Projects

Redmine then.

So what’s that then i hear you cry…ok well maybe not but you’re probably still interested. Redmine is an alternative project planning, issue tracking, wiki type tool to Trac. We’ve been using Trac in the office for a few years now, i installed v0.10 about two years ago. Up until now, that’s been fine, it’s offered everything we wanted. (See http://trac.edgewall.org/)

But we’ve outgrown it, as with many things, so we’ve turned to Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/) which has many better features, such as:

• Multi-project support
• Cross project tickets
• Ticket dependancy and relations
• SVN/Wiki BLAME (puts the name of the person who edited of each line of code/wiki next to it)
• Built in LDAP auth support – with field configuration (ie configure that uid=username etc, so it will work with AD and native LDAP)
• Time management and planning – including worked hours, gantt chart and more.
• Lots of good plugins – including, graphing, costing (budgets), ticket reminder (Whiner – emails a reminder to a user if they haven’t worked on an assigned ticket in a set period), code review (annotation) and more

So that’s Redmine, what about the installation. To evaluate the system i set up a basic ESXi 4.0 VM running CentOS 5.3. It was installed mostly from this guide http://blog.itsmine.co.uk/2009/01/22/howto-install-subversion-and-redmine-on-centos5-rhel5/

This went mostly smoothly, i skipped the steps of setting up SVN (but did this later on). It wasn’t all plain sailing though there were a few issues -

MySQL Sock

(unable to find /tmp/mysql.sock) To solve this simply edit redmine/config/database.yml to inset the new socket location. You need to edit this file anyway, but that’s covered by the install guide. Here’s the final config (username and password obscured for obvious reasons)

production:
 adapter: mysql
 database: redmine
 host: localhost
 username: ourdbuser
 password: ourdbpassword
 encoding: utf8
 socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

For our system (CentOS) the location of the MySQL socket was at /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock.

Email configuration, is in email.yml also in the config directory

production:
 delivery_method: :smtp
 smtp_settings:
 address: ourmailserver.internaldomain
 port: 25
 domain: ourdomain.co.uk
#    authentication: :none
#    user_name: daemonuser
#    password: daemonpassword

That’s for a mailserver which doesn’t require authentication, this will be the case for most people. If you do need it you can specify plain and secure as authentication types, as well as uncommenting those 3 lines obviously.

Trac Migration:

Simples!? Well, you’d think so. Firstly i had issues installing sqlite2 on the system alongside sqlite3 which apparently they will both work side-by side. Anyway, our new CentOS system was stuck with sqlite3, but our Trac DB is in sqlite (2) format on NetBSD. This means that i was unable to direclty import the sqlite2 database into Redmine as i couldn’t compile the sqlite2 ruby gem.

Trac as of v0.11 started using sqlite3 so provided upgrade instructions, which would have been fine on their own (see http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/0.10/TracUpgrade) (Command

sqlite trac2.db .dump | sqlite3 trac.db

What i did here was instead redirect the dump to a file which i copied onto the new Redmine server and imported that way, using these commands

#Execute on trac v0.10 server
sqlite trac.db .dump > tracdump.dmp

#Execute on Redmine sqlite3 server
cat tracdump.dmp | sqlite3 trac.db

Then use the trac migration instructions here http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/RedmineMigrate

I modified the command,

#Original command
rake redmine:migrate_from_trac RAILS_ENV="test"

#Modified
rake redmine:migrate_from_trac RAILS_ENV="production"

This imported the Trac db directly into the project, you will need to supply the location to the trac envrionment (full envrionment not just the DB so do a trac hotcopy to get a full version, but convert and overwrite the trac.db file in /tracroot/db/trac.db)

The trac backup command is

/usr/pkg/bin/trac-admin /usr/pkg/share/trac/tracproject hotcopy /root/tracbakup

That’s for NetBSD installations, on your system trac-admin is likely to be lcoated elsewhere and your trac project location will be where ever you set it up to be.

Subversion integration:

I had an issue here where it refused to load the repo properly. First of all i had created a new local repo then imported the SVN dump file from our production SVN server

#SVN Dump

svnadmin dump /path/to/reponame > /tmp/reponame.dump

#SVN Create
svnadmin create /path/to/reponame
#SVN Restore

svnadmin load /path/to/reponame < /tmp/repo1.dump

I then configured Apache with mod_dav_svn to act as the SVN server, secured against LDAP with the following config

<Location /svn>

 DAV svn
 SVNPath "/var/svn/repo/"
 AuthType Basic
 AuthName "Subversion repository"
 AuthBasicProvider ldap
 AuthzLDAPAuthoritative   On
 AuthLDAPURL              ldap://ldapserver.local:389/ou=People,dc=ourdomain,dc=co,dc=uk

 AuthLDAPBindDN cn=admin,ou=People,dc=ourdomain,dc=co,dc=uk
 AuthLDAPBindPassword adminpassword
 AuthLDAPGroupAttributeIsDN on

 Require ldap-group cn=Dev,ou=Groups,dc=ourdomain,dc=co,dc=uk
 Require group cn=Dev,ou=Groups

 </Location>

That config just lives in httpd.conf (or under ssl.conf if you wish) and states that the repository at /var/svn/repo is to be served as /svn via HTTP to anyone in the Dev group of LDAP (where Dev is a ListOfUniqueNames) It specifies the credentials to bind to LDAP with (admin).

That done we can configure Redmine, this is done through the UI, go to the web interface which should hopefully be running and log in with admin/admin. If you’ve imported Trac then you’ll already have a project set up in which case go to Settings > Repository. Fill out the obvious details, if you don’t allow public read-only access then you need to specify a user which at minimum can read-only.

This probably won’t work for you as the system won’t have permission to create the config directories in the default location /root/.subversion/  So follow the bottom of the Redmine CentOS install guide carefully. I also ran a command which fetched the commit history manually so that the credentials were saved and i could accept any certificates which were presented.

So that’s it more or less. A couple of small hints,

To enable cross-project ticket references go to global Administration > Settings > Issue Tracking and tick ‘Allow cross-project issue relations’. For LDAP auth go to Administration > Settings > Authentication  Then at the bottom right hand corner there is a small ‘LDAP Authentication’ link Click this and then ‘New Authentication Mode’ to fill out the details.

One of the neat things about Redmine is the ability to specify which LDAP fields correspond to username, firstname, lastname and email. Which is very useful as AD stores the usename in one field wheras POSIX users are stored differently.

I hope that help’s someone, i’m going to attempt to blog more of my work IT stuff like this (nothing sensitive obviously) as i know i was googling a lot to find answers to my questions!

So it appears i have been away a long time, not so true, my current webhost (000webhost) decided to delete my account for ‘inactivity’ despite having the site set as my homepage so it always gets hits. Obviously they are demanding i log into my online control panel every so often – if i don’t, they just delete the account – without asking or reminding me.

In 8 months it will be back on a self hosted line, i may even have a dual line – 2x 24Meg Be* perhaps? We’ll see how it goes. For now the site may randomly disappear from time to time but i will do my best to restore it quickly.

The lack of blog is more due to being busy – first i was commuting from manchester to the wirral every day for work, now i’m snowing myself under with final year project work – it’s a very exciting and interesting project but shhh i can’t say much more now.

That said, i’ve spent the last 4 days watching House M.D. back to back so i think it’s time i got off my ass and did some work. I have some interesting personal projects lined up so as i complete those i will try and post the details of what i did and how i did it.

My lounge now contains a rather nice 24U server rack (fully enclosed, full depth, all black with blue trim and a smoked glass door) which was a bargain at £50, although driving it back from Huddersfield in my car was not fun to say the least and an experience i will not be repeating.

That will do for now, everything is more or less ok. TTFN.

Well, i’ve been very busy reacently, so busy i haven’t had time to blog so heres a bit of a roundup of what’s been going on:

OSPF:

OSPF dynamic routing protocol – me, matt and martin implemented this across our VPNs so that if one of us adds a subnet it’s instantly routable by any of us. Unfortunatly it works on a system of trust – i could add a subnet which is the same as one of matts and all those routes would propagate and really screw up. This sort of happened when some routes which shouldn’t be served were being served so the VPN tried to send VPN packets down it’s own tunnel! Once some filtering was sorted this now works fine and is quite an elegant solution to the problem. It does mean however we have to co-ordinate use of subnets though.

SyncToy:

Now that i’ve moved my desktop back to windows running on the 160Gb RAID-0 array for speed i have put one of the spare 160Gb IDE drives in the same machine as my backup disk. While searching for a backup solution i came across the windows Xp Powertoy – SyncToy, which is actually quite advanced – it supports bi-directional sync of changes/new files etc, one way copies (as backup), a contribute where files from both sides are combined and never deleted and a couple of other options. Running it with the -R flag just runs the backup automatically so i have it set up to run when i log in, though perhaps it should be when i startup instead. I’m also going to use it to sync the music collection on the laptop in the car.

Car Startup Controller:

I have been searching for some time for a mecahnism to auto-boot the laptop in the car, now, this can be done quite simply with a relay, resistors and a couple of capcitors but this is quite inflexible, the problem is that the relay has to close then open again after a short time as you can’t just hold down the power button on the laptop all the time as it won’t boot.

So i used one of the little picaxe microcontrollers – 08M, when it starts up, it waits 60s, closes the relay, waits 1s then opens it again. The best part of this solution is that it is reprogrammable – i can just plug it into my computer and upload a new program.

The Design – just a regulator on the 12v input down to 5v, the 3 resistors to ground on the serial in pin, then a transistor on the output pin with the relay and a protection diode.

Work:

Things have been hectic with all sorts going on, i’ve had 3 major projects to deal with in quite a short space of time -
1. Wrestle with the DirectX SDK to provide recording, playback and live interfacing to AXIS video servers – which use Mpeg4 over RTSP/RTP. Now that i’ve done it, i can now interface with almost any other DirectShow video source with minimal of fuss – simply a matter of changing the filters.
2. Alter the way our VHF recorder uses the windows waveOut/In devices for enumeration and record/playback. We had landed ourselves in a situation where we had a soundcard which had no mixer device – which we were previously using for enumaration and setup and also assumming that the waveOut/In ID was the same as the MixerID which in fact they’re not. So this required some alteration to the way we were using the API. As a side effect it actually makes the program more robust in situations where soundcards arn’t always as expected (one wave in, one wave out and one mixer device)
3. Dongle Licensing Protection – i have designed and implemented a dongle based protection and licencing scheme which will eventually interface into a full customer/order database system.

As well as those, we now have a need for a calandering solution so i looked at Scalix mailserver, but for us, all it really offers over our current setup is the calander, outlook connector and webmail. Since none of us in the office use webmail or outlook it is of limited use. Plus changing the MTA to postfix instead of sendmail didn’t seem all that simple. Instead i setup iCal’s on our WebDAV server which seems to work pretty well using the thunderbird lightning plug in. When i get around to it i’ll set up a private WebDAV area for each of us to use for our iCal plus a public one.

Apart from that there’s nothing much else going on at the mo, i’m moving house in 6 weeks back to manchester which should be…interesting to say the least.

Well here goes…

Fileserver/NAS

I finally got round to buying the HDs for this – 3x 750Gb Samsung SATA-II hd’s. The box is a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 1Gb Ram and 80GB Boot HD. Installing Solaris was relatively painless but getting it all working was a bit of a pain.

The ZFS/RAID-Z side of things was a doddle – just plugged in the HDs, logged into the web interface and set up the disk configuration…within 5 minutes i had a 1.3Tb RAID suppported storage array

Setting up samba wasn’t too hard just svcadm enable samba and swat. The only problems i had was file permissions on the samba, got round that by forcing all files to be 777 permissions on disk, but using samba user permissions for read write (exactly how i like it).

I also noticed my throughput just dropped off randomly, this is due to some conflict issue on the network card and IRQs or the motherboard chipset – it’s a rubbish SIS thing. I swapped the slots the card was in and it works much better, i get around 20megabytes per second on a gigabit LAN. (card is a Pro/1000 MT Server)

All in all it works pretty well and i’m happy, although i do only have 500gig of space left – that is everything on there though – movies, downloads, music, games, documents and editing work. All i need to do now is get more disks and the case – i have my eye on a 20 bay 4U thing – 20 SATA hotswap bays, should be enough to keep my system for years to come. I’ll just have to keep buying controller cards…

My monitoring controller is coming on nicely, i played with the PICs for the first time not too long ago – a doddle to program and use. I’ve just about finished the audio circuits – nice powerful headphone amp is done, i replaced the main pots with a couple i found in a box as the ones i was using were absolutely dire – they crackled! But i plan to get a nice motorised one as it’ll be linked up to an IR remote control kit i got which is quite nice.

I’m slowly plodding on with it, i shoudl put some effort into getting it finished before i move back to manc though.

In the midst of sorting my NAS i got really pissed off with swapping monitors and keyboards about so i bought a Compaq Sever Console Switch (rackmount KVM to me and you, 8 ports) i was quite impressed…but it was broken! Quick email to the ebay seller and he organised a replacement. That sorted i took the broken one apart and discovered there was no output voltage on the PSU board, so i looked up the specs and found the voltages.

One ATX psu and some bodgery later i was feeding it the +12, +5, -5 and 0 it deserved, it now works perfectly, so i’ll have two once the replacement arrives.

They support cascading in a really nice way – link using a spare computer port (mouse, kb and vga) and set up the master so it ‘knows’ where the cascaded machines are – the OSD even supports point and click mouse control!

Even if it was £40 + £20 for cables it’s well worth it.

I also got around to replacing my VMWare server (5U dell poweredge dual PIII 1.4GHz, 2x 18gb, 2x36gb, 1.5gb ram if anyone is interested in buying it from me) with a 1U Compaq Dual PIII 1.4Ghz, 1.5Gb Ram and 2x 73Gb HDs, it’s running VMWare ESX very nicely and i put in a broadcom gigabit card too.

This easily runs my 3 windows server VMs and saves space (even if it is noisier) to complete my network to a nice stage i need to replace the voice server with a 1U box and then i’ll be happy.

Speaking of gigabit, i finally replaced the gigabit switch as i was having all sorts of problems – linux refused to link at gigabit – on any card on any linux! Now i have a Linksys SD1008 8 port which works like a dream, throughput is about the same though.

Had the car MOT’d over easter, they had to replace a section of the exhaust and it cost me about £130 in total which isn’t too bad for a 10 year old car, it’s mostly going strong so hopefully it’ll last a couple more years yet.

Work is hectic at the moment – i’m currently working on DirectX/Show interfacing for an IP CCTV camera and having to trawl through the MS Documentation is a bit of a drag but i’m getting there i’d say another week before it will all work, then a week more to tidy it up and get it integrated.

I also got a Grandstream HT488 FXO/FXS adaptor for work too which arrived this week, i’ve set that up – not as easy as it shoudl have been since the latest firmware just broke incoming PSTN calls completely, i had to dig out firmware 1.0.3.86 from the depths of the internet before it would work properly! I’ll be able to unleash it on the office properly on monday and really give it a good go.

Also along the lines of VOIP, i picked up a couple of Cisco 7940′s (My First Cisco…ahh how sweet) which are really really nice! They were quite awkward to flash with the SIP firmware (couple of stages, TFTP booting config files etc) but once that was done they’re such a dream to use and the build quality is far and above that of the grandstream GXP2000 i own. So good in fact that work, on seeing them, want to get some for the office!

Ubuntu 8.04 is finally on proper release – and my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse still don’t work properly, however, they do work if i force the dongle into HID mode so that’s an improvement over what it has been. Other than that issue (and the complete lack of support for proper multi monitors/extended desktop and multi line i/o on soundcards) it seems to work pretty well. I am however going to have to go back to windows because i will need a proper windows dev environment for my final year project (somthing c++ based to do with MIDI programming and user interfaces)

So there we have it, theres a lot there so i hope you enjoyed it. I should try and blog more often then i can get into the detail of the things i’ve been doing (so it may be of use to others).

See you soon folks!

Yup, i decided to hit the ‘upgrade distro button’. After taking all the necessary safety precautions:-

Fresh beverage…..Check.
Snacks………………..Check.
Seat Belt……………..Check.
Unplugged sensitive data HD…..nah be right, today i’m walkin’ on the wild side
Anything else? Nah don’t think so.

So i sat back, strapped in and clicked ‘Go’

Mostly successful, my bluetooth keyboard is broken – STILL! This is a *known* bug and was reported weeks ago but noone has fixed it yet, its partially caused by the missing HIDD binary from the Bluez-Tools package (think they’re going for a replacement method but it doesnt work. My lovely Logitech Dinovo Bluetooth keyboard simply won’t work – it doesnt even work fudging as a usb keyboard since Ubuntu detects the dongle as a bluetooth device – if you don’t install drivers under windows it just ‘works’ This had better get fixed soon as it is doing my head in using a PS2-USB adaptor which crashes every so often and i get stuck letters.

I just got Compiz working again finally, normally it would just max the cpu, it turns out this is a settings related issue which didnt get upgraded/disabled during the update. So that’s working again.

In an attempt to fix my keyboard and compiz i installed all of the test packages – thus breaking the entire system as it decided it wanted to change the kernel type to 386 (i only found this out later) so didn’t have the modules or the restricted modules installed. So everything broke – no hardware detection, no graphics to speak of etc etc etc.

Eventually i was able to fix it by installing the modules packages, why it changed the kernel type to begin with is beyond me.

Virtual box is now integrated into the distro which is nice, but i still have to manually do chmod 777 /dev/vboxdrv before i can run it, this is due to me being too lazy to look up how to add myself to the vbox group. Which should be done in the installer but isn’t.

Off Ubuntu…ish I attempted to use Mythbuntu (and hence the TV part of LinuxMCE) to find that neither of my tuners are supported, so that idea is just out completely. I’d like to try it properly – i like the idea of a backend-front end system (noisy server with big disks and lots of tuners in a cuboard, thin netbooting client on the front for playback) and being able to run clients all of which can watch tv all over the house. But alas no, it’ll have to wait until i buy new tuners.

Instead, i gave Vista a go on my mediacentre, it being a decent enough spec to run. It’s not bad either, the MCE seems less buggy, bit annoying to try to set familier settings as they all seem to have moved around but now bad. All my drivers were detected automatically – even the Tuner card. The RAID card didn’t work until i put the CD in (cheap designed before vista even came out hence no vista drivers) but it looked at the CD and said yes ok, i’ll use those – it actually worked. I’ll see how it goes, but so far it’s been more reliable than the last XP MCE install.

MS related, i was told about MS DreamSpark for Students https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ Any current student is eligible for this – either your institution must be a partner, you have an Eduserv Athens Password or an ISIC number (also on your NUS Extra-rip-off card) You authenticate your status by logging in with your Athens password (or thats how it did it, more about Salford Uni and MSDNAA later…) and you’re let in for unlimited free donwloads of things like Visual Studio 05/08 and Server 2003 Standard.

Not bad for a freebie, but not as much as i’m entitled to. Salford University, like many others are MSDNAA partners, this means they have the ability to give students access to the vast majority of MS software for free (or at least for the School of CSE) – do they allow this – NO! I suspect purely becuase of the admin overhead. Salford Uni isn’t even listed as a DreamSpark partner. Other universities give their students access to this system through their online systems (Salford has Blackboard), friends of mine elsewhere can get their hands on any MS software completely legally.

I on the other hand, am going to end up subscribing to TechNet Online – £200 a year for all the OSs and some office/server stuff isn’t bad. I’d rather have the CD Media version, but it’s twice the price.

Car wise, all isn’t bad, MOT on thursday, fingers crossed it passes. I’ve more or less sorted the Laptop in there now, i have another problem where the USB hub won’t run properly, but i’m forced to use it as the laptop only has one USB port! I found some software which monitors the power type (AC/Battery) and on switching to battery it waits 10s, closes the LCD Control App, waits 20s then hibernates. This way shutdown is automatic when i get out of the car. Start up it restores from hibernate and waits a bit, then launches the LCD control app.

I contacted the developer of LCDC, the LCD app, and asked him to put resiliency in on losing the USB/Com port, just like my Car2PC adaptor does. He said he would look into it. I’m still awaiting a response.

It’s highly likely i’ll end up developing my own, it’ll be more reliable.

I was looking at PicoITX boards – tiny little things, but i still like the idea of using a laptop – with batteries, so that i can completely cut power when the engine is off. I’ll have to replace the current machine though, with one which has a decent docking station at least – power, audio, multi usb, display, so nothing goes into the laptop itself and i can keep the ports well protected. I’ve strapped in the box of tools/fluids at least so damage is less likely.

Work wise things are going well – just sent off an order to the Isle of Man today, may be going out there to comission it in a while. Other big orders are coming up too, which is good, it keeps us busy but does get in the way of doing fun stuff!

I’ve also dug out my monitoring controller again, i finished another pair of line drivers yesterday, once i do the headphone amp and low pass filter that will be all of the audio circuitry done! Yay! I will the have to integrate switching and control, that’s a big job, i need relays, pics and usb GPIO. I have a 4-bit IR TRx module which will go in there too. I already have the light up buttons so i can get those mounted soon.

Well that’s all for now, i’ll keep you updated as and when stuff happens. TTFN

Well then, i know i haven’t been blogging much recently, i’ve just been in that new-years lull where i can’t really be bothered with anything, however, i’m working my way out of it and do i have a treat in store for all of you. This entry will be quite full, so sit back, strap in and enjoy the ride. (Geek restrictions apply.)

First off, a nice easy one – i got me a new PC! Spec:

Asus P5B Intel based mobo – lots of sata, usb and all the usual bits, although annoyingly only one IDE – my MCE has two IDE hd’s and two IDE optical drives – i changed this (see later)
Pentium E2180 CPU – dual Core 2GHz, can be overclocked to the max – which i won’t be doing as i want it to run cool (and therefore quiet)
2Gb Ram
nVidia 8400GS Graphics

Not a bad replacement spec – i put MCE 2005 on it and does it fly! I can play back 720p MKV video at about 15% CPU – the old box used more CPU to play Mpeg4! As a result i’ve been watching a few HD movies, although i will be glad when we get American TV back again (it seems shows will be returning to the air in the US in April) 1080p also doesn’t seem a problem.

By far the best footage i’ve seen is the BBC Top Gear Polar Special, in 1080p, the detail really is phenomenal – you can see individual snow flakes on the screen. It also highlights production cheats – one shot in particular i noticed that Richard Hammond was blue screened (or chroma keyed if you prefer) onto the backround – something i did not notice on the SD version.

A good investment, although it currently does not have any optical drive (due to no IDE connectors), i am seriously considering buying a Blu-Ray reader/DVD-RW drive as they are around £60-70 now and then i can purchase HD content on disc. Now that HD-DVD has properly died, blu-ray will be the leading format for some time to come.

Now that i have the guts of the machine spare, i have piled them into my old light-up case along with the PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 and the 8 port SATA controller. After installing solaris the system is all ready to go with a ZFS filestore, i just need to purchase the disks, i am planning on 3x 500GB to begin with, and expanding later.

I am well away i need to re-write the computers page of the site, as all the specs are now wrong and i will do when i get around to it! Using a new mobo in the mediacentre allowed me to remove loads of expansion cards – USB2, Sound, Network – all gone as they are on board.

I did have a problem with standby relating to the mediacentre remote control – it requires 5VSB at all times – sending the machine to S3 caused it to wake again, but disabling the remote. Simply find the 5VSB jumper for the USB port you are using and switch it – instructions are in the manual. It’s a jumper not a BIOS option!

Next Up: Car2PC

I caved, i bought one of these devices and even though its cost me somewhere near to £70-80 (due to customs charges and ParcelFarce surcharges) it is actually well worth the money…if it works…which mine doesn’t.

If i leave it in the car overnight, it stops working – i emailed tech support and they said they would get me a replacement, i’ve not heard anything since, so i emailed them again and im waiting a response. I do hope they send another, one that works, because if it’s reliable, it’s a fantastic bit of kit – being able to control the laptop from the headunit remote – and the steering wheel control is just amazing. It takes the hassle out of it all – i’m still using the LCD where the clock was for artist and track name and it all looks factory fit almost. You can even control shuffle from the headunit, the problem i have seen however though, is that i no longer have shutdown control.

If i eventually get a proper car-pc (mini ITX job) then it will be on permanant 12V so standby would suffice.

Already mentioned Solaris, but worthy of a mention again, since im only lacking disks, i have been playing with ZFS using the debug ‘file’ method (virtual disks), there is an extremely nice webgui for configuring ZFS and RAID-Z which i will make extensive use of as soon as i buy disks. I’m not sure when that will be, perhaps after easter when i get more student loan, who knows?

And onward we march, to the final main thing i have to talk about tonight – http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-wireless-pc-lock/42940.html

The wireless RFID PC lock. Really, fantastic. If you write your own software…which is what i did. Since all this does is fudge up a HID device – on linux it emulates a mouse and makes the pointer jump randomly when in range. You can tie in quite a lot to it. I did give their own software a go at work – on windows it simply displays a full screen splash which you cant ALT+TAB round until you’re in range. This is comepletely useless since i have dual displays and i was still able to read my email even though the system was ‘locked’.

I contacted Lindy tech support asking for an API, they just said No, not even a why? how can we help instead, just No. So reverse engineering it is. After snooping the USB traffic on a windows box i noticed all the fob does is transmit a burst every few seconds of 4 bytes.

Since on linux it appeared as /dev/input/mouse3 i can pipe this into cat and into a file, therefore, all the data recieved by the fob is piped into a file. All i did was carry out a 5 second cat of the data and if the file was still empty, call xlock & to lock the workstation, if data was then detected it just called pkill xlock – effectively unlocking the workstation!

Code example below:

#! /bin/bash
RFIDPRESENT=0

export DISPLAY=:0

while test 1==1; do

cat /dev/input/mouse3 > /root/test & sleep 5s && pkill cat

FILESIZE=$(stat -c%s “./test”)

echo “starting round tests”

if test “$FILESIZE” -eq 0; then
echo “no data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 1; then
xlock &
RFIDPRESENT=0
echo “no data in file terminal locked”
fi
fi
if test “$FILESIZE” -gt 0; then
echo “data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 0; then
pkill xlock
RFIDPRESENT=1
echo “data in file terminal unlocked”
fi
fi

echo “ending round tests”

rm “./test”
touch “./test”

done

That code will loop forever, until user terminates, it’s not pretty but it does the job. It will eventually be integrated as a cron job, and also cause XMMS/media player to pause and change my MSN status to away.

All in all, a worthwhile project! Next task is getting it to work on windows! Oh and my thanks to MattJ for the bash help. There may be a video attached, if i can get it to work of the system in action. It’s pretty cool, especially given the cost. I’m quite proud as it’s my first reverse engineered device

Video here: http://www.lewty.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/rfidlock.mp4

So thats the main projects covered as for everything else, it’s just ticking along in the usual way, work is going well, finally finished our low bandwidth compression project and we’ve started work on another order. That’s in between me designing a fully relational database system for in-house management. I also got WebDAV working finally so we have a secure file storage facility which is quite cool.

Currently i’m working on integrating our secondary VHF Recorder product into the mainstream IRIS Radar Display – not a whole load of new code, just quite tedious and complicated to follow (a lot of what were we thinking? moments!)

That’s all for now, will try and blog a bit more often in the future, but i tend not to bother if there isn’t any big projects on.

Well i thought it was about time to let you know whats been happening in the world of Dave. So here goes:

Entertainment Setup:
Got me a 32″ TV! Yes i did and i only paid £325 for it too which is an absolute bargain considering the quality is on a par with the TVs i’ve seen priced on the high street at £800-900! And before you ask, yes i did get it legitibatly – from Microdirect in fact – an amazing store.

I picked up a second hand Yamaha 5.1 AV Reciever (DSP-AX620) which is pretty comprehensive in features – component/composite/svideo switching, lots of digital i/o for the audio not to mention up to 24bit/96kHz sampling.

All of my sources are now feeding it digitally which is nice – both the PC and the Mediacentre are just shoving down the S/PDIF exactly whats in the source material without pissing about it with, leaving it to the reciever to decode so i get lovely 5.1 (well, strictly speaking 5.0 as theres no sub but the front’s do more than a good enough job on the bass).

To get that working i had to replce the soundcard in the mediacentre – from a SB Live! Value which, while i forced S/PDIF passthrough on the special ‘for creative digital speakers only’ jack (turns out to be coax S/PDIF on a minijack) it was glitching quite a lot – probably due to the datarate – after all the card was only designed for 4.0! Got me a SB Live! 24-Bit and once again the minijack-phono adaptor does the trick to get a digital output from it!

I need to replace the rears as i want to be able to use my hifi again in the bedroom but other than that it’s pretty sweet. I have a DVI-HDMI cable coming soon too so hopefully i will be able to run the TV at the panel’s native resolution – 1366×768 instead of 1280×768 (where 720p HD is 1280×720) The funny thing is they are apparently ALL WXGA standard! Which is just a lie… I don’t want my TV scaling the image, even though when i play 720p content it’s going to get scaled anyway… No matter, it looks ace on decent bitrate SD material – much better than my old CRT TV and the MCE interface looks very crisp and sharp – even using the MSN Messenger client in it is more than usable.

At home:

I’ve got my keyfob finally! I can park my car in the secure carpark i’ve been paying for for the last 4 months at last! This means i’ll be able to service it too which will be nice, it was due some time ago! They also managed to send a plumber to do my bath taps, his conclusion was that the funny regulator/mixer value from the middle of the tabs was knackered and the whole unit needs replacing – no word back yet on when that’s going to be done, but one can only hope.

Also yesterday my glasses decided to snap in half! So i got a copy of my pescription from Specsavers and popped off to www.glassescrafter.co.uk and orderd a new pair – £44.50 all in! The lenses were a mere £8! I couldn’t believe how cheap it was, so i will have to wait and see how they turn out hopefully they will be ok, in the meantime i have my jam-jar glasses from D&A – same pescription (just about) as my broken ones but the lenses are twice as thick!

I’m going to attempt to repair my broken ones as i much prefer them – a bit of wire works but its a bit obvious, i will try glue, perhaps glue in some cut paperclips as reinforcement.

At work:

Work’s going well, buiried under C++ as usual, but i’ve also been working on the new server -

3x Xen VMs with: DNS, DHCP, OpenVPN, Apache, PHP, MySql, Trac, SVN, Postfix, Dovecot, Webmin, SpamAssassin, Amavisd-new, ClamAV, plus the biggie – LDAP! Arghh!

LDAP is amazing once it works – you can do so much with it, but setting it up is more than a bit tricky, i now have it working as auth for EVERYTHING which is just ace soo easy to administer.

Anyhoo, i’ll leave it there for now, hope that keeps everyone happy

otherwise known as British Telecommunications Plc.

Yes, the fight goes on, but it is finally drawing to a close. I have successfully finally managed to become a BT customer – i even have a (unconfirmed) phone number and an account number. They tell me that the line will be active by the end of Tuesday and that they won’t have to send anyone out to my flat.

Great.

Only took me 5 hours of saturday morning to get through to someone who could actually help. I have now spent nearly 7 hours on hold to them simply because they are incompetant and cannot see past their computer screens. This has also cost me a fortune in mobile phone bills as the silly on hold message neglects to mention i could have called from a payphone for free, i only heard that from the nice bloke at BT Openreach – who i was wrongly advised to call by customer services and although he couldnt really help he did make a few good suggestions.

Every time i called customer services i got a different story…

“I’m sorry sir but there is no line at that address”

“There hasn’t been service on that line for an extremely long time”

“When a previous tenant has their number transferred the old line becomes invalid”

I think that the best one is the first one, i simply thought to myself “well, Mr BT Man, i know that you’re lying to me as im looking at the line right now”. Even after explaining that i can get a dial tone, call BT Line Test 17070, use the Reminder call feature (*55* – and it actually calls me back (thanks for the free alarm clock BT!!)) and get through to emergency services, they refused to admit there had ever been a line there and wanted to send someone out.

Sending someone out would have been fine if they hadnt told me that the only advance notice i would get would be that they would call me on the day they were coming to say so – this turns out to be another white lie by BT, Openreach told me that they call to arrange a mutually suitable date to come and sort it out.

But as it happens no one needs to come out, and if they had it would have been a completely pointless exercise. However, i’ve still been sucked in to paying the ?124.99 ‘new line installation’ charge. Ahem, ‘new line’? they had better send me a reel of cable and a spare BT Master box in the post then, after all, i have paid for it.

When i finally got the line ordered, they still refused to admit the previous tenant had service with BT – i even asked them to look at her account, which he SAID he did (i’m not convinced) because the previous tenant (now a neighbour) wouldn’t lie about somthing silly like that, she had a line with BT and had ADSL also (though im not sure if that was with BT or not).

No matter, once the line is active, i will write a letter to the head of customer services enclosing an invoice for the inconvinience they have caused me. 7 hours on hold, not getting a straight story, being lied to, being passed through to departments which are closed, being hung up on by their customer ‘service’ represenatives.

In absolute honesty, i have never encountered a worse to deal with company. The laughable part is that this is the hassle i get trying to become a customer, what is it going to be like when i want to leave?

In other news, Tiscali have announced that they have bought Pipex! WHY! I cry, why must i be eternally chased by Tiscali are they that desperate to have me as a customer? (unlike BT who are desperate not to have me as a customer) Unfortunatly all my domain names are managed by 123-reg which is owned by pipex, now owned by tiscali. That’s one thing i can’t so easily change, however i will be changing ISP as soon as i can. I am getting Be Unlimited down here (along with a nice static IP) and will probably go to Demon at home.

According to the Wikipedia tech specs for a standard ADSL2+ DSLAM and my distance from exchange, i can expect to recieve around 22-23meg speeds with Be, once my line is in, i will be able to get it ordered they say 1-3 weeks installation, i do hope its more 1 than 3.

Work wise, the second week went well, im picking up C++ reasonably quickly, there are a few things i want to get my head round before i will be more comfortable, but i have an array of books to look as well as the internet at work.

Internet. Hmm, well, i have no internet at home for the time being, not least until BT pull their finger out, right now im on G over Bluetooth, thats right G, not 3G or anything fancy, just plain old simple G.

Speedy.

I have added a new Blogroll link now, as well as MattJ’s good old blog (trying to get www.matt-j.co.uk up to the top of google like me) and Right Way Forward, a Conservative blog by Stephen Haraldsen. I have to say right here and now:

*** THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED AT WWW.RIGHTWAYFORWARD.COM MAY OR MAY NOT COINCIDE WITH MY OWN. THEY ARE ENTIRELY THE OPINION OF THAT SITES AUTHOR ***

There you go Steve, disclaimer added.

Speaking of top of google, if you google the right things you get my site, one of the most common is DBPx fellside, but another i have noticed is also recycled tfts – it results in the Crazy Dave site, somthing of a joke really, but if you wish to check it out when toddle off to www.crazydave.org.uk.

Well, i think thats all for now, blogging will be quite intermittant the next few weeks until i get internet sorted, so bear with me. I should be buying more tech soon so i will blog about that, in a review sort of style…maybe.

It’s all broken!

Or at least it seems that way, first of all the PSU fan in my desktop pc is dying – once it gets going its ok, but i have to keep checking its on – i’ve smelled it cooking twice now, i will replace it as soon as i can afford to.

Then, my mail server got attacked – i had to delete over 9,000 messages in the queue as Pipex had blocked my server from sending mail! Had to reboot the router to get a new IP to be unblocked, spent some time locking it down after that, even though all the OpenRelay tests were coming up negative…

And today, there was a powercut at home and none of the machines come back up! Had to talk my brother through it on the phone on getting them back together – DHCP failed to startup on the firewall so none of the machines got IPs which is annoying.

This led me to ring BT again to get my phoneline sorted – which there has 100% definatly been service on this line before and i was told by them that this would mean a simple ?30 reconnection fee. Alas no. Since the previous person took the number with them it means the line is properly disconnected (apparenlty) i sent a nasty e-mail, i might submit a complaint with Oftel, well, Ofcom as they are now.

I’ve got myself a lovely account on Matt’s VOIP Asterix IAX server which is very very nice, the call quality is amazing, i also have an incoming 0845 num!

Other than that not been up to much becuase of starting at Ledwood Technology which is going well, i think it’ll be a lot of fun, although, i’m having to do a crash course in C++ because uni didn’t teach me anything useful….

Anyways, i’ll go, got lots to do this weekend!

Been a busy few days on the tech front!

I decided to get my head round how subversion (SVN)� and Trac work. They’re both clever beasts – subversion allows multiple contributors to one project (mainly software programming) while maintaining a full revision history – which means you can go back and re-download any version of the software regardless of what modifications occured after that.

The Win GUI is quite good – highlights changed files and so on, also allows you to merge them. Trac is basically an extension to SVN giving a web interface for the entire project allowing plans, documentation and schedules to be inserted. It also allows the allocation of work tickets to individual contributors which means everyone on the project has more of an idea of what they’re supposed to be doing. This is all in preparation for starting at Ledwood on monday (!) as i’ll be using that sort of system there.

Routing wise, i got martins subnet up and running with correct firewall rules, i’ve also discovered i can have subdomains on my public dns meaning that i can now have www.drz.lewty.org.uk. This is in addition to the fact ive finally found out how to do root proxy vhosts – ie my mce.lewty.org.uk now fully points to my mediacentre pc, with the web based login to the guide – allowing me to set it to record no matter where i am.

The iptables rules are getting lengthy to say the least, and ive just remembered what i had planned to do today – go to B&Q to get a bolt to fasten the toroid in my monitoring controller into the case! I’ll pop off and do that now then, TTFN.