Category Archives: Systems

Tips on Operating Systems mostly focus on Linux and Mac OS X
Trucs et astuces, tests autour des systèmes d’exploitation, principalement Linux et MacOsX

PirateBox upgrade to Forban

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I’m looking to upgrade my two pirate box to test the mesh network forban between the two. Apparently, this will slow down the device as the TP Link small devices are not so powerful, but i like the idea to be able to create mesh network between piratebox. In my point of view it is the right way to make this project real.

I actually have my two piratebox configured in version 0.5, i’ll firstly update them to the latest version, then add the Forban tool following Matthias’s materials.

I’ll upgrade my TP Link Mr3020 and TP Link MR3040.

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Search strings in a binary file

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A simple way to get strings from a binary file on Linux, use the od command with -S option.

od -S 6 file.bin

will print all the strings with at least 6 printable chars

 

Restoring a grub2 bootloader broken

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After I had to change a hard drive for another my linux Opensuse 12.2 grub bootloader was broken, here are some of the learning of this debugging phase :

– Restore grub to the new disk

– Start kernel manually

– Fix hard drive references

At the end, the process to recreate the bootloader and particularly to recreate the initrd file was broken, and I assume bugged. To really make it works, I had to update the whole Linux and again at the end of the process the booloader based on grub2 was impossible to execute. The solution was to select Grub (version 1) and it worked. I assume it was possible before update the whole distribution to use yast2 booloader and choose grub instead of grub2.

When you get a message like waiting for device … to apear at boot, it may be because of the initrd does not contain the right modules to access the hard drive. It appears when the motherboard has been changed.

This article is mostly notes taken during this debugging phase … so do not consider it as an howto but as a list of command and possible way to debug this kind of issues…

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Promiscious mode wifi capture on iMac with Atheros 5416

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Sound a old hardware, but as it is not the first time I have issue to dump (tcpdump or wireshark) wifi connection on promiscuous mode, I prefer to write it once of all … It is not working !!!

If any of you have a solution to make it works, I’ll be happy to update this post. For the others, I expect you will loss less time searching and trying.

I’ve try to change the rights on the /dev/bfp* devices

I’ve try to use tcpdump -i en1 host xx.xx.xx.xx instead of wireshark

And at the end, I finally just got the broadcast traffic and the local traffic.

 

HowTo synchronize two Linux server using rsync over ssh

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When your need to replicate data from one server to another, the rsync solution is usefull. It works over ssh and you do not really have any specific thing to configure. Here are the options to be used to get a full copy with all the rights and ownership replicated :

 rsync -P -azc src_files_or_dir user@dest_server_ip:/dest_server_dir/

This works if the destination server have ssh open on port 22. If it is not the case another set of options is required :

rsync -P -azc -e "ssh -p dest_port" src_files_or_dir user@dest_server_ip:/dest_server_dir/

Hope it’ll help ! fro sure it will be a good reminder for me 😉

 

Use Boinc with opensuse 12.2

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I had some trouble to install boinc application on OpenSuse 12.2 due to wxWidget configuration…

The right way tomake it work is to :

– Install wxWidgets-wxcontainer-compat-lib-config

– Install the libwx_xxxx_xxx-2_8-0-wxcontainer required (use ldd boincmgr to get the list)

– Create a symbolic link on libnotify.so.4 to libnotify.so.1 in /usr/lib64

After doing this, it worked for mand the following message has disapeared : symbol _ZTV16wxWindowListNode, version WXU_2.8 not defined in file libwx_gtk2u_core-2.8.so.0 with link time reference

 

Mac OS X virtual IP configuration

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To create a virtual IP on mac OS X, the command to be used is the following one, for example on the wifi interface :

sudo ifconfig en1 alias xx.xx.xx.xx/zz up when xx.xx.xx.xx is the expected IP address and zz the netmask

to remove the virtual interface replace alias by -alias option.

 

Customizing PirateBox configuration

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After installing the piratebox, it’s nice to customize it a little bit… There are many reason for this, the first one, in my point of view is to have a more understandable SSID name depend on your country… Here are the list of the step of the customizations I made on myne.

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