Here we are, 2009, and a new 2.5″ IDE hdd of 320GB is less than 1kkr. I got one and after some deliberation I opted for windows7 with Fedore Core as a close runner up.

So what did I install before the computer got productive?

The puropse of my machine is to connect to work, deveop some hobby projects of my own, write documents and such. Nothing out of the oedinary, really.

Work related:

* MS Office – Commercial word processor etc.
* Visual Studio – Commercial development environment.
* SqlServer Express 2008 – Database backend
* Tortoise -[free] Splendid windows explorer integrated client to subversion
* CCTray – Client monitor for CruiseControl.Net
* BeyondCompare – [commercial]File comparison tool.

Neat utilities:

* Notepad++ – Free excellent text editor with color coding for lots of syntaxes.
*Foxit Reader – Free fast PDF-reader.
* Process Explorer – Free task manager replacement.
* 7Zip – Free multi format compression handler.
* ImgBurn – Free CD/DVD burner with ISO support.
Internet

* Putty – Free ssh client.
* Firefox – Free internet browser
* Chrome – Free internet browser
* Skype - Free chat and phone client.

Just for fun

* Spotify – Excellent music client.
* Flash – For games and stuff in the browser.
* VLC – Free media player, supports most formats.
* Filezilla – Free graphical ftp client.

That’s most of the  initial cut of installations.

There are a few things left to install:

* 4Dos – The command shell microsoft never made.
* CdEx – Free audio ripper.
* CygWin – Free Linux utils for windows,

Have fun. Let me know if you think I missed any useful tool!

–Jesper

Twitter to the rescue… http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail+down and you’ll get the basic idea. I’m fairly sure it can be used to check other new items too.

I also stumbled upon http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com and just as gmail served me a 502 server error, the aforementioned site said that “it’s not just you”…

Actually, there were a few things that annoyed me on Telia. One was that I didn’t manage to change the machine that was connected to the ADSL connection. I followed all instructions I could find and even called support. All I had to do was switch off the modem for 20 minutes and turn it back on with a new box plugged in. Never worked. Three hours. Still no new IP. Of course, it may have been just me, but that has never stopped anyone from being annoyed before.

The other thing was that I upgraded to 24Mbit/s, paid more, but they didn’t send me a new modem. I also had a feeling that new customers got better deals than me.

So, I switched. The switch was surprisingly painless. The target date was April 30th, and I expected all connections to go down and I’d have to install the new shiny modem I received from Tele2. Nothing of the kind! All of a sudden my dhcp address changed and that was it!

Then my wife started complaining about her mail not reaching her friends. My first suspicion was user error, but then I realized I had set up my qmail mail server to route via Telia’s smtp-server. Doh. I can’t blame Telia for not routing mail from Tele2 customers.

The neat thing about my linux servers is that they never crave any attention. That’s also a bad thing. While documentation is fun of the highest degree, my own network is slightly less than 6 sigma standard in that regard. Luckily I remembered that all I had to do was change the server name in the /var/qmail/control/smtproutes file.

Unfortunately Tele2 have blocked all outbound traffic on port 25. Instead they require mail clients to use port 587 and also to authenticate.

I had received a paper with a user name and password. I also set up a mail account with a new password. Furthermore I spent significant time researching how to shove that into the smtproutes file.

All to no avail. Support closes at 8 pm, but then I’ll try to explain my problem. The support site mentions very little about how to configure an smtp-server, though it does mention a lot about configuring mail clients. They also have a robot help desk service named Sara, where you can presumably ask questions in natural language. She claims to answer questions about internet, broad band and so on. I asked “How can I relay from my smtp server?” and got the reply “Server… Not my thing really. I don’t know much about hardware”.

Tomorrow I’ll bother tech support. That’ll be fun…

–Jesper

My latest informational reorg included an idea to publish sound and video on a share that the kids could access. All that stuff used to sit on a share deep in a structure from a previous box I used to run.

Easy thing to figure out what to do; simply create a new share, call it Media and allow all the internal network read-access.  Mount it on a linux box with root access, then move everything from the old jesper/backup/jesper/bigdrive/private/media to that directory.

The only thing is that it’s not possible to simply rewrite the inodes when moving things from one nfs-mounted volume to another nfs-mounted volume. Every single bit needs to be copied.

It was a somewhat lengthy procedure to move everything onto the NAS, but at that time I had a gigabit card (still have it but it is not recognized by vmware esxi) and data was only going one way – from one box onto the NAS. This time, I was stuck with a 100MBit nic and data had to travel from the NAS, to the computer and then back to the NAS. Admittedly I didn’t have to watch, but I figured it would take me days to shuffle all of that data.

As the ReadyNAS runs a linux distro behind the scenes I figured the solution would be to gain terminal access to the NAS using ssh. Unfortunately that wasn’t on by default. I googled and found several solutions to fix the problem, ranging from opening the NAS and mounting the disks on another computer to using some odd “feature” in Apple File Protocol and hacking the crontab file.

Eventually I found a much simpler solution: Installing the official ‘enable ssh access’ patches.

On http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=94 you’ll find – at the bottom of the page – two patches; ToggleSSH and EnableRootSSH. Both need to be installed, and the NAS wants to reboot after each one.

ssh into the nas. Log in as root with your existing admin password. Voila! you’re in!

Now moving the remaining data was a few keystrokes away and obviously lightning fast using the good ol’ mv command.

Happy hacking!

–Jesper Hogstrom

I get logs mailed from my various systems on a daily basis. Several times a week they are filled with failed attempts to pick up mail from adam, annie, alonzo, bert, bill, caesar, daniel, david… as well as requests for /phpadmin/index.php /phpdbadmin/index.php, /phpsqladmin/index.php and so on.

The idea I dreamed up was fairly simple; either hook onto an existing intrusion detection system (IDS) like snort or write some other simple rules, maybe by analyzing log files from apache; “if an ip# requested 10 non-existing pages in 5 seconds, drop all packets from that source”.

I didn’t get very far in my thinking, before I realized someone else may have already done this. My first search yielded quite a few hits, including some stating it’s a bad idea to auto-block ip# based on IDS rules, mainly because of the many false positives.

However, one guy was right along my thinking with a Dynamic Firewall Daemon. The specs matched much of what I would eventually have set up myself (he said humbly). Other applications in the same area include fwsnort.

On the other hand, this article from linuxsecurity.com states “intrusion prevention is still at its early stage and there is no out-of-the-box product that will perfectly fits your requirements.” – though that was written ages ago (2006 I would guess based on the date of the first comment).

An insightful article from IBM gives some handy scripts, but not quite automation.

I readily admit to not being an expert in package filtering, but I do run firewalls, IDS and open only the ports required. What worries me a bit is that the majority of people out there are unaware of even the most basic facts about how to protect themselves from attacks. And even Pentagon have a problem securing their perimeter…

Before I completely take off on something else, I recommend the OnPoint Radio show on Cyber warfare. Much more high level than mere firewall scripts, but very eye-opening.

Anyway, if you have any experience on dynamic firewalls, open source or commercial, please feel free to share!

–Jesper Högström

Anyway, I got myself an account but rather quickly decided my laptop speaker did not make the music selection justice (and really, no matter the selection, the lap top speaker would be a joy killer), so I decided to put one of the old boxes to use and plug it into the stereo.

Said and done, I grabbed an old lappy with a broken screen I previously thought would be my video player, but it lacked the CPU power to do better than 50% frame drop rate. I guess it had an old Fedora 6 installation on it.

I should also mention that while I have ran cables to some places in the house, the corner of the stereo is unwired.

Thus, I spent more time than I really had learning about wireless under linux. Then I formatted the harddisk and installed FC9 on it. It accepted the wlan card without a problem, but I still couldn’t connect to the network. A few hours later I moved myself and the machine to a place where I knew for sure the wlan waves actually reached. Doh. The material in my house eats radio waves like pop corn.

At this point I was ready to install Spotify. On the minus side there is no linux client available. On the plus side it worked like a charm using Wine. Yehaa! For several minutes this worked out well. Using VNC I could easily remote to the “jukebox” to control the spotify client and it poured out the lovely tunes of my choice.

Then it lost the network connection, and I had to restart the Spotify client and then it played on and on for a few more minutes. Not satisfied!

I finally gave up on the project and bought one of those FM transmitters usually used to get the mp3 player to send audio to the car stereo.

Now I have Spotify running on my trustworthy ol’ lappy, the FM transmitter just beside me and music coming from my stereo tuned into FM 98.3MHz. If it hand’t been for the complete radio proof house I live in my neighbours could also enjoy the ride

–Jesper Hogstrom

To make things perfect, I wanted all the machines to run VMWare tools. On some machines that was as simple as selecting the appropriate menu item.

However, in some other cases it was simply not that simple. I needed to do the whole thing manually. For now, I’ll skip over the details of that and cut to the chase.

I tried to upgrade my kernel so I could recompile some vmware tools drivers when something went terribly wrong.

When I rebooted, all I had was a black screen saying “GRUB _” and it didn’t accept a single key stroke.

Luckily, it wasn’t the most important machine, but still – things didn’t look too good.

After spending some time on google, I found that others had had the same problem, and it seemed to having to do with the MBR (Master Boot Record) being messed up. It made kind of sense, but what then?

A thread I found on an Ubuntu site mentioned something called the Super Grub Disk. I downloaded it from http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ and uploaded it to the ESXi data storage.

Add a CD to the VM and point it to the ISO image.

Next – how to get the VM to change boot sequence?

Shut down the VM, edit settings and check the little box.

Save and reboot.

The interface is somewhat different – but plain menu driven! For me, it worked to simply select the menu options with help, select language, opt for Gnu/Linux and then “Fix boot of Gnu/Linux (GRUB)”. 0.1 seconds later I got an OK message, shut down the machine and switched back the boot order.

It just worked, The machine is back online. Now it’s time to beat the next generation in table tennis one more time before I install the VMWare tools.

A piece of advice: Take snapshots before you upgrade the kernel!

–Jesper Hogstrom

I alluded to my initial conversion issues in this post. While I learned more than I asked for, it seems it wasn’t quite necessary to use the lsilogic adapter. Buslogic worked just as fine…

First, credit where credit is due. I gathered all my information from http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi and http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/howto-convert-vmware-windows-xp-ide-disk-to-lsilogic-scsi.

Having converted a couple of disks, I felt obliged to add the minor details I managed to add to the process.

Not that I’m a sissy, but one never knows. Close the virtual machine and backup!

My disks hadn’t been defragmented in a while – as I didn’t even know that was possible, so lets start doing that:

When I read the other posts, I was quite worried about not having a “small vmdk-file” that contained the disk description. Fear not! It will magically appear after the next step: Disk conversion. While we’re at it, give the disk a better name. Delete the old disk. We have a backup, remember?

The virtual physical layout of the disks will change when we convert it to a SCSI disk, but the number of sectors remain the same. Check the number of sectors you have now:

The number 25165824 will be used to create a dummy SCSI disk. YOUR NUMBER WILL NOT BE THE SAME!

If you’re like me and prefer to copy entire lines and avoid remembering numbers between screens, here goes:

Either way, look at the scsi.vmdk file and copy the lines the look similar to

Open virtualmachine1.vmdk and replace the lines that have the same keys.

Now we need to make some changes to the vmx-file. The vmx-files don’t seem to care about the order of values. My file was hard to navigate in, as keys were not collated. To the rescue:

Edit the vmx-file and remove/comment out the ide0:0* keys.

Find the section mentioning scsi, or place it in the correct alphabetical place:

I already had the key ’scsi0.present = “TRUE”‘ present. Having the key twice prevents the machine from starting!

If you changed names on the vmx-file, remove the old machine from the inventory in VMWare server console. Open the new vmx-file. Start it.

Important: If you did rename the files, you will get a question if you want to keep or replace the identifier. Most likely you want to KEEP the identifier. After all it is the same machine.

If everything worked as expected, delete the backup directory. You can also delete scsi.* from your VM directory. If it didn’t work out – restore the directory, start from top of page and read more carefully.

–Jesper Hogstrom

I’ll cover the gory details of that in another post. At this point, all you need to know is that ESXi doesn’t support IDE disks, only SCSI disks. Most of my VMs have IDE disks. Sigh.

After crawling the net for a while I found some extremely useful posts covering what needs to be done:

http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi and http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/howto-convert-vmware-windows-xp-ide-disk-to-lsilogic-scsi.

One of the first things that must be done is to install the LsiLogic driver. I opted for the WHQL 1.20.18.00.

The problem then is to upgrade the BIOS. I must admit I am not exactly sure if that is a required step, but I did it anyway. Why is it a problem? Well, a set of files need to be placed on a bootable floppy drive. And my lappy doesn’t have a floppy slot.

Luckily there is a way. Open the settings for the machine.

Add a Floppy. Make sure you select to create a blank floppy image.

Specify a filename and do NOT connect at power on.

Start the VM. Once booted, connect the disk.

Open windows explorer, right-click the A: disk and select Format

Make sure to create a startup disk.

Click start and the process is over in a few seconds.

Now you can put the files from the LsiLogic BIOS package on the disk. If you are running VMWare Workstation you can simply drag them from the host machine into the VM. Note that you should NOT copy LSI’s command.com. It simply didn’t work well for me; something about a corrupt image. Just take all the other files.

Shut down the VM, open settings, select the floppy and have it connect on power on.

Start the VM again. It will now boot from the floppy assuming your VM BIOS is set like mine. Press F2 during booting and make sure:

If you made any changes, exit and save changes.

A familiar screen…

Run the install-command and ponder which option suits you. I chose (a).

On the next screen, I chose (t)

Then quit your way out.

To be quite honest I don’t think this worked as well as I hoped. At least when I do it again and again I manage to see something about “base address not found”. Maybe it works only once? Or maybe this step isn’t required.

At any rate, I thought it was a nifty way to solve the problem with creating a boot disk under vmware when I needed one. Or at least thought I did.

–Jesper Högström

Looking at the file everything looked fine. The line

SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

was indeed present, but “qmailctl stat” kindly informed me the services weren’t running.

# qmailctl stat
/service/qmail-send: supervise not running
/service/qmail-send/log: supervise not running
/service/qmail-smtpd: supervise not running
/service/qmail-smtpd/log: supervise not running
/service/qmail-pop3d: supervise not running
/service/qmail-pop3d/log: supervise not running
messages in queue: 0
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

Finally I found a blog entry that pointed me in the right direction. It also included a pointer to this blog entry.
In short, it seems fc9 uses another boot sequence than fc8 and earlier versions. Note too that the two scripts in the above mentioned links look slightly different.
You probably want to read up on things by investigating

man events
man initctl

This guide also contains some useful information.
After some experimenting I got the script right, and it looks like

# svscan - daemontools
#
# This service starts daemontools from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on shutdown

respawn
exec /command/svscanboot

Put this in /etc/event.d/svscan and reboot – or simply test it by “start svscan”. Verify by invoking initctl list.

# initctl list
control-alt-delete (stop) waiting
logd (stop) waiting
prefdm (stop) waiting
rc0 (stop) waiting
rc1 (stop) waiting
rc2 (stop) waiting
rc3 (stop) waiting
rc4 (stop) waiting
rc5 (stop) waiting
rc6 (stop) waiting
rcS (stop) waiting
rcS-sulogin (stop) waiting
serial (instance)
sulogin (stop) waiting
svscan (start) running, process 1862
tty1 (start) running, process 1749
tty2 (start) running, process 1745
tty3 (start) running, process 1747
tty4 (start) running, process 1738
tty5 (start) running, process 1743
tty6 (start) running, process 1751
vpnc-cleanup (stop) waiting

–Jesper Högström