Connecting to shared calendars on ical server using the Lightning extension for Thunderbird

January 19th, 2012

To access a shared resource/location calendar on a iCal server from the Lightning extension for you’ll need the GUID for the calendar you wish to access, see my previous post on how to obtain it.

Once you’ve obtained the GUID, construct a url using the following convention (assuming you’re connecting to the server via SSL)
https://yourserver.somewhere.local:8443/calendars/__uids__/your-shared-cal-guid/calendar/
Switch to Thunderbird, go to File > New > Calendar…
Select “On the Network” from the wizard & press continue
Select “CalDAV” as the format & for the location specify the URL you constructed using the convention above & press continue.
Once you’ve specify a name for the shared calendar & pressed continue you should have access to the shared calendar.

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Connecting to shared calendars on ical server using an iPhone

January 18th, 2012

To access the shared resource/location calendar on a iCal server from an iPhone via the caldav protocol you’ll need the GUID of the shared calendar.

First, find the GUID of calendar on the server using the calendarserver_manage_principals command, eg
sudo calendarserver_manage_principals --search shared
1 matches found:

your shared cal (Resource)
GUID: 6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686
Record name(s): 6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686

Then on the iPhone (assuming the device is unmanaged), create a new CalDAV calendar account & fill in the correct server, username & password field & hit next.
Assuming everything went ok, you should be back on the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” page, select the new calendar you just created & advanced settings.
Edit the “Account URL”, replacing the UID on the end of the url with the GUID of the shared calendar you noted down on the first step.
eg:
https://username@yourserver.somewhere.local:8443/principals/__uids__/6x3331a8-as12-ea2x-4ou1-ndeb3ct4wa686

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Posted in OS X | 1 Comment »

CUPS generates “Internal server error” when visiting administration page

January 18th, 2012

It seems that Mac OS Lion server (10.7.0) may have been released with a broken CUPS configuration. Visiting http://localhost:631/admin would generate an “Internal server error”, this seems to be addressed in newer builds (my Macbook Pro which was install from a 10.7.2 image does not exhibit the problem yet a customers server which came bundled with 10.7.0 (upgraded to 10.7.1 > 10.7.2) does).
To resolve the issue sudo cupsctl --debug-logging
Then switch off the debug logging with sudo cupsctl --no-debug-logging

I suspect the problem is due to a missing directory because comparing the default, previous & current revisions of the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf did not show anything that could cause problems.
I’d also go far as to say that you don’t need to turn on debug logging in-order to resolve this issue, it can be any of the options that can be set via cupsctl as it checks the configuration of the system, this is just a theory as I was unable to dig further because I was on a production system. Resetting the printing system did not solve the issue when attempted previously.

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More on the ThinkPad X61s

August 20th, 2011

I came across a couple of bits of information which are useful if your looking to improve performance on your ThinkPad.
First thing is though the X61s is specced as a system only capable of running 4GB of RAM, it can in fact take up to 8GB using 2x 4GB PC2-5300 or 6400 sodimms, Its can be quiet an expensive upgrade but very useful if you’re taking advantage of the VT extension on your CPU.
Second thing is the ICH8M chipset actually supports SATA II at 3Gbps but is soft locked in the bios to 1.5Gbps, this is a big difference in terms of performance, there is lots of information/rants/flames regarding the matter as it seems other vendors implemented the same restriction (completely missed this), it appears that there is a negotiation problem between the ICH8M chipset & marvel PATA to SATA bridges, this post provides a good summary of the situation & what changes are required to a bios image, but theres no need to get your hands dirty, there are modified bios images available from a couple of sources, I used the image available on the same forum, there are images available for other ThinkPads too, covering the X300, T61, T61p, R61 & R61e.

dmesg snippet from FreeBSD 9.0 before

ahci0: port 0x1c30-0x1c37,0x1c24-0x1c27,0x1c28-0x1c2f,0x1c20-0x1c23,0x1c00-0x1c1f mem 0xf8426000-0xf84267ff irq 16 at device 31.2 on pci0
ahci0: attempting to allocate 1 MSI vectors (4 supported)
msi: routing MSI IRQ 258 to local APIC 0 vector 58
ahci0: using IRQ 258 for MSI
ahci0: AHCI v1.10 with 3 1.5Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
ahci0: Caps: 64bit NCQ SNTF ALP AL CLO 1.5Gbps PMD SSC PSC 32cmd CCC 3ports
ahci0: Caps2:

& after

ahci0: port 0x1c30-0x1c37,0x1c24-0x1c27,0x1c28-0x1c2f,0x1c20-0x1c23,0x1c00-0x1c1f mem 0xf8426000-0xf84267ff irq 16 at device 31.2 on pci0
ahci0: attempting to allocate 1 MSI vectors (4 supported)
msi: routing MSI IRQ 258 to local APIC 0 vector 58
ahci0: using IRQ 258 for MSI
ahci0: AHCI v1.10 with 3 3Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
ahci0: Caps: 64bit NCQ SNTF ALP AL CLO 3Gbps PMD SSC PSC 32cmd CCC 3ports
ahci0: Caps2:

My MacBookPro3,1 is also locked to 1.5Gbps but there doesn’t seem to be any solution at the moment due to the signed firmware images.

Intel ICH8-M AHCI:

Vendor: Intel
Product: ICH8-M AHCI
Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.10 Supported

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Beginning LaTeX – Typesetting the OpenBSD FAQ

May 30th, 2011

I attended a one day training course held by the UK TUG back in July of last year which introduced beginners to LaTeX.
It was relatively simple to get up & running & we were able to put together basic documents with ease after a little practice.
Slides from the course
Handout from the course
To apply what I’d learnt on the course I decided to typeset the OpenBSD FAQ to get me on my way with LaTeX as the official PDF available for download appears to be generated using a pdf printer from the website which is great (links & chapters are there & working) but I don’t think it look that great.
A beautiful OS deserves beautiful documentation! :)
So I had a brief attempt at it the days proceeding the course & got side tracked after doing the very basics on the first 4 chapters. Nearly a year on, I thought I’d have another stab at it.
The tex files are in a Mercurial repo & there’s a PDF too :)
I’ve managed to get 10 of the 15 sections from the faq into tex files so far, with basic formatting applied to text, but there are lots to do yet e.g links, tidying up formatting, setting a typographical convention & applying it consistently.

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ThinkPad X61s

April 20th, 2011

I couldn’t justify spending £1400+ on a built to order MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, I settled on what has turned out to be a mint condition X61s with 8 cell battery & still under warranty for £172.98.
I’m really pleased with it so far but it’s still no MacBook Air (I went into the Apple store to double check) :)
Though they’re both “ultraportable laptops” they both scratch a totally different itch for me, the macbook is a sleek, tightly integrated with Mac OS, the ThinkPad is an extendible machine which is far more accommodating to various operating systems.
The reason I was looking to move to an ultraportable was so I have something I can with me at all times (obviously) which was to replace my back breaking 17″ MacBook Pro with the ability to run multiple operating systems with ease.
I was able to successfully multi-boot MacOS, FreeBSD & OpenBSD on my MacBook Pro using the gtpsync tool from rEFIT but support for the hardware wasn’t great e.g as It had an nVidia graphics card there was no resume support on OpenBSD, power management didn’t really work under FreeBSD either If I remember right & having a single mouse button meant it was a pain to use X, having to use workarounds with the eject button on the keyboard to emulate right clicks.
The 11″ MacBook Air seemed like the perfect machine for me, but the whole sealed unit really grinds my gears, it’s not that I wanted to take a screw driver to it but I’d like to have the option to extend the system at a later date instead of having to decide on the system configuration which would be set in stone, requiring a new system if I wanted to expand, the ram being the most important thing, buy it with 4GB of ram or be stuck with 2GB. Though 2GB is fine for OS X alone, it really doesn’t cut it when you’re multi tasking with iChat, Terminal.app, iTunes, Thunderbird, Safari, Omniweb or Opera. These are the apps which are usually always open on my system & my 2007 Mac Mini really struggled with this work load with 2GB or RAM, grinding to a halt regularly as the system swapped furiously, moving to 3GB gave the machine a new lease of life & stopped this behaviour, I would hate to be in the same position with a new system so the BTO Air was the only option for me.
I would also be stuck with another nVidia based system if I went for the Macbook Air which means I would still have problems with sleep & X acceleration so the second hand Thinkpad X61s with the intel chipset was the way to go.
The machine is currently multi-booting OpenBSD-CURRENT, FreeBSD-CURRENT & OpenIndiana 148a development build quiet happily.
The system works a treat under OpenBSD, sleep support is still not there in FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT but I suspect that may just be a bug in acpi_ibm(4). I was hoping to be running Schillix on this system but was unable to get the system to boot after install, I suspect a change in device paths between booting from the optical drive in the ultrabase & hard disk is the cause but didn’t look into it in-depth settling for OpenIndiana after trying Solaris 11 express (which freaked out after the rwn driver was installed) while I work through the DTrace book , though I’ve compiled in dtrace support for FreeBSD & it’s there out of the box on MacOS X most of the examples in the book don’t work as covered in the book on these platforms.

Hardware wise I ditched the supplied intel wireless card & installed a AzureWave AW-NE766 Ralink chipset wireless card. The ThinkPads check minipci-e & wireless usb devices against a device id whitelist in the bios & if not listed the system presents a “1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI card” error & refuses to boot. Reflashing the bios with a modified bios image by someone called Zender turns this off & allows the system to boot without any problems.

All in all a great system which is cheaper than a netbook, far superior in build & spec but inferior to a MacBook Air in some ways :)

OpenBSD 4.8 dmesg
FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT dmesg

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Unable to transfer voice memos from iPhone

March 31st, 2011

I made a few recordings on my iPhone using the Voice Memos app but out of the three recordings I was only able to transfer one of them successfully into iTunes.
The way it’s meant to work is, if you connect your iPhone to your machine & select Music > Sync Music & tick the Include voice memos then when you sync your phone, your recordings should show up in a playlist in iTunes named Voice Memos.
Assuming your files have been processed correctly that is!

What happens is when you record your voice memos, they are saved as quicktime .mov files, then the app converts these to .m4a files afterwards. If you’re unlucky & this conversion process is interrupted e.g in my case I made these recordings on a iPhone 3G which meant no multitasking, switching out to another app meant that I was left with an incomplete m4a file which would never play or get imported, at the time I assumed this was due to the fact that the recording was too long for the iPhone but now that I’ve upgraded to the iPhone 4 & still experiencing the same problem I decided to look further.
I downloaded a demo version of PhoneView which gives you access to the files stored on your phone & fired it up, selecting the Voice Memos folder I could see my recordings which I selected & hit the “Copy From iPhone” button.
The file which transfered succesfully into iTunes previously played without a hitch, but the other two still wouldn’t play though file(1) reported all three files as:
ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, iTunes AAC-LC
Looking at the preferences for PhoneView I enabled “Advanced disk mode” to see if I could dig a little deeper
Advanced Disk Mode

After enabling this & selecting the Disk folder on the top left hand side I was given access to the filesystem on the phone, selecting the Recordings folder I could see .mov files of the two recordings which I couldn’t get to play so I copied them out & gave them a try in quicktime, these turned out to be the intact recordings.
View of the iPhone filesystem via advanced disk mode

Deleting the .m4a versions & reopening the Voice Memo.app restarted the conversion process again.
Voice Memos.app processing recording, converting from mov to m4a file

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Posted in OS X | 2 Comments »

Building & administering jails on FreeBSD, Part 1

June 21st, 2010

The FreeBSD jail(8) manpage & Chapter 15 of the FreeBSD handbook do a great job of explaining jails & helping you get on your way with creating jails, this post builds on that information, covering alternative methods for getting your jails installed & adding what’s not covered already such as maintenance of jails (patching to be specific) & version upgrades.

  • Part 1 (this post :) ) will cover alternative install methods & jail maintenance
  • Part 2 (not yet published) will cover upgrading to a new version FreeBSD

Once completed the information from these posts will be submitted for inclusion in the handbook.

So lets begin, when creating a “complete” jail you have two options for the source of the userland, compile from source code or use the prebuilt binaries from install media, both the jail manpage & handbook cover building from source code, we wont go over it again here.

One thing worth mentioning though is if you want to build from source code, create a src.conf file & disable items which are not required, this should speed up the time required to build world & reduce the amount of disk space used by jails.

Here are two sample src.conf files, which disable building items such as firewalls (no use unless you’re using vimage), acpi or documentation:
Sample src.conf #1
Sample src.conf #2

To install the userland from installation media
first create the root directory for the jail, eg
mkdir -p /usr/jails/mynewjail
set the $DESTDIR variable to this location
if using sh
export DESTDIR=/usr/jails/mynewjail
if using csh/tcsh
setenv DESTDIR /usr/jails/mynewjail
mount the media (using the 8.0-RELEASE cd 1 iso in this example)
mount -t cd9660 /dev/`mdconfig -f /some/path/to/8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso` /mnt

Extract the binaries from the tar balls on the install media into your declared destination, realistically, you’ll only need to extract base, but you can do a complete install if you wish to.
To install just base:
cd /mnt/8.0-RELEASE/base; ./install.sh

You are about to extract the base distribution into /usr/jails/mynewjail – are you SURE
you want to do this over your installed system (y/n)?

To install everything but kernel:
if using sh
cd /mnt/8.0-RELEASE; for dir in base catpages dict doc games info manpages ports; do (cd $dir ; ./install.sh) ; done
if using csh/tcsh
foreach dir ( base catpages dict doc games info manpages ports )
cd /mnt/8.0-RELEASE/$dir; ./install.sh
end

All configuration steps from here on to get up and running are as specified in the jail man page & handbook.

Keeping jails up to date with patches
On a host with default settings the freebsd-update(8) tool doesn’t work as
chflags(1) is not permitted in a jail, set sysctl security.jail.chflags_allowed to 1 to allow it & freebsd-update can be used.
The other option is to patch the userland manually from the host OS. All the needs to be done is the $DESTDIR has to be passed to the make install command eg.
In section 2b of the FreeBSD-SA-10:04.jail advisory you’re told to
# make obj && make depend && make && make install
after patching, instead you would issue
# make obj && make depend && make && make install DESTDIR=/usr/jails/mynewjail

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OpenNMS-dev port for FreeBSD

June 9th, 2010

I’ve created a new FreeBSD port for installing releases from the unstable branch of OpenNMS.
This port suffers from the same issue as the stable port

You can grab the port here

9/6/10
Initial port, installs version 1.7.92

6/11/10
Update to version 1.9.2

25/4/11
I’ve setup a temporary mercurial repository with all version of the port in the repo to make moving forward easier (I say the repo is temporary as I intend to host my own instance of mercurial & to push out to git & bitbucket as well).

26/4/11
Update to version 1.9.7

17/5/11
Update to version 1.9.8
With this release, OpenNMS switched to the new JNA Pinger The JNA Pinger assumes IPv6 is enabled by default & if not doesn’t fail gracefully, this will cause problems if you’re running OpenNMS in a jail from example & you’ve not assigned the jail an IPv6 address, you can keep with the progress of this issue in NMS-4673
PR’s have been raised to update JICMP, JRRD & iplike to the latest versions in ports, see PR #’s 156785 156786 157120

11/08/11
Update to version 1.9.90

17/11/11
Update to version 1.9.93

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Configuring OpenSolaris with IPv6 connectivity

May 27th, 2010

To configure OpenSolaris to use IPv6 NDP (neighbour discovery protocol) create an empty file named in the following convention:
/etc/hostname6.interface#:#
first hash being the interface number & the second being a user defined number for a logical interface
eg
/etc/hostname6.e1000g0:1

If you’re having DNS resolution issues, do
cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf

To configure OpenSolaris to use a static IPv6 address
create a file using the same convention as mentioned during the NDP stage above & inside it add
addif ipv6address/mask up
eg
addif 2a01:300:200::1/64 up

To configure your default IPv6 router on OpenSolaris
create a file named /etc/defaultrouter6 & add the ip address inside

The instructions above make the changes persist across reboots, if you’d like to make changes to a current session, the configuring an IPv6 network section of the IP services Solaris administration guide is a handy reference.
These instructions should also apply to Solaris as well though I haven’t tested it.
The source of information for this article was the IPv6hostsolaris wiki article.

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Running rndc without specifying a port on Mac OS X

April 11th, 2010

The stock BIND config on Mac OS X (both client & server versions) is set to listen on TCP port 54 for control commands via rndc(8), the rndc utility however doesn’t have a config file, so it defaults to using TCP port 953, this mean it has to be invoked with -p 54 to work properly, to rectify the issue create /etc/rndc.conf & add the following to it
include "/etc/rndc.key";
options {
default-key "rndc-key";
default-server 127.0.0.1;
default-port 54;
};

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Posted in OS X | 1 Comment »

IPlike port for FreeBSD

January 5th, 2010

As part of getting OpenNMS on FreeBSD via ports I’ve created a port for the IPLIKE which is a C implementation of the iplike stored procedure that’s used by OpenNMS.
You can download a copy of the port here

If I haven’t heard any bad reports by the end of the week, I will raise a PR to have it added to ports.

ports/142581 was commited earlier today

iplike commit message on freshports.org

The port can be found at databases/iplike, please update your ports

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OpenNMS port for FreeBSD

January 27th, 2009

The port is for the current stable version, v1.6.2. It is in its very early stages, there are still some issues which need to be ironed out:

* The port will install just fine except that it complains about some files listed in the pkg-plist which are not there, well they are there but the files named are dynamically generated everytime a build is attempted (jetty-webapps & webapps cache files) so this will need to be fixed.

* As there are issues with these filenames in the pkg-plist, make package fails.

* A problems with the jicmp dependency, it fails to detect that jicmp is installed & attempts to build & install it no-matter what & obviously fails if it is.

All previous issues with the port listed above have been resolved, the port now just needs to be tested before submission for inclusion in ports.

You can grab the port here

11/5/09
Port updated to version 1.6.4, use the link above to fetch a new copy of the port.
There is an issue with the packing list as it currently doesn’t take into account new files that are created from things such as availability reports, which means when you come to remove the package some files are left behind as well as empty directories, this will be solved in the next revision when I’ll separate out the location the data resides from the binary & config files.

17/5/09
Port updated to version 1.6.5, again use the link above to fetch a new copy of the port.
The issue with the packing list still existed in this version.

3/8/09
Updated the packing list so that it now includes some files which I missed before.
There are issues with the packing list which still need to be resolved.

5/1/10
Updated the port to 1.6.8, if you have a previous version of the port installed, backup your opennms directory before doing the upgrade as files will be removed.
I have a been working on separating the config files, logs & rrd data from the libraries & binaries etc, the OpenNMS build mechanism has support for this, allowing one to pass -Dinstall.etc.dir=/confdir/opennms-data/etc -Dopennms.home=/opt/opennms -Dinstall.logs.dir=/var/log to build.sh
Unfortunately the source code doesn’t, there are 2 major hurdles which need be passed before this will work correctly
1) some files ignore some of the variables passed to build.sh, most important one being install.etc.dir, see bug report
2) source files are hardcoded to look for files/directories under $opennms.home eg the etc directory.
I have a whole bunch of diffs which I need to go over again as I’ve hit a wall, I would’ve included the patches with this update but, all the diffs manage to do is break things, so I removed them from this version.
The port now use openjdk as it doesn’t suffer from the SIGSEGV issue experienced by some, including myself, a workaround if you want to remain with diablo or sunjdk is to disable IPv6 support in the JDK. You will also need to remove the if condition from the OpenNMS port Makefile aswell.
I’ve also created a seperate port for iplike here

18/3/10
Thanks to David Okeby for updating the port to version 1.6.9 & sharing a link in the comments section below, I’ve mirrored a copy of the port on this site & updated the download link, the original had resource files inside which I’ve removed.

6/4/10
Updated to version 1.6.10, as mentioned before, backup your opennms directory before upgrading to prevent data loss.

9/6/10
Update to version 1.8.0, the port now requires openjdk 1.6 to run

1/10/10
Update to version 1.8.5

24/04/11
I’ve setup a temporary mercurial repository with all version of the port in the repo to make moving forward easier (I say the repo is temporary as I intend to host my own instance of mercurial & to push out to git & bitbucket as well).

26/4/11
Update to version 1.8.11

17/5/11
Update to version 1.8.12
PR’s have been raised to update JICMP, JRRD & iplike to the latest versions in ports, see PR #’s 156785 156786 157120

11/08/11
Update to version 1.8.13

17/11/11
Update to version 1.8.16

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Posted in FreeBSD | 57 Comments »

USB & Firewire support for NetBSD/cobalt 4.0

October 15th, 2008

The GENERIC kernel for NetBSD/cobalt 4.0 does not support USB or Firewire out of the box, I’ve created a set of patches (sourced from various threads on port-cobalt@) to add support.
You can grab the patches here
Once you have built & installed your new kernel, you will need to make a new MAKEDEV script.
cd /usr/src/etc
make MAKEDEV
& place the new copy of the script in /dev
then generate the device files for the newly supported devices by running
sh MAKEDEV usbs
I’ve successfully used 5 rs232 > USB on my Qube2 via a PCI ALi chipset USB & Firewire card on NetBSD 4.0.
ohci0 at pci0 dev 10 function 0: Acer Labs M5237 USB 1.1 Host Controller (rev. 0x03)
ohci0: interrupting at irq 9
ohci0: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support
usb0 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0
uhub0: Acer Labs OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
ohci1 at pci0 dev 10 function 1: Acer Labs M5237 USB 1.1 Host Controller (rev. 0x03)
ohci1: interrupting at irq 9
ohci1: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support
usb1 at ohci1: USB revision 1.0
uhub1 at usb1
uhub1: Acer Labs OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub1: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
ohci2 at pci0 dev 10 function 2: Acer Labs M5237 USB 1.1 Host Controller (rev. 0x03)
ohci2: interrupting at irq 9
ohci2: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support
usb2 at ohci2: USB revision 1.0
uhub2 at usb2
uhub2: Acer Labs OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub2: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
ehci0 at pci0 dev 10 function 3: Acer Labs M5239 USB 2.0 Host Controller (rev. 0x01)
ehci0: interrupting at irq 9
ehci0: BIOS has given up ownership
ehci0: EHCI version 1.0
ehci0: companion controllers, 2 ports each: ohci0 ohci1 ohci2
usb3 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
uhub3 at usb3
uhub3: Acer Labs EHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub3: 6 ports with 6 removable, self powered
fwohci0 at pci0 dev 10 function 4: Acer Labs product 0x5253 (rev. 0x00)
fwohci0: interrupting at irq 9
fwohci0: OHCI version 1.10 (ROM=1)
fwohci0: No. of Isochronous channels is 4.
fwohci0: EUI64 00:90:e6:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
fwohci0: Phy 1394a available S400, 2 ports.
fwohci0: Link S400, max_rec 2048 bytes.
ieee1394if0 at fwohci0: IEEE1394 bus
fwip0 at ieee1394if0: IP over IEEE1394
fwohci0: Initiate bus reset
uplcom0 at uhub4 port 1
uplcom0: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 3
ucom0 at uplcom0
uplcom1 at uhub4 port 2
uplcom1: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 4
ucom1 at uplcom1
uplcom2 at uhub4 port 3
uplcom2: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 5
ucom2 at uplcom2
uplcom3 at uhub4 port 4
uplcom3: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 6
ucom3 at uplcom3
uplcom4 at uhub0 port 2
uplcom4: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 7
ucom4 at uplcom4

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BarCamp 3 slides from my talk

September 6th, 2008

As a first time attendee of BarCamp Brighton I had to do a short presentation/talk about a topic of my choice, I decided to cover some basic pointers on how to avoid being flagged up on the radar of script kiddies, the talk was titled “Protecting your server against
script kiddie attacks”
You can grab a copy of the slides here
Cover image courtesy of linuxisforbitches.com
Thank you for the support Paul, Jim, Mike & the other people who attended.

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Gigabyte GN-WI05GS-RH on OpenSolaris

July 19th, 2008

After installing the rum driver run
update_drv -a -i '"usb1044,800a"' rum as root

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Posted in SPARC / Solaris / OpenSolaris | No Comments »

CoovaChilli 1.0.12 port for FreeBSD

June 18th, 2008

As v1.0.12 is finally released I’ve updated the unfinished port for the SVN builds
The todo list is kinda the same but I’m on the case this time & its fairly trivial to sort out, I just need feedback on any issues building the port & getting it up & running.

Grab the port here
If you need a main.conf to start with grab it here

29/6/08
Thanks to David Bird for working over the issues with coova on FreeBSD this weekend, the random coredump issue has been resolved & chilli_query now works properly aswell as coova itself! :)
I’ve updated the port, use the link above to download & test.

20/11/08
Updated the port to make it build-able on FreeBSD 7.0, added rc script & sample configs, the port is nearly ready for submission, its now lacking documentation & a little cleaning up on scripts, use the link above to fetch a new copy of the port.

11/1/09
Tidied up the scripts by removing linux related references e.g iptables, the port has now been submitted for inclusion in the ports tree ports/130357
Use the link above to fetch a copy in the meantime.

20/1/09
Port Commited
Please note that the sample configs are now located in /usr/local/share/examples/cooovachilli
The chillispot port has also been updated to prevent installation of both packages.


CoovaChilli port for FreeBSD commited

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Posted in FreeBSD | 11 Comments »

Going IPv6

June 9th, 2008

Looking for something to do this weekend I remembered that a few years back after reading Secure Architectures with OpenBSD I’d signed up to freenet6, I retrieved my forgotten account details & logged in to the portal to get started, then remembered why I never got off the ground with this project, the client is a PITA to setup, a quick search of the ports tree showed up net/aiccu.
The description of the port:
AICCU makes it very easy for anybody to get IPv6 connectivity
everywhere they want. It uses the TIC (Tunnel Information & Control)
protocol to request the information needed to setup a tunnel through
which the connectivity is created.

AICCU supports the following tunneling protocols:
– 6in4 static (RFC 2893)
– 6in4 heartbeat (RFC 2893 + draft-massar-v6ops-heartbeat)
– tinc (http://www.tinc-vpn.org)
– AYIYA (draft-massar-v6ops-ayiya)

As AYIYA even works from behind NAT’s, thus unless there is a very
restrictive firewall in place, anybody should be able to get IPv6
connectivity without problems and everywhere they want.

One does need a SixXS account and at least a tunnel. These
can be freely & gratis requested from the SixXS website.

Before installing the port I headed over to the SixXS website to have a nose around, the FAQ is well worth a read, it lays down the basics of the signup process quiet well.
The only hold up between signing up & getting going with your 1st tunnel is the wait for approval by the project admins which though the site says it can be as long as a week took, it only a few hours for me (even on a saturday!:))
The project works on a credit basis (there is no money inolved), costs are broken down in the FAQ, basically you start off with 25 credits, which allows you to get a tunnel for a single host setup at the cost of 15 credits.
Once you’ve been able to demonstrate that you can keep the tunnel up for seven days you’ll be credited 5 credits, this will give you enough credits to apply for a subnet.
Fingers crossed, if it all goes well I’ll be migrating my home network to IPv6 sometime next week.

The setup of the aiccu client was pretty straightforward, I just needed to provide my username & password to the config file. You don’t actually have to use the aiccu client, you can create a gif(4) manually, this is covered in the faq aswell, but seeing as I’m a n00b at this I will ditch the client once I’m more comfortable. Before you fire up the client you need to configure your firewall rules so that ipv6 traffic is allowed, most importantly icmp6, details covered in the faq.

So, now I have a tunnel setup, the next step is to find a registrar to move my domains to whom supports IPv6 records, surprisingly the big boys, tucows, 1&1, go daddy don’t (well go daddy allows the creation of AAAA records but you can’t use them for your NS records).
The FAQ once again has this covered here
Once I’ve transfered my domains across, I’ll be ditching OpenBSD 4.3 & moving to -CURRENT temporarily as Apache supports IPv6 there.

RIP Jun-ichiro “itojun” Hagino

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NetBSD 4.0 Cobalt restore CD Mk3

May 16th, 2008

New restore CD for the Cobalt Cube using Izumi Tsutsuis updated restore CD script

You can grab a copy here

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Dell PowerEdge T105 & *BSD

February 1st, 2008

Dell where running a special offer this week on the PowerEdge T105 servers.
For £173inc Vat & Shipping they make perfect test boxes, I placed the order on monday & they where here on thursday.
I’ve spent some of today trying ou the AMD64 flavours of FreeBSD 6.3 & 7.0-RC1, NetBSD 4.0 & 200802010002Z snapshot, OpenBSD 4.2 RELEASE & CURRENT.
One word of warning the onboard broadcom network card is a POS, you will need an additional network card installed in the system if you’re planning to have any means of connectivity to you box.
I used a cheapo intel pro/1000 GT PCI network card.

Here are some dmesgs:
FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE AMD64
FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 AMD64
The broadcom network card was enabled in the bios but wasn’t detected by the kernel

I was unable to NetBSD 4.0 & 200802010002Z as the setup program claimed there where any disks installed.

OpenBSD 4.2-RELEASE GENERIC kernel
OpenBSD 4.2-RELEASE GENERIC.MP kernel
OpenBSD 4.2-CURRENT GENERIC kernel
The broadcom network worked fine during the install process as far as I was able to obtain a IP address from a DHCP server, upon reboot when the system went multiuser & the network card was initialised the system would panic, using the intel card instead stopped the panic onboot, but still panicked on reboot, disabling the broadcom network card in the bios solved any panics. Screenshot
I was unable to test the 4.2-CURRENT GENERIC.MP kernel as the system failed to boot, complaining about em0: watchdog timeout -- resetting
&
wd0a: device timeout writing fsbn 1885728 of 1885728-1885759 (wd0 bn 1885791; cn 11 tn 98 sn 12), retrying Screenshot

I also booted the system off the FreeBSD-CURRENT snapshot using the bootonly iso, the broadcom network card was detected but panicked when attempting to obtain a IP address via DHCP.

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Posted in FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD | 4 Comments »

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