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Xlogic XL833A mp3 player fix

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 10:33:41 GMT

Here's how to fix an Xlogic XL833A mp3 player that's refused to acknowledge the existance of the files you know are on it:

From a DOS prompt (get one on Windows by choosing "run..." from the start menu, then typing "cmd" or "command"):

format f: /FS:FAT /A:32K

(where the mp3 player is connected as drive f:)

then create folders named MUSIC and RECORD (both in all caps). Files placed in the MUSIC folder will be playable as per usual.

Spyware removal

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 01:28:24 GMT

Just thought I'd post about this in the hope that it makes its way onto a Google search and it helps somebody.

Last night a weird error message popped up on the family Windows XP box, saying something about "unable to verify downloaded data" or something. At the time, nobody told it to download anything and so our suspicions were aroused.

Pressing ctrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager revealed the existence of something called ezwnud.exe. Googling revealed it to be an update module for something called EZNORUN.EXE. Nobody knows much about it, except that (a) it's not part of Windows or any other machine I know about on that machine (b) it's probably related to the "Easy Internet" spyware company. Therefore it's something bad and should not be on that machine.

So I got rid of it by using Regedit to delete a registrty entry that looked something like this:

HKeyCurrentUser\..\Run: [EZNXP] C:\PROGRA~1\EZN\EASYIN~1\eznorun.exe
(you may not have to edit the registry, you might be able to get rid of it by choosing run from the start menu, typing "msconfig", and deleting the eznorun.exe entry from the startup tab.)

and deleting the folder
c:\program files\ezn

The folder couldn't be deleted the normal way, but I used Unlocker to delete it at the next reboot.

references:
Unlocker: < http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ >

(x-posted to my regular journal.)

Building Steamboy

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:38:46 GMT

Yesterday I rebuilt my PC (sort of).

After backing up the data and settings I wanted to keep, I took out the CD-ROM drive (left in the burner though) and added a 60Gb hard drive and a 5 1/4" floppy drive. The floppy drive is for (a) archiving a bunch of old DOS games that are currently on 5 1/4" disks, and (b) because I can. :)

I then ran DBAN to completely wipe all HDs. This was to (a) get rid of all partition information and (b) find any errors on the disks. DBAN reads, writes and erases to every sector of the disk 3 times, and it reports on any errors it finds.

Then I rebooted the machine with the Ubuntu 6.06 CD in the drive. This booted into a LiveCD Ubuntu environment, from which it is possible to install Ubuntu on the hard disk.

Ran into a small problem with partitioning - you've got to remember to set the partitions and mount points for all hard drives. The 30Gb drive holds the OS, the 60Gb drive is my home directory, and the 40Gb is /media/roms and will hold roms (once I get the emulation figured out, I know it's possible to run console emulators on Ubuntu systems).

And then after installation came the fun part - selecting software to install. The graphical package manager is easy and intuitive to use, although you may want to drop to a command line and uncomment a couple of lines in /etc/apt/sources.list to add the Universe and Backports repositories, then do an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. And then run the EasyUbuntu script to automagically add mp3 support, Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers, and other common and useful stuff.

As for the title of this post: the machine used to be called Vash for networking purposes, but because of the 5 1/4" drive's oldskool charm, I've renamed it. Steamboy is an anime movie, and all machines on my LAN are named after anime characters, series or movies.

references:

Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN): < http://dban.sourceforge.net/ >
Ubuntu Linux: < http://www.ubuntu.com/ >
EasyUbuntu Script: < http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/ >

Another server

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:40:34 GMT

I just got done rebuilding my other file server. While I had the case off (to change hard drives), I hooked up an old 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. And it seems to work. Which is good - I plan to put that drive into the desktop machine I'm writing this from and use it to archive some old DOS games so I can play them on my old Amstrad "luggable" which only has a 3 1/2 inch drive.

Building the server is pretty much the same process as the other one, but without the parts relating to RAID. Also,the ext3 file system doesn't seem to work so well on 120 Gb drives. You can format the drive but only 2Gb or so of it is useable. So I've gone with xfs, which works perfectly.

Building a file server, part 2

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:16:41 GMT

After 4 attempts, I finally got a non-corrupted Ubuntu ISO. This is Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake alternate for i386 architecture.

The next step (after burning the ISO) was to boot from the CD install Ubuntu. I did it in server mode (doesn't install the GUI, I post-installed it to save some memory).

The tricky part is the disk partitioning. Since I was trying to make a RAID disk, I couldn't go with the standard guided partitioning. Instead (this may be slightly wrong, I forgot to take notes as I went so I wrote this bit from memory after the event):

1. Choose "manually edit partition table"
2. Delete any existing partitions on all disks
3. Select the now empty partition (labelled "Free Space") on the first disk in the array.
4. Press enter and choose "Use as volume for RAID"
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for other disks in the array
6. Choose "Setup RAID array".
7. Choose "Setup MD device" to start the wizard. It's pretty straightforward - just choose RAID type (type 0 is striped, type 1 is mirrored) and the disks to be in the array. When done, choose "finished" to go back to the partition manager.
8. Choose "go back" (press tab to get to it), then partition manager, then auto-partition. Select the option to delete all partitions on the drive that will hold the OS. I found if I kept going with manual partition editing, it wouldn't install and kept going back to the partition manager, so this step is important.
9. Continue setup.

Then, once it's all installed, I did the following:

1. Login as the user created during install.
2. Use sudo to edit /etc/apt/sources.list You need to use sudo to get root access, otherwise it opens in read-only mode. e.g. sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
3. Afer saving the file, run sudo apt-get update to update the sources list.
4. Install the Jed text editor and the Xubuntu desktop packages (this is optional but I did it so I'm including it here) The commands are sudo apt-get install jed and sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop. Xubuntu-desktop takes quite a while to install, I left it running overnight. Once it is installed you can start it with the command startx. But the rest of this requires the console anyway.

To format the RAID disk and give it a mount point:

1. sudo mke2fs /dev/md0 (formats the disk with the ext2 filesystem)
2. sudo mkdir /media/raid (creates a directory where we'll mount the disk)
3. Add this line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/md0 /media/raid auto defaults 1 2
4. Back to the cosole: sudo mount /media/raid mounts the disk.

Now to set up file sharing with Samba:
1. cd /media/raid
2. sudo mkdir vault (create the directory we'll share)
3. sudo chmod 777 vault (give users access to the share)
4. sudo apt-get install samba to install Samba
5. Edit /etc/samba.conf
5a. change the workgroup variable to the name of the workgroup. The default is MSHOME, the same as the Windows networking default
5b. at the end of the file, add the following lines:
[vault]
writeable = yes
public = yes
comment = Mirrored RAID
path = /media/raid/vault

Finally, restart the computer. Go to your Windows machine and, if you did it right, you should be able to see the share by browsing the network through Windows Explorer. You should be able to read from and write to it. (Right now, I'm trasnferring the data I backed up before redoing the entire server).

Bibliography:

Quick HOWTO: Linux Software RAID < http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/linux-adv/raid.htm >
The Software RAID Howto < http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html >
Installing Xubuntu < https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingXubuntu >
Atomic magazine < http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/ >

Building a file server, part 1

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 07:23:10 GMT

I've finally got around to starting the projects I created this account for. Project #1 is rebuilding my file server with the type 1 RAID drive. I'll do this as if I was building it from scratch, since that's pretty much what I'm doing (due to hard drive failure). So here we go.

Part one: gathering material

Get a PC of some kind. It should be capable of running Linux, so anything faster than a 486 will do (although older processors may have trouble with some of the software we'll be using). You need a network card and as much RAM and disk space as you can put in there.

In my case, it's a 1Ghz Pentium something or other (whatever the first generation of Pentiums that could run at 1Ghz was) and 3 hard drives - one 10Gb, two 120Gb. I'll be using a type 1 RAID array for backing up all my data, so the two 120Gb drives will become part of that, and the OS will go on the 10Gb drive.

Then grab a copy of Ubuntu Dapper. If you're low on RAM, get Xubuntu. If, like me, you want to use RAID, you need the alternate version. Find it at http://www.ubuntu.com/ or your ISP's free traffic server.

(This is based on tutorials that appeared in Atomic magazine a few years ago, modified from my own experience)

Xbox security

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:27:57 GMT

I'm posting this mostly because I don't feel like reading the whole thing right now, but it also looks very interesting. And provides some more ammo for the anti-Microsoft crowd. :)

http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System

Well, well, well...

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 08:54:24 GMT

Every blog needs a first post, and this is it.

I created this account because I've got some interesting projects planned for the mid-year break from uni, and didn't want to flood the flists of people who don't want to read about techie stuff. Plus it's a good place to keep all the info without bothering with tags etc.

Anyway, after my exams I'm planning to finally get around to replacing the dead hard disk in my raid pair server, and while I'm at it I'll upgrade the Ubuntu install from Breezy to Dapper.

Then I'll also upgrade the other server.

And then modify the hardware in this machine to include another hard disk (which will make 3) and a 5¼-inch floppy drive (I have my reasons, which will become apparent shortly). Then completely reformat all drives and install Ubuntu Dapper and try getting WINE working so I can run Windows stuff on here (if I can't get it working, the laptop's got XP so I can still run any Windows stuff I need for uni). Might play around with other emulators as well.

And then... recently I came across a collection of old DOS games on 5¼-inch floppies. The Amstrad luggable will probably run most of them nicely... the problem is that it onlu has a 3½-inch drive. So I plan on using this machine to copy said old DOS games onto 3½-inch disks so they can actually be used on the Amstrad. It would be such a shame to let all those person-years of programming go to waste...