Something I’ve struggled with often in my career is getting a link between two buildings in the same property – a house to an office, a house to an outbuilding, two offices, two apartment – and having it be non-line-of-sight, so wireless links start getting expensive (900mhz equipment runs $500 per end if you’re getting them prefab; even assembling them yourself runs $250 per end, plus time.)

This particular property already had phones running from the house to the barn/office, so I knew there was some sort of cable between them – turns out to be a reasonably good Category 3 phone cable.

We purchased two Cisco 828 DSL modems, and set them up thus. On the master:

` bridge irb ! interface Ethernet0 no ip address bridge-group 1 hold-queue 100 out ! interface ATM0 no ip address no atm ilmi-keepalive dsl equipment-type CO dsl operating-mode GSHDSL symmetric annex A dsl linerate AUTO bridge-group 1 pvc 0/35 ubr 2312 ! !
interface BVI1 ip address 192.168.44.1 255.255.255.0 ! ip forward-protocol nd ip forward-protocol spanning-tree no ip http server

bridge 1 protocol ieee bridge 1 route ip `

And on the slave end:

bridge irb ! interface Ethernet0 no ip address bridge-group 1 hold-queue 100 out ! interface ATM0 no ip address no atm ilmi-keepalive dsl equipment-type CPE dsl operating-mode GSHDSL symmetric annex A dsl linerate AUTO bridge-group 1 pvc 0/35 ubr 2312 encapsulation aal5snap ! ! interface BVI1 ip address 192.168.44.2 255.255.255.0 ! ip forward-protocol nd ip forward-protocol spanning-tree ! bridge 1 protocol ieee bridge 1 route ip

And we have a working 2mbps link between buildings.

The one downside we ran into is that this property is so far from the ISP central office that the ADSL signal on their main phone line is very, very weak. The SHDSL signal is very, very strong. We had to lower the line rate of the SHDSL to get the link budget low enough to back off the power.

We ended up lowering the rate to 1032 kbps, which allowed the ADSL just enough wiggle room (moving from 6dB to 8dB of noise margin!) to sync at 1 mbps, rather than 288 kbps.

A server I had to work on over the weekend has several Very Large Filesystems – checks take about an hour, and every hour of downtime means angry customers.

The date was being reset badly, and making EXT3 throw an inconsistency check, because the time of the last mount was after the current time. It’d set the “filesystem has errors” bit on the filesystem, making a disk check mandatory.

Eventually, I reset the filesystem’s error bit, so that it would ignore the trivial error:

debugfs -w -R 'set_super_value status 1' /dev/diskname tune2fs -T now /dev/diskname

Status 1 is “clean, no errors”

Danger, Will Robinson, if you’re doing this to bypass serious errors, but in this trivial case, it saved several hours of downtime.

This applies to things like “Windows Antivirus Pro”, “Antivirus 2010”, “Antivirus Live”, “Antivirus Pro 2009”, among others. They’re a dime a dozen and the names change often.

There’s two ways these nasty things work: some install a module that keeps any but a few programs from starting in the first place, others close down programs they don’t want to let you run after the fact.

Often, the first kind can be defeated by right-clicking the program you want to run and clicking “Run as”, then selecting this user and un-checking the box to protect your computer from the program.

That bypasses the weakest of the modules that won’t let programs run.

The others can usually be defeated by renaming the executable you’re trying to run to iexplore.exe or explorer.exe.

The trick is to then shut down the fake antivirus that’s blocking removal tools. I usually start by running the Windows task manager, taskman.exe, and shutting down as much as I can – shut down the most random-looking process names first, then if there’s nothing that’s not part of windows left, shut down explorer.exe. Within task manager, you can run things like the installers for anti-malware tools, web browsers, etc. If you’ve got the first sort of blocker, you’ll have to rename each executable to get ‘em to run, if running from Run As didn’t do the trick.

I usually open up regedit and look in HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun and HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun for anything I don’t recognize; temporary folders especially. Nothing in there is critical, so remove things and sort them out later if you’re not sure what they are.

Next look in HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon. Check the userinit value for paths other than to userinit.exe. Remove them if so. Look in the subkey notification and look for modules with odd names. Antiviruses usually show up here, as well as Windows Genuine Advantage modules. Sometimes something obvious shows up here. Google if you have to.

You may have to run netsh winsock reset to get network access running again.

Once you can get something like Malware Bytes Anti-Malware running and scanning, you’re usually golden. Do a quick scan, then a full scan. Get your preferred antivirus installed and up to date.

With any luck, you’ve defeated the fake antiviruses.

1/2 cup canola oil 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar 1 tablespoon lime juice 1 tablespoon ume plum vinegar 1 tablespoons soy sauce 1 tablespoon kelp granules 1 tablespoon dulse flakes 1-2 tablespoons brown rice syrup 4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped fine

Just mix and shake. The syrup and carageenan in the kelp together make a decent emulsifier, so this separates more slowly than other vinaigrettes.

Apparently it’s quite common for the fix to MS010-15, that is Tuesday’s KB977165 to cause a blue-screen of death after it’s installed.

The computer reboots in an endless loop, and if you start it up disabling the reboot after crash, you see a STOP error:

Page_Fault_In_Non-Paged_Area

STOP 0x00000050 (0x80097004,0x00000001,0x80516103,0x00000000)

The security fix fixes one of the longest-standing bugs in the Windows kernel, a seventeen year old bug that’s recently been used in the Chinese attacks on Google, among other attacks.

A prime cause of the crash is being infected with a virus that relies on the old bug. Viruses like this live in device drivers, particularly ATAPI.SYS (the CD ROM device driver)

Fixing the problem involves uninstalling KB977165 while started into the rescue console from the Windows CD, and replacing ATAPI.SYS with the stock copy from the CD:

cd windows$NTUninstallKB977165$spuninst batch spuninst.txt cd windowssystem32drivers expand d:i386atapi.sy_ exit

Do a virus scan afterward, and re-install KB977165. The Virus ESET Nod32 detects is Win32/Olmarik.SJ in my case; others may have similar or the same symptoms and fix.

I use VirtualBox to run Windows to prepare Windows-only BIOS updates for customer computers, especially since floppy disks are so rare now.

Make a folder to work in:

mkdir CD

In the Mac OS Terminal, create an empty floppy disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=CD/bios.img bs=10k count=144

Attach it as a floppy image in Virtualbox running Windows. Run the BIOS update disk creator in Windows.

Detach the floppy image, then create a CD image with the bootable disk image:

hdiutil makehybrid -o boot.iso -joliet -iso -eltorito-boot CD/boot.img CD

Then burn the CD:

hdiutil burn boot.iso

Dr. Parkinson reimagines primary care

First, install cdrdao – if you use macports: sudo port install cdrdao

To rip the CD to an image:

sudo cdrdao read-cd --device IODVDServices file.toc

To write the image back to CD:

sudo cdrdao write --device IODVDServices file.toc

Make sure that the CD isn’t mounted before reading, use disk utility to make sure.

My friend pseudomammal made this spiffy game, Khromax, and I think it’s excellent. I really love simple, addictive, clever games like this. Give it a try.

I came in to work today to find my mac workstation spinning running rpc.statd at 100% CPU.

A quick dtruss -n rpc.statc showed that it was looping trying to read its database in /var/db/statd.status

Removing the database solves the problem neatly.

Inspired by Winnie The Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Make the vegan vanilla base cake recipe, and add toasted sesame seeds, toasted coconut, toasted poppyseeds, and whatever dried fruit you have handy. Bake as usual. Then turn out of the pan (upside-down), brush with honey or agave, and stick under the broiler briefly until a crisp crust develops.

• 1 cup white flour
• ⅔ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup water
• ⅓ cup canola oil
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredients. Add the remaining and beat until well blended. Pour into a greased 8 or 9-inch pan and bake at 350 °F for 30 to 40 minutes.

You can make a white cake by omitting the cocoa and using double the vanilla.

Makes an excellent base to make gingerbread cake, banana cake, marble cake (mix half cocoa and white cake batter in the pan, leaving a swirl), and it’s the base for my Crustimony Proseed Cake.

I just created a drop-down menu with an option to add your own entries. Feel free to use.

The skinny. Demo.

I just asked my OpenSRS/Tucows domain reseller rep about AAAA (IPv6) glue records: They are planning to support them soon! In the mean time, they can configure them manually.