Awesome HNN Schwag!

HNN came into existence around the same time we did. They went dormant around the time time we did. They came back a while after we did. Back when HiR was just getting started, HNN would diligently and without fail link to our new e-Zine releases. They've always been better at maintaining a consistent news schedule than we have, though.

We were surprised and thrilled to get this little care package in the mail this week:



Thanks!

Banned by Google+

That didn't take as long as I thought it might. A rundown of what happens: Your google profile goes wonky as shown in the photo. GMail, Docs, Picasa, Voice and Talk all work fine, although anywhere you would expect to see your profile photo, it will be missing. You can view other people's content in Buzz, Reader ans Plus, but you cannot share, post, comment or otherwise produce any content on those services, nor, apparently, can you follow new contacts either.

Most people that I collaborate with elsewhere know me as ax0n. My real name, address, phone number etc are no secret, but most people don't even know who I am by my given name.

By for now, Google+.

Lock Fail

Simplex-style pushbutton locks are ubiquitous in the medical industry. They're used on medicine carts, cabinets, lockers and doors. This is a cabinet that is designed to hold a thin-client workstation and/or patient record portfolios, and restrict access to ethernet ports.







Yep. You can open this one by sliding the exposed latch with your finger.

Also: if you happen to shoulder-surf the code for one of these, you can almost guarantee every other cabinet in the same hospital uses the same code.

Sysadmin Sunday: parse strings with spaces using shell script

I run into this once in a while: I'm trying to perform some operation on a bunch of files or a big line of text, and a space in the filename or text file janks everything up. Take for example all these recordings from a podcast that got batch-named with spaces in them.

Chimera:Recordings axon$ ls

(110) - .mp3 (12) - .mp3 (18) - .mp3 (39) - .mp3 (79) - .mp3

(111) - .mp3 (15) - .mp3 (3) - .mp3 (70) - .mp3

I really don't want spaces in the names. No problem, just use ls -1 (the number one) to list the files on their own line, and use sed or something for renaming them and changing every space to a null character, right?

Chimera:Recordings axon$ for file in `ls -1`

> do mv "$file" `echo $file | sed s/" "//g`

> done

mv: rename (110) to (110): No such file or directory

mv: rename - to -: No such file or directory

mv: rename .mp3 to .mp3: No such file or directory

mv: rename (111) to (111): No such file or directory

mv: rename - to -: No such file or directory

mv: rename .mp3 to .mp3: No such file or directory

[truncated]

That did not go as planned...

There are a few interesting ways to solve this one. The actual reason for this problem is your shell's internal field separator. When iterating over some input (here, the results of "ls -1"), the shell interprets any kind of whitespace as a field separator, including spaces, tabs and newline characters.

Although there are some other clever ways to get around this limitation when dealing with filenames specifically, my favorite solution to this problem works on any whole line of input regardless its source, whether reading a text file and operating on it one line at a time or taking filenames as input from another command such as ls or find. You simply have to use something that can accept spaces and requires a newline character in order to set a variable. Of course, I'm talking about a rather unsavory (but totally viable) use of the read command, which most unixy shell-script writers are familiar with when they require user input. Check it:

Chimera:Recordings axon$ ls -1 | while read file

> do mv "$file" `echo $file | sed s/" "//g`

> done

Chimera:Recordings axon$ ls -1

(110)-.mp3

(111)-.mp3

(12)-.mp3

(15)-.mp3

(18)-.mp3

(3)-.mp3

(39)-.mp3

(70)-.mp3

(79)-.mp3

You can also remap the $IFS variable to contain a newline, but be sure to unset it afterwards (if using BASH, this will set it back to default), or your shell will act differently than you likely expect when you're done. Messing with the internal field separator can be useful for other things (such as parsing /etc/passwd or handling CSV files) but honestly I'd probably be more inclined to use awk for those. If we remap IFS to a newline, our original script that errored out above works just fine.

Chimera:Recordings axon$ IFS=`echo -en "\n\b"`

Chimera:Recordings axon$ for file in `ls -1`

> do mv "$file" `echo $file | sed s/" "//g`

> done

Chimera:Recordings axon$ ls -1

(110)-.mp3

(111)-.mp3

(12)-.mp3

(15)-.mp3

(18)-.mp3

(3)-.mp3

(39)-.mp3

(70)-.mp3

(79)-.mp3

Chimera:Recordings axon$ unset IFS

OAMP Update: Secure OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP

I got tired of essentially re-writing the same article over and over again, yet it seems with each release of OpenBSD and each OAMP install I do, things get just a little more refined. So I present to you a living document on its own page here at HiR Information Report. It's been written so that it is not specific to a distinct architecture or version of OpenBSD, so long as the proper packages exist on the OpenBSD mirror sites. This has been updated and tested on OpenBSD 4.8 and the recently-released OpenBSD 4.9, i386 architecture only.

Secure OpenBSD, Chroot Apache, MySQL and Suhosin Hardened PHP Installation Guide

Why I'm coming home to OpenBSD

Although those who know me will tell you I love OpenBSD, I'm generally an operating system agnostic. I enjoy tinkering with OSes, and always have. There have been a few I tried and couldn't enjoy for the life of me (Mac OS versions prior to OS X, PalmOS, HP-UX and plan9 among them) but since 1997, OpenBSD has always felt like home to me, and I've long been a little bit of a fan.

Not long ago, my primary computer was a 13" MacBook that was bought for me by one of my consulting customers in late 2006, and prior to that, I was using OpenBSD on a crappy old Dell desktop and OS X on a G3 PowerBook. OS X is just unixy enough to geek out on. I could get most BSD-type stuff to compile. My MacBook also ran Windows 7 pretty well. I got switched on to it when my wife upgraded to 7 from Vista. It also ran OpenBSD, Backtrack and Ubuntu in VirtualBox like a champ.

When the MacBook started showing its age about 6 months ago, I went to a Toshiba NB305 netbook. It came with Windows 7 Starter edition, which really isn't much of an operating system at all. It's basically a kernel meant to launch Internet Explorer. Not amused. I didn't feel like paying to "unlock" Windows Home Premium.

Figuring that the hardware and all of the funky function keys would probably work best under Ubuntu, I went that route. Webcam aside (I never use it anyway) the hardware worked pretty well. I had to wait around for patches to get the screen brightness keys to work. Power management was always funky right after getting unplugged. Otherwise, Ubuntu worked pretty well for me. I set it up to dual-boot alongside Windows 7 Starter, just so I could use my radio programming software.

3 months ago, Ubuntu managed to corrupt the partition table on the hard drive. Recovery involved spending 4 hours restoring Windows 7 starter edition from the factory media and re-installing Ubuntu. A few days ago, the same thing happened. A co-worker has had similar trouble lately, as well.

There are a bunch of distros out there -- probably too many. Netbook-specific distributions are hot stuff. Frogman's on a Crunchbang kick. More than one person tried to tell me to go to Gentoo, Debian, Arch or some other flavor of Linux. I've used them before. Every few years, Linux has to piss me off, I suppose.

Faced with the prospect of a half-day wasted getting my netbook back to the way I thought I liked it, I decided to see what OpenBSD offered, since I haven't run it on the desktop outside of a VM in several years. The install is always quick, so if anything, it wouldn't be too much of a waste of my time.

As expected, Xorg didn't need any configuring to determine and use my display to its maximum potential. X has come a long way since the late 1990s. I was worried about things like power management (suspend, resume), hardware drivers, support for WPA2 and of course the function keys for display brightness, volume and the like, since they gave me a bit of trouble on Ubuntu.

You know what, though? Everything worked right out of the box. I had to enable apmd in /etc/rc.conf to get suspend to work, but that was it. I also found a pretty neat trick to get most flash videos to play in Firefox, with only open source tools and not actually using anything from Adobe. Youtube, vimeo, blip and even Badgers all work great. Let's face it, life would suck if you couldn't watch Lolcats, Badgers and Mythbusters.

It's way too soon to tell if OpenBSD will be any more reliable than Ubuntu in the long run, but I feel much more at home for the time being.

Moar useful OpenBSD resources I ran across this week:

OpenBSDsupport: OpenBSD Desktop For Windows Users

Using WPA on OpenBSD

That reminds me, I'm behind schedule on my OAMP guide for OpenBSD 4.9, but I'm pretty sure the existing instructions haven't changed, save for version numbers.

Using Severe Weather WX Alert on Yaesu Handhelds

I have a Yaesu VX-7R and VX-2, both of which are great handheld radios. Deep in the menu system, each one has a "WX Alert" option. It's item 20 in the VX-7R's menu, and the VX-2's menu items are in alphabetical order, so look for "WX ALT" there. After enabling this option, my radios still failed to alert me when the National Weather Service issued alerts via their NOAA Weather Radio system.  What gives? The manuals that came with my radios are very vague about how to use this feature, and Googling around, it seems like a lot of people have the same problem.

The trick is that you have to be scanning!

On the VX-7R, you have to be scanning the weather band for this to work. If you scan the weather band with WX Alert enabled, it will silently pause on any NOAA Weather Radio stations it finds, listening for the alert tone without breaking squelch. If it finds one, it will stop, open the squelch and play the weather alert. I recommend using the SUB band for this. Here's how you do it.

* Press [F] then [0] to enter the menu, and scroll to item 20. Enable WX Alert by pressing the [MAIN] or [SUB] buttons, then momentarily press PTT to exit the menu.
* If you have only the MAIN tuner up, press and hold the [MAIN] or [SUB] button to see the dual tuners. Momentarily press [SUB] to select the SUB tuner.
* Press [F] then [3] to move the SUB tuner to the WX band.
* Press [F] then [1] to start scanning the WX band for weather alerts.
* Press [MAIN] to start controlling the MAIN tuner, and use the radio as normal.

On the VX-2:
* Press and hold the H/L button to enter the menu, scroll to "WX ALT"
* Press H/L momentarily, then use the VFO knob to enable it.
* Press PTT Momentarily to save the setting.
* Press [F] followed by the [WIRES] button in the bottom left corner to enter special memory mode
* If needed, press [BAND] repeatedly until the weather band shows up.
* Press and hold the [BAND] key to scan the weather band.

The VX-2 will silently pause on any NOAA Weather Radio stations it finds, listening for the alert tone without breaking squelch. If it finds one, it will stop, open the squelch and play the weather alert. I also found that if this option is enabled on the VX-2 and you're scanning other memory frequencies, the radio will occasionally jump over to the weather band and listen for the alert tone. You should probably have the WX band tuned to the frequency of the nearest weather radio transmitter, because I don't think it scans the whole weather band, only the station that was last used in the WX Special memory mode.

Of course, not all Yaesu radios have these features, and these steps may not work exactly the same for all Yaesu radios that support WX Alert.