Monthly Archives: July 2008

How to hack your Belkin router

Posted by on July 31, 2008 6 comments

It innocently (like many cool things) started off with the replacement of my current modem router with a Belkin N1 Vision gigabit router:

I would have gone with a Airport Extreme base-station instead, but the local Apple stores have been out of stock for weeks. During my upgrades I stumbled across a mysterious page on the router (http://routerip/wukongjiuwo.html) which opens up a console window straight onto the Belkin’s operating system:

Once there you can control the router remotely (not sure why you want to do this) but you will also be able to run any Linux command (repeat after me: rm -rf / ….. DONT!). Very quickly you will spot that /www directory and within a number of pages such as http://routerip/wifi.html – which provides you great opportunity to tweak TX-settings:

Where does the above lead? Just a matter of time until you will be able to flash your router with a custom-firmware.



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iPhone 3G: Sheit – it’s broked

Posted by on July 30, 2008 No comments

So you got yourself one of those beautiful new 3G iPhones like the one below:

BUT…. WTF???? Yeah, no photoshopping this one. If you head over to the official Apple iPhone forum you will notice dozens of posts like this one. Plenty of users are already reporting hairline cracks on the phone’s case.

The damage appears to consist mostly of hairline fractures, typically around the volume and vibrate controls, but also in some cases around corners, speakers or the headphone jack. From the forum reports a high quantity of white iPhones are affected (but there are also a large number of black ones been mentioned – I guess the later are not as visible as cracks on white phones)

Sux – you sell your soul, stand in queues for days and then your “Jesus Phone” just flakes out like this. But there is light at the end of the tunnel – click here for eternal happiness.

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DSTV – High-definition – WTF?

Posted by on July 29, 2008 2 comments

DStv operator MultiChoice announced at a press-release last week, that they will (finally) launch O-N-E high-definition channel on August 1. The channel, which will be available in a resolution of 720p, will be used to broadcast the Olympic Games from August 8 (apparently not life, but re-broadcasts), and from August 24 it will carry a new entertainment channel called M-Net HD.

The device, which includes a 500GB hard drive, costs the same as the standard-definition (SD) PVR model — R2 499 — and is capable of storing 150 hours of SD content and 50 hours of HD material.

Come on Multichoice — ONE CHANNEL???? Most of the HD-content broadcast on the marvelous new HD-channel will be anyway multi-cast on standard definition: Season 6 of CSI Miami (Tuesdays at 8.30pm), Season 4 of CSI New York (Thursdays at 9.30pm, and Season 1 of Gossip Girl. Other shows include season 3 of My Name is Earl, season 1 of Samantha Who, season 4 of Lost and season 1 of Reaper.

But wait – there is more – a whole bucket of high-def movies (all of which you should have on Blu-ray already): Die Hard 4, Zodiac, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Spiderman, Oceans Thirteen and Shrek the Third.

The new HD-PVR is a step backwards though. While the current SD-PVR features dual-view (you can hook up two TVs, record one programme but watch two different channels in parallel), the “new” HD-PVR will only support watch one and record two – WTF? DSTV is broadcasting so many repeats anyway, so it is pretty pointless two record two programmes simultaneously anyway.

But there is XtraView which eventually will allow you to pair your existing decoder/PVR with your HD-PVR and will then give you view-three/record-three (if you pair the HD-PVR with a SD-PVR).

The device would have been appealing if even SD content looked better via HDMI (if you are running an LCD bigger than 46″ you will find out that most programming appears washed out or grainy). But to just watch one channel with re-broadcasts in high-definition defeats the purpose of forking of R 2,500.00.

I am certainly not going to get a HD-PVR, as Multichoice will only launch XtraView “sometime in October”. Multichoice was supposed to provide a firmware update to stabilise the PVR’s by last year October and is only now managing (10 months later) to deliver it. So who believes that XtraView will be on time. Not to mention that you will either have to fit a splitter/multiplexer and in the worst cast re-cable/re-install (if you do not have a twin-LNB).

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NAS: Enable SCP and password-less SSH login

Posted by on July 26, 2008 7 comments

DISCLAIMER: I am not going to educate about the risk of doing this with your root userid. This works for me, as I am behind a secure network. Once you have followed the instructions below, you will be able to logon to your NAS through SSH without using a password (as SSH will use your unique public key). You will also be able to use SCP (with the benefit of compression) from/to your NAS.

The necessary steps to give your NAS SCP – part I: Enable login via public key certificates:

  • On NAS: If you have a recent firmware (.640), then just enable SSH on the diskstation.
  • On NAS: Edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and uncomment/insert the following line (#2) to enable public key authentication:

    #RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

     

  • On NAS: If you are super-paranoid, you can disable password-login (doing this can potentially lock you out if you stuff up your public key):

    # To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here! PasswordAuthentication no #PermitEmptyPasswords no

     

  • On client: On you host computer (not the diskstation) open a terminal and run the following command:
    $ ssh-keygen -t rsa

    Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/magicdude/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in id_rsa Your public key has been saved in id_rsa.pub The key fingerprint is: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX magicdude@mymac

     

  • On NAS: You need to create a directory with a file containing the the authorized keys of clients being able to connect:

    # cd /root mkdir .ssh touch .ssh/authorized_keys vi .ssh/authorized_keys

     

  • On NAS: Paste the content of your id_rsa.pub-file from your Host-computer (the one you want to connect from) into the authorized_keys file.
  • On NAS: Change the file permissions of the authorized-key file:

    chmod 700 .ssh chmod 644 .ssh/authorized_keys

     

After rebooting, you should be able to login without password via ssh root@mynasip — if not, sorry for you, you did not follow the instructions properly.

Next part is to enable SCP. This requires you to have the bootstrap on the NAS installed and you need to have basic knowledge of IPKG:

  • Use ipkg download zlib to download zlib
  • untar via tar -xzvf zlib*.tar
  • untar the data file tar -zxvf data.tar.gz
  • You require two libraries for SCP compression to work. Use the following command to copy them: cp ./opt/lib/libz* /lib
  • Now you need to get openssh which contains the scp exectuable. Download via ipkg download openssh
  • untar via tar -xzvf openssh*.tar
  • untar the data file tar -zxvf data.tar.gz
  • Copy the scp-binary: cp ./opt/bin/scp /bin

You are done. You should now be able to do a simple scp filename root@mynaspIP:/nasfolder without a password prompt.

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Streaming 5.1 surround sound to PS3

Posted by on July 25, 2008 2 comments

Update (2008-12-23): I have discovered an alternative to the method below, which works equally well (although not as fast as the DVD is ripped and re-encoded) – details are posted here.

Wow – it has taken me nearly 8 weeks to figure it out and the solution is so simple. The vast world-wide web seem to have no appropriate solution for (legally) ripping a DVD to a movie-file, so that it can be conveniently stored on a multimedia-server without having to hunt down the DVD itself (or having to get up between movies – :D )

I was looking for an easy, automated way to rip a DVD with it’s surround-soundtrack and then stream it to the PS3 via the UPNP server. Yes there are tutorials out there to rip video and audio separately, then mux and demux and re-encode the whole thing into a specific video container. Problem is that once the codec changes or a new device comes out (such as the ATV) your tuned, 6-lines of encoding-optimisations parameters (which not even a rocket-scientist understands) are useless.

The screenshot below shows Transformers being streamed over a AEX-WAN onto the PS3 (notice the 5.1ch?):

The above was straight-forward: vobcopy -l. The latest version of vobcopy will rip the title with the most chapters as a VOB and the PS3 is more than capable of streaming it without jitter or drop in quality. (Transformers will rip to 7.5GB for the whole movie)

Alternatives? I have not been able to find a way to rip and re-encode a DVD via the command-line, retaining surround-sound and good video quality. Handbrake was not up to the challenge and many other options are just involving too many manual steps. So if you have a surefire way of reducing file-size and achieving 5.1 surround sound let me know.

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The Friday Picture: Domestication

Posted by on July 25, 2008 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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OS X: Time Machine backups

Posted by on July 23, 2008 No comments

I have been running Time Machine backups as described in my tutorial for more than a week.

In the Apple forums there have been discussions that the above method does not work. However:

  • Backups via Time Machine to a NAS DO work. It will not work properly if you do not backup inside of a sparsebundle.
  • A bug (which got fixed in OSX 10.5.4) prevented Time Machine not to purge old backups and resize the sparsebundle. This is now working properly and I could confirm it in the OS X console.
  • When a sparsebundle is created with fixed size and a quota is applied on your NAS, Time Machine will purge old backups to make the latest backup fit within the provided quota
  • OS X introduced additional AFP functions 4C (for Spotlight), 4E (directory sync for TimeMachine) and 4F (file sync for TimeMachine) and the NetTalk protocol implemented on any NAS does not support this. The lack of those functions however does not affect your backups.
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NAS: Avoid data corruption from power failures

Posted by on July 22, 2008 No comments

So I got this 1 terabyte beauty of network storage where I can stream high-definition video onto my TV (at a gorgeous 5MB/sec videorate) and suffered on the weekend the first power-outage.

Although it was a self-induced incident (lesson learned: turning off the circuit-breaker switches everything off in the house), it brought back the reality, that with Eskom’s “guaranteed” services and the risk of cable-theft it would be only a matter of time until the diskstation would suffer an outage. Unthinkable what could happen when 1 terabyte of storage with read-heads flying at 7200RPM over the disk-surface come to a grinding halt in the middle of file-operations.

I was in dire need of a reliable UPS – such as the Back-UPS CS 350 from APC.

The Synology DiskStation makes it actually quite easy for you: You install the UPS, connect it via the USB cable to the diskstation, and it will automatically configure the UPS:

With a complete power-failure, I will be able to continue operating the NAS for another 80 minutes. I did however configure it to shutdown after 30 minutes.

Major thanks go to: Riaan Strydom (Skype: riaan.rks) from RKS Computer Solutions. I was able to order the UPS on a Monday morning and had it delivered within 5 hours the same day. I had tried to source an APC UPS for 4 days, and no other company had stock or did not even bother to respond. Well done Riaan – excellent customer service!!

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OS X: Garmin Bobcat beta 2.0.0.8 released

Posted by on July 21, 2008 No comments

Get it from here.

Fixes include:

  • Added finding partial street names to Find Address
  • Updated city search to work for ‘City, State’ queries
  • Fixed issue where some route calculations could hang interminably
  • Fixed ‘Displaying results within…’ string not updating for empty find results
  • Fixed crashes that could happen while importing from a file or receiving from a device
  • Fixed routes received from some devices causing crashes
  • Fixed various find crashes
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The Friday Picture: Fire

Posted by on July 18, 2008 No comments

The Friday Picture will provide you with inspirational and (de)motiviational guidance to make the approaching weekend so much more appealing:

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