Matt's Happenings

Woo keychain decryptyness

Aha! now I have a decryptor for Apple keychains, spitting out plaintext secrets. Of course you do need the password, they're not stupid or anything :) It's also a good lesson in python and pipes being the way, rather than hacky C. So much easier to just screenscrape the output of Apple tools and parse fixed-length datastructures in python, than read arbitrary-lengthed attribute lists in C. (I had a fugly previous attempt which shall remain hidden from eyes).

Wonder if it'd be useful as a migration tool to the Gnome keychain-thingmo... Though that would require going back and replacing the security dump-keychain -r screenscraping with other code, which might get ugly. The source is available at least.

File transfer via ssh-agent

For the geeks reading this....

Ever been logged in to a remote host via SSH, and thought "OK, I need that file there"?

ssh-xfer is the answer!

You can transfer files through multiple SSH hops, via authentication agent forwarding. The details are here.

It is quite hacky, but works handily and seems reliable enough.

OS X keeps passwords on disk.

Woo for Apple.

You can encrypt all your files and secret stuff with FileVault and Keychain, but it'll swap your password to disk...

rez:~> sudo strings -8 /var/vm/swapfile0|grep -A 4 -B 2 longname
Password:
/bin/zsh
/Users/matt
longname
password would be here

Nice work.

Blatant advertising

For sale - 1 Airport card, great condition, suits g3 iBook or non-Extreme Powerbook. Probably around $75, matt @ ucc if you want it.

Update: It's been sold.

Another one bites the dust. Rapidly.

Well. After being told on 7th April I'd get a new iBook from Apple, it finally arrived at Winthrop on Friday 7th May. It booted all happy, and with the magic of firewire-target-disk-mode, I copied my old home straight back over. All good.

Except that when I booted it ... the startup (firmware) chime stopped half way. And was replaced by the sound of a full-bore fan. A new iBook g4 1 ghz, dead, after 3 boots. I took it to Winthrop, was told to D(ead) O(n) A(rrival) it. Fiddled a bit more and got it to boot, and I thought that _perhaps_ it was just some weird glitch, coming out of firewire mode or something.

But no, later Friday night, I tried to boot it, and it wouldn't at all. Full bore fan, screen slightly flickering (no backlight), and no chime. *sigh*. Anyway, another week or so wait for a replacement, since Winthrop didn't have any in stock they could swap with. I just wish Apple would sort their awful quality control out.

Fucking apple.

Gah.

Well, after two weeks of no iBook, the replacement logic board finally arrived in stock. Serge at Winthrop was helpful and efficient as usual, but once again, Apple seem to be sending out fucked up replacement parts.

This new board features an innovative "fade to blue" feature, fading to the placid apple blue background every ~20 seconds, for about a second. It _looks_ like a software issue, except it also happens when booting to the 10.3 installer CD.

Anyway. Time to mail fair-trading and ask how many times a company is allowed to do dodgy "repairs" on a broken product. And try to brave the apple callcentre. If anyone has ideas on who to prod at apple to get something useful happening, I'd like to know....

*sigh*

Update: I think the problem is that it is spontaneously deciding to run "detect displays". And sometimes it even changes the res, to 800x600 etc. Spechial.

vCal extracting...

I'm borrowing my sister's iPod currently, and thought the calendar on it looked nifty (though limited). So, feeling like having a slack Sunday arvo, I hacked up a bit of python, which'll proxy through your requests to timetable.uwa, and then feed out a vCal file which you can import into your random calendar programs, phones, etc. Seems to work, though haven't bothered with longer-than-45min events yet. Probably won't be hard to fix it though.

matt.ucc.asn.au/ttparse/ttproxy.py is the url, the source is in that dir if you want it. Let me when it breaks. And since mermaid is really slow (that's where the above link is hosted), WAIX people can use 203.24.97.244/~matt/ttparse/ttproxy.py. It should be faster.

Sleepy

Well, no luck yet with the automagic Minitar dev setup, though I have got the modem-relay power cycling the minitar. "echo ATH1 > /dev/tty". mmmm. It _seems_ that I get the correct serial from the AP (ie its not fried), since the lights on the eric^* blink a bit, and when connected to a Decserver (at a slow baud rate, they're old and deprecated), it seems to spit things out. But it won't talk to _any_ random Linux PCs I've attached it to. I'll have to try a laptop again, perhaps it's only low voltage or something...

Tried Darwinports for OSX, it seems a lot nicer than fink. Perhaps less packages, but it is uptodate. Originally tried just using stow, but some libraries like libjpeg don't know Apple's way of doing things. Though stow is probably useful for small stuff which darwinports doesn't have.

^* An eric is a crazy little serial debugging widget, with (usually) 4leds. Two are green (indicating "link" I think) and two are red ("data transfer"). There's also a switch (2p2t I think) which switches between normal and null-modem style. I can't find any online schematics, but perhaps there might be some about under a different name. I think Alwyn traced out the schematic, perhaps he might have it and I'll scan it.

Might work now...

Hm. The Minitar APs are kinda cool, but its a shame they have serial kinda. Since then it won't work with my iBook without a spendy dongle from keyspan or somewhere. The solution being, to put it somewhere at UCC, plugged into a machine with network, serial, and remote power reset. The easiest way for remote power? A modem of course (thanks James). Just like the UCC door. Now I just need to figure if I can just run the power straight through the phone-line into the modem, or if I need to break out the relay inside or something. If anyone noticing this knows, mail me.

With the Mintar itself, seems to be progressing well, although I neglected to notice that it was missing it's root FS (ext2). Ooops. Being able to jump to random memory locations in the bootloader is nifty though. Just set the IP (but don't ping to test, it ain't doing ICMP :), tftp an image, it ends up at 0x80500000, so you "jump 80500000". Look ma no flash! And less chance of a paperweight Minitar.

Anyway, looks like it should be able to work quite nicely as a tiny DSL router type thing for our tiny unit, so its all good. Assuming of course the wireless works. And we get DSL.