Vader's ramblings on stuff

Apparently hooking on to a host OS com port with virtualbox only works if you actually have com ports. So somebody has come up with a solution.

What you need:

1) VirtualBOX

2) Guest OS what wants serial port access for some reason (perhaps serial console)

3) A windows named pipe to TCP proxy program

4) Something that can connect to a TCP port (putty or a telnet client)


And in the manual to virtualbox there is a mention to one, however a user called 'shvechkov' has created a windows program to create this named pipe to TCP socket proxy, you can find the instructions and download at: Windows named pipe to TCP port made easy (local copy).

An example:

In VirtualBOX:

a) map COM1 to 'Host pipe' and checkmark 'Create pipe'

b) Name the pipe like '\\.\pipe\com1' (the com1 part is your own unique chosen name for the pipe)

In nptp:

a) Create an entry for the previously mentioned pipe and map it to a TCP port (like 700)


Connect telnet or putty (in telnet mode) to localhost port 700 (the port chosen) (unless you have allowed external ip)

That's it, you should have output from the serial port on the telnet connection.

Not many modern systems come with serial mice, expect us nerds that have old legacy stuff lying around and pull it out, because they just became useful again. Hey, why buy a new wireless keyboard mouse for your mediacenter, if you have some old IR integrated keyboard and mouse lying around.

However modern Xorg still supports serial mice, but alot of manual entry would be required, or try to use the new hald framework. It can be done by hinting it to hald via inputattach This example is for linux:

inputattach -bare /dev/ttyS0

If that works, put it in rc.local and remember to background it ('&')

All though this is a very nice screensaver, some recent changes have made it a bit annoying for users typing their password wrong. A dialog box is displayed for a fixed period of 4 seconds if one or more failed logins are performed. Here is a patch to add a configuration option called failedLoginsTimeout that will take a Time spec so it can be changed to something like 0:00:00 and the dialog box will never be shown.

Patch against xscreensaver 5.07 : patch-failed_logins_timeout
(for easy application on FreeBSD place in ports/xscreensaver-*/files/)

For Simon, enjoy....

Once again, new trouble after upgrading PHP (5) on a FreeBSD (6) server. So nice of php to start segfaulting, and no indication as to why. No real clue was to find anywhere. Running it in GDB however showed that it failed somewhat around session.so and downwards in the call stack.

Well, decided to force a rebuild of all php related stuff. No joy there. Finally decided to google for some kind of indication, and (not to my surprise) people have had somewhat the same problem since 2002.

Well, finally found an indication of what could be wrong.. Look at the extensions.ini file and identify the modules. And yes, it was in fact not causing any problems when session.so had been commented out. A hint i found was to reorder the file.

So moved the session.so to the very top of the list, and there you go. Works again.. Thank you letting me deal with yet another unnecessary problem at this hour of the day. I know, i have the source, i can just fix it, but since people have mentioned problems with this for such a long period of time, it seems no one cares.

A friend pointed me to this little and nifty add-on. It lets you write out in a command line style what it is you want to do. Just try these for samplers, i think you can guess what they will do, but typing is believing.

<ubiquity hot-key>translate rød-grød med fløde
<ubiquity hot-key>map tycho brahe planetarium
<ubiquity hot-key>command-list
...

The add-on somehow shows potential for complete exploitation of ones browser if one is not really careful about what commands or other extensions are installed to use it's API, but it really does the trick for keyboard jockeys or the rest of us that like to write what we mean instead of this tedious clicking around at random to get some meaningful work done.

Read more about it at: Ubiquity

The add-on is still in a very early stage of development (ie. it throws some exceptions now and then, none fatal though), but it really shows some promise for anti-mouse users.

Some time ago i stumbled across this little nifty Add-on for Firefox (and others). Simply put it lets you preview a link, image, etc. easily within an existing window, without having to open it.

I especially enjoy using it reading articles which are heavy on acronyms and definitions, where you only just want to read the synopsis without actually having to open it in a new tab...

Read more about it at : http://cooliris.com/site/firefox/

Seems like someone, somewhere, might have missed the purpose of enabling the plugin that facilitates java applets to run in firefox3. At least on FreeBSD i had to manually do:

# ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.5.0/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so \

/usr/local/lib/firefox3/plugins

to fix it.

(Replace jdk.1.5.0 with whatever version you have installed)

What fun it is to discover that the web browser on the Nokia N95 (8GB) just didn't want to start.

Turns out there is a trick to recovering it, without resetting the phone entirely. At least this worked for me, no restart required, just clearing out the web browsers cache directory on the phone internal flash resolved the issue.

Use one of the excellent Y-tools, Y-Browser to delete your web browser cache is the solution. Install the Y-Browser, navigate to C:\CACHE, mark all files in that directory, and delete them.

You would think there was a way to clear the cache from elsewhere. But no, to clear the cache, you actually have to be able to start the web browser.

Tip harvested from: FixYa; Best Solution.

Sometimes i find myself in the need of getting some OS up and running quickly, just to try some stuff out. Like Live CD images of various sorts. Lately i've found myself playing around with SLAX, a live Linux Slackware, with a file system that can exist on a USB flash stick on FAT32. That way the stick still is useful for other things (ie. using it as a normal stick from other operating systems that can mount FAT32 partitions).

Incidentally BT3 (an security auditing tool) is these days also is based on SLAX.

I have yet to find a way to make VMWare player (the free version of VMWare Inc's popular virtualization software) boot from the USB device.

There are several sources on the world wide web explaining how to customize the VMWare player, but i'll just recap my base configuration file, and other hint's that might be useful for customization.

Wandering around the web, i've been searching for someone that had ported BSDMake (pmake) to windows. No such luck. And making a native port using mingw32 tools to cross compile it, but after a few tries, it just seemed to border on self torture.

Instead i fell back to cygwin, and decided that it was okay to have cygwin1.dll and such. At least for the first try. It did not take long to create a sorts of runnable make.exe, and thats about the amount testing that has been done: It runs. Here is the patch for it:

cygwin_bsdmake.patch

Built on: $ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-6.0 dl 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin

Source extracted from:
svn co http://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/7/usr.bin/make/

Please note the SVN repository of FreeBSD is quite new and as of this writing, subject to change.

Well, i finally decided it was time to create one of these blog's. It seems so popular, and i needed a place to put stuff, that doesn't fit anywhere else.

All opinions expressed within are solely for the purpose of people's and more specifically my opinion. All content and information is provided as is.