1. Become big
2. Become even bigger
3. Become so big that Google or someone else has to buy us

• The MplayerWii port is sheer awesome: Small app installed and your Wii plays pretty much every media file from SDCard or USB mass storage devices. Best thing I ever installed on my Wii.
• If you have to generate professional PDFs in Python use Reportlab. It's easy to use and produces professional looking PDFs, including barcode generation.
• Another Python note: If you need an ORM for something not-Django, use sqlalchemy. Flexible, powerful, and easy to extend. Writing your own Widgets is really easy.
• "Stranded on Earth" by The Herbaliser is wicket cool:
  

Network connections fail all the time, we’ve all been there. There are so many things that can go wrong, the network adapter driver can fail, the dhcp server can revoke the lease, the wifi router can disappear, the routing may be wrong at some point along the line, the dns server can be overloaded, or the remote host may be down. Those are some of the possibilities, and it can be quite a pain to track down the problem.

But the first thing to do is to figure out exactly what is working and what isn’t. If you know that much then at least you know where to start. My goal here is to create a fairly simple test to examine the status of the network connection, leading up to a working internet connection. One constraint that I have is that I like it to be portable, so that I can carry it around along with my dotfiles. That means I would like it to work in any location just as long as I can get a shell, it should not require any dependencies.

A fully functional network connection looks like this:

What I do is try to detect the parameters of the network step by step, using the regular tools like route, ifconfig. Once I know what the hosts are, I do a ping. Now, a ping obviously isn’t a foolproof test; if you’re on a network that doesn’t allow outgoing icmp then it’s entirely possible that you can tcp out anyway. So what you really should do is tcp on port 80, not ping. But ping is extremely portable, whereas doing a tcp/udp probe is asking a lot more from the environment, needing something like nmap or hping.

Once you’ve established that the connection is working, and you want to know more about the network, you can go further with something like netscan.

The code is relatively stupid and messy, but that’s the way bash is.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Martin Matusiak <numerodix@gmail.com>
# Licensed under the GNU Public License, version 3.
 
function havenet {
	local route="/sbin/route -n"
	local ping="ping -c1 -W2"
 
	local badrange="169.254"
 
	local rootname="A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET."
	local rootip="198.41.0.4"
 
	local inethost="yahoo.com"
 
	local creset="\\e[0m"
	local cred="\\e[0;31m"
	local cgreen="\\e[0;32m"
	local cyellow="\\e[0;33m"
	local ccyan="\\e[0;36m"
 
	### Scan networks

	echo -e "${cyellow} + Scanning for networks...${creset}"
	test=$($route 2>/dev/null | grep -v $badrange | egrep "^[1-9]")
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
	else
		local nets=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $1 }')
		for net in $nets; do
			local gw=$($route 2>/dev/null | egrep "^$net" | awk '{ print $3 }')
			echo -e "    ${cgreen}$net ${ccyan}/ $gw${creset}"
		done
 
		### Detect ips
 
		local ips=
		for net in $nets; do
			local r=$(echo $net | sed "s/.0$//g" | sed "s/.0$//g" | sed "s/.0$//g")
			local ip=$(/sbin/ifconfig 2>/dev/null | grep $r | sed "s/inet addr:\\([0-9.]*\\).*$/\\1/g")
			ips="$ip $ips"
		done
 
		echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting ips...${creset}"
		test=$(echo "$ips" | egrep -v "^[ ]+$")
		if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
			echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
		else
			for ip in $ips; do
				echo -en "    ${cgreen}$ip${creset}   ping: "
				test=$($ping $ip 2>/dev/null)
				if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
					echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
				else
					local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
					echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
				fi
			done
 
			### Detect gateways
 
			echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting gateways...${creset}"
			test=$($route 2>/dev/null | grep UG)
			if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
				echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
			else
				local gws=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $2 }')
				for gw in $gws; do
					echo -en "    ${cgreen}$gw${creset}   ping: "
					test=$($ping $gw 2>/dev/null)
					if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
						echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
					else
						local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
						echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
					fi
				done
			fi
		fi
	fi
 
	### Test inet connection
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Testing internet connection...${creset}"
	echo -en "    ${ccyan}$rootname  ${cgreen}$rootip${creset}   ping: "
	test=$($ping $rootip 2>/dev/null)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
	else
		local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
		echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
	fi
 
	### Detect dns
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting dns servers...${creset}"
	test=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf 2>/dev/null | grep nameserver)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
	else
		local dnss=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $2 }')
		for dns in $dnss; do
			echo -en "    ${cgreen}$dns${creset}   ping: "
			test=$($ping $dns 2>/dev/null)
			if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
				echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
			else
				local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
				echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
			fi
		done
	fi
 
	### Test inet dns
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Testing internet dns...${creset}"
	echo -en "    ${cgreen}$inethost${creset}   ping: "
	test=$($ping $inethost 2>/dev/null)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
	else
		local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
		echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
	fi
}

Download this code: havenet_networktest.sh

Click [here] to read the article.

Installing and keeping software up-to-date is so much easier with Linux than with Windows or MacOSX, package repositories are the shit

Installing software in Linux is so hard, and it never has the software I want. Windows' setup.exe dance is so much better

I have all my apps in my profile folder and can easily take them with me when I copy my profile.

• Windows: You go to the software maker, get a CD/DVD or download a "Setup.exe", run it and you have it installed. Windows offers a remove tool for software that installed that way. Updates are not handled if the program does not do it by itself. Disadvantages: No centralized update.
• Linux: For most software you just pick the package from your distribution's repository. Software is removed the same way- via a centralized package manager. Users can provide their own repositories that integrate nicely. Updates are done in a centralized way, the software itself does not have to bother updating. Advantage: All packages are automatically kept up-to-date. Disadvantage: When you copy your profile to another computer you might have to install some software cause the software itself does not come from your profile.
• OSX: You go to the software vendor, download a file, drag and drop things around for a while then the software is installed into your home dir. Updates happen if the software does it by itself.Advantage: Your programs "travel" with you. Disadvantage: No automatic updates.

A lot of really bad “comedy” movies have been made to portray the despair of suburbia. People whose lives revolve around work in a big supermarket or other chain, empty most of the time, so they try to find something, anything, to distract themselves from the daily routine.

The premise for Chuck is the same. He’s a geek, he has a pity-friend geekier than him. He works at a big electronics chain. And he has a “normal” sister who wants him to be “normal”.

Then it happens. His old college buddy, a CIA agent gone rogue, sends him a message containing every government secret he’s stolen in his “rogueness”. Chuck somehow absorbs the whole thing, the computer breaks, and now he’s the only one with the secrets. Except he’s still the geeky suburbia guy, so two agents from competing agencies show up to make sure nothing “happens” to him. Needless to say, he cannot divulge anything to his sister or his friend, so he has to pretend like nothing has changed. The agents, in turn, get jobs near him and have to fit into the suburban landscape.

You’re probably thinking “with a premise like that it could so easily suck”. And I’m with you. But it doesn’t. Chuck is pretty good in his role, and the whole spying thing is sufficiently farsical to be funny, but not so overdone that it’s stupid.

A Network Attached Storage(NAS) has been in my wanted list for quite a long time, thanks to Live Search Cashback program to make it happen: a Western Digital MyBook World Edition(500GB). More information about the hardware specification:

• ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) [41069265] revision 5 (ARMv5TEJ) 99.73 MHz
• Memory: 32M
• VIA Networking Velocity Family Gigabit Ethernet
• WD5000AAVS-0 500G HD

I believe 100MHz ARM CPU is powerful enough to drive this tiny box, but the limited capacity of memory cripples it as a lame duck. The sustainable file write(85G using lftp mirror) rate is approximately 3.8MB/s. It hardly qualifies any service beyond file server. Now, it is time to hack.

Jailbreak and SSH

The first thing to do is to create a user in the web interface of MyBook as root with null password is banned for security reason. Log on with admin and 123456, create a user JOE and setup the password for later use.

Run the script discussed in the wiki, and ssh with JOE. Now you can su to root with blank password, 0wned!

User management

MyBook takes a very intricate way to manage users:

All Samba users are granted shell access, but unix password sync = yes is not set, the /etc/shadow and /var/private/smbpasswd are updated individually by a Perl script via the web interface. The only reasonable explanation is the minimized Samba lacks PAM support.

All user names are capitalized. I assume this is a brutal force approach to address the difference between Samba and Linux native accounts: Windows user name is case insensitive, while Linux is case-sensitive.

As the password scrambled in /etc/shadow, it is easier to add/delete/update users via the web interface, then fine-tune the corresponding files. The user administration executives are hidden in /usr/www/nbin.

Share with Samba

The default exported directory is /share/internal/PUBLIC, the permission of the directory is set as rwsr-sr-x, and the owner is www-data, YMMV. So any file/directory created will be owned by www-data. If you are unhappy with the name, you may add a user, e.g joe as discussed before, then add joe to www-data group:

remember to change the default mask in /etc/smb.conf:

Package management

Though I am a big fan of Gentoo, it is a little bit paranoid to build everything from scratch. A precompiled package management, like Optware makes more sense. Check out this tutorial for bootstrapping.

The essential packages for daily administration imho are screen, lftp.

Feature requests

There are some itchy miss features, if you happen to know a solution or hint, please drop me a message in the comment:

Access Anywhere No mionet, just SSH. If you are a perfectionist, consider to port this Delphi application to MyBook to host MyBook in your preferred domain.

Download Manager A web front-end to listen to download requests from Firefox/IE plugins, then delegate it to wget backend with cookie support. A more aggressive approach may support megaupload happy hour.

1. insert the cd
2. power the machine on
3. wait for a while
4. type "passwd" "******" "******"
5. type "/etc/init.d/sshd restart"

I don’t know about you, but I have on a lot of different places a directory called ‘hg’ with lot of different mercurial clones inside. Whether on the home of my several computers for my own projects, or inside other directories for external projects, and so on.

Now, remember one important aspect of distributed source control : your clone is actually both a repository and a working directory. This is why you usually (git and others do the same) have two different commands : one to synchronize the  repository (pull) and one to update the working directory (update).

Updating comes with a risk : you can have conflicts. This is why I never update a svn repository without thinking first (do I have local modifications ?). But pulling is a lot less problematic. And, especially on my laptop, I often want to ’sync them all’ as soon as I have some internet connection. Until now i had a script syncall with the path of all (svn,unison and) mercurial repositories hardcoded. This does not scale, and I now need that in at least 5 different places. I dont feel like maintaining such scripts.

And now comes the magic alias that made my day. I’m usually lame at shell scripting, so I’m sure there are better ways. But it works, now, on my computer. And this is so useful.

alias hgbulk '\ls */.hg -d | cut -d\/ -f1 | xargs -i bash -c  "(cd {}; hg pull )"'

(yes, I use tcsh, but i’ve tested that in bash too. Don’t ask why I use tcsh.)

I don’t know why they didn’t post this on the Gentoo front page, but obviously the October GMN is not coming.  If you are on the ‘Gentoo-dev-announce’ mailing list, you would have seen Anant mention what’s going on with the GMN.

Hi Folks,

I’ve been extremely busy traveling & attending conferences for the last few weeks and will be required to continue the same for atleast 2 weeks more; and nightmorph is just recovering from his failed hardware. As a result, there will be no October issue of the GMN. We hope to resume to normality by the end of November.

Apologies.
–
Anant