Kosh’s Web Log

Lately I’ve played with a fair few new things, I’ll be writing up some details on :
- VMWare Server 2.0.0 on Gentoo.
- My Distributed Hosting Control Panel setup.
- File Server building
- Woes with GA-EP45-DS5 Motherboards and Windows XP.

I’ll probably write up a guide later, but I started using Bogofilter lately for spam filtering.

I love it, bayesian filtering with almost no real overhead. (I’ll back this up with stats later)

Just an update to refresh the pages.

Save The Internet Rally.

Save the Internet, Brisbane City, Parliament House, 12 Noon, 1st of November 2008

Update: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=31469553613 : A facebook event has been created.

I contacted ACA and TT (through their website forms) about the Internet Filtering plan that the Australian Government is pushing through.

I’ve been really vocal about this previously, but now I think it’s time to start committing myself into writing and helping others get their letters written and sent to the people both responsible and the people letting this happen.

Click on the article to see the full text I submitted.
Continue reading ‘Contacted ACA and TT’ »

Source code attached, see end of article.

I had to pull the password for the internet connection out of a router at work recently and stumbled upon a problem that didn’t seem to have much of a solution, the router allows you to save a binary copy of the config, but it didn’t appear to be a known format.

kosh@aerith ~ $ file config.bin
config.bin: data

So after a little digging I found a Zlib header in the file and found a resource on the internet that had a windows only decoder (which failed for me ) so I proceeded to figure it out for myself.

kosh@aerith ~ $ hexdump -C config.bin | head -n 2
00000000 4c 4d 4d 43 00 03 00 00 c9 1a 00 00 8d 0e 8d cb |LMMC............|
00000010 e0 a2 00 00 78 9c ed 3d 6b 73 db 38 92 9f ef 7e |....x..=ks.8...~|

You can see the Zlib style magic at the 20-byte mark (0×14, “78 9c”). I tested my theory by grabbing zpipe.c from the zlib website and using dd to decode it.

kosh@aerith ~ $ dd if=config.bin of=test.bin.Z bs=20 skip=1
342+1 records in
342+1 records out
6857 bytes (6.9 kB) copied, 0.0165227 s, 415 kB/s
kosh@aerith ~ $ ./zpipe -d < test.bin.Z
<config version="3.7.0" fsstamp="20061221093151">
....
</config>

But considering I was 5 minutes from a simple working setup, I hacked zpipe.c down and made zlmcc.c from it. I’ve made zlmcc.c available for anyone else that wants to deflate these files quickly.

Usual guarantee applies, if it blows up the world, not my fault. I only tested it on my system and with my single config file, using the above steps you should be able to figure it out if they change the format by a little (offset, etc)

KoshWiki - zlmcc.c

I’ve been having an issue with strangely “non” Nokia SyncML servers causing my mobile to stop contact syncing at 180 of 303 with “System Error”.

Using the Horde SyncML server I finally found out what was causing the error, it was one of the contacts thumbnails was malformed somehow.

After removing the contacts thumbnail it worked fine.

GRAGGH !

Anyway, the best process for determining which contact it is (sounds simple, but here it is) create the /tmp/sync folder for horde to write the debug info into, then load up the largest syncml_client* file after doing a test sync.

Scroll to the bottom and then just scroll up until you see the contact name in cleartext, I could make a smarter “use this strings/grep/tail one-liner” but I need to get back to studying.

It has been a while since I updated this web log, my free time has seriously shrunk to very unmanagable levels.

I’m currently studying at QUT LS37, “Applied Science (Medical Science)” while working full time at a coding company in the CBD (I’m working as a System Administrator in an excellent team).

I’ll try (again) to update a little more often, but lately I haven’t had many side projects.

I’ve changed the way wordpress is setup on my server to make updates *alot* easier, hell I could probably write a 10 line shell script to do updates automatically for me … I may just do that and publish it here so others can learn from it.

Well, I’ll keep this update as short as possible, but it is great to be back. I have a lab practical report to finish writing for Chemistry at the moment, so I better get back to that.

I really must update wordpress.

Yeah, I’m back and coding stuff like always.

I’ve got a script that pulls the XML data out of the armory, parses and stores it for later use in a database.

w0000t

I hate writing personal “blog posts” (as opposed to the “articles” in this “Web Log”) but I’m just putting down a reason for my absence.

I met a girl 7 weeks ago, we broke it off 2 weeks ago.

That’s about the limit of my touchy-feely “post”, get back to work.