System Administration

System Administration, Telephony

GXP2020EXT Provision & Template

The Grandstream GXP2020EXT is an accessory “sidecar” (or in Grandstream-speak “Expansion Module”) that adds 56 speed dials with BLF to Grandstream model GXP20xx VoIP telephones. In the article below I’ve provided two scripts to help GXP2020EXT users keep their units programed with fresh directory information and matching card inserts. The Problem As the phone system…
Bash, System Administration, VBScript

Finding Malware URLs in W97M infected Word Docs

An email with a trojan Microsoft Word document made it past the spam filter today at work. At least one user reported opening the attachment. The attachment was named: DOCO943488.doc, but running the file through virustotal.com it was clear that it’s been known by other names.. To help affected people find this page here are…
System Administration

Glimpsing the Heap

You connect into the server and type “w” to see who else is on. You see a connection from an IP you don’t recognize! [cc theme=”blackboard” width=”100%” height=”100%”] 14:43:11 up 5 days, 22:32, 2 users, load average: 0.52, 0.41, 0.36 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT root pts/0 203.0.113.17 Wed10 2days 0.31s 0.31s…
Bash, System Administration

Detect Wi-Fi Clients on your DD-WRT Router

Here is a script I wrote that scrapes the web interface of a router running DD-WRT. The script looks for the MAC addresses of wireless users. When it sees a MAC address that it hasn’t logged before it issues an alert. To help identify the new equipment, a portion of the MAC address is sent…
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, 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:…
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…
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…
Helpful Tools, System Administration

Make a Program Run as a Windows Service on Boot

Components that run automatically with Windows on boot up often establish themselves as a system service. Other options are to add programs into the registry in places like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or into the “All Users” Startup group folder (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, C:\Users\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). There are pros and cons to each method,…