Google summer of code 2008

Here we go again, let’s see what picks my fancy this time.

• well, surely all the FreeBSD projects are worth mentioning, and they put up a wiki for this year too
• omg! battle for wesnoth got some projects in!
• USB support for GRUB, woha, that would really be outstanding for homebrew blackboxes (something I really like to build btw)
• a DragonflyBSD live cd. until it’s actually useable for clustering, of course, there’s clusterknoppix
• improved wine support for FreeBSD, eh, they might as well get in touch with codeweavers
• TCP anomaly detector for FreeBSD. This I really want to see… oh, there are an 802.11 fuzzing&testing suite and improved layer2 filtering too
• ext3 support for NetBSD (soon to be found everywhere else if they manage a robust bsd-licensed implementation) and some ssl-secure implementation of syslogd (see above for bsdiness). I’m not too sure about the last one, a log aggregator that sniffs out traffic and compares it to the legit syslog is a pretty neat trick as tripwires go.
• ncat and nping development. I’m already happy with socat and hping2, but the more the merrier.

Zfs versions feature madness

Feature creep? This is feature madness! This is SpartaZFS!
just go to http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/1/ and increment the last number (or, read on, might as well write it down as I read) for all the goodies [thet keep gettin] added to zfs.

1. This is the initial ZFS on-disk format as integrated on 10/31/05
2. Support for “Ditto Blocks”, or replicated metadata. Metadata can be replicated up to 3 times for each block, independently on the underlying redundancy. (i.e.: if you have a raid1 on two disk, you get 6 copies of the blocks you deem important) So even if your user data get corrupted everything (fingers crossed) will still be discoverable and the pool will be useable.
3. Hot spares, improved RAID-Z accounting (does not mention how it get improved however), and support for double-parity RAID-Z (aka raidz2, aka suspiciously-looks-alot-like-raid6).
4. zpool history. A log of whatever happens to your pools
5. gzip compression for zfs datasets. Your /usr/ports is now very happy (remember to mount /usr/ports/distfiles elsewhere however)
6. ‘bootfs’ pool property. (yes, it does what it looks like it does)
7. With the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) an application (a database usually) does know that whatever it did just wrote to disk will stay written even if a power failure occurs. Instead of waiting a second or two for the zfs to do all its magik, there’s a transaction log in which fsync(fd)s are stored, so the database can churn away happily without having to wait. If power failure occurs between zfs disk commits, this log is read and committed to disk as well.
8. Administrative tasks (such as creation/of descendent datasets) can be assigned to non-administrative users. While this is a bit scary, remember we can assign quotas to the parent dataset
9. Dataset quotas and reservation can be configured not to include descendent datasets (such as snapshots/clones) in the space consumption cap. And there’s support for the sun cifs server as well
10. You can specify a device in the zfs pool to act as cache. “These devices provide an additional layer of caching between main memory and disk. Using cache devices provides the greatest performance improvement for random read-workloads of mostly static content.” You know what a cache is, and there’s way too much math for me to go look at the detailed performance improvement.

interesting links:
nice recap of avaiable solaris filesystems

easy introduction to zfs, and way-too-much-math introduction to zfs2

zfs cheat sheet

introduction to ZIL and more in-depth stuff as well

List of zfs administrative tasks which can be delegated, along with a nice primer

configuring the cifs server to use zfs datasets, for workgroups and with active directory

edit: a very interesting blog about building an home fileserver using ZFS, and the ZFS Evil Tuning Guide.

Crossover Games for FreeBSD

A beta of Crossover Games (it’s a version of wine if you’re not into this stuff) has been announced for FreeBSD.

Currently there’s one crossover developer porting/building it, and he asks for community support on their pledges page (i.e.: if you do buy it, even if not very functional, and go on their website saying “hey, make it work”, they’re going to try and make it work)

edit: there’s an RSS feed for FreeBSD support

Is wetware such a misunderstood asset?

While surfing for some clustering news I came across this post on scalability.org (it’s their take on this other article, go read ’em both, they’re interesting.)

What tends to remain behind is the ‘residue’ the least talented and effective IT engineers. They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can’t afford to let them go.

Well, what can I say? Sometimes I just think I really do need to jump ship, stop bothering with the technicalities and apply for work at HR somewhere.

Of course you end up with “dead wood”, and of course wetware is the trickier asset to manage. Educating users is often more difficult than educating clients [that is: people or companies to wich you serve, we’re talking just wetware here], it’s an ongoing battle, like against spammers.

However I do believe there’s much that can be done to avoid that, even in a cost-effective manner. What you provide to an employee isn’t just money, there’s a cartolad of fringes you can throw in, and if you do manage to know your people (which you should do if you’re hr) you can be more effective giving away perks than simply throwing money at the problem.

(This of course holds true for it as well) (not the perks, the analysis of the problem and the thowing money at things)

Mac clones a moving target

Well, it seems the whole mac clone story is shadierthan I tought.
The guardian tracked down Pystar’s movements, both on the web and on the map.
Yep, on the map. Not only their website appeared out of nowhere a couple of weeks ago, but their physical address is moving around too, seems they’re changin it every few days.
Maybe it’s to escape the wrath of netkas, who claims pystar stole his v8 efi emulator.

Scam or no scam? Well, they promised Ars they’ll send them a unit for review, so we just have to sit back and wait.

VirtualBox For Teh Win (on FreeBSD)

Lately I was snooping around for a good virtual machine solution, there’s a lot more stuff than just a few years ago (and qemu got really better on linux), when I came across some nice BSD news (yes, it’s BSD news, buried as usual but still there).

It seems VirtualBox (aquired by sun recently btw) is being ported to FreeBSD. Well, that would make the number of reliable vm avaiable … one (no, serenity virtual does not count, it was crappier than qemu without the kernel extensions).

Oh, and btw, there’s (obviously) a port for opensolaris too, and the usual unix nutcasgeniuses at sun are putting it through some really tight loops. (that does mean I must urgently find some excuses not to buy me an ultra. Either that or manage to build a nuclear reactor in the backyard to power up all my junk)

The only big downside of virtualbox is that it cannot give the guest os access to actual hard disk drives, on the other hand it’s got a builtin iscsi initiator (the €100 version only, mind you), so you can probably work around that limitation.

The BIG upside compared to vmware it’s a builtin rdp server to the guestos, and I have a pile of junk sitting somewhere that will probably be converted into a thinstation. (assuming I can still find the right ac/dc adapter of course)

edit: it seems some FreeBSD developers have picked up the ball, and are developing the initial port effort done by innotek.
See also innotek’s forum and freebsd-ports, also a first patch against the current svn and this post from Sander van Leeuwen (of sun).

edit2: FreeBSD build instructions, solaris 10 installation instructions, workaround for a nic problem in FreeBSD 7.0, a repository of virtualbox images

Buy an already-hacked mac clone

There’s people buying apple hardware because it is quality stuff, people with a ton of hardware already around hacking macosx to run on their iron.

And then there’s people offering you a pre-hacked mac minitower for sale at 400 bucks, yep, that’s right. Those soon-to-be-sued-to-hell guys at psystar offer you a mac clone with osx already installed.

If you want it, do get it fast, this box is making the rounds on the net and I doubt it will be avaiable for long.

List of hard disk ata master passwords

Ferreted this out after some hours of web searching, guess I can spare you the same trouble

If you find this stuff useful, please do leave a comment, “hi, it worked” is enough.

(nb: see my previous post for unlocking instructions)

SEAGATE -> “Seagate” +25 spaces

MAXTOR
series N40P -> “Maxtor INIT SECURITY TEST STEP ” +1 or +2 spaces
series N40P -> “Maxtor INIT SECURITY TEST STEP F”
series 541DX -> “Maxtor” +24 spaces
series Athena (D541X model 2B) and diamondmax80 -> “Maxtor”

WESTERN DIGITAL -> “WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD”

FUJITSU -> 32 spaces

SAMSUNG -> “ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt” (32 times t)

IBM
series DTTA -> “CED79IJUFNATIT” +18 spaces
series DJNA -> “VON89IJUFSUNAJ” +18 spaces
series DPTA -> “VON89IJUFSUNAJ” +18 spaces
series DTLA -> “RAM00IJUFOTSELET” +16 spaces
series DADA-26480 (6,4gb) -> “BEF89IJUF__AIDACA” +15 spaces

HITACHI series DK23AA, DK23BA and DK23CA -> 32 spaces

TOSHIBA -> 32 spaces

For xbox hdds try “XBOXSCENE” or “TEAMASSEMBLY” too

Air car on Earth

I always wanted an electrical car, they’ve got good torque, do not guzzle fuel like they’ve got an hole in the tank, and as a side note they do not pollute much.

Trouble is, while there are some great electric cars (like the Tesla Roadster), they all do have something in common: they’re way too pricey and, well, have you ever tried buying new batteries for a laptop? Just picture the cost (both for you and for whoever disposes of them) for the monsters powering up a car.

Then, surfing aimlessly, trying to find out what’s electric on the market today, I stumbled upon what’s aircompressed on the market today.

Yep, air compressed. Well, nothing so new or so groundbreaking, c.a. engines have been around for a bit. However, lately a lot of guys have come up (in parallel, it does seem) with some new engineering. Take for example EngineAir, an aussie company that makes rotary c.a. engines.

Yes, all this stuff seems limited to small flatbeds or similar junk. Uh, no wait, what’s tata motors got to do with it? Well, it seems one of those guys got an agreement with them to actually produce a c.a. car. Yep, a car, they’re producing it, Just Right Now^TM.
I want one.

They’re affordable, as green as you can get (and working in an over-polluted city sooner or later you do notice), and most importantly just beg to be modded like hell. Just add some solar panel film on the roof, some tubing to recharge it while you’re driving around and an electric air compressor and you’re good to go. Oh, and since the waste product is cool air you’ve solved air conditioning as well, just add some more tubing and a filter at the end.
It seems they’re coming to Europe and the states sooner or later. Good, I think I’ve found my next car. Now, to find some eolic/solar generator to recharge it…

other links:

http://www.aircarcatvolution.com/

Halt and Catch Fire

Got a disk for cheap off ebay, since the user forgot the ata password. Turned out the disk was 0xDEAD anyway, but I’ve learned a bit more about the ata/pata commands.
If you got a locked disk and do not care much for the contents read on.

First thing first: you really do want to go pay HddGuru a visit, they host some really great tools like mhdd (which lets you send ata commands directly to the disk), a forum, and of course the ATA/ATAPI-8 revision 2b — AT Attachment — 8 ATA/ATAPI Command Set (January 10, 2006). A not-in-any-way-dull list of all the stuff you can send to your disk, including HCF but sadly lacking RAISE_FROM_THE_DEAD.

Ok, let’s grab/burn our Ultimate boot CD (mhdd is under the diagnostic tools btw) and fire it up.
Select your locked disk (1 usually) and let’s ask IDENTIFY to the bugger. Yes, that’s way too much info.

The first thing to look for is the 8th bit in the 128th word, 0 is security=high, 1 is security=maximum.

If it’s zero we’re in luck, and we can either unlock the disk with the regular password (assuming you know it, I did not) or with the master password (you can find some of them on the net, just google for your model number). (edit: I’ve collected the passwords I’ve found here)

Let’s type UNLOCK, and reply 1 when asked [that means we’re using the master’s password], and enter our password.
If we do not get an error [ERR turns red on the top of the screen] we’re good to go, if we do there’s 4 more tries with the password before we need to powercycle the disk.
If we get the password right a DISPWD (followed by 1 and the password again) will stop all this locking nonsense for good.

Oh, right, there’s maximum security too.
Well, that’s more satisfacting if slow as a glacier.
Just send an ERASE PREPARE followed by an ERASE UNIT and after an hour or so you can go and DISPWD it for good. Yes that will erase it completely, told you it was more satisfacting.

list of interesting stuff from identify:

• bit 8 in word 128: security, 0=high 1=maximum
• word 92: if it’s 0xFFFE the master password is unchanged (and you could get lucky and find it on the net)
• words 89 and 90: how long will it take to ERASE the disk
• word 88: which kind of dma the disk supports
• byte 2 in word 53: wheter the fields in word 88 are valid or not (wtf?)

list of interesting links:

• Paragon’s website, everything you’ll need for hdd and laptop unlocking
• Techspots’ mobile computer forum, the aforementioned dude can be found here as well
• Mike’s page on unlocking dell laptops
• and something for toshibas as well

Happy disk hacking everyone

tags for the spiders: how-to howto unlock a password protected hard disk hdd