DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

Recently market has been flooded with 400GB and 800GB versions of Intel 910 Enterprise PCIe SSD priced just one tenth of original cost. Downside of this device is its inability to boot requiring separate SSD for system files and software RAID0 support from OS. Both obvious downsides for my intended use with ESXi.

Latest firmware for Topfield TF500PVRc is 3.56 from 2010 while for TF510PVRc and TF520PVRc there's 3.96 from 2013. Can you flash Topfield TF510PVRc / TF520PVRc firmware to older TF500PVRc? Yes, yes you can after changing SysID with VegaPack and it will start and appear to work just fine. However since TF500PVRc has only 32MB RAM system will quickly run out of memory. First menus will disappear and soon entire system crashes. Flashing newer model firmware "works" only for DVB-C models. In DVB-T models (TF500PVRt / TF510PVRt / TF520PVRt) tuner was changed and while OS will run it won't be able to receive any channels.

While looking for something else I spotted Buffalo WLAE-AG300N "range extender" in our IT "treasure room". Noticing it's OpenWrt supported decided to give it try.

After many, many months of waiting Cisco finally managed to build new version of CSR1000v 3.13 that is compatible with VMware ESXi 5.1. Another quiet release without release notes. As with earlier 3.13 versions this new 03.13.01S build is available only in OVA format without purchasing license (csr1000v-universalk9.03.13.01.S.154-3.S1-ext.ova). Not to worry as you can extract ISO image and even BIN images if needed for upgrading older install from OVA. If you're coming from 3.12 or older with eval license (which allowed creation of eval license locally) you'll need new licenses. Usual two month license is available from Cisco portal  but it's extra step compared to 3.12.  Another difference is performance levels for unlicensed and eval licensed modes. Unlicensed 3.12 is 2,5Mbit/s, eval licensed 3.12 is 50Mbit/s, unlicensed 3.13 is 0,1Mbit/s and eval licensed 3.13 is 10Gbit/s.

Server in question was HP Proliant DL320 G6 from 2010 without any firmware upgrades ever made. Those old versions have multiple known issues, both usability, stability and hardware component compatibility related. Downtime required to perform these steps will be around 3 hours.

Seems Ukkomobile has fixed their provisioning setup. LTE network itself came up last week, but only DNS traffic was allowed and all tcp/80 traffic was hijacked to infinite 302 redirect loop between www.ukkoverkot.fi and www.ukkomobile.fi.

450MHz LTE is alive!

Initial version of Cisco CSR1000v 3.13 (csr1000v-universalk9.03.13.00.S.154-3.S-ext) was broken and kept crashing while booting on VMware ESXi 5.1, but apparently does work on ESXi 5.5. Cisco has silently replaced it with 3.13S0a version (csr1000v-universalk9.03.13.00a.S.154-3.S0a-ext) without providing any release notes or even updating filedates. Which is exactly as broken as old one - stuck in infinite reboot loop. Download is here , but for some reason for 3.13 only OVA packaged one is available after free registration. If you need ISO simply unpack OVA with 7zip and use ISO you can find inside for install. And then it will fail. Perhaps something to do with crazy nested virtualization CSR uses. Thanks guys.

Tested with Exchange 2010. You'll need Exchange Management shell but no need for exchange admin rights. Get-Recipient -ResultSize unlimited | Select Name -ExpandProperty EmailAddresses | Where-Object {$_.SmtpAddress -ne $null} | Select Name,SmtpAddress,IsPrimaryAddress | Export-csv -Encoding unicode -NoTypeInformation AllEmailAddress.csv

One of my Atheros AR9280 minipcie cards had some odd undefined regulatory domain (0x6B) configured. This caused even latest Linux ath9k driver to break so I wanted to change it to valid regdom. Which ath9k developers think is sin and are trying to prevent people from doing, but luckily our old friend iwleeprom has Atheros support letting us to fix this.

Nothing special here in my opionion, but I've seen few comments saying that FMK  doesn't work with Huawei B593u. Just follow instructions below and you end up with normal firmware image having one important difference - you can telnet in as admin from LAN side of device.

I found couple Motorola AP-5131 802.11a/g access points today. It's old design from Symbol Technologies dating back to 2005 with manufacturing date from 2010.

Netdisco is neat tool to collect layer-2 forwarding database from switches, match MACs with layer-3 ARP table from router and present it over searchable webui. Old "Netdisco 1" was quite horrible to setup, but it did still do its job. Recently "Netdisco 2" was released making admins life much easier and also bringing fancy new look for webui. So here's my notes about installing new virtual machine with Netdisco 2.

Public Huawei document I linked couple days ago mentioned factory diagnostics tool called  " Huawei deviceLocker V0.1" that will grant access to root shell on router. I got curious on how this would actually work and came to conclusion it must be something extremely simple and insecure, it IS Huawei after all. Did some poking around /bin/web process I figured this out - it's all there in clear-text for anyone to read. And that admin password is in Huawei docs, not exactly secret either. In case you didn't realize there's no need for authentication to exploit this. Protip: Try to hide you backdoors a bit better next time.