Hacker's ramblings

That should be an easy task, right? You guessed it. If I'm writing about it, it isn't. Once in a while I still test with a real IE8. The IE10 and IE11 emulators should be good enough, but they aren't. Here are the stats from this blog:

People seem to run with IE8 a lot. They shouldn't but ... they do.

Here is what I did:

1. List of Windows updates installed on the computer:
   
2. Managed to find Internet Explorer 9 in it (on Windows 7, that's pretty normal):
   
3. Un-install starts:
   
4. Yep. It took a while and hung. Darn!
   
5. I waited for 20 minutes and rebooted the hung piece of ...
6. Reboot did some mopping up and here is the result. No IE anywhere:
   
7. Guess who cannot re-install it. On a normal installation it is listed in Windows features, like this:
   
   In my case, no:
   
   

No amount of reboots, running sfc.exe or anything I can think of will fix this. This is what I already tried:

1. Attempt fix with Windows Resource Checker:
   PS C:\Windows\system32> sfc /scannow
   
   Beginning system scan.  This process will take some time.
   
   Beginning verification phase of system scan.
   Verification 100% complete.
   
   Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.
   It simply fails to restore the files, because all the bookkeeping says, that IE8 shouldn't be there!
   
2. Let' just download the installation package and re-install manually. Download Center - Internet Explorer 8
   
3. Ok, we're not going to do that, because the IE 8 installation package for Windows 7 does not exist. Reason is very simple. Win 7 came with IE8. It is an integral part of the OS. You simply cannot run the Windows 7 without some version of IE. No installation packages necessary, right? Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7 is not available for download
   
4. Right then. I took the Windows Vista package and ran the installation anyway. All the compatiblity modes and such yield the same result. Internet Explorer 8 is not supported on this operating system
   
   
5. Re-installation instructions, part 1: Reinstalling IE8 on Windows 7. Not much of a help. The
   
6. Re-installation instructions, part 2: How to Reinstall Internet Explorer in Windows 7 and Vista. No help there either.
7. Registry tweaking into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions to see if {7B849a69-220F-451E-B3FE-2CB811AF94AE} and {CF7639F3-ABA2-41DB-97F2-81E2C5DBFC5D} are still there as suggested by How to Uninstall IE8. Nope. No help with that either. That article mentions "European Windows 7". What could the difference be?
8. Perhaps re-installing Service Pack 1 would help? But well... in Windows 7 SP1 cannot be re-installed like it was possible in Windows XP. That actually did fix a lot of operating systems gone bad at the XP-era.
   

The general consensus seems to be, that you simply cannot lose IE from Windows 7. Magically I did. Just based on the Wikipedia article about removing IE, it is possible.

Some of the symptoms I'm currently having is Windows Explorer Refuses to Open Folders In Same Window. Some of the necessary DLLs are not there and Windows Explorer behaves funnily.

I don't know what to attempt next.

I was transferring an existing production web-application to a new server. There was a slight gap in the operating system version and I ended up refactoring lot of the code to compensate newer libraries in use. One of the issues I bumped into and spent a while fixing was barcode printing. It was a pretty standard Code 39 barcode for the shipping manifest.

The old code was using a commercial proprietary TrueType font file. I don't know when or where it was purchased by my client, but it was in production use in the old system. Looks like such a fonts sell for $99. Anyway, the new library had barcode printing in it, so I chose to use it.

Mistake. It does somewhat work. It prints a perfectly valid barcode. Example:

The issue is, that it does not read. I had a couple of readers to test with, and even the really expensive laser-one didn't register the code very well. So I had to re-write the printing code to simulate the old functionality. The idea is to read the TTF-font, convert it into some internal form and output a ready-to-go file into a data directory, so that conversion is needed only once. After that the library can read the font and produce nice looking graphics including barcodes. Here is an example of the TTF-style:

The difference is amazing! Any reader reads that easily. Both barcodes contain the same data in them, but they look so much different. Wow!

Perhaps one day a barcode wizard will explain me the difference between them.

Danske has a huge ad campaign here in Finland about the new mobile payment system. You can send and receive money simply by using a phone number. I'm not going to dwell into the security issues of such a system today, because what could possibly go wrong! Ok, I'll give them that they have limited the damage by built in a cap of the amount you can transfer, 250,- € per day and 15.000,- € per year. So, in any unfortunate event people are not going to much (if 250,- € is all you have, then ... it's another story).

Anyway. I got the app from the App Store and started their registration process. It's long. It's tedious. It'll drive you crazy. Looks like they don't want your business.

The information they ask during registration:

• First name, last name
• E-mail address
• Phone number
• Credit card number
• IBAN-number of your bank account

Not a problem. I have all of those. But guess who has all the information in the same phone, you're supposed to enter the data. Typically that's not a problem. A simple task switch to password vault software, copy the numbers and back to registration.

Now the idiots who designed and wrote the app expect everybody to know and type long series of input data. Nobody ever does that! That's what the mobile computers are for: they store data and make it possible to copy and paste it between apps. But these design geniuses chose not to use anything standard. If you switch apps between registration, the entire process needs to be started over. Nice! Really nice thinking. The paste won't work anyway, so ...

Definitely this is a good example of now not to write apps.

Why doesn't my setting of NOT installing important updates automatically stick? Every once in a while it seems to pop itself back to the stupid position and does all kinds of nasty things in the middle of the night. From now on I'll start a counter how many times I'll go there to reset the setting back to the one I as system administrator chose.

All this rant is for the simple reason: I've lost data and precious working time trying to recover it. This morning I woke up and while roaming in the house in a semi-conscious state attempting to regain a thought, I noticed couple of LEDs glimmering in a place there shouldn't be any. My desktop PC was on and it shouldn't be. On closer inspection at 3 am it chose to un-sleep for the sake of installing Windows updates. This is yet another stupid thing for a computer to be doing (see my post about OS X waking up).

The bottom line is that the good people (fucking idiots) at Microsoft don't respect my decisions. They choose to force feed me theirs based on the assumption that I accidentally chose not to do a trivial system administration taks automatically. I didn't. I don't want to lose my settings, windows, documents, the list goes on.

The only real option for me would be to set up a Windows Domain. In Active Directory there would be possibility of fixing the setting and making it un-changeable. I just don't want to do it for a couple of computers. Idiots!

Earlier I wrote about upgrading my Windows 8 into Windows 8.1. At the time I didn't realize it, but the upgrade lost my Media Center Pack.

At the time I didn't realize that, but then I needed to play a DVD with the laptop and noticed, that the OS is not capable of doing that anymore. After Windows 8 was released it didn't have much media capabilities. To fix that, couple months after the release Microsoft distributed Media Center Pack keys for free to anybody who wanted to request one. I got a couple of the keys and installed one into my laptop.

Anyway, the 8.1 upgrade forgot to mention that it would downgrade the installation back to non-media capable. That should be an easy fix, right?

Wrong!

After the 8.1 upgrade was completed, I went to "Add Features to Windows", said that I already had a key, but Windows told me that nope, "Key won't work". Nice.

At the time I had plenty of other things to take care of and the media-issue was silently forgotten. Now that I needed the feature, again I went to add features, and hey presto! It said, that the key was ok. For a couple of minutes Windows did something magical and ended the installation with "Something went wrong" type of message. The option to add features was gone at that point, so I really didn't know what to do.

The natural thing to do next is to go googling. I found an article at the My Digital Life forums, where somebody complained having the same issue. The classic remedy for everything ever since Windows 1.0 has been a reboot. Windows sure likes to reboot. I did that and guess what, during shutdown there was an upgrade installing. The upgrade completed after the boot and there it was, the Windows 8.1 had Media Center Pack installed. Everything worked, and that was that, until ...

Then came the 2nd Tuesday, traditionally it is the day for Microsoft security updates. I installed them and a reboot was requested. My Windows 8.1 started disliking me after that. The first thing it did after a reboot, it complained about Windows not being activated! Aow come on! I punched in the Windows 8 key and it didn't work. Then I typed the Media Center Pack key and that helped. Nice. Luckily Windows 8 activation is in the stupid full-screen mode, so it is really easy to copy/paste a license key. NOT!

The bottom line is: Media Center Pack is really poorly handled. I'm pretty sure nobody at Microsoft's Windows 8 team ever installed the MCP. This is the typical case of end users doing all the testing. Darn!

I finally got my account into younited. It is a cloud storage service by F-Secure, the Finnish security company. They boast that it is secure, can be trusted and data is hosted in Finland out of reach by those agencies with three letter acronyms.

The service offers you 10 GiB of cloud storage and plenty of clients for it. Currently you can get in only by invite. Windows-client looks like this:

Looks nice, but ...

I've been using Wuala for a long time. Its functionality is pretty much the same. You put your files into a secure cloud and can access them via number of clients. The UI on Wuala works, the transfers are secure, they are hosted on Amazon in Germany, company is from Switzerland owned by French company Lacie. When compared with Younited, there is a huge difference and it is easy to see which one of the services has been around for years and which one is in open beta.

Given all the trustworthiness and security and all, the bad news is: In its current state Younited is completely useless. It would work if you have one picture, one MP3 and one Word document to store. The only ideology of storing items is to sync them. I don't want to do only that! I want to create a folder and a subfolder under it and store a folder full of files into that! I need my client-storage and cloud storage to be separate entity. Sync is good only for a handful of things, but in F-Secure's mind that's the only way to go. They are in beta, but it would be good to start listening to their users.

If only Wuala would stop using Java in their clients, I'd stick with them.

One of my servers is running Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 on a CentOS 6. CentOS is good platform for web hosting, since it is robust, well maintained and it gets updates for a very long time. The bad thing is that version numbers don't change during all those maintenance years. In many cases that is a very good thing, but when talking about web development, once a while it is nice to get upgraded versions and the new features with them.

In version 10 Parallels Plesk introduced a possibility of having a choice for the PHP version. It is possible to run PHP via Apache's mod_php, but Parallels Plesk does not support that. The only supported option is to run PHP via CGI or FastCGI. Not having PHP via mod_php is not a real problem as FastCGI actually performs better on a web box when the load gets high enough. The problem is, that you cannot stack the PHP installation on top of each other. Different versions of a package tend to reside in the same exact physical directory. That's something that every sysadmin learns in the beginning stages of their learning curve.

CentOS being a RPM-distro can have relocatable RPM-packages. Still, if you install different versions of same package to diffent directories, the package manager complains about a version having been installed already. To solve this and have my Plesk multiple PHP versions I had to prepare the packages myself.

I started with Andy Thompson's site webtatic.com. He has prepared CentOS 6 packages for PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5. His source packages are mirrored at http://nl.repo.webtatic.com/yum/el6/SRPMS/. He did a really good job and the packages are excellent. However, the last problem still resides. Now we can have a choice of the default CentOS PHP 5.3.3 or Andy's PHP 5.4/5.5. But only one of these can exist at one time due to being installed to the same directories.

My packages are at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/CentOS/6 x86_64/Parallels Plesk Panel/ and they can co-exist with each other and CentOS standard PHP. The list of changes is:

• Interbase-support: dropped
• MySQL (the old one): dropped
• mysqlnd is there, you shouldn't be using anything else anyway
• Thread safe (ZTS) and embedded versions: dropped
• CLI and CGI/FastCGI are there, the versions are heavily optimized to be used in a Plesk box
• php-fpm won't work, guaranteed!
• I did a sloppy job with that. In principle, you could run any number of php-fpm -daemons in the same machine, but ... I didn't do the extra job required as the Plesk cannot benefit from that.

After standard RPM-install, you need to instruct Plesk, that it knows about another PHP. Read all about that from Administrator's Guide, Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 from the section Multiple PHP Versions. This is what I ran:

/usr/local/psa/bin/php_handler --add -displayname 5.4 \
  -path /opt/php5.4/usr/bin/php-cgi \
  -phpini /opt/php5.4/etc/php.ini \
  -type fastcgi

After doing that, in the web hosting dialog there is a choice:

Note how I intentionally called the PHP version 5.4.22 as 5.4. My intention is to keep updating the 5.4-series and not to register a new PHP-handler for each minor update.

Also on a shell:

-bash-4.1$ /usr/bin/php -v
PHP 5.3.3 (cli) (built: Jul 12 2013 20:35:47)

-bash-4.1$ /opt/php5.4/usr/bin/php -v
PHP 5.4.22 (cli) (built: Nov 28 2013 15:54:42)

-bash-4.1$ /opt/php5.5/usr/bin/php -v
PHP 5.5.6 (cli) (built: Nov 28 2013 18:20:00)

Nice! Now I can have a choice for each web site. Btw. Andy, thanks for the packages.

The mail disable cannot be done via GUI. Going to subscription settings and un-checking the Activate mail service on domain -setting does not do the trick. Mail cannot be disabled for a single domain, the entire subscription has to be disabled. See KB Article ID: 113937 about that.

I found a website saying that domain command's -mail_service false -setting would help. It does not. For example, this does not do the trick:

/usr/local/psa/bin/domain -u domain.tld -mail_service false

It looks like this in the Postifx log /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog:

postfix/pickup[20067]: F2B5222132: uid=0 from=<root>
postfix/cleanup[20252]: F2B5222132: message-id=<20131128122425.F2B5222132@da.server.com>
postfix/qmgr[20068]: F2B5222132: from=<root@da.server.com>, size=4002, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
postfix-local[20255]: postfix-local: from=root@da.server.com, to=luser@da.domain.net, dirname=/var/qmail/mailnames
postfix-local[20255]: cannot chdir to mailname dir luser: No such file or directory
postfix-local[20255]: Unknown user: luser@da.domain.net
postfix/pipe[20254]: F2B5222132: to=<luser@da.domain.net>, relay=plesk_virtual, delay=0.04, delays=0.03/0/0/0, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered via plesk_virtual service)
postfix/qmgr[20068]: F2B5222132: removed

not cool.
However KB Article ID: 116927 is more helpful. It offers the mail-command. For example, this does do the trick:

/usr/local/psa/bin/mail --off domain.tld

Now my mail exits the box:

postfix/pickup[20067]: 5218222135: uid=10000 from=<user>
postfix/cleanup[20692]: 5218222135: message-id=<mediawiki_0.5297385c4d15f5.15419884@da.server.com>
postfix/qmgr[20068]: 5218222135: from=<user@da.server.com>, size=1184, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
postfix/smtp[20694]: certificate verification failed for aspmx.l.google.com[74.125.136.27]:25: untrusted issuer /C=US/O=Equifax/OU=Equifax Secure Certificate Authority
postfix/smtp[20694]: 5218222135: to=<luser@da.domain.net>, relay=ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[74.125.136.27]:25, delay=1.1, delays=0.01/0.1/0.71/0.23, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1385642077 e48si8942242eeh.278 - gsmtp)
postfix/qmgr[20068]: 5218222135: removed

Cool!

Over 5 years ago I filed a bug report about GCC crashing during ImageMagick compilation on RHEL 5. Nobody at Red Hat cared about that until couple days ago. Funny thing. At the time I had the issue, I simply kept the old ImageMagick and completed the project with that one. It would have been nice to have a more recent version, but since the new one would not compile, I just forgot about it.

Now the Red Hat guy Jeff is just being stupid. Why would anybody care anymore? Why did he have to do the obligatory works-for-me / need-more-information -routine. Now, at this point its just insulting, since they ignored the issue when it was actually present. Who would use RHEL 5 anymore. Not me.

I was pretty amazed to notice that my Mac actually wakes up for the sole purpose of running a scheduled backup and goes back to sleep. Oh, but why?

Going to web with the issue helped, I found Apple support community discussion with topic "time machine wake up unwanted". I don't think my pre 10.9 did that. Anyway I can confirm that 10.9 does this rather stupid thing.

Luckily the discussion thread also offers the fix: "Time Machine won't wake up a Mac, unless another Mac is backing-up to a shared drive on it via your network, and the Wake for network access box is checked in System Preferences > Energy Saver". Definitely something for me to try.

It helped! I can confirm, that there are no backups for the time my Mac was asleep. Pretty soon I woke it up, it started a TM-backup and completed it.

Thanks Pondini in Florida, USA!

This is my previous blog-entry about vim's comment leaking.

It looks like, my instructions are not valid anymore. When I launch a fresh vim and do the initial check:

:set formatoptions

As expected, it returns:

  formatoptions=crqol

However, doing my previously instructed:

:set formatoptions-=cro

Will not change the formatting. Darn! I don't know what changed, but apparently you cannot change multiple options at once. The new way of doing that is:

:set formatoptions-=c formatoptions-=r formatoptions-=o

After that, the current status check will return:

  formatoptions=ql

Now, the comments do not leak anymore.

My attempt to distribute the Huawei B593 exploit-tool failed yesterday. Apparently people could not download the source-code and got a HTTP/500 error instead.

The reason for the failure was, that the Apache HTTPd actually executed the Perl-script as CGI-script. Naturally it failed miserably due to missing dependencies. Also the error output was not very CGI-compliant and Apache chose to dis-like it and gave grievance as output. In the meantime, my server actually has runnable Perl-scripts, for example the DNS-tester. The problem now was: how to disable the script-execution for a single directory and allow it for the virtual host otherwise?

Solution:
With Google I found somebody asking something similar for ColdFusion (who uses that nowadays?), and adapted it to my needs. I created .htaccess with following content:

<Files ~ (\.pl$)>
    SetHandler text/html
</Files>

Ta daa! It does the trick! It ignores the global setting, and processes the Perl-code as regular HTML making the download possible.

Mr. Ronkainen at http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/ has done some really good research on Huawei B593 web interface. He discovered that the ping-command in diagnostics runs any command you'd like to. Really! Any command.

I being a lazy person didn't want to use cURL to do all the hacking, that's way too much work for me. So, I did a quick hack for a Perl-script to do the same thing. Get my script from http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/Huawei%20B593/exploit/B593cmd.pl

To use my script, you'll need 3 parameters

1. The host name or IP-address of your router, typically it is 192.168.1.1
2. The admin password, typically it is admin
3. The command to run. Anything you want. 

Example command B593cmd.pl 192.168.1.1 admin "iptables -nL INPUT" will yield:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination        
DROP       all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state INVALID
ACCEPT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state RELATED,ESTABLISHED
INPUT_DOSFLT  all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0          
INPUT_SERVICE_ACL  all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0          
INPUT_URLFLT  all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0          
INPUT_SERVICE  all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0          
INPUT_FIREWALL  all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0     

In my box the SSHd does not work. No matter what I do, it fails to open a prompt. I'll continue investigating the thing to see if it yields with a bigger hammer or something.

Happy hacking!

I was looking for a firmware for s-22 and minutes after finding the Vodafone firmware, a Telenor one popped up. It must be a really new one, as I cannot find any comments about it from The Net. The download location for the firmware version V100R001C00SP070 is at http://stup.telenor.net/huawei-b593/V100R001C00SP070/.

I didn't test this version either. If you do the upgrade, please drop me a comment. The version number and router compatibility information comes from extracted firmware header it says (in hexdump -C):

# hexdump -C Telenor_fmk/image_parts/header.img | head
00000000  48 44 52 30 00 d0 8f 00  cf 3b 61 18 00 00 01 00  |HDR0.....;a.....|
00000010  1c 01 00 00 a4 14 16 00  00 00 00 00 42 35 39 33  |............B593|
00000020  2d 55 31 32 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 31 30 30  |-U12........V100|
00000030  52 30 30 33 43 30 33 42  30 30 38 00 00 00 00 00  |R003C03B008.....|
00000040  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 31 30 30  |............V100|
00000050  52 30 30 31 43 30 30 53  50 30 37 30 00 00 00 00  |R001C00SP070....|
00000060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 65 72 2e  |............Ver.|
00000070  42 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |B...............|
00000080  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 31 31 2e 34  |............11.4|
00000090  33 33 2e 36 31 2e 30 30  2e 30 30 30 00 00 00 00  |33.61.00.000....|

This is the the obligatory warning: if you have a s-22 DON'T update with this firmware. If you don't know which version you have: DON'T update with this firmware. Nobody want's to brick the router, right? It is expensive and all.

Update 5th March 2014:
Mr. Bjørn Grønli shared his test results with us. Here is a spreadsheet to various B593u-12 firmware and their features.

I was looking for a firmware for s-22 and bumped into Vodafone's firmware. It seems to be in use at least in Vodafone Germany. The download location for the firmware version V100R001C35SP061 is at http://vve.su/vvesu/files/misc/B593/.

Just to be clear, the 3.dk's version for u-12 is V100R001C26SP054. Another thing: I didn't test the new version, currently my router runs just fine. If you do, please drop me a comment. The version number and router compatibility information comes from extracted firmware header it says (in hexdump -C):

# hexdump -C Vodafone_fmk/image_parts/header.img | head
00000000  48 44 52 30 00 10 9b 00  04 da 6f d2 00 00 01 00  |HDR0......o.....|
00000010  1c 01 00 00 d4 14 16 00  00 00 00 00 42 35 39 33  |............B593|
00000020  2d 55 31 32 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 31 30 30  |-U12........V100|
00000030  52 30 30 33 43 30 33 42  30 30 38 00 00 00 00 00  |R003C03B008.....|
00000040  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 31 30 30  |............V100|
00000050  52 30 30 31 43 33 35 53  50 30 36 31 00 00 00 00  |R001C35SP061....|
00000060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 56 65 72 2e  |............Ver.|
00000070  42 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |B...............|
00000080  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 31 31 2e 33  |............11.3|
00000090  33 35 2e 33 33 2e 30 30  2e 30 30 30 00 00 00 00  |35.33.00.000....|

This is the the obligatory warning: if you have a s-22 DON'T update with this firmware. If you don't know which version you have: DON'T update with this firmware. Nobody want's to brick the router, right? It is expensive and all.