Recently I had a Tablo Dual Lite OTA DVR appliance fall into my hands from a family member after its wireless started to act up. Doing what I do best, I decided to tear it apart and figure out how it works and in doing so found a few methods to gain root access into the stock firmware. One thing I did not expect to find, however, is an engineering backdoor that could be hijacked to provide an easy method for root access.
Continue readingI recently got my hands on a nice new NAS box that included a few QLogic quad port 4gb fibre channel cards and I decided to mess with the idea of upgrading my SAN from Ethernet to Fiber. The problem is the only real way to do this without too much pain is to use SCST. For those who are interested in setting that up, I followed this Tutorial and I had no issues getting it going on a 3.14.5 kernel… minus the init.d startup script not working, which I have a fix for. So, if you have issues with SCST not running at startup in Debian, this post is for you!
If you have a handful of servers you need to add to Saltstack for management purposes, and don’t want to spend 10 minutes per node setting it up the Saltstack minion, you normally do one of two things. One, create a script to automate the process for you or Two, streamline the process to a single command. Well I did the latter, and felt like sharing it so you don’t have to spend 5 minutes dealing with regular expressions and sed.
If you have an AMD 990FX Chipset Motherboard, and have an issue where the network interface stops working during large file transfers, you may need to update your network driver. To fix this, you just install the r8168 driver. Problem is, by default it will not compile on the 3.10 kernel. So, here is a copy of the official r8168 driver patched to compile and run on the linux 3.10 kernel!
Download: r8168-8.036.00-Patched.zip
For the past month or so my storage box has been driving me insane. Whenever I SSH into the box, after about 30 seconds it would always disconnect me. I checked everything from routes, to firewall rules, and nothing was amiss. I spent weeks looking for the cause of these SSH Disconnects, but to no avail. That is, until recently. After some extreme googling, I was able to figure out the cause and I had to share it. Continue reading
After searching the internet for a monitoring solution for my network, I can finally say I have found the best contender, and its worth sharing. Consider this a update/solution to my previous rant about monitoring software.
How does a painless, easy install sound? How about cross platform support? Would you like Graphing/Logging of network traffic and system resources? What if I said it was based on PHP/SNMP, and it is 100% free and open-source? Ladies and gents, let me introduce you to Observium!
This is technically a continuation of my post Here, but I felt this deserved its own post. If you are like me, and have Samba mounts that HAVE to be in place and ready right after boot, you want a way to make sure the drive is mounted before the system fully starts up. Well, I made a nice little script that will check a samba mount at boot time.
CoovaChilli is an open-source captive portal system for linux that I personally use to run a free wireless access system around my area. The reason I use coovachilli instead of, oh I don’t know, nocatspash, is that with CoovaChilli I can not only limit speed per each connection, but I am also able to log IP and MAC Address’s to prevent abuse. So, lets go install coovachilli.
So I recently invested in a new storage server and set it up as a NFS server so I could set up HA to prevent downtime with my VM’s when I had maintenance to do on my Proxmox Hosts. The problem is that if I use iSCSI it sends the drive as a block device that a single VM can use and the problem with NFS for me is that it was extremely slow (need to do more research on this) but when the server was setup with samba, I was able to get 113MB/s both ways to the box from my desktop (8x 300GB SATA drives in raid 10). So why not just use samba with proxmox?
So I finally decided to make the jump to virtualization. Sure the performance is 1-3% slower then running on raw hardware, but the features gained from this way outweigh the cons. Now I can do backups on the fly, snapshots, quickly move resources around machines, and its all free thanks to Proxmox! Proxmox is a Linux Debian based distro that utilizes a custom kernel with support for OpenVZ and KVM. I’l go more into depth on Proxmox later, but for now here is my situation.