hints & tricks in no particular order
01/06
I acquired a Netgear ReadyNAS, not a very powerful one but quite unexpensive and good hack potential, as it is based on Debian on ARM. The OS version is ReadyNAS 6.1.8 at the time of writing. After installing Transmission (through an app) and OpenVPN (through apt-get) quite easily, I wanted to route Transmission […]
28/05
22/04
To adapt when looked more closely: shamelessly stolen from Source: Hacking the Marantz MCR-610 for the time being. Information gathered through the Owner's Manual There is some open source software in use, namely: Boost: Set of C++ libraries Expat: XML Parser Toolkit FastDelegate: "Member Function Pointers and the […]
22/04
More a shameless copy/paste compilation of some articles (in case they vanish from the internet) Low Rent Firmware Hacking Quick'n Dirty Firmware Reversing Some tips Tip 00x01 - I normally like to look for bootcode if I have the choice. If not, I just deal with what I have. Tip 00x02 - Firmware files are in hex and […]
03/03
11/02
21/01
Expand a logical volume Source Make sure the host partition is big enough (using parted or gparted) (must be done offline if partition is mounted) The following commands can be done online (even if the logical volume is in use) Check disk usage (Allocated / Free) sudo lvm vgdisplay Check allocation of the lv sudo lvs […]
17/01
DriveSort sorts the directory tables of a volume formated in FAT12/FAT16/FAT32. This sort orders the files in each folder according to their short or long names alphabetic order. The majority of recent operating systems sort the files before showing them to the user, either by name, by size or by whatever the user […]
17/01
15/12
14/12
Also known as ZuniDigital ZR301, and maybe others too. Based on Realtek 8196C (SoC) + RTL8192CE (WLAN) + MXIC 25L3206E (4MB of flash) + Winbond W9825G6 JB-6 (32MB of RAM) But no success, it appears that 8196C is based on "broken" Lexra MIPS Microarchitecture. Not sure if it will ever get good support. On top of that […]
03/11
In an attempt to secure my internet connection, I setup OpenVPN on a OpentWRT enabled router: a good old Linksys WRT54G v3.1. The best firmware for this router seems to be OpenWRT Backfire 10.03.1 (brcm-2.4) (LuCI 0.10.0) (also in attachment of this page). The upgrade is very easy from the Linksys or (DD-WRT) web GUI […]
05/10
24/05
I have an installation of TFS 2012 bound to a SQL Server 2012 instance. They were both trial versions that I registered today. TFS went down and refused to work for a very good reason: the TFS databases were down on the SQL Server machine. SQL was stating that Database 'Tfs_Configuration' cannot be started in this […]
16/05
I wanted to replace the standard TFS compare/merge tool with WinMerge, especially since the Visual Studio trial I was using expired. It was not possible for me to configure TFS from Visual Studio as it refused to start. Fortunately a one liner allowed me to do it (in a Developer Command Prompt for VS2012) tf diff […]
10/05
I got my hand on a 2005 computer which needed some fresh OS and a bios upgrade. The PC didn't have a working floppy drive but could fortunately boot on USB (which is not a given on older computers). The trick was to get a USB stick with a bootable FreeDos on it. It was quite easy! Use gparted to create a single FAT16 […]
13/04
I got problems with a linux machine with a very small /boot partition. It wouldn't install any updates anymore and would complain about boot partition being full. I found out that many kernel versions were stored in this partition, and I did a bit of cleanup -- which turned out quite bad because I deleted the active […]
13/04
Beware when creating files with Linux on a Windows partition! Some characters which are allowed in Linux are forbidden in Windows, making those files unavailable. Chkdsk would even treat the files as corrupted and will rename them and put them in a LOST.DIR. So, forbidden characters in Windows are NUL : and \. Some […]
17/03
I've got a JVC HD camcorder which uses a proprietary MTS container. It is however quite simple to re-mux those videos into MKV (without re-encoding, which is also possible but of course much slower): ffmpeg -i input.mt2s -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f matroska input.mkv An a bash script to automate that: […]
15/01
Same story as before, but on Windows 8 instead of 7. It has been a bit more difficult to install the ATI driver. What I did: Download the ATI Legacy drivers (x64 | x86). Install them, going all the way until they fail. Download the ATI MobilityModder and install it. When it is finished, copy the mobility modder patch […]