The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Power User’ Category

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Reminder to self: get less dependent on the various clouds

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/06/04

For my link archive: [WayBack] Grote Google-storing trof Gmail, YouTube en diensten van derden – IT Pro – Nieuws – Tweakers.

It has some interesting tips for IoT video doorbell products that are less depending on single-choice clouds:

EvilPlatypus 
@terradrone • 3 juni 2019 10:38
Er bestaan er minimaal eentje; smart deurbel met camera en evt speaker, eigen intern netwerk, compatible met SIP (en video), zelf verantwoordelijk voor opnamen, etc. Enige nadeel is dan wel de prijs, het is een Duits kwaliteitsproduct, dus reken rond de 350 euro voor het absolute basismodel. Doorbird heet het; oa te koop bij Robbshop en CoolBlue of direct bij de fabiraknt’s website.
seba
@controvi • 3 juni 2019 15:49
Nee hoor, ze hebben een LAN API: https://www.doorbird.com/downloads/api_lan.pdf?rev=0.25

 

dasiro
@controvi • 3 juni 2019 17:52
Je moet je huis flink geautomatiseerd hebben wil je echt nut van die api willen hebben.

als je alles zelf in de hand wil hebben doe je dat ook. Je zorgt er zelf voor dat je webinterface via een externe URL bereikbaar is en dan is het enkel je eigen hardware en internetverbindingen die als SPOF dienen en je kan dan ook makkelijker van solution-provider wisselen zonder vast te zitten.

 

mahsalti
@controvi • 3 juni 2019 13:24

wellicht is dit een oplossing voor jou?

https://www.instructables…oorbell-for-Less-Than-40/

 

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud Apps, Internet, IoT Internet of Things, Network-and-equipment, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Persevereren / Niet-zichtbare gevolgen / Gevolgen | Hersenletsel-uitleg.nl

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/06/04

Voor mijn link archief:

Persevereren is afgeleid van het woord persevere en beteken letterlijk het herhalen of doorgaan met een handeling, een woord, een beweging maar zelfs ook het voortzetten van een emotie.

[WayBack] Persevereren / Niet-zichtbare gevolgen / Gevolgen | Hersenletsel-uitleg.nl

–jeroen

Posted in About, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

VMware ESXi: VMware Tools Installed but not running

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/06/04

Sometimes you get this situation on a Windows VM, usually after a reboot but not logging on:

Networking No network information
VMware Tools Installed but not running

A “Windows” “VMware Tools” “Installed but not running” – Google Search mostly gives results about the VMware tools installation ISO being malformed, the registry not being correct, or having Linux as guest:

In practice though, there is a really good change that your default power settings allow Windows to go to sleep after some time of activity. The Windows VM then really sleeps, including services and network adapters. Then VMware ESXi thinks the machine has no VMware tools running:

I have noticed this on ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 with both Windows 7 and Windows 10. It is broader though, as others have seen this in ESXi 5.x as well: [WayBack] VMware Communities : All Content – VMware ESXi 5.

Verifying sleep is enabled

This little trick shows you the various possible sleep states:

C:\>powercfg /availablesleepstates
The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby ( S1 )
The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S2)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.
Standby (S3)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.
Hibernate
        Hibernation has not been enabled.
Hybrid Sleep

Disabling sleep

If you search for “sleep” in the [WayBack] Powercfg command-line options | Microsoft Docs, you have a hard time finding these:

/change or /X

Modifies a setting value in the current power scheme.

Syntax:

/change  setting  value

Arguments:

setting
Specifies one of the following options:

  • monitor-timeout-ac
  • monitor-timeout-dc
  • disk-timeout-ac
  • disk-timeout-dc
  • standby-timeout-ac
  • standby-timeout-dc
  • hibernate-timeout-ac
  • hibernate-timeout-dc
value
Specifies the new value, in minutes.

Examples:

powercfg /change monitor-timeout-ac 5

in order to disable sleep, you hav disable the standby timeouts (suffix -ac means “Plugged in” and -d means “On battery”) by setting their values to 0 (zero) minutes as UAC elevated Administrator:

powercfg /change standby-timeout-ac 0
powercfg /change standby-timeout-dc 0

This is far less than in WayBack – FutureMark forums – windows 7 – how do i disable SLEEP mode via command line ? (via [WayBack] Disable Sleep mode using powercfg – it.megocollector.com), but this is really all you need, as it correctly disables sleeping:

Later I found that [WayBack] windows 7 – How to disable sleep mode via CMD? – Super User also shows this shorter solution.

Note you need to run those on as UAC elevated user, which you can check for using the net session trick in [WayBack] windows – Batch script: how to check for admin rights – Stack Overflow.

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Event, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Microsoft subdomains

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/06/02

Almost every company I know has more than one subdomain, but while researching why support.microsoft.com could not be archived in the WayBack machine, I realised how many they have and bumped into a few sites listing most of them:

All via microsoft.com subdomains – Google Search.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DNS, Internet, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Every site should have a script like web.archive.org/__cleancookies__.html

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/06/02

I run in too many sites that keep creating new cookies, but never delete the old ones, ultimately leading to 5xx errors.

Every site should have a page like [WayBack] web.archive.org/cleancookies.html that cleans non-current cookies.

So I copied toe source to [WayBack] Copy of https://web.archive.org/cleancookies.html · GitHub for inspiration to look at.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Fritz!Box repeater and other devices: “Radar detection enabled. At the moment no wireless LAN connection (5 GHz) is possible; please wait.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/31

If any of your Fritz!Box devices under “Wireless” -> “Radio Channel” -> “5-GHz band”  the indicates “Radar detection enabled. At the moment no wireless LAN connection (5 GHz) is possible; please wait.” – Google Search:

  1. Click on the “Refresh Auto Channel” button
  2. Wait until it has chosen a new 5Ghz channel
  3. Verify you can connect over 5Ghz
  4. If you still cannot connect, retry steps 1…3 once.

I had this only happen on 1750E repeaters so far, but others seem to have had it on other Fritz!Box devices as well.

In the Netherlands, potentially affected channels seem to be 52 through 140.

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in Fritz!, Fritz!Box, Fritz!WLAN, Internet, Power User | Leave a Comment »

E46 fuse box and cigarette lighter connection when front has VDO navigation installed

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/31

Some links (mostly in German) about E46 fuse box, and cigarette lighter connections (in my case: there was a VDO Dayton navigation in the normal place of the cigarette lighter in the front):

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in cars, E46 330xd touring BMW, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Downloading files with wget on ESXi · random writes

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/31

Reminder to self to check if wget on ESXi now finally supports https downloading: [WayBack] Downloading files with wget on ESXi · random writes.

In the mean time, ESXi 6.7 Update 2 and up seems to support this; so the below workaround might only be needed for ESXi 6.7 update 1 and below.

[WayBack] VMware ESXi: help downloading large ISO – Server Fault

I will likely not do this, as by now all my ESXi boxes should have been recent enough.

I will keep the article because of the BusyBox commands section below.

If so, I might finally try and write a Python wrapper for this, as I know that Python 3 on ESXi supports https, but the ESXi BusyBox does not have a built-in cURL.

Some links and notes I might need by then:

BusyBox commands

Another cool thing in the above blog post is that it shows how to dump the BusyBox built in commands.

I ran it for ESXi 6.7 with a slight trick to get the full path (using back-ticks and escaped back-ticks) and content.

Since ESXi is BusyBox based, the commands that are in /bin are not actually binaries, but each command is a symlink to the BusyBox binary. BusyBox then knows the original name of the command, so it can deduct what part to execute. This makes for a very space efficient storage scheme.

The various bits of the tricks to get the location of the BusyBox binary, so the --list parameter can be passed to it:

  • The which wget gives the full path of wget.
  • The ls -l `which wget` shows the full path of wget and the symlink target (but there is no way for ls to only show the symlink target).
  • The readlink -f `which wget` shows the full path of where /bin/wget points to: the BusyBox binary.

The main trick consists of backtick evalution, and knowing that ls cannot get you just the symlink target, but readlink can:

Now the back-tick escapes, because you cannot nest back-ticks:

  • The `readlink -f \`which wget\`` executes the BusyBox binary without arguments.
  • The `readlink -f \`which wget\`` --list executes the BusyBox binary with the --list parameter.

Note I do not like the cat --help (see [WayBack] How do I check busybox version (from busybox)? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange) way of getting the BusyBox version, as that gets echoed to stderr.

This is the output:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, cURL, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware ESXi, wget | Leave a Comment »

“FIPS mode initialized” when you ssh out of an ESXi box

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/28

The once per console/shell logon output of FIPS mode initialized to stderr when you ssh out of an ESXi box seems to be something new since ESXi 6.7.

Since I hardly do this, it took a while to reproduce and track back the version where it was introduced and to realise why it is on stderr.

stderr in retrospect is logical: if you need to parse stdout of a job running across an ssh channel, you do not want it to get interfered with “side channel” output, hence stderr.

For a longer explanation see, for instance [WayBack] ssh “FIPS mode initialized” message to stderr – Why? – Unix and Linux | DSLReports Forums:

Keep in mind that “ssh” is used to transport a stream, as with “rsync”. What you put on “stdout” becomes part of the stream. That’s why this sort of informational message needs to go to “stderr”.

Parsing is hard, so bugs like [WayBack] Git fetcher fails on machine with FIPS enabled machines · Issue #3664 · inspec/inspec · GitHub got [WayBack] fixed in [WayBack] pull request like [WayBack] not parsing stderr, but checking for exitstatus.

Stock OpenSSH portable does not contain FIPS support

Finding back when and how FIPS support for OpenSSH was introduced provide a bit harder than I hoped for.

It appears that stock [WayBack] OpenSSH: Portable Release does not support FIPS. But there are patches on top of these files:

Many (most?) Linux distributions include a patched version like [WayBack] ssh.c in openssh located at /openssh-5.9p1 (git://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/openssh).

They integrate the patches like [WayBack] File openssh.spec of Package openssh – openSUSE Build Service.

Patches for instance look like [WayBack] openssh/openssh-5.3p1-fips.patch at master · gooselinux/openssh · GitHub which is more than a decade old (see the 2009 message [WayBack] rpms/openssh/devel openssh-5.3p1-fips.patch, NONE, 1.1 openssh-5.3p1-mls.patch, NONE, 1.1 openssh-5.3p1-nss-keys.patch, NONE, 1.1 openssh-5.3p1-selabel.patch, NONE, 1.1 openssh-5.3p1-skip-initial.patch, NONE, 1.1 .cvsignore, 1.24, 1.25 openssh.spec, 1.170, 1.171 sources, 1.24, 1.25 openssh-3.8.1p1-krb5-config.patch, 1.1, NONE openssh-4.7p1-audit.patch, 1.2, NONE openssh-5.1p1-mls.patch, 1.1, NONE openssh-5.1p1-skip-initial.patch, 1.1, NONE openssh-5.2p1-fips.patch, 1.6, NONE openssh-5.2p1-nss-keys.patch, 1.3, NONE openssh-5.2p1-selabel.patch, 1.2, NONE).

The patches seem to originate at the (now defunct) WayBack Index of /export/openssh of http://openssl.com/export/openssh/ .

In the end I found [WayBack] Mailing List Archive: OpenSSH FIPS 140-2 support using OpenSSL FIPS modules? having these quotes:

vanilla OpenSSH doesn’t support running OpenSSL in FIPS-140 mode. Some
downstream providers patch OpenSSH they deliver with their distributions
with changes to enable FIPS-140 mode.

[WayBack] Secure Shell and FIPS 140-2 – Managing Secure Shell Access in Oracle® Solaris 11.4 explains a bit of background of them.

ESXi 6.7

Binary searching for the version where this was introduced could have been a lot shorter if I had done a “FIPS mode initialized” “ESXi” – Google Search, resulting in for instance:

The final two links made me discover XSIBackup

They see be one of the few (only one?!) free backup solutions for the bare ESXi:

In addition, they have a binary for rsync version 3.1.0: [WayBack] 33HOPS | Rsync for VMWare Backup, so lees need to go to Source: ESXi 5.1 and rsync – damiendebin.net

––jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, ssh/sshd, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Wondering about the flavours of Tumbleweed ISO images

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/05/28

The Tumbleweed ISO images have many flavours, none yet covered in a comprehensive list.

I found [WayBack] Get openSUSE , which only explains part of the puzzle:

  • Installation: x86_64, i586, aarch64, ppc64le (for DVD/NET)
  • Kubic x86_64 aarch64 (for DVD)
  • Live x86_64 i686 (for )

I do get the processor/architectures:

README files:

These all have the same content:

These ISO files are published automatically once a new snapshot finished.
They haven't seen any kind of testing before publishing, so download on your
own risk and cost.

Most of the time they work, but there are times when they are broken.

So visit (and edit if you reported a bug severe enough)
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

But I could not find a single page explaining the difference between all these (and why some of them are not prefixed with Tumbleweed):

flavour media name architectures: x86 architectures: ARM architectures: PowerPC architectures: Z Systems
openSUSE-Kubic DVD x86_64 aarch64
openSUSE-MicroOS DVD x86_64
openSUSE-Tumbleweed DVD i586, x86_64 aarch64 ppc64, ppc64le s390x
openSUSE-Tumbleweed-GNOME Live i686, x86_64
openSUSE-Tumbleweed-KDE Live i686, x86_64
openSUSE-Tumbleweed NET i586, x86_64 aarch64 ppc64, ppc64le s390x
openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Rescue CD i686, x86_64
openSUSE-Tumbleweed-XFCE Live i686, x86_64

I do not get why:

  • some have a media name (especially not DVD: all of them are iso files, right?)
  • the architecture lists is so different for most of them
  • the rescue image is not i586

I know there are also non-ISO images for instance for Raspberry Pi or pure ARM at

  • [WayBack] Index of /ports/armv6hl/tumbleweed/images/:
    • openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv6l-Current.raw.xz
    • openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS.armv6-rootfs.armv6l-Current.tar.xz
  • [WayBack] Index of /ports/armv7hl/tumbleweed/images/
    • Too long a list to fully categorise right now; limited categorisation:
    • Flavours seem to be E20/GNOME/JeOS/KDE/LXQT/X11/XFCE
    • Architectures seem to be a13olinuxino/a20olinuxinolime/a20olinuxinomicro/arndale/beagle/beaglebone/chromebook/cubieboard/cubietruck/cuboxi/efi/loco/midway/nanopineo/olinuxinolime/olinuxinolime2/panda/paz00/raspberry2/sabrelite/sinovoipbpimplus/socfpgade0nanosoc/udooneo/wga//              all armv7zl flavoured

Then there is

I have questions on these too (:

The JeOS question got answered

When originally writing this in 2019, I could not figure out what JeOS was.

Now I know it is supposed to be pronounced as juice and is meant to have “Just enough Operating System” to get a base system working:

For Raspberry Pi 2, this was the image to use mid 2020 via [Wayback] HCL:Raspberry Pi2 – openSUSE Wiki and [Wayback] http://download.opensuse.org/ports/armv7hl/tumbleweed/images/:

The OpenQA shows the global build state, but not specific to Raspberry Pi models: [Wayback] https://openqa.opensuse.org/group_overview/3

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | Leave a Comment »

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