Author: admin

Trash to Treasure

Dell Vostro 1000 Backlight Inverter Replacement

An aging Dell Vostro 1000 ended up on my desk the other day. The owner said it had died, when he turned it on some LEDs lit up, but there was no display. It turned out that the backlight which illuminates the LCD panel was not working. This is a common problem with older laptops….
System Administration

Unattended ACPI Shutdown of Windows VMs

As part of a backup script I have some VirtualBox machines shutdown gracefully using the VBoxManage command: [cc theme=”blackboard” width=”100%”] VBoxManage controlvm “$VM_NAME” acpipowerbutton [/cc] This command emulates pressing (not holding) the power button on a modern computer. A compliant operating system should see the event and trigger a shutdown or other response. For ACPI…
Bash

Bash Snippet: Trim Function

Occasionally I find myself wanting to removing leading and/or trailing occurrences of a character or string from a larger string in bash. A couple common uses are removing quotes, or stripping an unknown number of spaces leading into the data of interest. This can be done pretty easily with other methods such as awk or…
Bash, System Administration

Zombie Process: Killing the Undead

Is your Ubuntu MOTD warning you of a zombie process? [cc theme=”blackboard” width=”100%”] Welcome to Ubuntu 11.10 (GNU/Linux 3.0.0-20-server x86_64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/C System information as of Thu Jun 28 18:36:57 EDT 2012 System load: 0.0 Processes: 94 Usage of /: 68.2% of 1.79TB Users logged in: 1 Memory usage: 29% IP address for eth0:…
Hacks, Helpful Tools, Rants

Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool (SERT) Pin Number (All of Them)

The Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool (SERT) is a great concept, it puts the power of Symantec’s Endpoint Protection antivirus scanning onto a bootable CD. If you are familiar with rootkits, you can probably see where this is useful. To scan a file for viruses an antivirus scanner makes a request to the operating system for…
Trash to Treasure

Replace Battery in Plantronics CS70 Headset

I’m not sure what electronics manufacturers are thinking by making devices with batteries soldered into circuit. I guess they are thinking “this is a rechargeable battery”, but eventually those batteries quit recharging. This is a problem that users of older generation iPods and iPhones are probably becoming very aware of. Anyhow, since I like keeping…
General Nonsense, System Administration

Reset Buffalo TeraStation PRO Model TS-RHTGL/R5 Password

Have a Buffalo TeraStation PRO Model TS-RHTGL/R5 and lost your password? Me too, here’s how I reset the web interface login without losing all my data. The steps will probably be similar on other TeraStation models, but I think the default user credentials might be different (username ‘Administrator’ vs. ‘admin’, etc). The TeraStation this was…
Hacks

Installing Tomato USB on Asus Routers (RT-N16 etc) in Windows

Why Tomato USB? For USB support. What is Tomato USB? It’s a USB enabled version of Tomato. It’s similar to DD-WRT. a third-party firmware for your router to give you advanced features not normally found in a consumer router (VPN, captive portal, etc). Why from Windows? There is already a good write-up on doing it…
System Administration

Install Asterisk 1.8 from source on Ubuntu 11.10

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…
Bash, Helpful Tools, System Administration

Access an APC AP5456 IP Gateway for Analog KVM in Linux

I recently wrote about running an ActiveX component without Internet Explorer. I used that technique to come up 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…