Ethertubes.com

After a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 I needed to install asterisk again, so I figured I’d make some notes for the next time I have to do it.

I’m using Asterisk 1.8 rather than the latest bleeding edge because 1.8 has long term support until 2015-10-21 where as the 10.x branch is end of life 2013-10-12. I have too many other things to do these days than reconfigure asterisk, figure out which of my third party add-ons work, etc every time there is an update.

Since this is a new install, I’m updating the package list and all my files that might be out of date

Make sure kernel headers are installed

Grab a bunch of packages for building asterisk, dependencies, compilers, etc

Switch into /usr/src directory as a place to build the source from

Downloaded and untar DAHDI. I don’t have any Digium hardware in this computer, but I wanted the DAHDI pseudo timing source for MeetMe conferences.

Move into the build directory, compile and install DAHDI

Download and untar Asterisk

Move into the build directory

Add mp3 support

Run the configure script

If everything works out, you should get the ascii art Asterisk logo

Optionally choose asterisk components to be installed

Build the binaries

Copy the files to the right places

Optionally copy the sample configs into /etc/asterisk

Copy the init startup scripts to make asterisk start on boot

And you’re done.

About 6 months ago I setup a motion activated webcam to snap pictures of the backyard wood pile after business hours. We’ve had some trouble with someone tearing up the lawn with their truck and stealing wood. The system sends me an email whenever it thinks something is going on.

No thieves yet, but plenty of woodland critters.

A lightning storm last night spammed my inbox, here are a few picks out of the bunch, including one apparently close by. The red thing is the reflection of an emergency exit light off the window (the camera is inside).

The NZB index service Newzbin is no longer available at Newzbin.com. They have moved to a new domain name not controlled by VeriSlime (and presumable therefore not subject to the same unethical seizures we’ve seen with recent ICE take-downs). Silencing free speech on the Internet to serve the business interests of private corporations is bad enough, but imposing this on sites in countries outside U.S. jurisdiction is just plain too far for my tastes. This seems like a very reasonable move on Newzbin’s part, after all why do we covet the lame versign TLDs in the first place (‘.com’, ‘.net’, ‘.org’)? Those are top level domains for people’s grandparents, the ones that assume everything ends in ‘.com’. Like having a toll free number in the age of unlimited long distance, there prestige is no longer warranted. .. but I digress

The new domain for Newzbin is newzbin2.es, but the SABnzbd+ in my Ubuntu repository doesn’t seem to reflect that. Here’s how you can manually update it.

Note: This will only have an effect when passing Newzbin report IDs or URLs to SABnzb. If you download files by uploading the NZB file to SABnzbd+ it is not required.

They say it’s a good practice to prefix ‘sudo’ to things rather than su’ing to root, but I just can’t bring myself to break the habit. The following was all done as root.

Stop sabnzbd+ if it’s running

Change into the directory where Ubuntu keeps the SABnzbd+ files we want to edit

This will do a recursive case-insensitive search (the grep part) for ‘newzbin.com’ inside all the files and directories under our current location. It lists the files and then hands them (the xargs part) over to be edited (the sed part). Notice I left off the ‘n’ from Newzbin.com inside of sed, this was done intentionally to preserve the correct casing (i.e. Newzbin2.es, newzbin2.es).

Start SABnzbd+ again

On my system this affected the following files:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to enjoying some nice downloaded public domain movies.

I recently wrote about running an ActiveX component without Internet Explorer. I used that technique to come with a shell script front-end for downloading, unpacking and running an executable in Wine for accessing an APC IP KVM (model AP5456). Here is the results of that effort.

At a minimum the script requires Wine and curl, but to do everything without manually downloading and extracting the cabinet file yourself, you’ll also need cabextract. Some less exotic stuff from coreutils: basename and dirname are needed, but you probably have those already.

You can download the script here.

Some ActiveX components add “enhancement” to the browser by dropping in custom controls for forms or other fanciness. Those types of components require the browser, because they augment the user’s experience within the browser. Other ActiveX components are little more than a standalone executable that can get it’s command line arguments from the web page that serves it. This article is about my experience separating out such an executable from it’s ActiveX constructs and using it without Internet Explorer.

I have an old APC AP5456 IP Gateway for Analog KVM, it’s a neat little device other than it’s insistence that I use Internet Explorer. It uses an ActiveX component to view the remote consoles. It’s based on VNC, and has some encryption of the RFB data added in. The device listens on port 80 (http) and 5900 (VNC). If I had any doubt after seeing the port number, it was cleared up in the “About…” dialog.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just use a regular VNC client to connect. The authentication process has been removed from the VNC-side of things and moved to the web page. When you authenticate to the web page of the IP KVM, it gives the ActiveX component an authentication token which is used to view the console of the computer it’s connected to.

When you first login using a web browser you’re shown several options. The one we’re interested in is “Connect Video”

After clicking “Connect Video” we’re taken to another screen where the ActiveX component should normally be launched. I’m using Firefox in this screenshot so it fails. Most browsers other than Internet Explorer have no idea what to do with ActiveX (and rightfully so).

This page will meta refresh back to the previous page, so view the source quickly.

I searched the page for the <OBJECT> tag that normally holds the ActiveX details. Here is the relevant portion.

The first thing to notice is the vpclient4187.cab cabinet file. Unpacking the cab file gives us AvocentHTTP.dll, vpfilexfer.dll, launchEXE.dll, vpclient.inf, vpclient.exe, and vpclient.dll. Awesome! It’s probably just that vpclient.exe I need to run right?

Well, no, unfortunately typing in the IP address of our IP KVM appliance into the dialog doesn’t result in a connection. We need that authentication token and encryption key to be included in the picture. It still seems very likely that vpclient.exe is what we want, but there’s more configuration that it clearly needs. Since there is no other settings in the dialog of vpclient.exe to adjust, we’ll be optimistic and hope that the additional info it needs are passed to it by the command line. The information could be passed to it by Windows messages, after all it’s not the first thing that gets called from the web browser. Looking at the contents of the INF file shows that launchEXE.dll matches the CLASSID of our object codebase. That dll probably gets all the details and hands it off to vpclient.exe. Before we freak out, lets try to keep it simple.

I wrote a little program to display a message box with the contents of any command line arguments it receives. From a Windows XP computer with Internet Explorer I connect to the IP KVM as normal, and then close the KVM application and Internet Explorer. This causes the ActiveX object to get downloaded and cached. Cached in %WINDIR%\Downloaded Program Files to be specific. I replaced the vpclient.exe with my own application (keeping the name the same). You will need to do this from the command line however, as Windows treats the %WINDIR%\Downloaded Program Files directory in a special way, which blocks you from seeing the actual files contained in it.

When I reopen Internet Explorer and attempt to connect with the IP KVM again, I see that my speculation was correct.

The Session Key and the Encryption Key change frequently, and require the vpclient.exe connection to come from the same IP address that authenticated to the web browser, but if we act quickly we can start a session using the information available in view source as command line arguments to vpclient.exe.

Of course the reasonable thing to do at this point is to make a front-end client to connect to the IP KVM web page, parse out the required content, and launch vpclient.exe with our argument. I’ll leave that up to you, but if you’re interested in doing it under Linux I’ve got you covered.

I was unable to reach php.net, the official home page of PHP. I was surprised by this, as PHP is a very large project used by millions of websites, including this one. I then jumped over to the popular website reachability tester DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com to see if php.net was down for everyone or just me. To my horror DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com was also down.

I certainly feel more comfortable about moving all things to the cloud.

EAS is a neat system. From a hacker perspective it’s interesting to think of the cascading effect that some well placed broadcast signal intrusion could do.

While I think it’s a good idea to test this system from the top down, versus at the station level as done in the weekly tests, the work to get the word out about ignoring the upcoming test undermines the system. We’ve essentially created a small window at a predetermined time, in which the system will be busy relaying test messages, and to which people have been prepared to ignore. Of course, this is all a bit of a moot point since we’ve never actually used the emergency alert system for anything terrorist related before anyhow.

Several interesting things can be gleaned from the Wikipedia article on EAS incidents. Based on the September, 2010 incident, it sounds like in-band signalling is used for activation, and that the system allows for replaying of messages. Based on several of the incidents, it would seem like people don’t really pay attention to the system anyhow.

Here’s a quick and dirty little script I wrote to rip fax.com. I had a bunch of faxes that I wanted to download so I put this together for my own use, and then added a little bit of extra stuff to make it potentially useful to someone else. My apologies in advance, as it’s pretty rough and will likely break at some point in the future. Fax.com will email you incoming faxes, which is great for archival going forward, unfortunately I hadn’t been saving my emails. Fax.com charges an overage fee of $0.05/page for faxes stored over 30 days. They have a nice feature to automatically purge faxes older than 30 days for you, but if you have already been paying an overage fee and would like to archive your faxes, you might find this handy to run before enabling the auto-purge feature. My settings are set to display 25 faxes per page (within the general settings for my account), you’ll need to tweak that (as well as the username and password fields) before running this script. I probably could have made this look up how many faxes per page you are set to, but I was lazy.

Download faxcomrip.zip