Kravlor.com - Computers

A Blast from the Past

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:40:13 -0600

Today, I ended up conquering an old DOS-based game that was among the first video games I ever played: Miner VGA.

There's nothing terribly special about it. By today's standards, it'd be awful. But on my cousin's shiny new 386 with 4 MB of RAM, it was one of the most fun things I had ever played, partially because it had a) color and b) sound. (The other 'landmark' game of this era for me? Wolfenstein 3D, of course!)

But, things have changed since 1989. (Ah, nostalgia!) The total awesomeness of this game, however, has not. Fortunately, one can use DosBox to emulate it perfectly. I would highly recommend anyone reading this to give it a shot!

Sometimes, I'm amazed by the collective efforts of the Internet

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:35:00 -0500

In my last post, I wanted to add a little snippet from Seinfeld -- "The Ukraine is not weak!" So, of course, I googled it.

And stumbled onto a site rife with amazingly stupid stuff, which proceeded to eat my spare time this afternoon.

Stupid, but really, really amazing. Check it out.

I Wish I Could Say it Better...

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:18:25 -0500

Today's XKCD cross-post:

Seriously, though -- these machines should be taken away and dismantled. I may be a fervent fan of new technology, computers, and the like, but when it comes to the foundation of our democracy, I'm very happy with good old-fashioned paper. I'll happily wait *gasp* a day to find out the election results, as long as they're verifiable!

The Wonderful Joys of XP Recovery -- Plus Dell Hard Drive Secrets!

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:09:28 -0600

For those of you who aren't tech nerds, please happily disregard this (lengthy) posting. However, it's time for me to vent after a full two days worth of effort.

The Problem

The task is one which can be seemingly accomplished by a low-level administrator with a few simple tools; that is, upgrade the hard disk in a laptop computer, running only Windows XP, and keep its contents in-place.

There are additional constraints:

You can only fit one hard disk in the laptop at a time
There is NFS and SMBFS access to a disk array which can easily absorb a full disk image
There is a USB 2.0 disk of sufficient size to absorb a full disk image
There is not a USB/FireWire adapter for the 2.5" drive, because you forgot that the one you did buy was for a PATA interface, not the shiny new SATA interface

So, the standard approach: make an image of the hard drive onto one (or more for backup) of the larger disks; install the new drive, and image back. Simple, straightforward, and easy, especially with commercial products like Ghost and PartitionMagic available for the process, right?

Wrong.

The Windows Approach

My version of Ghost (admittedly from 2003) was unable to read my USB disk in the DOS mode which needs to be dropped into for the actual imaging operation; similarly, network access under DOS (always sketchy, back in the day) proved impossible due to the non-existence of appropriate Gigabit ethernet drivers for my onboard card (also not suprising).

At this point, a Windows guy with my limited subset of equipment would go and fork over some more money for a shiny new USB adapter that hopefully Ghost could recognize, allowing for direct disk-to-disk transfer overnight. I, however, needed to get this thing going today to keep doing plasma physics research!

So, with the traditional Windows tools exhausted, it's Linux to the rescue! The problem has now officially been promoted to a More Difficult, but Not Impossible task. After all, if Linux can't do it, it's not worth doing; and with more than five years' worth of Linux experience, I should be up to the task -- and with stereotypical Linux snobbery, do it faster and better than Windows could have. :)

The Linux Approach -- Take 1

My approach was the same: make an image of the source disk and restore onto the new one after a hard disk swap. My latest on-hand Fedora Core 5 Rescue CD didn't have the appropriate network drivers for my network card, either; fortunately, the Fedora Core 6 DVD did. By booting into rescue mode (boot: linux rescue) I was able to manually activate my network devices for my home network, create virtual mountpoints in the rescue-mode created ramdisk and attach to my NFS ~1 TB megastore.

My first Dell-specific surprise when using Linux (and fdisk) was that my disk had some hidden partitions on it!

$ cat fdisk.txt

Disk /dev/sda: 38.5 GB, 38502535680 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4681 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           5       40131   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *           6        4074    32684242+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            4075        4680     4867695   db  CP/M / CTOS / ...

Well, with those guys lying around, it appeared that it was a small diagnostic partition, coupled with a sizable (DVD-sized!) restore partition hanging around, too! No wonder my purportedly 40 GB drive was clocking in near 30 GB in Windows!

Since I figured it'd be good to keep them around to start, the imaging itself was a snap; using dd:

#dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/nfs/mount/raw_disk_image

After the image was written, I swapped disks and repeated the process:

#dd if=/path/to/nfs/mount/raw_disk_image of=/dev/sda

Again, after the imaging took, I rebooted; Windows booted normally. I was done -- or so I thought. (Did you see my mistake? Hint: the partition table was copied literally.) Since this was a bit-for-bit raw copy of the source, the new hard disk reported itself as an identically-sized drive. I figured that PartitionMagic could do the trick, as it was designed for just these wacky partitioning schemes.

Unfortunately, both PartitionMagic as well as Windows reported the maximum hard drive size as that of the source, and not of the actual capability of the drive. My next thought was to confirm that the laptop recognized the new drive in its entirety. Strangely enough, the BIOS reported the old disk size as well! This was starting to smell like a Master Boot Record (MBR) problem, since dd happily brought the old one over for the ride.

At this point, I had to do some digging; by visiting my hard disk manufacturer's website, I was able to obtain a bootable CD containing yet another spiffy DOS-based utility to probe the hard drive. Among the tweaks possible was to re-define the capacity of the drive! It took -- at least the BIOS said so -- but Windows and PartitionMagic disagreed; afterward, they had somehow reset the original, incorrect data too. This led to a prolonged sequence of reboots while properly resetting the MBR and trying other tricks.

The problem seemed to stem from inappropriate drive geometry (cylinder, head, sectors) information stored in the MBR. fdisk should be able to take care of that, but for whatever reason, was not being saved properly. D'oh! (Of course, this took several reboot/re-tweak HD size/Windows boot cycles.)

I then turned to a Linux LiveCD to help me out -- the latest version of Knoppix. (After all, a Fedora Rescue CD is rather bare-bones when it comes to the increasingly difficult task I'd set it to do.) Specifically, I was after easy access to try and tweak the partition table using fdisk and gparted, the latter only which runs in an X environment. (gparted is a PartitionMagic clone.) It appeared to work, since I could re-define the partitions, resize the NTFS (!) and go on my merry way.

Until I rebooted, and got a wonderful Windows XP BSOD and a stop code (0x0000007b) which corresponded to a bad boot drive. D'oh!

A bit of googling turned up a problem with gparted, the NTFS toolkit package, and the 2.6.19 kernel used on my Knoppix CD; supposedly the latest, greatest gparted LiveCD using the 2.6.20 kernel fixes the problem.

So, after burning yet another LiveCD, I was able to shrink and un-move the partitions back to under the original 40 GB boundary. Windows booted -- hooray! However, after 6 hours worth of grow/resize/move tricks with gparted (PartitionMagic and Windows continued to refuse to recognize the true drive size) I had to give up.

The Linux Approach -- Take 2 [Works!]

Since dd imaging worked so well, and the MBR squarely identified as the offending culprit, I took the (considerable) time to do my imaging better -- i.e. partition-by-partition, again to the NFS megastore:

#dd if=/dev/sda1 of=./sda1
#dd if=/dev/sda2 of=./sda2
#dd if=/dev/sda3 of=./sda3

Then, I manually zeroed the partition table with fdisk and manually created the necessary partitions of exactly the same size and filesystem type as from the original, except without the 4.6 GB Dell restore partition. (After all, I now had its contents safely pulled out into backup image sda3. Re-imaging:

#dd if=sda1 of=/dev/sda1
#dd if=sda2 of=/dev/sda2

And with a reboot: a nice blinky cursor. My job was not yet finished!

The trick: since the MBR was created from scratch, even though the NTFS partition was toggled to be bootable, there wasn't actually a boot loader to do it!

The solution for that problem is to use the Windows XP Recovery Console, off a trusty Windows XP installation disc (and even more reboots!). Not a big deal; one just needs to run fixmbr under it. That is, until I discovered that Dell had set an Administrator password on my machine that I did not know!

So, I had to hack into my own machine, crack the Administrator password, and then reset it to a new one using yet another Linux LiveCD, this one being custom-tailored to Windows password cracking/resetting.

Following the hack, the Recovery Console fixmbr fix worked like magic; the system booted and PartitionMagic properly recognized the additional hard disk space. One last round of NTFS resizing to claim the 120-ish GB free on the replacement drive and I was successful!

Final Thoughts

If you find yoruself in my position, the right thing to do is to manually re-create the partition table -- don't bring it over via dd! You'll be happier after you do it. Also, Dell steals your hard disk space to leave DVD restoration images -- and leaves secret recovery passwords on the working Windows partition so you can't easily fix things when they go wrong!

Laptops are Fun

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 15:00:02 -0600

I've been enjoying the use of my new laptop computer. I finally decided to bite the bullet and obtain a machine that will be helpful while I travel and make increasing numbers of professional presentations. And, of course, play games.

In particular, this post is coming from the waiting area of my local area Car-X, where I will unfortunately soon pay a rather large sum to make sure my car can stop safely. (Brakes, it turns out, are an important safety feature of a motor vehicle these days.)

Work is continuing to go well. I've been versing myself in the art of Igor Pro XOP programming, which is essentially grafting the codes I've developed over the last several months into a different package that can then be accessed through Igor, a program that our research group uses extensively to view, manipulate, and otherwise look at data from our experiments.

With things starting to warm up these days, it's just about time for a BBQ!

Hacked Again!

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:16:32 -0600

There's nothing like finding out that your web server has been compromised by some Romanian kiddiez. And then kicking yourself because it's clearly your own fault.

At least it's forced me to upgrade my server OS -- something that really, really needed to be done. Unfortunately, it seems my CMS, Drupal, doesn't play nice with the latest versions of PHP and MYSQL. So, things may look craptacular for a while until I get it fixed. :)

Let this be a lesson -- MythTV users should not be allowed SSH login!

Minnesota Republicans -- Now Phoning Home!

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:00:56 -0600

Yes, I'm mirroring a /. story, but this is something that really hits home for me, since I grew up in Minnesota.

It turns out that the Minnesota GOP has been distributing a CD that contains a Flash-based poll system. However, what they don't tell you is that should you run the CD, it phones home to the GOP, along with your name, address, and political opinions! And, to make things worse, this is done without any type of notice in the packaging or the program itself.

Clearly, this is Not A Good Idea. As for myself, I'd put it in the same bin as all the spyware and malware that is floating around the Internet and otherwise infesting Windows machines. (As an aside, I wonder whether an outbound-blocking firewall such as ZoneAlarm would be capable of detecting this mothership-signaling behavior?) Let's hope that this is treated with the same type of legal classification (illegal) that malware deserves.

Knocked Offline

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:16:14 -0600

Things have been very busy lately, largely due to my work at Pegasus. I've been in the process of establishing a link between the DIII-D PCS, the Pegasus data archive system, written primarily in LabVIEW, and MDSplus. Substantial progress has been made in the last few days, so I'm glad to almost be done at this point! I've certainly learned a lot about LabVIEW programming, and how to interface it to external libraries in C -- and will be glad to be done with passing data types between one another shortly!

I have been trying to write, but unfortunately my Internet access which provides access to this site has been very spotty over the last few weeks. With any luck a technician will be fixing things early tomorrow morning. And, with further luck, I'll be continuing to write sporadic updates, mixed with technical updates on some of the features I've been working on. First up on the list of things to write about: I've figured out a way to export recorded programs from my MythTV box to DVD, in a straightforward manner. (With a GUI, too!)

For now though, it's back to circuit analysis and MHD. At least I got a chance to go swing dancing this weekend!

Some Technical Musings (with Job Offer Potential!)

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:23:17 -0600

I took a break from my regular busy grad-student life to attend a seminar today hosted by National Instruments regarding their new LabView software revisions. As Pegasus uses LabView for nearly every aspect of data acquisition and control (at one level or another), it seems well worth my while to learn about the subject from the people who make it!

While the experience was what I expected -- marketing hype mixed with real engineering tidbits thrown in -- a conversation with the presenter at the end was not. I had asked a question regarding some of the finer points of his talk, when he abruptly changed topic, asking me about my background and job prospects! He seemed disappointed when I told him I was in for the long haul with the Ph.D, but wanted to emphasize how my "significant" (I would have chosen "meager") understanding of LabView makes me much more marketable in today's job market.

I suppose that makes sense, given that lots of Big Companies are now using LabView to automate very large production systems, etc. Still, it's fun to know that I have a fall-back skill to sell to industry -- even to the point where I get an easy crack at a job just by attending their seminar!

On another note, I've been reading with disgust about the new Sony Rootkit technology that has been secretly corrupting the Windows OS for the express purpose of enforcing its DRM -- to the point where one is prevented from ripping the tracks from the raw audio data for use on an iPod! (Before I go off the deep end in techno-babble, you can find out more about rootkits and how to find them, as well as more on the Sony rootkit here.) On top of the flagrant breaches in computer security and trampling of consumer fair use rights, the uninstall program that was initially published by Sony after an uproar of public anger -- which requires use of an ActiveX controller using Internet Explorer -- turns out to allow arbitrary code to be run by any subsequent website that a victim of this rootkit may visit!

Let's hope that Sony gets slapped with some huge civil and criminal suits as a result of this massive attack on computers worldwide. (It is a Federal crime, after all, to knowingly and maliciously alter computer systems without owner consent!) Heck, there's even been reports that it may contain LGPL software components without redistribution of source and object code modules -- meaning we may see yet another trial of the GPL in court!

Hacked!

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:23:08 -0500

I hate to say this since I'm a rather security conscious guy -- but the old incarnation of Kravlor.com was exploited via an insecurity in the Coppermine photo gallery software on top of the old PHP-Nuke CMS. No user account compromise or password cracking (thank God), but the attacker was able to install an IRC chatbot.

It looks like they compromised it on July 17; I'm just glad I caught it at this point rather than later. Grr!

This made me take extra time to accelerate the transition from the old version to the new; I've now scrapped all prior content and ported over all the old photos that were in the gallery. 301 Redirects abound; I've kept around the old Quotes page and backported other content like the Ultima guide and the Windows Tips to my new Drupal system.

Drupal Importing Fun

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:57:04 -0500

Ack.

Let's just say that the act of pulling a LiveJournal's entries into a static file and then importing them back into a fresh Drupal site isn't easy.

After a couple day's worth of Googling, I decided to bite the bullet and manually transfer over all my LJ/old Kravlor.com posts. Grr.

If I had some spare time, I'd be interested in figuring out how to get said LJ-rip-Drupal-dump functionality working. It shouldn't be altogether hard; I'd just need to learn some PHP and maybe a bit o' Perl. :) But no -- now it's time to be studying math. (The Linear Algebra book is finished as of this evening!)

Note to Self: Buy Good Power Supplies

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

Fires can be fun, but not when they are from computers -- or when said computers are spewing smoke into your bedroom! I'm just glad I was around this evening right by the computer when it happened -- so as to catch it before it became much, much worse. After airing out the place, I performed an autopsy of my recently rebuilt gateway machine. Diagnosis: power supply melting down, vaporizing a plastic inductor sheath.

Let this be a lesson: buy high-quality power supplies for when you're rebuilding a computer from spare parts. Don't just use "that one I've got in my closet." That, and have a fire extinguisher on hand if you need it.

Is random stuff blowing up / catching on fire the curse of the graduate student? I don't mind it when it happens in the lab, but I do mind when it follows me home from work!

Retro Gaming + Assembly + Spare time = ...

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0600

I'm a big fan of the good old-fashioned 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I enjoy the fun of playing the classics with a real Nintendo controller, as opposed to on emulators. That's why I built an interface to my computer to do just that.

However, I've been one-upped by many people who have taken further steps. People such as those who are writing the emulators we all enjoy. People such as those who are devoted hardware hackers.

I was so impressed by one of them that I had to give it a glowing review -- meet the Devtendo! Who wouldn't want to couple their PC to the NES through its controller port?

High on my wishlist is a programmable flash-ROM based NES cartridge... and it seems like people are working on it.

!Fun With System Crashes

Mon, 03 May 2004 00:00:00 -0500

After approximately 18 months of service, my expleteve deleted Maxtor 96147H8 hard drive began randomly failing on sector read/writes.

A Maxtor representative arrogantly blamed me for the hard drive failure, accusing me of dropping the drive. When given a hardware diagnostic code from Maxtor scanning software, the representative confirmed that the drive was defective.

Of course, the stated minimum lifetime of the drive is five years. While the warranty on the drive expired last November. Which means I am out of a POS hard drive.

Linux was able to warn me that the drive was on fire and falling from the heavens. Windows just crashed. Fortunately, I was able to recover much of the (important) data on the drive and save to a local NTFS partition.

When I removed the defective drive (and unfortunately my new Linux partition), Windows happily told me that I had a pirated copy and refused to boot. So -- I get to nuke my Windows partition too!

So, I've spent more than 6 hours today messing around with my machines, getting angry at Maxtor for making such crappy products -- and then blaming me for their failure. ("Total Customer Satisfaction" my ass.)

Moral of the story: Maxtor and Microsoft both suck.

20 More Reasons to Dislike Microsoft

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Well, it looks like we get to patch away some 20-odd new complete security vulnerabilities with the latest patches from Microsoft. I, for one, am sick of the whole process! I don't like having complete remote exploits on systems that are facing the Internet. So, I'm working on Making the Switch to Fedora Linux, the latest incarnation of Red Hat's old desktop distribution. Things have been going well so far! For those without the requisite free time to learn a new (and really fun) OS, I guess it's time to visit Windows Update again...