To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.

With thanks to Timothy Leary & Tool.

The talks were awesome, and i’ll update some more about that when I get a chance, but part of the fun was seeing Kiwicon posters on important buildings around Wellington.

Apparently the NZ Defense security team don’t take kindly to posters being stuck on “Military Buildings”

“How big is my mysql database?!”

It’s not always an easy answer, but this little bash foo seems to take care of it.

mysql -uusername -ppassword database -e 'show table status;' | \
awk '{sum=sum+$7+$9;} END {print sum/1024/1024}'


Gives you the database size in mb.

:)

So here we go:

(this assumes you have root access / mysql command line access and all that)

We’re working on two servers, I’ll call them Jack and Jill, for the sake of this howto.

Jack is our master, Jill will be the slave.

On Jack:

edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, and add the following:

log-bin=/var/log/mysql/binary/mysql_binary_log
binlog-do-db=database_name
server-id=1

where log-bin is the directory your mysql logs go to (this is the default for debian)
database_name is the name of the db you want to replicate.

Now restart mysql

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Still on Jack, open a mysql connection :
mysql
mysql> GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON database_name TO 'slave_user_name'@'slave_hostname' IDENTIFIED BY 'slave_password';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;


Replace the stupid bits with smart things. database_name is the db, slave_user_name is whatever you want, hostname is the name of our slave server (jill)

now make sure you have two terminals open on our master server, one for mysql, another for the mysqldump we’re about to do.


mysql> USE database_name;
mysql> FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;


DO NOT CLOSE THE MYSQL SESSION!

Lets get the session status

mysql> SHOW MASTER STATUS;



+----------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File | Position | Binlog_do_db | Binlog_ignore_db |
+----------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql_binary_log.025 | 796947 | database_name| |
+----------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)


Write this down, and keep the mysql session open.

Now go to your other shell and dump the db:


mysqldump --opt database_name > database_name.sql


Go back to your mysql session and unlock the tables:

mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;


scp the db you’ve dumped above to the slave

Now jump on the slave server!

Import the mysqldump from the master server:


mysql database_name < database_name.sql


Edit the slave’s MySQL configuration to setup replication:


$ vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf


Add under the [mysqld] section.
It doesn’t matter what the value for server-id is, as long as it is different from the master’s.

server-id=2
# master server settings
master-host=hostname.com
master-user=slave_user_name
master-password=slave_password
master-connect-retry=60 # num of seconds, default is 60
replicate-do-db=database_name

replace the bits above with your settings.

Restart MySQL — don’t worry, it won’t start slaving yet.


/etc/init.d/mysql restart


Tell the slave specifically where to start logging:

This is where you use the data from SHOW MASTER STATUS; from the master mysql database.


mysql> CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='master_host_name', MASTER_USER='slave_user_name', MASTER_PASSWORD='slave_password', MASTER_LOG_FILE='mysql_binary_log.025', MASTER_LOG_POS=796947;


Note that you don’t put quotes around the value for MASTER_LOG_POS or mysql will give you an error.

Now start slaving!


mysql> START SLAVE;


Check your logs, make sure things are working.

On my debian system, the logs look something like this:

May 24 20:34:55 jill mysqld[27025]: 070524 20:34:55 [Note] Slave SQL thread initialized, starting replication in log ‘mysql-bin.025′ at position 796947, relay log ‘./jill-relay-bin.000001′ position: 4
May 24 20:34:55 jill mysqld[27025]: 070524 20:34:55 [Note] Slave I/O thread: connected to master ’slave_user@hostname:3306′, replication started in log ‘mysql-bin.025′ at position 796947


Woo!

So, here’s what I did.

Firstly, I set the domain TTL’s to something really low, like 300 seconds.
This lets us change around NS entries quickly, without having to wait 14000 seconds for the domain to update.

Then, on the old server;

Dump the mysql db:


user@oldserver user $ mysqldump -uusername -ppassword -Q --opt --database database | gzip > database.oldserver.sql.gz


This mysqldump command will Quote table names (-Q) and drop the tables, add locks, add extended inserts and lock tables (–opt) and we’re only dumping the database we want (–database)

Then, rsync the entire site’s www directory, unless you use subversion or something similar (like we do)

(if you put the above .gz file into the site www directory, it will get copied along with the below command, which is good)


user@oldserver www $ rsync -zavP -e ssh user@newserver.com:/var/www/sitename/ /var/www/sitename


(-z is for compress, -a archives, which really means it does heaps of stuff. -v for verbose, -P for show progress)

Also, /var/www/sitename is the directory containing your web files ;)

This will copy everything over to your new box, providing you put the mysql gzip in the same directory.

Now just import your DB, after you’ve uncompressed it of course:


user@oldserver www $ mysql -uuser -ppassword < database.sql


So now you have your site files and db on the new box! woo!

In the meantime, I threw up some RewriteRules to stop customers seeing Bad Things.

Here’s what I used in the apache vhost config:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.php
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^(255.255.255.255|ip.of.client.here|etc.etc.etc.etc)
RewriteRule ^/.*$ http://website.com/maintenance.php [R=302,L]


This assumes you have maintenance.php in the root directory of the site.

Basically, we’re saying to let the ip’s in {REMOTE_ADDR} access the site as usual, but anyone else gets the maintenance page.

I set this up on both the old server and the new server, then swapped the DNS entries to point to the new server.

So now you get the client to check everything is cool, get your developers to fix the stuff that is broken, and once its done, remove the RewriteRules and we’re in business!

Feel free to ask questions about what I did here. I’m probably missing something.

BIG NASTY WARNING!

This mod won’t cost you anything but is a little bit technical..
In saying that, I believe that if you followed the steps pretty carefully, then anyone with a limited amount of computing knowledge could do this.
It does involve opening your PC and your xbox, which will void the Xbox warranty completely, and does have the potential to fry everything.
This isn’t really very ’safe’ as you’re working with live components, but if you’re careful and not stupid it will be fine.

You may need to do a bit of research on your own regarding downloading the files you need and certain parts of the mod.

Here’s the steps I followed, after doing a bit of research on the xbox-scene forums.

Programs / Tools you will need:

• Ldot’s XboxHDM v1.9
• The Uber XBE exploit - You should probably get UXE Complete v0.2.x instead, which is found from the “usual sources” (http://www.xbox-scene.com/articles/xbins.php)
• A Torx head screwdriver (I think just one will do, but check)
• A PC, with a CDRW drive and some blank cd’s.
• A personal network of some sort - either via crossover cable or with a switch etc. (so we can access your xbox and copy files / backup stuff)

Okay, so you should have all the gear now, ready to start the modding process.

Software prep:

Extract the xboxhdm zip - the key folder for us during this entire process is everything in the LINUX directory.
Extract the uxe-complete archive, and run “71-fonts-install.bat” then nkpatcher-06-install.bat.
(this is just a batch file that copies some files and does some renaming)

Copy the files in uxe-c-replace to the C directory in xboxhdm/linux/C

Once this is done, run the make-win-iso.bat file in the xboxhdm dir, which will create a nice linux ISO for you to burn to a cdrw.
Burn it!
check that everything worked by booting your PC from the cd.. if successful you should get a weird linux-y screen with a few options.
If things look good, power your PC off and pull up your sleeves.

Open your xbox!

Grab your torx head screwdriver, and prepare to void your warranty. (Woo!)
UNPLUG YOUR XBOX FROM THE POWER SOURCE!

There are six screws on the bottom of your xbox - some of these are hidden under stickers/rubber feet.

Check Here if you need help.

Once you’ve got the top off, have a look around - You should recognise a few PC-like parts :)

Its probably a good idea to unscrew the hdd tray and hard disc itself. - it makes the next few steps easier.

The softmod

Get the xbox (with power and tv ready) as close to your PC as possible.
(now for the hard/dodgy part.)

We’re about to pull out the xbox IDE cable from the hard disc - so get it ready to be removed. (unplug & replug the IDE cable a few times so you get the feel of how much you’ll need to yank it out - maybe even plug it back in quite loosely so its easier)
I’d suggest you get the xbox hard disc all the way out of its caddy and the xbox itself, and even plug it into your PC’s power supply, to provide a proper earth. Leave it plugged into the xbox IDE cable for now.

Make sure you dont have your fingers touching anything dangerous, and plug your xbox back into the power source. (dont turn it on JUST yet)

Get everything ready.. PC ready to be turned on, xbox ready, hard disc power plugged to PC and IDE to xbox, ready to be removed..

Power on your PC & Xbox.
Your PC will boot the linux cd and wait at the prompt - dont press anything yet!
Take a quick breath, because the next few steps need to be done reasonably fast. (Don’t rush though)

The xbox will make the startup noise and JUST BEFORE the Microsoft logo appears, pull out your xbox IDE cable.
I found that pulling the cable out just as the startup noises were ending was the most successful.
(this bit is hard to get right - it takes a couple of tries sometimes)

What we’re doing is making the XBox unlock the hard disc - as it does every time it boots - but as soon as it is unlocked we want to remove it from the IDE cable and while it is in an unlocked state, plug it into our PC.

So now your xbox hdd is unplugged from the IDE cable and still running.
Your xbox might do some weird stuff once you unplug the IDE cable, but it is ok.
Plug your xbox hdd into your PC’s IDE cable, and choose option 1 from the linux boot menu (if you get problems with option 1, try 2)

You might get a few error messages that scroll past, and it might take awhile to finish, but once everything finishes loading, you should be presented with a linux prompt

- type xbrowser and hit enter.
(If you don’t get this far, you’ve messed up, you’ll need to power off your xbox & pc, plug the hdd back into the xbox and try again)
In Xbrowser (also known as Midnight Commander, for all the linux fans) you should be able to see your xbox hdd on the right hand side (called /PriMas) and the linux cd on the left side.
If you aren’t seeing this, your xbox hdd didn’t unlock properly. (doh - go back!)

Hit TAB to access the xbox hard drive, and hit the DOWN ARROW to highlight /E, then hit ENTER.

Hit F7 to create a new DIR on E , name it ORIG_BACKUP. Then hit TAB to return to the CD side of xbrowser.

Now highlight the /.. and hit ENTER. Hit the DOWN ARROW until the /PriMas is highlighted then hit ENTER.

Highlight the /C and hit F5, this will bring up the copy dialog, just hit ENTER to begin the transfer. This will backup the complete XBOX C into the folder E:\ORIG_BACKUP\C.

Now hit F10 to drop you back to the prompt.

Exploiting!

Type xboxhd and choose option 2

wait for this to complete, and when completed, press 8 to go back to the prompt, and type “poweroff” (to shutdown your PC)

You’ve just completed the Exploit! Before you celebrate, lets finish some backups.

EvoX and backing up your eeprom

Turn off your xbox, plug your xbox hdd back in, and power it back up.
You should get an EvoX screen. If you don’t - something is fucked, so go back to the start :)

If successful, Scroll down to to SETTINGS in the evoX menu and choose BACKUP. This will copy your xbox eeprom to a backup folder.

Connect your xbox to your network, and ftp to the xbox (EvoX will tell you the IP it has in the settings menu somewhere)
(username and password is xbox / xbox by default)

Browse to the C/ and then fonts/dashboard/backup (i think) and download everything that is in there.

Copy all that stuff to the xboxhdm eeprom directory (xboxhdm/linux/eeprom/) on your PC.
Check that you have 4 .bin files in there, delete the old linux.iso that was created, and re-run the make-win-iso.bat file to create your new iso with the eeprom on it.

Erase your CDRW and burn the new linux.iso.

Now you can use the unlocking tools provided, so you don’t need to do the dodgy IDE hotswapping anymore.

Just unplug the xbox hdd, connect it to your PC and then boot the linux CD - choosing the unlocking option from the first linux boot menu. (not the dos one)
Once unlocked you can reboot your PC and access the xboxhdm stuff again, but before you use the hdd in your xbox again you have to lock it.
Boot the cd and choose the unlocking option - and then follow the prompt instruction (lockhd -a from memory)

You can download various applications and add them to your xbox hdd via FTP now.
These are all at the “usual sources”
I run Xbox Media Centre as my dashboard, which is much nicer than evox.
:)

Flash 9 (beta) was released on the 18th of October, and I for one have been waiting a Loong time for this puppy.

Finally, I can play line rider without having to do any stupid wine hacks - to make things work in linux.

Installing the latest flash plugin was a breeze. quit browser, gunzip, untar, then copy the .so file to your plugins directory - usually /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ or /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/

Woot!

My review of Windows Vista (RC 1)

:)

I decided to just pay the freight fee and get the Vista DVD shipped directly. It arrived in a couple of days, which was quite surprising.
I expected it to be delayed.

Inside there are two DVDs the 32bit version and the 64bit version..

You also get the product key inside the jewel case (but you don’t need a photo of that)

So, here’s my workstation before installing Vista - Its currently running Ubuntu 6.06, with some XGL things, Firefox beta etc.

Before I installed I did a bit of googling, and found that Windows Vista INSISTS on being installed on the primary partition on the first hard disc.. So I just threw a spare drive in and disconnected my main hard disc.
I let vista partition and use the entire disc.
Here’s are the initial Windows Vista boot screens:

The install was pretty painless, there aren’t very many questions to answer and it seemed very straight forward, which is pretty good.
It reminded me a lot of a Ubuntu install actually :)

I went off and had lunch, leaving Vista to complete the install.. when I came back it was prompting me for a username, and asking me to pick a pretty login picture and wallpaper (yawn)

Anyway, it was up and running within no time, most of the drivers and hardware were installed, the only thing that wasn’t detected was my soundcard (which is an onboard IBM model, so I wasn’t surprised) installing this was very easy, I just told it to go find the drivers online, Vista went off and did this without interrupting me at all, installed & configured without reboot (!!) and I had sound working straight away.
Nice one.

I HATED the User Account Control (UAC) aspect, which prompts you just about every time you want to do anything useful. I turned this off pretty smartly.

Live search is great, the new windows explorer looks pretty cool, but the whole thing just smells like OS X.

There seems to be FAR too much eye-candy and stuff to play with - I don’t see anyone getting much work done for the first few times they use Vista.

Speaking of eye candy, I don’t get the full “Aero” experience, even with an Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 XT, which is a little sad.

Everything feels kind of slow and sluggish, even on this PC which is filled with RAM and has a reasonable CPU.. It just seems so bloated.
I had a fair amount of the gadgets and shit turned on, but then I have all that stuff in Ubuntu as well, and it flys.

The general layout of Vista does look a lot nicer than XP, but it still FEELS like XP.
I honestly can’t believe there has been that much code changing.

There are lots more screenshots over on Paul Thurrott’s Vista site and of course Wikipedia has a heap of information about all the new bits of Vista (far more than I care to talk about)

In conclusion, after playing around with Vista for a few hours, and using it as a normal workstation for about 20 minutes, I decided to boot back into Ubuntu.

Vista isn’t really that cool.
It looks pretty, it has some interesting features, but I really can’t be arsed.

I figured the best way to do this was using wget

I needed to download all of one particular file, but leave the rest alone, so..

mike@focker / $ wget -r -l 1 -A pdf -nd http://www.client.website.com/superawesomedownloads/

This goes into that dir and pulls everything with a pdf extension.

-r means be recursive
-l 1 means set the level of recursive-ness to only be recursive by one directory, because I don’t care about anything deeper than that.
-A pdf means only download .pdf files.
-nd means no directories, don’t create them just fill my current directory with glorious pdf files.

and bingo, all the files in one place, as required :)

I was getting

foo.file: /bin/perl^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Which was caused by someone pasting or writing code in windows.
(Windows and DOS text files have carriage return and line feed pairs as their newline characters, while Unix text files have the line feed as their newline character)
Which is bad, when you want to do important things in linux.

To fix:

#apt-get install tofrodos
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  tofrodos
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.8kB of archives.
After unpacking 69.6kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://http.us.debian.org testing/main tofrodos 1.7.6-2 [16.8kB]
Fetched 16.8kB in 1s (12.2kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package tofrodos.
(Reading database ... 58379 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking tofrodos (from .../tofrodos_1.7.6-2_i386.deb) ...
Setting up tofrodos (1.7.6-2) ...
mike@focker / $ dos2unix foo.file

Cool.
:)