Hacker's ramblings

My cloud storage choice has been LaCie's (the hard drive company) Wuala. The main reason why I did choose Wuala is in their Privacy Policy:

2. Stored Content

Wuala encrypts all your files before they leave your computer. They are encrypted such that only you and those you have authorized can decrypt them. Even LaCie cannot decrypt them unless you have made them public or share them by secret weblink and access them with your web browser. In the latter case, the encryption key is temporarily sent to our web server as part of the URL for the purpose of serving the requested data.

They do exactly like Kim's MEGA. They encrypt everything so that even they can not access it (or at least that's what they claim to do, nobody has yet proven that wrong, though). That is: unless you choose not to encrypt the data, or publish the decryption key, but then it is an another story.

The sad thing is that they use Java on client-side to do the access. Java Runtime has been described as a disease in an article in the Forbes magazine. They're right. It is a disease. In Wuala's own discussion forum there are a number of happy customers pleading to stop using Java.

What really pisses me off is that on my 64-bit Windows 7, the only reason to have a 32-bit JRE is Wuala. All my other software utilizes the 64-bit version I also have installed. Whenever a new JRE version comes out, I need to update both versions. Also I simply cannot use Wuala on all of my computers. For security reasons, I refuse to install Java Runtime into them.

Wuala: Stop using Java now! Please.

Earlier I wrote about Hyper-V crashing with BSOD. The entire project was doomed from the beginning. After I managed get the Windows not to crash, all I managed to do is get the Linux installer to hang whenever it attempted to anything major on the hard drive. I configured Hyper-V to provide the hard drive from a .vhdx-file, so I initially suspected that old .vhd-file might help, but no, nothing helped. Any minor operations succeeded, but any sort of normal usage made the Linux to hang.

Symptoms include:

• Console message: "INFO: task jbd2/sda blocked for more than 120 seconds" and instruction to deactivate the warning with:
  echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs
  Example:
  • http://helpinlinux.com/tag/echo-0-proc-sys-kernel-hung_task_timeout_secs/
• Repeated "Sense Key" -messages in dmesg, example:
  • http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-734696-view-next.html?sid=64f39476a9b96703e2a2c998023729b9
• No change in /sys/block/sda/stat:
  • Kernel documentation about block-device stat says that columns 3 and 6 contain the number of sectors read and written.
  • In my hung box, the values don't increase.

I was puzzled about this for a very long time. It took me several hours to bump into Linux-SCSI mailing list's discussion about the issue. There Mr. Olaf Hering describes an issue "storvsc loops with No Sense messages".

Luckily Mr. Hering realized what's going on and made a patch to fix the problem. Unfortunately the fix is not yet pushed into mainstream Linux kernel.

Since I was about to install ArchLinux, I took the trouble of compiling the necessary kernel module of hv_storvsc.ko into following kernel versions:

• 3.8.4, used in installation ISO-image:
  • SHA-1 sum: 74d2a5de73a4c7d963b649eb34b171eba86a268c
• 3.8.6, the version that got installed when I got my install done:
  • SHA-1 sum: 57a4216fc6749085820703d47cd87dcce47b1739
• 3.8.7, the version that it upgraded into when I did a system update:
  • SHA-1 sum: 3f8757ab69c97a6389c7c83a8ef57f16e9caa85d

All of the packages are available for you to download at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/ArchLinux/2013.04.01/. Your only trick is to get them replaced into initial RAM-disk -image. I just replaced the original file at /usr/lib/modules and re-ran the mkinitrd-command.

There was an update to my Fedora 17 Linux and among others, I got a new kernel. I didn't notice it at the time, but the reboot ate one of my Ethernet interfaces. There are two NICs on the motherboard, but on top of those, I have an Intel multi-port NIC. So in the end, there are more than your usual dose of ports.

Traffic to one particular LAN didn't function and I started to investigate:

# ifconfig -a
...
rename5: flags=4098<BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 90:e2:ba:1d:33:f1  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device memory 0xfe7e0000-fe800000

Well... I don't remember which one of my Ethernet-ports was rename5 after installation. Typically they are something like eth0, eth1 and so forth. Modern Linuxes tend to add more complexity with names like p2p2 or so, but I've never seen rename5-type naming.

From that I concluded that udev goofed up something. Fedora 17 does not create the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules-file which would solve my problem. Lot of Googling later, I found this page, it contains very useful Perl-script to dig enough system information and report it in udev-compatible format, in my case it yields:

# perl /root/bin/write_udev
...
# Added by 'write_udev' for detected device 'rename5'.
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="90:e2:ba:1d:33:f1", NAME="rename5"

I created the persistent rule -file and added above into it. I just edited the NAME-part and renamed the interface properly.

Getting the rules to take effect was bit tricky. None of these worked:

udevadm trigger
udevadm control --reload-rules
udevadm trigger --attr-match=address='90:e2:ba:1d:33:f1'
udevadm trigger --sysname rename5

The trick was to get the full path with udevadm trigger --verbose --sysname rename5 -command and use the test-command with the full path:

udevadm test --action=add /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:06.0/0000:02:00.1/net/rename5

Then I got my new rule to take effect immediately and my interface up and working.

"Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website." (Direct quote from their website.)

Utilizing the results from the project is pretty straightforward, just get an existing library and start using it to check incoming IP-addresses. One of the PHP-libraries is AbyssGuard. It is distributed under GPLv3 for personal use. Being an open-source fan I naturally like to exercise my GPLv3-given right to modify and distribute modified copies of the original work.

However, in this case the author chose not to distribute the source code. WTF?! It appears that the only format he chose to distribute the project is in obfuscated code. I don't much care about PHP's eval()-function and like to configure my PHP with disable_functions=eval whenever possible, so this piece won't even run on my box.

I did the only reasonable thing an open-source loving PHP-coder would do. I de-obfuscated the code and distributed it on my site with appropriate GPLv3-required notification about it. So feel free, it is at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/AbyssGuard/ for you to get it.

Since most modern Intel CPUs have VT-x in them and Windows 8 Pro has Hyper-V in it, I had to make use of the combo on my old laptop. It has a i5 mobile CPU which makes it on the less powerful end of CPUs. But the simple existence of a possibility of running a Linux on top of a Windows laptop makes me want to try it.

I added the Hyper-V feature into my Windows. I started the Hyper-V Management Console, added a virtual network switch and created a new virtual machine. It booted into Linux installer and the entire Windows crashed with a blue-screen-of-death. WTF?!

After a number of attempts with tweaking the Hyper-V settings, no avail. Every attempt to actually do anything reasonable in the guest system yielded a BSOD. Couple more futile attempts on command-line indicated that it had to have something to do with networking.

Next day I managed to Google into one discussion thread on Microsoft's social forums. There another unfortunate user is experiencing the same symptoms than me. Unlike his Windows 7, on my Windows 8 BSOD there isn't much of a stack trace or any usable information. But I had to try something, so I took an Ethernet-cable and plugged it into my laptop and reconfigured the Hyper-V virtual switch not to use the Intel Centrino 6200 WLAN, but a 1 Gbit/s Realtek port. That did the trick! Apparently some network drivers are not Hyper-V compatible. I don't know how to tell the difference between functioning or not functioning driver, but it is there.

There seems to be some sort of issue with hard drive, but that's an another story ...

Update 30th Dec 2013:
Anything I say below is subject to debate. This issue is not clear, see the new article about Mac Mini HDMI Dolby Digital audio output.

My mini is mainly for entertainment purposes and I chose to use it at living room. That should be an easy setup, right? Just plug the HDMi-output of the mini into my Yamaha amp which is connected to my Sony TV and everything will work out just fine. No.

Video-signal passes through the amp and TV displays it as supposed in correct resolution and frame rate. No glitches there. But the audio-signal has issues, there were only disappointing two channels. I was expecting to see 5.1 channels as my Yamaha amp has been set up already.

First I confirmed that my Mac Mini supported multichannel output (2 channels as stereo is not multi). There is no adapter in my setup (About Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters @ Apple support), so initially I had to assume that HDMi-port supports multichannel audio since my model is newer than mid 2010 and newer than early 2009 with adapter. To my understanding 2009 is the point where multichannel audio was possible without 3rd party add-ons. Anyway, I'm way above that line and should have the support.

Apple support forums have vast number of discussion threads about getting 5.1 sound. It is apparent, that for some reason, this is a problematic issue. I'm saying that the reason is: it does not work out-of-the-box as most Apple fans are used to doing everything in the Apple-land.

After numerous failing attempts I finally managed to get my setup working. At one point I realized that my mini is displaying audio status based on my TV, which obviously can produce only stereo sound. There is the amp in the HDMi-chain, and mini should detect audio by that. When I enable multichannel output from OS X:

... my amp does not reflect the change. It still displays the input signal as stereo. This is not typical behaviour. My amp correctly detects the type of the audio signal on all of my other devices. The fact that I missed was, that I can force the amp to do 7-channel signal:

... then 5.1 sound works perfectly.

Testing that everything works ok is very simple: In the MIDI-sound app there is the test-button. When each channel produces sound correctly, I downloaded a couple of movie trailes from http://trailers.apple.com/ and verified that all was as it was supposed to be.

Hope this helps somebody struggling with multi-channel issues.

This is a follow up on Windows Backups -article I wrote earlier.

I've been running Acronis on daily basis on a couple of Windows-machines to take a backup into a NAS-box. I have been mostly happy with the software, but ... Here is my grievance list:

• Consolidation: Completely worthless! A number of users according to Acronis' forums are having problems with it. The recommended approach is not to use it. See: 36241: Consolidation Process Hanging. There was an occasion when I waited for 30+ hours for the consolidation to complete. It did, but come on! 30 hours to copy 80 GiB of data! On a best case-scenario it does really weird things, aborting with no obvious reason and leaving temp files lying around.
  
• Laptop backup: Works ok when destination NAS-box is reachable, completely worthless when not. There is NO way to cancel the job besides holding down the power button (my laptop does not have a reset). I spent roughly an hour trying to cancel / kill / nuke / stop a backup job which is failing to write a backup for obvious reason that the destination drive was not there to be written into. I shouldn't be too hard to automatically abort a backup job when the network connection is not there. This is the worst issue I've been experiencing.
  
• NAS-drive not found: This happens occasionally on a laptop, but not on a desktop PC. The problem is a weird one. Every possible test I do from TrueImage or Windows Explorer indicate that everything is there and accessible, but the job does not see that for some unknown reason. This can be circumvented with a cancel job / start job -pair. Sometimes a previous, already existing backup needs to be pointed manually to ATI. I don't know why it lost connection with the file which has existed after ATI wrote it.
  
• Support period: Pretty short for new user. Couple of weeks or so. I got my product installed and running, but when there were real issues (see above), the support was already gone.
  

I've been looking for any suitable competing products, but apparently there are none available. The lack of better backup solution leaves me running Acronis TI. This is pretty close to a good product, but apparently the developers cannot be bothered with this type of easily fixable minor issues.

The short version is: it does not work.

Having a SSD is feasible in the long run only if there is possibility of operating system informing the drive that an entire drive block (typically 16 KiB) can be erased. openSUSE wiki has following quote in it: "There are three terms often used to interchangeably describe this same basic functionality: Discard, UNMAP, and TRIM." This discard is possible only when there are no operating system sectors (typically 512 bytes) in the drive block.

Here is what I tried to do: I installed two Intel® Solid-State Drive 520 Series drives into my server and tried to see if RedHat-based CentOS 6.4 has enough backported bits & pieces to support RAID-1 /w TRIM.

The drives are fine and kernel TRIM-support is there:

hdparm -I /dev/sda | fgrep -i trim
           *    Data Set Management TRIM supported
           *    Deterministic read after TRIM

My initial attempt had GPT-partition table with a single RAID-partition on it. The command I used is:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

I created EXT-4 on top of md0:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0

and mounted it:

mount /dev/md0 /mnt/tmp/ -o discard,noatime,nodiratime

The discard-support is in the kernel ok:

mount | fgrep md0
/dev/md0 on /mnt/tmp type ext4 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,discard)

The next thing I tried to do is confirm if TRIM does work either automatically or as a batch job. I followed instructions from this blog entry and tried to run hdparm --fibmap on a newly created file. It failed with a segfault. Apparently that is a known issue, so I ended up packaging the latest version myself. My own RPM-package is available at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/CentOS/6%20x86_64/hdparm-9.43-1.el6.x86_64.rpm.

With latest hdparm 9.43 I could verify that FIEMAP (file extent map)  ioctl() does not return correct results on a soft-RAID-1 device. The LBA-sector given by hdparm does not seem to contain the file's data.

My next attempt was to tear down the existing md0 and re-build it using entire drive as RAID-device.

mdadm --stop /dev/md0
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sda1
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdb1
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb
mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/tmp/ -o discard,noatime,nodiratime

I ran the same test, but this time hdparm --fibmap informed it failed to determine the drive geometry correctly. A short peek into the source code revealed that current version of hdparm works only with partitions. It tries to load the RAID-partition start LBA even if it is not located on a partition. I made a quick fix for that, it turned out that /sys/block/md0/md/rd0/block has DEVTYPE=disk or DEVTYPE=partition to indicate the base drive type.

Nevertheless, it did not help. fibmap does not return the correct LBA-sector. I loaded a Bash-script to do the manual TRIMming of a SSD-RAID-1, but it only confirmed what I already knew. The LBA-mapping does not work enough to see if discard works or not.

Currently I don't have anything on my RAID-1, I'll have to see if it is possible to get the discard working somehow. A newer Linux might do the trick.

There was bit of a duel (or a full-scale war) between Spamhaus and Cyberbunker. Spamhaus has published some information about their side here. All this dates back to 2011 when they first collided. The latest skirmish started with Spamhaus on the losing side, as allegedly Cyberbunker had some help with a botnet creating tons of DNS-requests to Spamnaus' servers. Cyberbunker naturally denies all this, but in reality they are simply coward liars! Who else would have the motivation to knock Spamhaus off the net. No need to think that any longer.

Since the enemy had some help, what happened next was Spamhaus joining forces with Cloudflare, a company specializing in mitigating the effects of a DDoS-attack. What happened at the end of March 2013 has been described as "The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet" by Cloudflare blog.

The spam-blocking service Spamhaus is providing technically works on top of DNS. Anybody running a receiving mail-server can configure it to confirm the connecting client's IP-address with a simple DNS-query returning funny-but-pre-determined names as an answer to determine the "spamminess" level of connecting client. The judgement who is a spammer and who is not is made solely by the Spamhaus. That's what the dispute between them and Cyberbunker is all about.

As described by Cloudflare, technically Cyberbunker's (alleged) DDoS works by amplifying incoming 36 UDP-bytes containing a valid query for RIPE.net's zone into 100-fold. There are at least 30.000 open DNS-servers responding to recursive queries. All they have to do is spoof the original UDP-packet's sender's IP into Spamhaus and they have harnessed a huge Internet traffic amplification machine targeting a single IP-address.

Since I myself am running a couple of DNS-boxes, I wanted to re-verify my servers, that they cannot be used into such activity. I googled some and found The Measurement Factory's Open resolver test. That appears to be a piece of crap. You punch in an IP-address and get open/closed status as a response. You can enter any invented IP-address to get the closed-verdict. WTF?!

The second thing I found is much convincing: Open DNS Resolver Project. The problem with that one is, that they just browse The Net and try to find open DNS-servers. For example my boxes were not listed. Not as open, closed or existing. They don't publish information about properly configured DNS-servers. It still leaves the original question unanswered: Can my DNS-server be used for attacking innocent or not.

Here is my answer to the problem: http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/DNStest/dnstest-cgi.pl

It caches the result of any query for 24 hours, and cannot be used for bullying somebody. That feature I simply stole copied from The Measurement Factory. Its fully written in Perl and even the source code is available for you to get.

Initial feedback after putting the thing on-line was to support FQDNs. The answer is NO. My thing won't do any unnecessary DNS-requests, if possible. But if you have any other suggestions, please drop a comment.

Everybody who has ever been to a store has seen those electronic gates which are meant to keep shoplifters from stealing stuff. Normal shoplifters use some kind of countermeasures and are actually not bothered by the gates, only honest people get to suffer from them. Typically the gate triggers the alarm by accident when shop personnel simply forgot to remove the tag, or sometimes a rolled wire of some sorts will resemble a coil so that the gate thinks that my recently bought extension cord and/or Ethernet cable is an anti-theft tag. The other not-so-typical scenario is that, there is a tag attached to thing that you bought, but the gate does NOT trigger the alarm. Well, this time that's what happened.

I'm at home and realize, that there is a tag attached. It looks ugly and annoying and should be removed. Since I've always wanted to know how do they remove them in the shop, I took my trustworthy Dremel and started cutting.

Here are the pics:

It looks that there are 4 lightly magnetic ball bearings inside a small cavity made out of plastic and steel. The steely part of the cave is also magnetic so that it attracts the ball bearings to stay on that side. Then there is the part they remove in the store, it is a metallic stud which really doesn't move a lot when pulled. If a lot of force is applied to the stud, the four ball bearings are tightening to the direction of the pull, so that is it impossible (or very very hard) to actually succeed in removing the stud from the tag. In the store (you see them next to the cash register) they have a powerful magnet which is applied to the plastic side of the tag. When the tag is placed on top of the magnet, it pulls the ball bearings down (with the help of gravity), making the stud move away. A removed stud slips back to the tag very easily without magnets or anything, the ball bearings just move out of the way.

The tag is fully covered with plastic and most of it is a coil for the gate. Normal tags don't have sharp edges or brownish dust from dremeling. This one does, since I literally cut it half. The white plastic part in the 2nd pic is typically covered with the black plastic. Also the stud in the pics 3 and 4 is bit longer, since it is not cut short with a power tool.

Next question typically is: How to remove them next time without cutting/breaking the tag? My answer is that I don't know. My tag is busted anyway, but next time I have one that is not busted, I'll try applying some sort of magnet and hitting the tag to the direction of the magned. Eventually, it boils down to the magnetic force, so a powerful one is recommended. I don't know if I have one that has enough pull in it, but I'll sure try. Another thing that comes into mind is to keep twisting the stud while pulling, it should make the ball bearings roll and stay loose enough.

Couple of weeks ago openSUSE-project released their latest desktop-Linux. That is the distro The Man himself, Linus Torvalds had a dispute about security policy of needing a root access to add a new wireless network. He actually said that openSUSE-people are morons. A year ago, they were very defensive and insisted that Mr. Man had it wrong. In reality: no other operating system requires demi-god permissions to do such a trivial task. In 12.3 the morons finally got it, connecting to a new wireless LAN does not require any special permissions.

My hardware for running a desktop-Linux is a very old Apple MacBook. The Mac OS X system info says, that this is a 1,1 hardware, making it pretty much one of the first ever Intel Macs there exists. It has two gigs of RAM and enough hard disk to run pretty much any modern disto. Being a Mac, it also has enough Intel chips in it to fulfill any requirements that modern distros have for 2D or 3D graphics, sound or display. It definitely lacks the I/O or CPU power that any not-6-years-old laptop might have, but it is very suitable for running a desktop-Linux. Mr. Torvalds prefers Apple Airs, but I didn't want to spend that much money on an used computer.

openSUSE install just keeps on improving. I always back up the old computer and do a fresh install, I sure haven't met a working operating system upgrade ever. During installation, all the settings are there if you need the, but the defaults are very good making the entire process flow smoothly. This time there was a glitch when the Atheros WLAN-chip was not auto-detected during install. I had to manually go configure network devices and add a wireless device. At that point the ath5k driver was detected and I got the box connected to The Net for the rest of the install. No other special things there.

After install the first thing I got was the pommed-package. It makes the Apple-keys work in Linux and is definitely needed. My keyboard layout is Finnish, so I also had to compile keyfuzz to get rid of those useless Apple-keys which are called Meta-keys in Linux. I need my alts, and do the following mappings:

 # Map Alt to Meta
458978 125
# Map Meta to Alt
458979 56
# Map Right Meta to Right Alt
458983 100

The final thing to do is to get the iSight-camera working. All it requires is the Apple-copyrighted firmware and it is ready to go. What I did, was to restore my previous file from a backup, but if you need to get one for yourself, there is ift-package or iSight Firmware Tools. With that you can extract the needed bits from Mac OS X device driver and place the resulting file into your Linux. There already is a Linux kernel-module isight_firmware waiting for the file to appear. As a result a brand new Video4Linux-device should appear and you can test it with MPlayer (that breaks couple of dozen copyrights and you need to get from The Net):

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=320:height=240:device=/dev/video0 -fps 30

The 12.3 runs clearly much faster than 12.2. I have all the KDE4-desktop effects enabled and 12.2 really couldn't manage the 3D-graphics. 12.3 seems to be able to get more juice out of the Intel's 945 GPU. With all the modern software and latest Linux kernel the open-source -guys are finally getting there (with support from Novell, of course). This is actually a very usable desktop for a geek like me.

openSUSE 12.3 get's my seal-of-approval with a bonus thumbs up.

This is a really weird one. On 64-bit Windows, a regular USB bar code scanner is not detected as a HID-keyboard. Actually it falls into smthing really weird -category in the USB-devices. And needless to say, but the scanner effectively does not work. Windows simply states that "driver not found" and adds that "device may not function properly". I tried upgrading the driver from Device Manager, but no dice there.

Couple of users are complaining the same thing, but one actually has a solution. The idea is to first connect a real keyboard into USB-port and after that the barcode scanner. WTF?! It actually works! Windows gets fooled enough by the actual keyboard, that barcode scanner works even if the real keyboard is unplugged. It's just that an actual keyboard needs to be present during the driver detection.

I had couple of Zebex scanners and tried to make them work with my Windows 7, but all I got was frustration and no tangible results (beside the keyboard trick). I had a the-cheapest-there-is -model and a proper one, but there was no real difference in how Windows saw them. Based on the reports available in the Net, this is not a single manufacturer issue, its more like a Windows HID-keyboard issue. Then I was doing something else for a while, enough for the laptop power saver to kick in. When I got back to the computer and slapped it up from the sleep, then miraculously Windows detected the already plugged in barcode scanner as a HID-keyboard!! WTF?! #2

Ever since, both scanners have been functioning ok. Also, I'm pretty sure that now my laptop has been "tainted" and I cannot continue my tests with it anymore. I'd probably should re-install entire operating system just to confirm the results. But I'd rather not.

If anybody can explain what happened there, please drop a comment.

MySQL Enterprise Monitor is a really good tool to see what's going on in the DB. At least I'd like to give my DB-box all the possible resources, I'm running the Service Manager -part in another server.

Sometimes there is a need to upgrade servers. This time it moving other roles out of the way was piece-of-cake, except the Service Manager. In the entire Internet, there is no spot-on information about how to do it in detail. The only really relevant information I could find is B.5. Backing up MySQL Enterprise Service Manager in the MySQL documentation. In the doc they manage to describe how to back things up, but not really how to restore anything.

I did the operation in following steps:

1. Fresh installation of Service Manager in the new server
• I chose not to configure anything and ended the installation there
2. Backup of the data as described in the doc:
   mysqldump --single-transaction -uservice_manager -p -P13306 -h127.0.0.1 mem > mem.dump
   
3. Restore of data into the new server using command like:
   /opt/mysql/enterprise/monitor/mysql/bin/mysql -u service_manager -p -P13306 -h 127.0.0.1
   
4. In the DB-server the Enterprise Monitor Agent needs to be reconfigured to send information to a new Service Manager
1. Edit file /opt/mysql/enterprise/agent/etc/mysql-monitor-agent.ini
2. Confirm value of agent-mgmt-hostname
   
3. Confirm value of aggr-mem-baseurl
   
5. After these changes a login to the newly setup Service Manager showed the DB as fully functional
   

Hope this helps somebody.

That happened to me with March 2013 updates. The machine was stuck with "Operations are in progress" -message for 12 hours. At that point I deduced that it is unlikely for the machine to actually be doing anything.

The real question is: What to do?

1. Force the thing into reboot cycle?
2. Wait a while longer?

I chose 1. and was ready for the smelly thing to hit the fan. Nothing happened. Windows finalized the updates during boot, which is pretty much normal in the circumstances. After that I logged in and everything worked fine.

I bumped into couple of issues earlier. Article about missing Integration Services and Networking Status: degraded.

RedHat managed to package the Integration Service drivers into RHEL 6.4 which essentially is the base of CentOS 6.4. So, from now on the much required drivers are bundled in the installation source.

There are no major changes in the drivers, though. Network status is still degraded and a hint of upgrading the drivers is there. It seems to be a mystery to everybody how to do the upgrade.

The list of integration services is unchanged:

• Operating system shutdown
• Time synchronization
• Data Exchange
• Heartbeat
• Backup (volume snapshot)

This article in Microsoft's social network describes the changes. Looks like Dynamic Memory (ballooning) is the only new feature. That wasn't even in the RHEL 6.4 beta, but they pushed it into final release.