Some projects are stranger than others. Today I embarked on reverse engineering a certain wireless device. In order to do so it became apparent that I would need to intercept my USB traffic and then be able to analyze it and likely send my own traffic over the USB. I ended up using a Beagle USB Protocol Analyzer and was very happy with it (it’s pretty inexpensive for what it does), given my specific requirements. I also ended up using the Wireshark’s USB analysis tool available here, although with more limited success. But while looking for a tool appropriate to my task I did find a few other tools out…
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iWork or Trojan
Ninja’s don’t often get trojans, but pirates of Mac software just might… According to an article on MacRumors, there is a pirated copy of iWork 09 floating around torrent-land that has a trojan in it. Apparently it creates /usr/bin/iWorkServices and then puts it in /System/Library/StartupItems. Now, in order to place the files in such a way it’s going to obviously need the user to enter a root password. But then, a regular installer would ask a user to do this too. The trojan has been named OSX.Trojan.iServices.A. Supposedly over 20,000 users have downloaded the infected files from the torrents, but at this time, I am unable to find one to…
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Let It Stop Snowing
The snow effect on the site was causing the pages to load slowly so it has been removed for now until I can comb through and make it less intensive. Plus, it’s not snowing any more in Minneapolis, so it isn’t really that indicative of the weather anyway. 😉
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Samba 4: A Poor Mans Active Directory
Today I pulled down the Samba 4 binaries and installed it using the instructions the developers are slowly building on the Samba 4 wiki. Overall it was a fairly painless experience, although I do believe I have a couple of bug reports to file (not surprising considering it is not out yet). Overall I found the process to be far easier than it has been in the past. The Samba team seems to realize that in order for Samba 4 to compete with Active Directory that it needs to integrate really well in the *nix server ecosystem. For example, like Active Directory you can choose to have Samba integrate into…
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Xsanity: Using Removable Media with Xsan
I posted another article on Xsanity. This one started out as an article on how to label LUNs from the command line, but ended up something completely different. It still explains how to do it from the command line, but since I wrote it while flying it ended up being more tailored to doing it on a USB jump drive since they don’t allow me to take an Xserve, Qlogic 9200 and a Promise RAID to my seat on the plane with me. Which is really a shame ’cause I could get SOOOO much done that way. Anyway, the article can be found here.
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Easily Automating and Simulating Web Traffic
There are a variety of applications out there that will simulate web traffic. But there’s nothing like the idea of true traffic. Load a page, click on a link, wait for the next page to load, click on another link, etc. Traditional load simulators simply are not real world enough in most cases. There are a variety of more real world simulators but they are typically cost prohibitive for the use I recently encountered a need for. So I started looking at using Automator. In its simplest form, you can just fire up Automator, click on the Record button and then perform an action. However, this is going to perform…
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Hacking at Random 2009 Conference
Hacking at Random, a hacking conference held every four years near Vierhouten in the Netherlands is back at it. Muddy, dirty, euro-hippie-hackers will descend on an otherwise quiet town (likely camping out and getting dirtier as the 4 day HackCon goes on) and, well, hack random stuff. It’s one of those funny things, either it sounds like heaven (in which case I’m guessing you’ve been to burning man at least once and while there tried to figure out why everyone seems to be such a luddite) or it sounds like hell (which means you’re likely not reading this blog). If you are one of the former I might just see…
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Spam and MediaWiki
Captcha is a nice anti-spam technique for websites. By forcing a user to enter a word that is a bit scrambled on the screen you can eliminate a large amount of spam that you would otherwise have to manually fix. reCaptcha is a free service that provides captcha functionality through an API. That’s what I’m using on this site and to be honest what I’m growing quite fond of. At this point I’ve leveraged it for about 5 sites in the past month and all have seen a dramatic drop in spam over previous techniques I’ve tried. This has been across Joomla!, WordPress and the latest: MediaWiki. The ConfirmEdit Extension…
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Finding the Serial Number on Tandbergs
The 1×10 VXA2 drives are kinda’ popular with smaller Xsan installations. While they don’t seem to have a ton of issues as with anything that has moveable parts at some point they’re gonna’ break down. When it happens you’re gonna’ need the serial numbers. This might be for the autoloader itself or for the tape drives on the inside. So where to look for these… Well, never fear, there’s no need to take the darn things apart. For the serial number of the autoloader, you can just look on the label on the back panel of the device or if you want to be one of the cool kids, from…
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Promise + Density >= Xsan Speeds?
Promise announced that they’ll now be offering 1TB drives in their Vtrak RAIDs. While it’s great to have the additional space, the darn things are just a tiny bit faster too. If bigger drives means faster, why? Doesn’t it seem like bigger drives, and thus more storage density, would make for slower speeds, not faster… Well, storage density is a measure of the number of bits that can be stored on a track, area of surface, or in a given volume. Areal density is the amount of data that can be placed onto a piece of storage, generally measured in bits per square inch. Higher density is typically better as…