A life without sudo

December 11, 2016 - 3 mins read

Fig 1. Classic XKCD cartoon :-) Please see the latest update, below! Ever since my first stumbling steps with Linux back in ‘96, I’ve been learning about UNIX. The first obvious lesson was to not use the root account. Since then I’ve been using a combination of sudo command and suid root binaries to get the job done. For the last ten years, however, I’ve been meaning to learn about Linux capabilities(7) and thanks to a friend and colleague of mine I now have :)

One ping only

November 19, 2016 - 1 min read

For some odd reason, today was the day when I woke up and continued working on libICMP. It’s now almost seven years since I first adopted Tim Lawless’ public domain version, and today I picked up where I left off and started refactoring and cleaning up. Example: #include "icmp/icmp.h" int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { char *host = "localhost"; struct libicmp *obj; if (argc >= 2) host = argv[1]; if (!

Merecat - another stray kitten?

November 6, 2016 - 4 mins read

This post is about my adoption, refactor, and rebranding of thttpd as Merecat.

I code for recreation as well as work. Most of the time I tinker around with my various projects simply to learn and sometimes these little projects turn into something useful for other people as well, which is great!

Recently I discovered my method to get started: refactoring, or just simple code cleanup. You see I've got this crazy idea that all simple things are correct. Although things usually tend to require a certain balance — not all things can be simplified, and not all simple things are correct.

When I recently had to migrate my personal blog, FTP, and GIT server, I set out to run everything from an old RasPi2. This put my private life in just about the same niche as my work life, embedded. On a resource constrained platform like that running Apache is not the best idea. So I set out to (re-)discover the web servers of my past, the late 90’s, I had almost forgotten:

mini_httpd,
Boa,
BusyBox httpd,
thttpd,
and more …

Come to think of it, they are probably one of the many reasons that I started my career in embedded in the first place!

New Toolchains

October 27, 2016 - 1 min read

Finally, fresh from the oven, here are the remaining two toolchains I’ve promised, based on GCC 6.1 and GLIBC 2.23. Download from the FTP: arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi-6.1.0-2.tar.xz powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu-6.1.0-2.tar.xz x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-6.1.0-2.tar.xz Unpack into /usr/local, and add to your $PATH, e.g. export PATH=/usr/local/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi-6.1.0-2/bin:$PATH The toolchains are built using crosstool-NG on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit, and are primarily intended for myself and users of TroglOS, but are generic enough to be useful for other purposes as well.

ARM Toolchain r1

September 26, 2016 - 1 min read

First GCC 6.1 based ARM (32-bit) toolchain released on my FTP. Built using crosstool-NG for Ubuntu 16.04 (x86_64) with GLIBC 2.23. arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi-6.1.0-1.tar.xz Download, unpack into /usr/local, and add to your $PATH export PATH=/usr/local/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi-6.1.0-1/bin:$PATH There’s lots of neat stuff included, both a sysroot and a debug-root with GDB and gdbserver for target. For details on using it, see the excellent docs. The main purpose for my building this is TroglOS, but it is useful for other purposes as well of course.

Finit3: Almost there ...

September 21, 2016 - 1 min read

Today the new logo for Finit3 was added to the GitHub repo and the homepage Gorgeous, isn’t it?! :sunglasses: This fancy artwork means we’re nearing the end of a long and agonizing release cycle where a lot of the internals of Finit have been rewritten and new exciting features have been added! More on this in an upcoming post :smiley:

The General Idea

September 2, 2016 - 1 min read

OK, so here’s the general idea: take one teaspoon of a well equipped SBC with Marvell chips you know well, add an awesome WiFi hotspot with USB connection, stir feverishly for several weekends in a row, then sprinkle some AlpineLinux and a custom kernel on top. Enjoy! I have no clue if this will actually work, may even try porting my own little thing called TroglOS to the ClearFog first, I don’t know, but it will definitely be awesome!

Live KVM migration with virt-manager

August 18, 2016 - 2 mins read

With the new servers and my server room shaping up, I’ve been working on setting up ALL THE THINGS! I just managed to set up live migration of the KVM virtual machines I use for testing my FLOSS projects. Here is a short writeup of that, just as a reminder for myself.

Checklist

Make sure the libvirt versions are the same. I tried setting up migration between CentOS 7.2 and and Ubuntu LTS 16.04 which turned out to be a mess of insurmountable incompatibilities. I’ve now gone back to run Ubuntu on everything and it all works fine.
Set up NFS for the backend store of /var/lib/libvirt/images. Make sure to export the share properly, I tried first with my ReadyNAS, but couldn’t set up root access (defaulted to nobody).
Set up VM disk caching=none
Set up VM processor model=default
Profit

Good Luck! :)

Fake RAID Adventures

August 13, 2016 - 3 mins read

The other day I got my geeky hands on two old SuperMicro X8STI-F 1U servers. I plan to use them as build and embedded target emulation servers for my open source projects as well as Minecraft server for my kids :)

Upgrade X1 Carbon BIOS from Linux

July 3, 2016 - 2 mins read

This is a very brief writeup of how to upgrade the BIOS on a X1 Carbon (G1) from Linux. For more information on this topic there is always the excellent ThinkWiki.

OK, this post is more about creating the bootable USB stick needed, was too much of a chicken to try Flashrom …