Posts Tagged ‘stuff’

iSH, the best free SSH / Telnet client for iOS iPhone, iPad equivallent of MobaXterm and fully functional Alpine Linux emulator

Wednesday, February 8th, 2023

ish-linux-terminal-emulator-for-iphone-ipad-ios-logo-screenshoticon

Since few months I've switched my old BLU r1 HD Phone (a great old low budget phone for its price) to a friend's iPhone 10 ( X ) who gifted it for me. Coming from Android world, everyone who has experience with it is a pain in the ass as some of the Apps, which are into Google's play store does not have the same equivalent into Apple's install Package manager tool AppStore. Some of the crucial tools which I was interested as a freshly new migrated user from Android to iPhone was to have a decent SSH / Telnet client and Terminal, with which I can easily connect to my Linux servers both home and work. 

As Android Phone user, to connect and manage my SSH sessions I used most often some of the most popular Connectbot / SSHDroid / JuiceSSH.
On Android I've usually installed all of these tools but most frequently used Connectbot, which quickly become my favourite SSH client for Android over time.

The reasons why I really loved Connectbot and used it on Android OS in short:

  • It is Completely free
  • Ad-free
  • Open-source (too bad not Free software but still step better)
  • Copy and paste text between Applications
  • Customizable interface (i.e. font size, keyboard layout, SSH auth agent, etc.)


connectbot-android-ssh-remote-connect-client-screenshot

I've seen some people used and preferred Termius but never myself really liked this client, as it was including some Advertisements or for don't remember why reason.
Switching to iOS mobile operating system, of course was quite a shock especially the moment I found out the standard loved SSH Remote Client programs are used are not available or have only a paid version. Thus it took me quite a while of a research and googling until I found some decent stuff.

termius-ssh-telnet-client-ios-screenshot

Tried for a time with Termius as well but again, its Ads and lack of some functionality pissed me off, so I've moved on to Shelly.

shelly-iphone-ssh-telnet-client-ios-screenshot

Shelly is really not a bad tool but has limitation over the SSH sessions you can add and other limitations, which can only be unlocked with an "Upgrade", to its paid version, thus I decided after few weeks of attempts to make it my remote server management mobile tool for iPhone, I've dropped it off as well.

Then I found the Blink Shell App – Blink Shell is a professional, desktop grade terminal for iOS. As overall the tool is really great and is easy to use but again to have it used in its full power you need the paid version and until you pay for it every now and then you got interruption of your shell for some really annoying ads.
Thus even though I used it for a times this few tools with whom basicly you can do basic remote ssh / telnet session operations eventually,  started looking for a better SSH Client Free alternative for iPhone Users.

Then came a friend at home for a dinner my dear friend Milen (Static) and he show me iOS.
The moment I saw this tool I totally loved it, for its simplicity and its resemblance to a classical TTY Physical old Linux console I used back in the days and its ability to resemble easily any improved functionaltiy through simple screen (multiple session management) command tool or tmux.

Wait, what's iSH ? And why it is the Best SSH / Telnet client to manage your servers remotely on iOS Mobiles (iPhone and IPads) ? 

iSH is a project to get a Linux shell environment running locally on your iOS device, using a usermode x86 emulator.


In other wors iSH is Linux emulator with busybox and a package ports for many of the standard Linux tools you get by simple apt-get / yum or if I have to compare you get via the MobaXterm's advanced apt-cyg (Cygwin packages) tool capabilities.

Once iSH is installed it comes with pre-installed apk command line package management tool, with which you can install stuff like openssh-client / screen / tmux / mc (midnight commander) etc. apk, is an apt like command like tool which uses as a basis for installing its packages Alpine Linux repositories.
Alpine Linux is perhaps little known as it is not one of these main stream disributions, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, but for those more concerned about security  Alpine Linux is well known as it is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. What makes the Linux even more attractive and perhaps the reason why the iSH developers decided to use it as a basis for their iSH emulator is it being actively developed and its tightened security makes it a good compliment to the quite closed and security focused mobile platform iOS.

iSH is available straight from AppStore , so to use it install it and run it (it is really a great news that iOS does not require iphone to be jailbreak – ed, and it is an ordinary installable software straight from AppStore):
iSH, already comes with some of the standard programs you would expect in a Linux environment such as Vi, wget, zip / unzip, and tar.
However to fit it better for my use over ssh and improve its capabilities, as well as support and use multiple Virtual windows ssh, just like you do on a Linux xterm
run from ish shell: 

# apk add openssh-client
# apk add screen
# apk add vim
# apk add mc


ish-screenshot-terminal3-linux-emulator-iphone-alpine

ish-screenshot-terminal2-linux-emulator-iphone-alpine

ish-screenshot-terminal1-linux-emulator-iphone-alpine-linux

I also like to have a Midnight Commander and VIM Text editor installed out of the box to be able to move around in Ncurses interface through my iPhone.

ish-iphone-keyboard-key-shortcuts

Note that, just like most GNU / Linux distributions, iOS shell will run a normal bash shell.
From there on to use iSH as my default SSH client and enable my just installed GNU screen some Windowing beauty for readability whence I use the screen with multiple ssh logins to different servers as well make the screen Virtual consoles to have ability for scroll back and scroll up of console text to work, I do set up the following .screenrc inside my /home/iPhoneuser

The .screenrc to setup on the iSH to easify your work with screen is as follows:
 

# An alternative hardstatus to display a bar at the bottom listing the
# windownames and highlighting the current windowname in blue. (This is only
# enabled if there is no hardstatus setting for your terminal)
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "
# Enable scrolling fix the annoying screen scrolling problem
termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
# Scroll up
bindkey -d "^[[5S" eval copy "stuff 5\025"
bindkey -m "^[[5S" stuff 5\025

# Scroll down
bindkey -d "^[[5T" eval copy "stuff 5\004"
bindkey -m "^[[5T" stuff 5\004

# Scroll up more
bindkey -d "^[[25S" eval copy "stuff \025"
bindkey -m "^[[25S" stuff \025

# Scroll down more
bindkey -d "^[[25T" eval copy "stuff \004"
bindkey -m "^[[25T" stuff \004

You can download the same .screenrc file from here straight with wget from the console:

# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/.screenrc


Run GNU screen manager

 

 # screen

You will end up with a screen session, to open a new session for Virtual Terminal use virtual keyboard from ISH and Press

CTRL + A + C

To open other Virtual Windows inside screen just press CTRL + A + C as many times as you need it, each session will appear ina small window on the down corner as you can see in screenshot

ish-terminal-with-screen-multiple-virtual-terminals-screenshot-iphone-ios

To move across the Screen unnamed 3 Virtual Windows 0 ash 1 ash and 2 ash use the Virtual keyboard

for next WIndow use key combination:
 

CTRL + A + N (where + is just to indicate you have to press them once after another and not actually press the + 🙂 )


For Previous Window use:

CTRL + A + P

Or use CTRL + A and type 

:number 3 (where number is the number of window)

The available iSH commands without adding any further packages which are part of the busybox install are as follows:

Available /bin/ directory commands:

arch  ash  base64  bbconfig  busybox  cat  chgrp  chmod  chown  conspy  cp  date  dd  df  dmesg  dnsdomainname  dumpkmap  echo  ed  egrep  false  fatattr  fdflush  fgrep  fsync  getopt  grep  gunzip  gzip  hostname  ionice  iostat  ipcalc  kbd_mode  kill  link  linux32  linux64  ln  login  ls  lzop  makemime  mkdir  mknod  mktemp  more  mount  mountpoint  mpstat  mv  netstat  nice  pidof  ping  ping6  pipe_progress  printenv  ps  pwd  reformime  rev  rm  rmdir  run-parts  sed  setpriv  setserial  sh  sleep  stty  su  sync  tar  touch  true  umount  uname  usleep  watch  zcat  


Available /usr/bin/ commands:    

awk  basename  beep  blkdiscard  bunzip2  bzcat  bzip2  cal  chvt  cksum  clear  cmp  comm  cpio  crontab  cryptpw  cut  dc  deallocvt  diff  dirname  dos2unix  du  dumpleases  eject  env  expand  expr  factor  fallocate  find  flock  fold  free  fuser  getconf  getent  groups  hd  head  hexdump  hostid  iconv  id  install  ipcrm  ipcs  killall  ldd  less  logger  lsof  lsusb  lzcat  lzma  lzopcat  md5sum  mesg  microcom  mkfifo  mkpasswd  nc  nl  nmeter  nohup  nproc  nsenter  nslookup  od  passwd  paste  patch  pgrep  pkill  pmap  printf  pscan  pstree  pwdx  readlink  realpath  renice  reset  resize  scanelf  seq  setkeycodes  setsid  sha1sum  sha256sum  sha3sum  sha512sum  showkey  shred  shuf  smemcap  sort  split  ssl_client  strings  sum  tac  tail  tee  test  time  timeout  top  tr  traceroute  traceroute6  truncate  tty  ttysize  udhcpc6  unexpand  uniq  unix2dos  unlink  unlzma  unlzop  unshare  unxz  unzip  uptime  uudecode  uuencode  vi  vlock  volname  wc  wget  which  whoami  whois  xargs  xxd  xzcat  yes  


If you're a maniac developer you can even use iSH, to do some programs development with vim with Python / Perl or PHP as these are available from the Alpine repositories and installable via a simple apk add packagename for security experts nmap and some security tools are also available but unfortunately not everything is still working as this project is in active development and iOS has some security limitations if OS is not ROOTED 🙂

Hence some of the packages you can install via apk manager will be failing actually.
There is a list of What works and what doesn't still on iSH on the project github wiki check it out here.

There is much more funny stuff you can do with it, and actually my quick research on how people use iSH on their phones lead me to some Videos talking about iOS and Ethical hacking etc, but I'll stop here as I dont have the time to dig deeper to it. 
If you know or have some good use of iSH or some other goody you are using as a hack please share in comments.

Enjoy ! 🙂

Configure own Media streaming minidlna Linux server to access data from your Smart TV

Friday, February 18th, 2022

dlna-media-minidlna-server-linux-logo

If you happen to buy or already own or just have to install a Smart TV to be connected with a LAN Network to a Linux based custom built NAS (Network Attached Storage) server. You might benefit of the smart TV to Share and Watching the Disk Storage Pictures, Music, Video files from the NAS  to the Smart TV using the Media Server protocol.

You have certainly already faced the Media Server at your life on many locations in stores and Mall Buildings, because virtually any reoccuring advertisements, movies projected on the TVs, Kids entertainment or Floor and Buildings Room location schedules or timeline promition schedules are streamed using the Media Server protocol, for many years now. Thus having a brief idea about Media Server proto existence is foundamental stuff to be aware of for sysadmins and programmers.

Shortly about DLNA UPnP Media Streaming Protocol

Assuming that your Smart TV has been already connected to your Wireless Router 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz Wifi, one would think that the easiest way to share the files with the SmartTV is via something like a simple SAMBA Linux server via smb:// cifs:// protocols or via the good old NFS Server, however most of Samsung Smart TV and many other in year 2022 does not have embedded support for Samba SMB / CIFS Protocol but instead have support for the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming support. DLNA is part of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) Protocols, UPnP is also known to those using and familiar with Windows Operating Systems realm simply as UPnP AV Media server or Windows Media server.
Windows Media server for those who never heard it or used it 
 allows you to build a Playlists with Media files Video and Audio data files, that can be then later played remotely via a Local LAN or even long distance over TCP / IP remote side connected Internet network.
 

1. Set up and Stream data via Media server on  Windows PC / notebook with integrated Windows Media server 

Windows Media server configuration on Windows 7, 10 and 11 is a relatively easy to configure via:

Network and Sharing Center -> Media Streaming Options -> Turn on Media Streaming 


Then you have to define the name of the Media Library, configure whether Media server should show
on the Local Netework
for other conected devices and Allow or Block access from the other network present devices.


 2. Using a more advanced Media Server to get rid about the limitation of DLNA set of supported file codecs.
 

The Windows default embedded DLNA server is the easiest and fastest one to set up, but it’s not necessarily the best option.
Due to the way DLNA works, you can only stream certain types of media codecs supported by the server. If you have other types of media not defaultly supported and defined by DLNA win server, it just won’t work.

Thus thanksfully it was developed other DLNA servers improve this by offering real-time transcoding.
If you try to play an unsupported file, they’ll transcode it on-the-fly, streaming the video in a supported format to your DLNA device.
Just to name few of the DLNA Media Streaming servers that have supported for larger MPG Video, MP3 / MP4 and other Audio formats encodings,
you can try Plex or the Universal Media Server both of which are free to use under freeware license and have versions for Linux and Mac OS.


Universal_media_server-windows-screenshot-stream-media-data-on-network

 

3. Setting up a free as in freedom DLNA server MiniDLNA (ReadyMedia) on GNU / Linux


ReadyMedia (formerly known as MiniDLNA) is a simple media server software, with the aim of being fully compliant with DLNA/UPnP-AV clients. It was originally developed by a NETGEAR employee for the ReadyNAS product line.

MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network. Linux Media servers clients you can use to test or scan your network for existent Media servers are multiple perhaps the most famous ones are applications such as totem (for QT users) and Kodi (for KDE).
The devices that can be used with minidlna are devices such as portable media players (iPod), Smartphones, Televisions, Tablets, and gaming systems (such as PS3 and Xbox 360) etc.
 

ReadyMedia is a simple, lightweight, the downside of it is It does not have a web interface for administration and must be configured by editing a text file. But for a simple Video streaming in most cases does a great job.


3.1 Install the minidlna software package 

Minidlna is available out of the box on most linux distributions (Fedora / CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu etc.) as of year 2022.

  • Install on Debian Linux (Deb based distro)

media-server:~# apt install minidlna –yes

  • Install on Fedora / CentOS (other RPM based distro)

media-server:~# yum install -y minidlna


3.2 Configure minidlna

– /etc/minidlna.conf – main config file
Open with text editor and set user= ,  media_dir= ,  port=, friendly_name= ,  network_interface= variables as minimum.
To be add minidlnad support symlinks to external file locations, set also wide_links=yes

media-server:~# vim /etc/minidlna.conf

#user=minidlna
user=root
media_dir=/var/www/owncloud/data
network_interface=eth0,eth1

# Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer).
# This option is mandatory (or it must be specified on the command-line using
# "-p").
port=8200
# Name that the DLNA server presents to clients.
# Defaults to "hostname: username".
#friendly_name=
friendly_name=DLNAServer Linux
# set this to yes to allow symlinks that point outside user-defined media_dirs.
wide_links=yes
# Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory.
#inotify=yes

Keep in mind that it is supported to provide separete media_dir and provide different USB / External Hard Drive or SD Card sources separated only by content be it Video, Audio or Pictures short named in config as (A,V,P).

media_dir=P,/media/usb/photos
media_dir=V,/media/external-disk/videos
media_dir=A,/media/sd-card/music

You might want to diasble / ineable the inotify depending on your liking, if you don't plan to place new files automated to the NAS and don't care to get indexed and streamed from the Media server you can disable it with inotify=no otherwise keep that on.

– /etc/default/minidlna – additional startup config to set minidlnad (daemon) options such as setup to run with admin superuser root:root 
(usually it is safe to leave it empty and set the user=root, whether needed straight from /etc/minidlna.conf
That's all now go on and launch the minidlna and enable it to automatically boot on Linux boot.

media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl enable minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl status minidlna

 

3.3 Rebuilt minidlna database with data indexed files

If you need to re- generate minidlna's database.
To do so stop the minidlna server with the
 

media-server:~# systemctop stop minidlna


 command, then issue the following command (both commands should be run as root):

media-server:~# minidlna -R

Since this command might kept in the background and keep the minidlna server running with incorrect flags, after a minute or two kill minidlna process and relaunch the server via sysctl.

media-server:~#  killall -9 minidlna
media-server:~#  systemctl start minidlna

 

3.4 Permission Issues / Scanning issues

If you plan to place files in /home directory. You better have a seperate partition or folder *outside* your "home" directory devoted to your media. Default user with which minidlna runs is minidlna, this could prevent some files with root or other users being red. So either run minidlna daemon as root or as other user with whom all media files should be accessible.
If service runs as root:root, and still getting some scanning issues, check permissions on your files and remove special characters from file names.
 

media-server:~# tail -10 /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log 
[2022/02/17 22:51:36] scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Videos/FILE006.MPG
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] scanner.c:819: warn: Scanning /var/www/owncloud/data finished (10637 files)!
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.
minidlna.c:1126: warn: Starting MiniDLNA version 1.3.0.
minidlna.c:1186: warn: HTTP listening on port 8200
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/admin/files/origin/External SD card/media/Viber Images/IMG-4477de7b1eee273d5e6ae25236c5c223-V.jpg
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Video/FILE006.MPG
playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.

 

3.5. Fix minidlna Inotify errors

In /etc/sysctl.conf 

Add:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536

in a blank line at end of file and do 

media-server:~# sysctl -p

Debugging minidlna problems, index errors, warnings etc

minidlna does write by default to /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log inspect the log closely and you should get most of the time what is wrong with it.
Note that some files might not get indexed because minidlna won't support the strange file codecs such as SWF encoding, if you have some important files to stream that are not indexed by minidlna, then install and try one of the more sophisticated free software Media Servers for Linux:

plex-media-streaming-server-screenshot

Note that most Linux users from my quick research shows, MediaTomb is the preferred advanced features Open Source Linux Media Server of choice for most of the guys.

mediatomb-linux-media-streaming-server-picture.jpg.webp
 

 

4. Test minidlna Linux servers works, getting information of other DLNA Servers on the network

media-server:~# lynx -dump  http://127.0.0.1:8200
MiniDLNA status

  Media library

   Audio files 0
   Video files 455
   Image files 10182

  Connected clients

   ID Type                   IP Address    HW Address        Connections
   0  Samsung Series [CDEFJ] 192.168.1.11  7C:0A:3D:88:A6:FA 0
   1  Generic DLNA 1.5       192.168.0.241 00:16:4E:1D:48:05 0
   2  Generic DLNA 1.5       192.168.1.18  00:16:3F:0D:45:05 0
   3  Unknown                127.0.0.1     FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF 0

   -1 connections currently open
 

Note that there is -1 connections (no active connections) currently to the server. 
The 2 Generic DLNA 1.5 IPs are another DLNA servers provided by a OpenXEN hosted Windows 7 Virtual machines, that are also broadcasting their existence in the network. The Samsung Series [CDEFJ] is the DLNA client on the Samsung TV found, used to detect and stream data from the just configured Linux dlna server.

The DLNA Protocol enabled devices on a network as you can see are quite easy to access, querying localhost on the 8200 server dumps, what minidlna knows, the rest of IPs connecting should not be able to receive this info. But anyways since the minidlna does not have a special layers of security to access it, but the only way to restrict is filtering the 8200 port, it is a very good idea to put a good iptables firewall on the machine to allow only the devices that should have access to the data.

Further more if you happen to need to access the Media files on Linux from GUI you might use some client as upmentioned totem, VLC or if you need something more feature rich Java eezUPnP .

eeZUPnP-screenshot-java-client-for-media-server

That's all folks !
Enjoy your media on the TV 🙂

Apache Webserver disable hostnamelookups “HostnameLookups off” for minor performance increase

Friday, February 12th, 2016

apache-disable-dns-lookups-for-speed-hostnamelookups-off-directive-building-scalable-php-applications

If you don't much care about logging in logs from which domain / hostnames requests to webserver originate and you want to boost up the Apache Webserver performance a bit especially on a heavy loaded Websites, where no need for stuff like Webalizer, Awstats etc. , e.g. you're using GoogleAnalytics to already track requests (beware as sometimes GoogleAnalytics could be missing requests to your webserver, so having some kind of LogAnalyzer software on server is always a plus). But anyways accepting that many of us already trust GoogleAnalytitcs.


Then a great tuning option to use in default domain configuration or in multiple VirtualHosts config is:

HostnameLookups off

If you want to make the HostnameLookups off as a default behaviour to all your virtualhosts on  Debian / Ubuntu / CentOS / SuSE / RHEL distro virtualhosts add either to default config /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default (on Deb based Linuxes) or (on RPM based ones), add directive to /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

For self-hosted websites (if run your own small hosting) or for a home situated webservers with up to 20-50 websites it is also a useful optimization tip to include in /etc/hosts file all the IPs of sites with respective domain names following the normal syntax of /etc/hosts, e.g. in my own /etc/hosts, I have stuff like:
 

pcfreak:~$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
127.0.1.1 pcfreak.www.pc-freak.net pcfreak mail.www.pc-freak.net
192.168.0.14 new-pcfreak
219.22.88.70 fw
212.36.0.70 ftp.bg.debian.org
212.211.132.32 security.debian.org
83.228.93.76 pcfreak.biz www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net
# for wordpress plugins
216.58.209.3 gstatic.com
91.225.248.129 www.linkedin.com
74.50.119.198 www.blogtopsites.com
94.31.29.40 static.addtoany.com
216.58.209.202 fonts.googleapis.com
216.58.209.14 www.google-analytics.com
216.58.209.14 feeds.feedburner.com
93.184.220.241 wprp.zemanta.com
199.30.80.32 stumbleupon.com
156.154.168.17 stumbleupon.com
2.18.89.251 platform.linkedin.com
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts

# … etc. put IPs and hostnames following above syntax


As you see from above commented section for wordpress plugins, I've included some common websites used by WordPress enabled plugins to prevent my own hosting server to query DNS server every time. The normal way the Linux / Unix works is it first checks in /etc/hosts and only if the hostname is not defined there then it queries the DNS caching server in my case this is a local DJBDNS cache server, however defining the hosts in /etc/hosts saves a lot of milisecons on every request and often if multiple hosts are defined could save (decrease site opening for end users) with seconds.


Well now use some website speed testing plugin like Yslow, Firebug Fiddler or HTTPWatch

 

Make picture transparent with the Gimp on Linux

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

GIMP Logo make picture transparent with GIMP on GNU / Linux
I’m trying to learn some basic design this days as an attempt to fill my huge missing gap of knowledge in graphic processing.
I’ve always been not too good with visual stuff and always been focused on the command line and console, however since
some time design started being quite interesting thing to me and I found it quite handy and challenging to learn some basic designing.

I’m not really a Windows guy and thus my Photoshop skills are next to zero.
Since The Gimp is the substitute for Photoshopfor Linux users and I had a task for one of the websites I’m developing to make some pictures for the website transparent, therefore I had to learn how to make pictures transparent with The Gimp
After some reading online and some experimenting with GIMP it appeared to me it’s very easy to actually make pictures transparent with the GIMP.
So I’ve come with a small article here on how to make image or a picture transparent with Gimp in simple steps in order to help people who are trying to achieve the same easy task:

1. Open Gimp and place your mouse cursor on the picture

Here, Press the 2nd or 3rd mouse button to show menu.

2. Select Layer -> Transperancy -> Alpha to Selection

In that menu select Select Layer -> Transprerancy -> Alpha to Selection

Gimp Alpha to Selection Menu

3. Use Fuzzy Select Tool and select the picture background

Gimp fuzzy select background

4. From Gimp Window pane main menu choose the Clear option

Edit -> Clear (Delete)
gimp edit clear menu

That’s all now your picture background should be removed if some parts of the picture still needs to be purged just follow the above step and remove them.
I should say I thought making picture transparent with GIMP would be a more complex task than it really was, quite nice one more step in my development as a designer 🙂

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Yesterday I spend a lot of time outside with Lily. We went to the fountain we watched film at home. The film was called”Wild Hogs” it was supposed to be a fun commedy (only supposed to be). This week is going to be a taugh one.We have to present a project at Marketing Research.

I have to write a 600 words resume about International Enterprice,also we have to make a presentation in Culture. Today in the morning i was on a Liturgy again. God’s grace ishere ! The week passed without serious server issues (Thanks God). Today I checked some logs of one of the serversand I observed oddities there. I checked the crontab and I realized it’s because of a crontab. The dumped databaseis a HUGE one 2.6G (bzipped).

I asked in irc.freenode.net #mysql, and the guys there pointed me to a similar issuewhich was supposed to be an MySQL bug when dumping large database. Since the dumping databases were of a type MyISAMI ofcourse could have used mysqlhotcopy.

But in the end the solution to the problem was removing “–opt” option fromthe backup opts of mysqldump and passing “–skip-opt” to it (I suspect this would slow the dumping process a lot).But I don’t care it is much better (a slow dumping), than hanging the whole Webserver and interrupting the site’s visibilityover the Internet.

Btw I started playing Quake 2, it’s cool but a little annoying there are too many tunnels and veryoften after I kill most of the bad guys I spend a lot of time searching for keys and stuff .. :).END—–

Beside myself

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

There is not much to say, Recently I’m experiencing mix of spiritual and emotional fluctuations ups and downs.I feel so alone quite often. There are not many valuable people (considering my interests).Day by day I’m asking myself the question “Hey man , why are you studying HRQM this stupid secreatary stuff.”I’m confused quite a lot and in a state of a denial, or better to say I feel a kind of lost because I’m out of my confortzone .. The teachers here in the HRQM stream claim that when a man is frightened and out of his confort zone,then he is learning a lot. They might be true about that, I don’t know. At Friday we had that Business Ethics test.Before the test we watched the movie “The Wizard of Oz” a movie from the distant year 1939. Right after the class wasover I went home and laundered my clothes. Then we had a dinner. Today I woke up around 11:00, had my breakfastat around 13:00 and near 13:30 I went out for a walk. I went to the city center and walked around the river Netherlands Rijn.A little later I walked through the city center around the open market which was located right before The St. Eusibeus Chapel.I went through a waggon which sells bibles in different languages and tried to draw people back close to God andspoke for a while with one nice old man who said used to be a Christian for 40 years already.Then I went for shopping to the grocy stores Aldi and Albertheijn and went back “home” to Honigkamp… That’s mostlyhow my day passed … I should thank to God for still caring for me and providing me with all necessary for my daily living.Thanks Lord! END—–

Management Games and Theathre Sports with Joop Vinke

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Yesterday and today we had Management Games and Theathre Games with Joop Vinke.At the management game we play a sort of Human Resources Management game. All the students are devided into groups and we play a simulator game. We had to manage a company. First we setup our 2 year goals and then we play the game on quarters (6 quarters). Every quarter we have to made some managerial decisions (invest money into different stuff, hire personnel, promote ppl etc.).

Basicly the company consists of 660 employees, there are 5 levels in the company starting from 1 where there is unqualified specialists and 5 which are the top management.

When we make our choices then all this data is inputed into a computer which gives us some feedback which helps us in taking the decisions for the next quarter. At the meantime Vinke organizes fun games to entertain us and make us feel comfortable with him and through this games he tries to show us basic concepts in business. The last two days I really enjoyed.

Today the game that impressed me the most was called

“The Werewolves from Wackedan”. Basicly it’s a strategic game with roles. In it you’ve got a bunch of ppl who play different roles, 3 of them are werewolves, others are citizens others are ppl who have special abilities to foresee who are the werewolves.

We had cards in front of us turned back to prevent others except us to see the cards. Some of the cards are citizens and ppl who belong to the citizens other 3 are werewolves.

Every night the werewolf kills a person (by selecting somebody from the crowd, when they sleep), because the werewolves are out at night when everybody sleeps. At the morning citizens awake and one of their friends is dead so they try to revenge by pointing someone to be killed (it may be a citizen again it may be a werewolf).

At the end only werewolves or citizens should servive 🙂 It was a big fun today to play this simple game. At the end of the day at 18:00 we had a session of the so called Theathre/Games. Theathre Games include different entertaining games which are designed to improve our communication skills and teach us to act like an actors plus they are pretty entertaining 🙂 That’s all thanks to God everything seems to run smoothly around my life. Except my health I’m still having some health issues although I can say I have an improvement I am not still healed and I still drink herbs.

At 20:00 I was out with Narf and we went to the fountain a little later Kimmo and Yavor joined us and we spend some time their. Well that’s most of the day at night I went to my grandma just to see how she is doing and now I write this post tomorrow the Management Game continues at 09:00. So probably after few minutes I’ll go for the night prayers and then I’ll go to sleep. END—–

Watch Star Wars in Ascii via a telnet connection! :)

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

By accident, I’ve come across Towel.blinkenlight.nl! You might be wondering what is so special with it? 😉 Well some crazy guy seems to have recreated a whole Star Wars movie in ascii art!!! 😉

To kill some time and enjoy some great ascii telnet to towel.blinkenlight.nl with a telnet client (movie shows great also even using a regular Windows telnet client).

As I’m a great ascii fan I enjoy a lot, hope more people will take the time to watch the re-created Star Wars Movie in ASCII !. I’m eager to see if someone knows of any similar kind of movies, demos or all kind of stuff streamed via telnet 🙂

To give you an idea on what you will see by telnetting to towel.blinenlight.nl, here is a short chop video:


 

Some priceless wireless stuff & my switch from wireless ipw3945 driver to iwl3945, how to make iwl3945 driver work much more decent

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Since I upgraded to the latest Debian unstable I was forced to switch from the good old ipw3945 wireless driver to the newer one with which I had a bunch of unpleasent experienced, that was a good reason for me to kept myself back to the ipw3945. Anyways all my attempts to port the already 2 years old ipw3945 without a development to my 2.6.30-1-amd64 left void.Therefore I had to unwillingly switch to the iwl3945 driver. To do so I had to:
1. edit /etc/modprobe.d/00local.conf and remove the line

install iwl3945 /bin/true

2. edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment the line

blacklist iwl3945

3. edit /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945.conf and comment out
install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install ipw3945 ;
sleep 2 ; /sbin/ipw3945d –quiet
remove ipw3945 /etc/init.d/ipw3945d modprobe-stop && modprobe -r –ignore-remove ipw3945
4. edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and comment out
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”ipw3945″, ATTR{address}==”00:1c:bf:bd:24:59″, ATTR{type}==”1″, NAME=”wlan0″SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:1c:bf:bd:24:59″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”wlan*”, NAME=”wlan0″
5. Last but not least:
rmmod iwl3945; modprobe iwl3945;

That so far was required to switch from ipw3945 to iwl3945.

Unfortunately after the switch I was pretty unhappy of the behaviour of the iwl3945 driver.
Like for example the driver won’t detect many of the wireless networks during scan compared to the one detected by the old ipw3945 driver.
I googled and found in Google many contradictions considering which driver (ipw3945 or iwl3945) prooves to be better. Some praised ipw3945 and tended to hold unto it while others were proclaiming that iwl3945 works in a much better manner.
Again some Googling and thinking over the created problem led me to a website which suggsted a helpful tip on how to intialize
the iwl3945 driver. That tip IMPROVED A LOT! the scanning behaviour of the iwl3945 driver.
Here is the tip itself:
Edit /etc/modprobe.d/iwl3945.conf and add to it the following: alias wlan0 iwl3945# the line below disables iwl3945 wireless driver hardware scanningoptions iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1# extend the network channels detected to 13options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU

After all is done the only left thing is to:
reload the iwl3945 driver
rmmod iwl3945modprobe iwl3945
And Hooray! It works Again! You will notice now much more networks are being detected
and apart from that scanning returns results every time you scan for wireless networks
To conclude the post I’ll say a few words on the line:
options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU
as well as explain briefly about wicdMany of you would wonder what is that about, well it’s about that on how many channels
would wireless networks be detected. For example in the European Union wireless networks
could be configured to work on channels up to 13, just to compare in the USA less channels
are available thus the default behaviour of the iwl3945 driver is not to detect wireless
networks on channels above 10 (I believe?). The above example communicates to the cfg80211 kernel
module that more wireless channels are available since we’re in the EU (European Union).
For kernels below version 2.6.24 you might need to use the variable:
options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU instead of the one I add above.

.Well let me conclude the post with some handy wireless manager I use some time ago.
Longly I (suffered) with Gnome’s default gnome-network-manager, nevertheless it’s proven thatpain doesn’t waste forever.
Mine would not too:

I Googled just to know if there are Good alternatives to gnome-network-manager and I found the nifty Wicd manager. Which behaviour I like much more than the classicwifi-radar or gnome-network-manager.
This days I heavily use the nice Wicd peace of soft.
So in case if you still don’t have it installed on your GNU/Linux go for it!
If you want to give some credits for this I hope helpful post please give them to God :)END—–