DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

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.

Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such posts as Failure #1 and Failure #2 . Today I'm here to tell you about "OpenVPN inside OpenVPN".

We mirror our hard disks, we mirror RAM on servers. Why not mirror network traffic as well? 

Got packet loss? Got two or more connections? Got server somewhere to route packets thru?

My notes on setting up extroot on USB memory stick with OpenWrt on TP-Link MR3220 v1.