Hacker's ramblings

Is it just me, or has somebody at Microsoft really dropped the ball on network location setting? When a Windows computer detects a new network, which it has not be attached into earlier, it pops you the question and asks about how to profile the security in that particular case. If everything goes ok, there is no need to change anything. However, when you install your computer, you don't get to answer that. Also, there is commonly known that people make mistakes. What if you simply fumbled the question and clicked wrong.

In Windows 7 the setting is simple:

You go there, click the value and select a better one. In Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 that is not the case. The setting cannot be changed. Period. Wtf?

There is a way to change the setting. I found this article with Google: How do I set my wireless network to be private instead of public? The "Easiest" and "Most direct" are crap, IMHO. The part with Local Security Policy seems to work:

That seems to be working from Windows 7 onwards. Whose bright idea it was to make the change that difficult?

I've had my issues with Acronis True Image. It fails running backup, restore or consolidate existing backups to reduce storage. See my earlier posts about that (1 and 2).

Then they send this automated e-mail about eligibility of an upgrade with reduced price. I need backup, that's given, but have been unable to find anything reasonable as replacement. After a short pros/cons-weighing type of thinking, I decided to go for the update and got an Acronis True Image 2014 Premium.

Pros:

• I know them and their product
• I'm "pot committed" to them already 
• When I know what not to do, I manage go produce restoreable backups
  

Cons:

• I know them and their product
• I'm "pot committed" to them already
• Consolidation does not work
• Stupid restore errors on raw disks
  

There were no real issues during the update. They still don't support HTTP-proxying and simply assume that everybody can connect to their servers anytime, all the time. I manage to get past that, increasing number of software vendors make that assumption. What about us who'd like to know what goes on in their networks. They completely forget us.

Anyway, my backups run fine after the upgrade. During my consolidation experiments I managed to delete some backup-files from my storage. Now TrueImage wants to see them. When I get rid of that problem, I should be running smoothly.

I'll report here if something nasty happens.

My previous post about my Huawei B593 4G-router has become quite popular, so I thought to tell more about my setup.

What I'd really need is a network bridge, so that my Linux-box would be the one getting a dynamically changing public IP via DHCP. Understandably it simply cannot be done with a mobile router. In UMTS-network, the mobile terminal will negotiate a data connection and get the IP-address associated with the connection. There literally is no chance for my router to do that via B593. Using an USB-based mobile terminal such a feat could be achieved, for example my Huawei E160 gets an IP-address directly to the Linux. No 4G LTE, though. So, I'll be sticking with my B593 for a while. See an example of a transfer speed measurement @ Ookla Speedtest.net. Not, bad huh?

I also did investigate if the box would be based on Linux. Huawei has some GPL-components in the firmware, but they don't release BusyBox nor Dropbear source. It is possible, that they are using something of their own make or simply don't have a prompt or are not using Linux at all. The reason I'd like to see them is that both BusyBox and Dropbear SSHd are very typically used in Linux-based hardware.

Doing a port-scan from LAN-side to B593 reveals, that it has something there:

Not shown: 995 closed ports
PORT    STATE    SERVICE
22/tcp  filtered ssh
23/tcp  filtered telnet
80/tcp  open     http
443/tcp open     https
631/tcp filtered ipp
MAC Address: F8:3D:FF:F8:3D:FF (Huawei Technologies Co.)

... but since all the nice stuff (SSH and telnet) are filtered, I don't know if there are actually any services listening to those ports.

To repeat: to my understanding, a bridging firmware cannot be done. However, something very similar can be achieved, it has a DMZ-setting. See:

It says "You can configure a computer as the DMZ host that is exposed to the Internet so that unlimited services and exchanges are provided between the host and Internet, for example, online games and meetings." in the page. That is pretty much same as bridge.

I had to test if it really would work. I took a hping-utility for crafting raw IP-packets and ran:

hping -c 1 -n <-da-IP-address-here> -e "AAAA" -0 --ipproto 41

That sent a single (-c 1) raw IP-packet (-0) and stamped the outgoing packet a IPv6-encapsulation protocol (--ipproto 41). If the Huawei would have a simple UDP & TDP forwarding, such a packet would never pass trough.

On my Linux it said:

16:15:50.115851 IP sending.host.com > receiving.host.net: [|ip6]
16:15:50.115920 IP receiving.host.net > sending.host.com: ICMP host receiving.host.net unreachable - admin prohibited, length 32

Goddamn! It works! The packet properly passes trough.

My conclusion is that the DMZ-function is actually usable. Apparently there is no need for SSH-prompt -based configuration tweaking. It would always be nice, though. All Linux-nerds like me simply love to go to the prompt and type cat /proc/version and cat /proc/cpuinfo and boast about their hacking abilities to anybody who cares (not) to listen.

This is a follow-up for my previous article about running IPv6 and WLAN access point. There I said "This was actually very easy to do into DD-WRT" and now I'd like to take that back.

It seemed to be easy, but ... Here are my settings in detail. Btw. I'm running DD-WRT v24-sp2 big
Release: 07/24/13 (SVN revision: 22118)

1. disable the autoconfiguration from the WLAN access-point and manually define a static IPv6-address

This is the part which I struggled the most. Sure it is easy to remove the manually assigned IPv6-address from an interface, just run:

ip -6 addr delete 2001::-da-IP-here-/64 dev br0

on a shell. It will drop the autoconfigured address and it will stay away. For a while. It surely won't survive a reboot.

To make this stick, go to web GUI Administration --> Commands and add a startup command:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/autoconf
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra_pinfo

/usr/sbin/ip -6 addr add 2001:-da-IP-here-/64 dev br0

That makes the settings stick. Autoconfiguration will be gone and a static address will be assigned instead. I attempted at least 20 different combinations while looking the sysctl-settings list, but that was the 1st one I found to be actually functional for deactivating the autoconfig.

2. use a static default route from the WLAN access-point and confirm that it has proper IPv6-connectivity

4. make sure, that any incoming traffic from the mobile clients is properly routed to the real IPv6-router, and confirm that traffic flows both ways

Yet again, go to web GUI Administration --> Commands and add a startup command:

/usr/sbin/ip -6 route add default via 2001:-da-router-IP-here-::1 metric 1

That creates a static route which will work and fulfill the 2). To achieve 4) make sure to have the metric 1 at the end.

3. run router advertisement daemon (RADVD) to advertise the WLAN access-point as a proper router for any wireless clients

In the DD-WRT IPv6 article it said that RADVD configuration should be like this:

interface br0 {
   AdvSendAdvert on;
   prefix 0:0:0:1::/64 {
    AdvOnLink on;
    AdvAutonomous off;
   };
};

Don't do that! DON'T! It will royally fuck up your LAN. Nothing in IPv6-land will work if you literally copy/paste that like they suggest. The problem is with the prefix of 0:0:0:1::/64, it will assume that your network has that /64-prefix and assign route and IP-address for any IPv6-host with that prefix. I can bet you $1.000.000 dollars, that it will not be your IPv6-prefix. ... and win.

Just put the exactly same prefix your real IPv6-router has. The WLAN access point's RADVD should be configured pretty much exactly alike. For the configuration directives see radvd.conf manual-page. It literally says:

• AdvSendAdvert: do send advertisements, default is off
• AdvOnLink: use the prefix for link determination (meaning: yes you can get to The Net via this), it is on by default, you really don't need this line at all
  
• AdvAutonomous: do distribute new the IP-addresses from this RADVD to your wireless (and wired) clients, yet again it is on by default and you really don't need this
  

With these settings I succeeded a reboot and still had my wireless and wired clients working using either of the two IPv6-routers. On Windows the setup will display two default routes, like this:

PS C:\Windows\system32> netsh interface ipv6 show route

Publish  Type      Met  Prefix                    Idx  Gatewa
-------  --------  ---  ------------------------  ---  ------
No       Manual    256  ::/0                       18  fe80::
No       Manual    256  ::/0                       18  fe80::

On Linux:

# ip -6 route show | fgrep default
default via fe80:: dev eth0 metric 1024  expires 0sec mtu 1280 hoplimit 64
default via fe80:: dev eth0 metric 1024  expires 0sec mtu 1280 hoplimit 64

That's ok. IPv6 will support that ok. Just be aware, that your traffic may route either way.

I've been using IPv6 on my own LAN for years. Most of the things I use on daily basis have IPv6 and it seems to work. For example a Sony television or iPhone 4S does not use IPv6, but iPad does.

On my router there is a Router Advertisement Damon to do stateless auto-configuration. On Windows 7 and 8 they have really weird things running out-of-the-box, but I'm in a habit of running (as admin):

netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=persistent
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=persistent
netsh interface teredo set state disabled

That way I'm using fixed IPv6-addresses and disable the unnecessary Teredo-tunnel.

I don't exactly know why or how, but on one of my computers (running Windows 7), the IPv6-sockects started to not work properly. The symptoms include lot of reconnections and for example in SSH-client, the connection would simply drop. I did everything I knew, but nothing helped. A failing SSH-connection would look like this on the wire:

After 31 seconds of connection, there is a sporadic retransmission. That is not dangrous and it happens sometimes. My Windows 7 would respond with a duplicate ACK into it, waits 3 seconds and goes ballistic. It simply starts re-transmitting the already transmitted data with 1, 3 and 5 second intervals before determining that the connection has died. WTF?! The connection is not bad! It works on all other computers. The issue can be easily repeated and it works the same way every time. Windows thinks it needs to start a burst of re-transmissions and disconnects when they seem to fail.

During one of the Google-session for the fix, I found netsh interface ipv6 reset command. I tried it:

PS C:\Windows\system32> .\netsh.exe interface ipv6 reset
Reseting Global, OK!
Reseting Interface, OK!
Reseting Subinterface, OK!
Restart the computer to complete this action.

Did the Windows restart, ran the above commands to disable privacy, randomization and teredo-tunnel. Everything started to work! Whooo-hoo! Now my SSH-connections don't drop anymore. How cool is that!

The fix is very microsoft-ish. Some counter ticked into illegal value and in their mind the correct fix is to reset everything to the post-installation state. On *nix-world network-stack -code would be of much better quality and the entire issue would never happen!

This is a classic question which I get to answer a lot. N00bs know the answer, but somebody outside the IT-business might ask something like that. This is also quite a popular question among young people trying to figure out if programming would be for them.

Anyway, here 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know from two people who actually have created some of the most popular languages currently used.

Nobody should call themselves a professional if they knew only one language.
- Bjarne Stroustrup

Larry Wall

See his interview: http://youtu.be/LR8fQiskYII

His list:

• JavaScript
• Java
• Haskell
• C
• Perl

Perl is not a surprise in his list. He created it in the 80s.

Bjarne Stroustrup

See his interview: http://youtu.be/NvWTnIoQZj4

His list:

• C++
• Java
• Python
• JavaScript
• C
• C#

Again, seeing C++ in his list is not a big surprise, he was one of the authors of the language in the 80s. The funny thing is that he mentions 6 languages.

Linus Torvalds

This two year old interview keeps popping up. In this video http://youtu.be/Aa55RKWZxxI mr. Linux mentions one programming language not to use.

The again, this person is well known from his more than colorful opinions about various issues. But anyway his work on Linux kernel and Git version management are well known, he is a fan of C.

me

Being a blog-author I have to express an opinion of my own. To solely copy/paste opinions of three very skilled persons is too much of a cheap thing. So, here goes:

• C
• Pretty much all languages created after 1970 owe something to C, it is imperative to know this.
• JavaScript
• When doing any kind of web-stuff, this is the only language being used in 100% of the cases. All browsers run this and it is the de-facto client-side language today.
• C#
• Very versatile compiled language by Microsoft, has lot of influence from C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. the list goes on. It is mainly used with .Net to create server-side stuff.
• PHP
• IMHO the most important web-server language there is. This is wildly popular and shares similarity with C, JavaScript, Perl, Visual Basic, etc.

In addition to learning programming languages, I encourage everybody to learn also following widely popular frameworks:

• Microsoft .Net
• Zend Framework

My reasoning between this is that if you understand how they work, you're pretty well covered and also going to Python/Django or Ruby on Rails is much easier task. I know that these are web-frameworks and people program a lot other stuff than web, but sticking to the topic of what languages to learn, these are the first ones to try. There are so many other frameworks, especially in PHP-land, but they don't have such an essential position as the framework made by people who created the PHP-language. In Microsoftland there are no other significiant frameworks to learn. Anyway, both are properly documented and lot of information can be found of them.

My favorite JavaScript-library Dojo has a very nice HTML-editor. During a project I even enhanced it a bit. Anyway the Dojo/Dijit-documentation is not the best in the world, so I'll demonstrate the three operating modes that are available. All of them have the same functionality, but how they appear visually to the person doing the HTML-editing differs.

Classic fixed size

This is the vanilla operating mode. From the beginning of time, a HTML <TEXTAREA> has been like this (without any formatting, of course). A fixed block-container of multi-line text editor which will scroll on overflow.

Example:

HTML for declarative instantiation:

<div id="terms-Editor" data-dojo-type="dijit.Editor"
    height="150px"
    data-dojo-props="extraPlugins:['insertanchor','viewsource']">
  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
</div>

There is really nothing special, I'm just using two extra plugins insertanchor and viewsource to produce two new icons to the editor toolbar to add functionality for the end user. I found out that the plugins really need to be all lower-case for them to load properly. The class-names and filenames are in CamelCase, but putting them like that makes loading fail.

The obvious thing is that the editor is 150 pixels high. I didn't set the width, but since the editor is a simple div, any size can be set.

Auto-expanding

This is a plugin expansion for the previous. The only real difference is that this type of editor does not overflow. Ever. It keeps auto-expanding to any possible size to be able to display the entire text at once. During testing I found out that the auto-resize -code does not work on all browsers. There seems to be a discrepancy of exactly one line on for example Chrome. The bug manifests itself when you try to edit the last line, pretty much nothing is visible there. I didn't fix the bug, as I concluded that I won't be using this mode at all.

HTML for declarative instantiation:

<div id="terms-Editor" data-dojo-type="dijit.Editor"
    height="" minHeight="100px"
    data-dojo-props="extraPlugins:['alwaysshowtoolbar','insertanchor','viewsource']">
  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
</div>

This has three things to be taken into notice:

1. The auto-expansion is achieved by plugin called alwaysshowtoolbar. It does not work in current Dojo version of 1.9.1, I had to fix it. See the patch at the end of this post.
2. It is absolutely critical to set the height="". Forget that and the alwaysshowtoolbar-plugin does not work.
3. It is advisable to set a minimum height, in my example I'm using 100 pixels. The editor will be really slim, if there is no text. This sets the size into something visually appealing.

Manually resizable

This is how a <TEXTAREA> behaves on many modern browsers. When using plugin statusbar you'll get a handle to resize the block. During testing I found out that it is a bad idea to allow the user to be able to make the editor wider. I enhanced the class with additional parameter which gets passed to plugin's constructor to limit the ResizeHandle functionality.

Example:

HTML for declarative instantiation:

<div id="terms-Editor" data-dojo-type="dijit.Editor"
    height="200px"
    data-dojo-props="extraPlugins:[{name:'statusbar',resizeAxis:'y'},'insertanchor','viewsource']">
  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
</div>

Note that specifying the resizeAxis won't work in your code. If you really want the code I can e-mail it to you, it is longish enough for me not to post it here. The height is 200 pixels initially, but user can make the editor any size.

Hope this helps to clarify the complexity of this fine editor. It would be also nice if a filed bug report would be processed in Dojo-project. Also their discussion in Google Groups is closed, the group is set to moderate any posts, but there is nobody doing that. So, effectively new people cannot post. There is nothing left, but to complain in a blog.

Appendix 1:AlwaysShowToolbar.js patch to fix the plugin-loading

--- dojo/dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar.js.orig    2013-07-19 13:21:17.000000000 +0300
+++ dojo/dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar.js    2013-08-02 17:31:44.384216198 +0300
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
     // module:
     //        dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar

-    return declare("dijit._editor.plugins.AlwaysShowToolbar", _Plugin, {
+    var AlwaysShowToolbar = declare("dijit._editor.plugins.AlwaysShowToolbar", _Plugin, {
         // summary:
         //        This plugin is required for Editors in auto-expand mode.
         //        It handles the auto-expansion as the user adds/deletes text,
@@ -198,4 +198,11 @@
         }
     });

+    // Register this plugin.
+    // For back-compat accept "alwaysshowtoolbar" (all lowercase) too, remove in 2.0
+    _Plugin.registry["alwaysshowtoolbar"] = _Plugin.registry["alwaysshowtoolbar"] = function(args){
+        return new AlwaysShowToolbar();
+    };
+
+    return AlwaysShowToolbar;
 });

I had a glitch with my DD-WRT -setup as it failed to pass-trough native IPv6-traffic on my own network. It took me a while to understand why only IPv4-traffic was getting trough it, but I managed to get it working. Here is my setup:

It is pretty trivial, the internet connection goes trough firewall and a router. Behind the router, there is my wired Ethernet and wireless connection to mobile devices. I had no issues with wired devices, IPv6 was working fine, so I guessed my WLAN-setup was flawed.

A closer inspection revealed, that my DD-WRT was configured to use IPv6 Stateless address autoconfiguration. This is part of IPv6-specification and a closer inspection of the traffic reveals, that autoconfiguration is done with couple of specially crafted ICMPv6-packets. I bumped into Mr. Matt Brown's blog, which pointed me to the RFC 4862 which defines the protocol. It states that there exists two kinds of nodes:

• router - a node that forwards IP packets not explicitly addressed to itself
• host - any node that is not a router

Then it struck me:
My WLAN access-point is considered a router, altough it is a bridge by definition, but for the sake of IPv6 autoconfiguration it is a router. As it came out, the autoconfiguration packages are using link-local addresses from address-space of fe80::/64, which by definition won't survive a hop over a router. (Which in my mind I didn't have, it was a WLAN bridge!)

The plan was to:

1. disable the autoconfiguration from the WLAN access-point and manually define a static IPv6-address
2. use a static default route from the WLAN access-point and confirm that it has proper IPv6-connectivity
3. run router advertisement daemon (RADVD) to advertise the WLAN access-point as a proper router for any wireless clients
4. make sure, that any incoming traffic from the mobile clients is properly routed to the real IPv6-router, and confirm that traffic flows both ways

This was actually very easy to do into DD-WRT. After disabling and enabling the wireless interface on my Windows 8, I finally got a default route:

PS C:\Windows\system32> netsh interface ipv6 show route

Publish  Type      Met  Prefix                    Idx  Gateway/Interface Name
-------  --------  ---  ------------------------  ---  ------------------------
No       Manual    256  ::/0                       18  fe80::c2c1:c0ff:c2c1:c0ff

This was nice! Everything simply started working. What I'm still looking for are ways of getting the default route without disable/enable for the interface. Both, on Linux and Windows.

In my Fedora 19 I've been wondering why my NTPd does not start on boot. It used to do so couple of Fedora installations ago. This is not a big deal, so I've been mostly ignoring it. Today I dug up some energy to investigate.

The reason was much simpler than I tought. On my very short checklist were:

1. Confirm that systemd has ntpd.service enabled, it was.
   
2. Confirm that ntpd.service has a dependency to start the service after network interfaces are up, it was chained to do a single ntpdate update and start the daemon after it.
3. Needed interfaces have not been blocked and/or needed interfaces have been enabled in config, everything was out-of-the-box: all network interfaces allowed.
   

The daemon even had the panic-threshold disabled in the config, so it wouldn't choke on startup if time was badly off for some reason. I found no reason for the daemon to start.

However, doing a search for ntpd in /usr/lib/systemd/system revealed what was going on. chronyd.service has Conflicts=ntpd.service in the service description. WTF?! What the hell is chronyd?

According to http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ it is "a pair of programs which are used to maintain the accuracy of the system clock on a computer". Sounds like a NTPd to me. Running netstat confirmed the fact:

# netstat -nap | fgrep :123
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:123             0.0.0.0:*                           666/chronyd        
udp6       0      0 :::123                  :::*                                666/chronyd        

The daemon does bind to NTP-ports. To get chronyd running properly, all I had to do was add proper time source and allowed updates from my LAN with allow-directives.

That's it!

My Fedora 19 failed to boot if I had an entry for an iSCSI-mount in /etc/fstab. During boot the system just fell to emergency mode. To get the box to boot, I simply did a "stupd man's solution", and commented the line out. This is what happens if I have the standard line in fstab:

My fstab line is:

/dev/qnap  /mnt/qnap  ext4  defaults  1 0

It took me a while to get back to the issue and investigate, it was that bad. This is the clue I found on Fedora project's documentation about iSCSI. They said, that any iSCSI-volumes should be mounted with a special flag _netdev. I changed to that, and hey presto! During bootup, it first does something and then mounts the iSCSI-drive. I merged those two occurrences into a single photo:

It works! I'm so happy about this. For clarity, the fstab-line is:

/dev/qnap  /mnt/qnap  ext4  _netdev  0 0

QNAP released their version 4 firmware. Its GUI has iPad-look and feel and is a major improvement overall. It has all the existing features (actually I don't know of any new interesting things), but the management interface has been completely re-written. It responds much faster and is really nice to use. Actually the version 3 GUI was very, very slow to log-in or respond to a click. It looks like this:

The only thing I noticed that didn't work was date/time settings. It chose a GMT-12 time zone for some reason. It does work in the background, I'm using Europe/Helsinki TZ and it shows EEST correctly on SSH-connection:

[~] # date
Wed Aug 14 13:24:52 EEST 2013

Also, I noticed that daylight savings time -setting displays the correct TZ.

To fix the NTP-client I did following:

# /sbin/setcfg NTP "Server1 IP" -my-IP-here-

# /etc/init.d/ntpd.sh stop
# /etc/init.d/ntpd.sh start

This does not reflect the change to the GUI.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see the next firmware to fix those issues.

During my ventures in the Linux-land, I constantly package and re-package RPMs. Sometimes to introduce new functionality to existing package or to simply get a newer version that distro vendor is prepared to offer. Number of times I've created packaging to software that is not in the distro at all.

Another thing I love using are symlinks. I can have newer and older package of a software and can simply switch with updating the symlink into correct version. When I combined those two, it bit me in the ass.

I had quite simple script-blocks to handle the symlink:

%post
cd /my/package/directory/
%{__rm} -f my.cool.symlink-name
ln -s package/library/my.cool my.cool.symlink-name

%preun
%{__rm} -f /my/package/directory/my.cool.symlink-name

On install, that worked, but on update/freshen there was no symlink left. I was puzzled, why is that? Little bit of googling revealed two pieces of information: RPM spec-file documentation about scripts, especially the Install/Erase-time Scripts -part and 2nd the Fedora Project's packaging information, especially the scriptlet ordering. I'll abbreviate the Fedora's ordering here omitting the non-interesting parts:

1. %pre of new package
   This is the part where my script confirms that the symlink exists.
   
2. (package install)
3. %post of new package
4. %preun of old package
   During update/freshen, this is the part where my script removes the symlink created in 1.)
   Crap!
   
5. (removal of old package)
6. %postun of old package

Further reading of RPM spec-docs said "the argument passed to version 1.0's scripts is 1". Ok, nice to how, but now what? How can I utilize the information? What is the exact syntax for the script? The only usable information I found was in the Fedora packaging instructions, there was an example:

%preun
if [ $1 = 0 ] ; then
  /sbin/install-info --delete %{_infodir}/%{name}.info %{_infodir}/dir || :
fi

So this was the thing I had to try. My solution is to change the %preun-block:

%preun
if [ $1 -lt 1 ] ; then
  # This is really an un-install, not deleting previous version on update
  %{__rm} -f /my/package/directory/my.cool.symlink-name
fi

I did that and upgraded the package. Poooof! The symlink was gone like there was no change at all. WHY? I upgraded the revision number of the package and upgraded again. NOW it worked! Nice.

There is a simple explanation what happened. It says in the Fedora project's order-list that "%preun of old package". OLD package! It works starting from the next update, but not on the first one.

Anyway I was delighted to get that one sorted.

I got one of Linksys wireless access points. The original idea was to install Linux into it with DD-WRT, but the operation failed miserably due the fact, that there are actually two kinds of E4200 APs. Guess who has the "wrong" kind. That would be my 3rd Linksys wireless access-point. I love their products due to extensive Linux-support and very high quality hardware. Now it looks like, this one didn't turn out like I planned.

Anyway, the thingie had a very old firmware and I thought that it would be a good idea to upload the newest factory firmware into it. That failed immediately, all I got was a "Image File Is Incorrect" error message. The message was spat out from the GUI almost immediately, so I decided to debug it. Here is the code I found:

var len = F.file.value.length;
var ext = new Array('.','i','m','g');
if (F.file.value == '') {
    alert(fwupgrade.upgradefile);
    return false;
}
var IMAGE = F.file.value.toLowerCase();
for (i=0; i < 4; i++) {
    if (ext[i] != IMAGE.charAt(len-4+i)){
        alert(hupgrade.wrimage);
        return false;
    }
}

Nice! The manufacturer designated file of FW_E4200_2.1.39.145204.SSA hardly matches the required .img file extension. Also on the code side: is the way of checking for the file extension completely braindead, or is it just me? Guess what would happen, if the filename would contain less than 4 characters.

It was safe to rename the file and upload the firmware. It didn't brick the thing. There seems to be plenty of people having the same issue. The unit seems to have interesting ports open, nobody knows why. Here are the port scan results:

Starting Nmap 6.25 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-08-07 13:47 EEST
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.1
Host is up (0.0017s latency).
Not shown: 992 closed ports
PORT      STATE    SERVICE
53/tcp    open     domain
80/tcp    open     http
139/tcp   open     netbios-ssn
443/tcp   filtered https
445/tcp   open     microsoft-ds
8083/tcp  open     us-srv
49152/tcp open     unknown
49153/tcp open     unknown
MAC Address: 58:6D:8F:GG:2G:3G (Cisco-Linksys)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.32 seconds

There is a project to get Linux running on Marvell-chipsets also, but the site seems to be down. So, I'm linking the WikiDevi page instead: http://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_E4200_v2
Hopefully that pans out and there will be support for DD-WRT some day.

My weapon-of-choice for storing passwords has been SplashID for ages. I cannot even remember which version was the first I installed into my Nokia running a S60 operating system.

Yesterday SplashData went into version 7. I've been wondering what they have been doing, since there has been no minor updates for a year or so. Couple of weeks ago they informed that version 7 is coming out and hang tight to wait it to be released.

For an existing user like me, the news was pretty good. It was a free upgrade! Yes. I could get new stuff without paying anything for it. To tell you the truth, I was mighty sceptical. Their track-record of getting things right is not the best one there is. Back in the days, Elcomsoft did a study about password management software, and SplashID wasn't in the winning side there. It is generally a very bad idea to store everybody's passwords using password "g.;59?^/0n1X*{OQlRwy". Sure it is very difficult to guess, but what would happen if you don't have to guess. All you have to do is get somebody's password vault, and it pops open using that password with a blowfish. The end result is unencrypted SQlite-database.

People at SplashData did listen. They did fix the issues pointed out by those nice white-hat guys. That is a very good display of morale from the company's side. Still today, there are so many corporations who simply laugh at security investigators. For example this is one of the recent ones, the Japanese toilet manufacturer Lixil ignores Trustwave's findings, so there is nothing else to do than go public with the findings.

Fortunately my scepticism (read: pessimism) didn't pan out. I upgraded my Desktop-edition on my Windows, it activated using my existing credentials. iPhone-edition upgraded automatically from the App Store, and also activated after my Desktop-edition was activated. My iPad-edition didn't upgrade automatically, I used the normal iTunes sync and clicked there to install the already existing app into my iPad also. On version 6, there were separate versions for iPhone and iPad, now there is only a single app, which is a much better way to go on user perspective. So, no glitches there. Everything works, WiFi-sync works.

Now they offer an option to sync to cloud. To my mind, that's insanity! It is the popular way of today, but I'd never do that. Ever. The inquisitive minds already are questioning Google and their mobile platform Android about password storage. There is no difference between KeePass or Firefox Sync to mention few of those password storage providers. You'd be handing them all of your most valuable items, your passwords, to store and use. When it comes to Google and Android, they don't encrypt your data, with Apple's iOS you at least have the option of doing so.

My final words to people at SplashData: Keep up the good work!

Previously I've studied the init.d replacement systemd.
Update 4th Jun 2017: See the new version

To my surprise, my contraption from the previous article didn't survive a reboot. WTF?! It turned out that in Fedora 19 the /var/run/ is a symlink into /run/ which has been turned into tmpfs. Goddamnit! It literally means, that it is pointless to create /var/run/<the daemon name here>/ with correct permissions in RPM spec-file. Everything will be wiped clean on next reboot anyway.

So, I just had to study the systemd some more.

This is my version 2 (the Unit and Install -parts are unchanged):

[Service]
Type=forking
PrivateTmp=yes
User=nobody
Group=nobody
# Run ExecStartPre with root-permissions
PermissionsStartOnly=true
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/mkdir /var/run/dhis
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/chown -R nobody:nobody /var/run/dhis/
# Run ExecStart with User=nobody / Group=nobody
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dhid -P /var/run/dhis/dhid.pid
PIDFile=/var/run/dhis/dhid.pid

The solution is two-fold. First an ExecStartPre-directive is required. It allows to run stuff before actually executing the deamon. My first thing to do is create a directory, the minus sign before the command says to ignore any possible errors during creation. The target is mainly to ignore any errors from the fact that creation would fail due to the directory already existing. Anyway, all errors are ignored regardless of the reason.

The second command to run is to make sure that permissions are set correctly for my daemon to create a PID-file into the directory created earlier. That must succeed or there will be no attempt to start the daemon. chowning the directory will fail if the directory does not exist, or any other possible reason.

Sounds nice, huh? Initially I couldn't get that working. It was simply due to reason, that the entire Service-part is run as the user pointed by the User=nobody and Group=nobody -directives. That user was intentionally chosen, because it has very limited permission anywhere or anything. Now it cannot create any new directories into/var/run/. Darn!

This where the solution's 2nd part comes in. Somebody designing the systemd thought about this. Using the PermissionsStartOnly-directive does the security context switch at the last moment before starting the daemon. This effectively changes the default behavior to allow running Service-part as root, except for the daemon. Exactly what I was looking for! Now my daemon starts each and every time. Even during boot.

Another thing which I noticed, is that when I edit a systemd service-file, the changes really don't affect before I do a systemctl --system daemon-reload. It was a big surprise to me, after all in traditional init.d everything was effective immediately.

PS.
Why cronie does not create a PID-file? I had an issue in CentOS where I had not one, but two cron-daemons running at the same time. This is yet another reason to go systemd, it simply works better with ill-behaving deamons like cronie.