requiring soldering iron and eeprom programming device to recover. Nothing wrong with that and that most certainly has higher hack value, but not for me this time. Since card itself was ok for BIOS I started thinking if I could somehow change ID supplied by card to one HP BIOS accepts...

New HP LaserJets are like Windows PCs. Operating system is bloated and buggy. Recently I had to fix HP LaserJet 600 M602 that said "49.38.03 error, turn power off then on" each time you tried to access network settings via menu - and via ethernet it was completely dead. To fix this turn printer on, press (X) button when all three leds on front illuminate, login as admin, clean entire disk and reload firmware from USB stick.

Need RDP access to remote Windows server or workstation, but forgot to enable it after installing OS? If there's no firewall blocking and required components are installed (as they are by default) run following command as user that has admin rights on target PC. PSEXEC.EXE -s \\HELSI1136 CMD.EXE /C "REG.EXE add ^"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server^" /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f"

There's often overlapping subtitles with XBMC and BBC iPlayer addon. Rather than modify actual addon and losing changes every time it's updated I hacked up script that edits SRT file after it's downloaded from BBC site but before XBMC reads it.

Could we get any older versions included in distros? kthanksbye

Close but not quite yet. Next we change some hidden settings via command line and then some more via GUI. Below are settings I prefer. As usual, you probably want to set more than one of these differently.

Now it's getting more interesting. XBMC is notoriously bad in buffering content. There's various patches floating around but none of them really does what I'm looking for:

Next we need to fix annoying bug that prevents HDMI audio from working out of the box.

Since XBMCbuntu is just Ubuntu with some tweaks next we apply my usual Ubuntu fixes over it. Only major difference is that this time we're not removing Network-Damager. And of course bunch of XBMC specific changes.

Installation of XBMCbuntu is fairly straightforward and default settings are fine. Install will take less than half an hour.

I had here series of posts, more like notes, of my XBMC install. I've since found out better ways to fix some of problems explained in those posts. To avoid having two set of posts with different instructions I took old ones down and will post new instructions.

This post contains mostly same information as earlier WDIDLE / WDTLER post . This time we just create bootable USB stick for XS35 BIOS update instead of playing with HDD parameters.

Finally got my HTPC wireless controls to wake-up it from suspend. I'm using PS3 BD Bluetooth remote with Trust Bluetooth 3.0 USB receiver (Atheros AR3011) and Logitech Wireless K400r with Logitech Unifying Receiver.

OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment Beta2 images for Zcom ZCN-1523H a.k.a Planet WNAP-7300 are broken. You can do recovery by opening case (three hidden screws under label on back) and soldering serial port (115200-8-N-1, TX closest to AR71xx, RX next and then GND, ignore fourth pin). After adding serial port cause of fault was quite obvious (kernel lacks support for ZCN-1523H) and also how to repair it without adding serial port.

Tired of logging manually to Cisco or Aruba controller based guest wlans with captive portal?

Just copy-paste of script and link to mailing-list archives. This will allow sending traffic to self on linux over physical or virtual wire. This is seriously cool trick and required patches are now included in kernel so it works out of the box on Ubuntu 12.04.

Recently I managed to flash bad custom build of OpenWrt to my Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H rendering it unbootable. See below for tips how to flash latest OpenWrt over TFTP from Windows XP client.

Debian and Ubuntu are still shipping ancient Strongswan packages. Today I wanted to do some testing with kernel crypto algorithms (af-alg) but Ubuntu Stronsgwan package had them disabled.

Now that Spotify is shutting down their free (ad supported) service people are forced back to building own MP3 collections. As usual filenames are total mess and ID3 tags missing.

Usually docs for *buntu are identical, but not this time. This works for Lubuntu. It does not work for Ubuntu. See http://magiksys.blogspot.com/2012/05/ubuntu-1204-and-nomachine-nx.html for tips how to get NX working on Ubuntu.

Officially this is easy. Configure Gmail IMAP on Outlook client and do drag-and-drop. Great unless you have 10GB of emails from over 15 years to transfer. Besides all of your emails will be to/from "undisclosed recipients" on Gmail. Finding some ancient email is already difficult, but stripping sender and recipient info makes it next to impossible.

I wanted to re-use few old WD disk on RAID. Since these were "green" versions and old enough I could fix their RAID incompatibility issues with WDIDLE3 and WDTLER.

Soon after setting up fancy new asset management tool you realized that all your clone PCs show up with identical info. Fixable, but requires a lot of work. One more reason to go with name brand instead.

There's supposedly no character set issues with ext3 on Linux. Bet you already guessed how it really is. Yep, there is very real problems with it.

VMware is weird company. They provide only Windows based management tools, but yet installing their products requires manual fiddling with Linux. Notes below are based on info from http://www.r71.nl/kb/technical/327-install-vsphere5-esxi-from-usb .

Quick and dirty configuration to bridge two ethernet segments using OpenVPN. With this setup you need two ethernet interfaces per host or alternatively one ethernet and wireless access to Internet.

For some reason some of my 2TB Hitachi SATA disks report 2000000000000 bytes instead of 2000396697600 2TB disk from all other manufacturer do. Even some Hitachi’s show 2000396697600 bytes.

GPT and EFI. Worst. Idea. Ever. At least with WTF-8 aka UTF-8 your system boots while looking funny, but with GPT all you get is black screen with blinking cursor at best. Sometimes even your cursor is taken away.

Updated:  http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2013/04/handbrake-auto-crop-and-channel-logos.html

After spending way too much time trying to figure out why new HP's can't boot from USB I finally spotted  this .

Install Devel::Trace (libdevel-trace-perl in Ubuntu) and launch your program using "perl -d:Trace ./xx.pl" like syntax. This gives you tracing similar to "set -x" on shell scripts.

Until recently rtorrent didn't support adding new trackers to torrent except by editing actual .torrent. Either manually, with some tool or via online service such as http://www.torrenteditor.com. Recently support to add trackers on the fly to active torrent was added, but documentation seems to be little thin.

"Usual" places on Linux will show wrong CPU frequency for Intel Turbo Boost enabled CPUs. You can check actual frequency used with "i7z". It works with i3, i5 and i7 series processors.

Been bit quiet lately. I might as well document another hack to entertain my very small audience. This time post is about how to add custom entries to Windows 7 start menu. Not under all programs, but directly to same level as other options such as Control Panel, My Computer etc.

This post is closely related to my  previous  one. Big difference is that in this case company we bought had Lotus Notes based email system that had to be kept running concurrently with new common email platform for several months. Well, actually it is still running to some extent over 4 years later but that's another story.

Few hours ago you got called to meeting with your boss. You were told that company you're working for just bought another firm and everything needs to be integrated ASAP starting with unifying email addresses.

Some time ago I wrote about how to make multiple unreliable Internet connections function like single reliable Internet connection. That was done using OpenVPN and some iptables trickery. This time we're going to do same without OpenVPN and without iptables.

Here's another interesting little known feature of Linux kernel GRE support.

Often it's not necessary to encrypt traffic when tunneling L2 network over L3 in corporate environment. I hear, you say use OpenVPN, tinc, gvpe, n2n etc. Now, did you know that there's easy built-in solution that has been part of Linux kernel since 2.6.29? If you need encryption just use IPsec to protect GRE traffic.

These are kind of "last resort" fixes if all normal ways fail to resolve problem. No guarantees. Worked for me...

It turned out to be just like I suspected , Planet WNAP-7300 (at least with firmware "2.0.3(PL)4") is exactly same device as Zcomax ZCN-1523H-5. Atheros AR7240 rev. 2 at 350MHz, Atheros AR9280 rev 2 5GHz radio, 32MB RAM, 8MB Flash and two 10/100 Ethernet ports. Therefore it works with Zcomax OpenWrt firmware. Bridge performance seems acceptable, around 70Mbit/s real world in bridged mode and 60Mbit/s if OpenWrt is doing NAT. With around 25 meters nearly line-of-sight performance is ~40Mbit/s. All tests uni-directional TCP (FTP/HTTP) with no other traffic than ICMP echo going on at the same time.

Didn't see this documented anywhere so here it is. How to use Finnish dy.fi dynamic DNS service with OpenWrt router.

Host system configuration: Intel Core2Duo 6300 w/VT CentOS 5.7 x64 VMware Workstation 8.0.1

For some reason latest Strongswan version for Ubuntu is still 4.5.1. See below how to compile and package latest 4.6.2dr3. Not pretty, but works for me when testing new version.

As OpenWrt Wiki lacks this particular example (there's other L2TPv3 examples) I guess better I document it somewhere.

Instructions were tested with Ubuntu 11.04.