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I reformatted my Seagate 200Gb external disk to use reiserfs. Don’t remember why, but it hasn’t really mattered. Recently I had a situation where I needed to copy multiple gigabytes from the disk onto a system running Windows XP. Try as I might, the Windows system was saying it saw my USB Storage Device, but it never actually showed up anywhere on the system. No drive to be seen. Then I remembered my move from NTFS to reiserfs. Fudge!

The answer to the seemingly impossible task was to use rfstool, a really cool hack by Gerson Kurz. His page includes some docs on the first steps you take to find the correct device, and then explain how I could copy an entire tree from the external drive onto the local system with the single command

rfstool cp /src d:\work\src

That was so quick and easy! And much, much faster than my first attempt: plug it into my Linux laptop, mount the disk, set up Samba to share it, and then make the Windows machine copy it all over the (really slow for reasons you’ll never want to know) network using Samba. Bleah.

Thanks, Gerson!

Say you want to talk to your wife or remote co-worker on AIM, but you’re on a system inside a firewall. All is not lost if the firewall is really picky about what ports it’ll allow you to use—and you have no ability to change the firewall’s settings. If the SSH port (22) is open on the firewall, you’ve got a workaround as long as you can SSH to a remote host that’s able to be configured for you or by you.

In the description of what I came up with (derived from the suggestions of others via google), both the home system and laptop I describe are running version 9.2 of the SuSE Linux distribution. In theory, however, this should work with any client using a recent copy of OpenSSH. Please feel free to correct me if this isn’t true. 🙂

Originally, I suggested that you need to install dante and dante-server on the remote server you’ll be using to do the work of the connection. However, it turns out OpenSSH has the DynamicForward option which does the work for you, making the OpenSSH server and client use the SOCKS5 protocol to handle the connection. Many thanks to Justin Mason for pointing it out.

On the laptop that’s roaming from place to place, install just the GAIM instant messaging package. (In theory, if we had to use dante-server then you’d also install the dante client on the laptop so KDE can use the SOCKS for its own IM client kopete. However, we’re using GAIM because I’ve been unable to make KDE+kopete work for me in this. And since OpenSSH is doing the work, we don’t need to install the extra package on the laptop.)

From inside the firewall, log into the remote system with the command “ssh home“. The ~/.ssh/config file (or wherever your SSH client keeps its configuration) should have

   Host home
     HostName 1.2.3.4  # server external IP address
     # If we were using dante and dante-server, we'd need:
     #LocalForward 1080 127.0.0.1:1080
     # However, we can just use this:
     DynamicForward 1080

On the laptop, run GAIM and go into Preferences, selecting Network. Under ProxyServer choose Proxy type SOCKS5, and set Host to 127.0.0.1 and Port to 1080. Click on Close.

To connect, click “Sign On” in the GAIM window. (You’ll need to make sure that each account in GAIM has “Auto-login” selected so more than just AIM are used.)

In theory, the SSH tunnel letting you use SOCKS should now make any/all of your AIM, MSN, and YahooMessenger IDs be online successfully. I’ll be interested to hear of any problems others might have trying to get this to work.

No NTL cable today, and the next time they can come to try to fix it? Monday morning. Nearly 5 days. If we want credit for the service being out, it’s up to us to call the billing department once it’s working again.

Harrumph.

Update: It turned out our entire street was out, which accelerated the fix and got it back up by late afternoon.

We’ve got a picture of the access card that’s inside the box and put it up here—half of it looks like it’s been over a candle, slowly slowly melting away:

Hacking on a Cube a little bit, I came up with this list of things you can do when it’s booting. What’s missing? Is there a definitive list anywhere?

At the prompt, type
• boot enet:0,yaboot — boot over the network requesting yaboot, the package I was using to do a network boot of the Cube
• boot cdrom
• boot cdrom:0
• boot hd:0
• load
• bye
• mac-boot
• eject cd
• dir hd:\
• reset-nvram
• reset-all

While booting, hold down:
• Opt-Apple-O-F — boot from firmware
• c — boot from cdrom
• t — don’t remember
• x — don’t remember
• n — boot from network

There’s a great article to help you learn about John Gilmore’s efforts to call the government’s bluff, insisting we shouldn’t be tracked like felons when we want to fly around the U.S.: Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy.

We’re on a holiday trip with some family members, and the place we’re staying lets you use the Net via a cable modem. So ever in pursuit of a hack, I got a linksys wireless router and hooked it up so we could all share the connection wirelessly. As an experiment, I left it unencrypted (we’re not billed for bandwidth) to see how many people would discover it and want to partake.

Up until today, it’s been a non-issue. But since this morning, we found the bandwidth slow to a crawl. None of us were doing any big transfers. (And this nearly 4Mbit link can get an awful lot before you start to feel it.) So I looked at the DHCP logs, and saw two IP addresses that were out of the range being assigned automatically. Hmmm. Turns out those two addresses were doing, together, long unending transfers. For hours on end. Sigh.

So much for that; up went the WEP (no WPA yet), and down went my hopes that people would enjoy the freeness of it but not abuse it. I know WEP won’t stop them if they’re really trying, but I expect there are easier targets now. Some jerk or jerks ate it up. Oh well, maybe I’ll try this experiment again sometime.

In Shannon Airport, we waited in line at US Immigration to continue our trip. There were six booths, each of which can have two INS officers working separate sides. On this occasion, there were only four INS folks working, divided between two stations. We went to the line on the right, sporting about 15 people; the line on the left was similar in length. We saw it take an average of about 5 minutes for each person to make it through. The slowdown appeared to be the requirement that every single non-US citizen (which in this case appeared to be the majority of the people) pose for a photo and offer a finger for a digital fingerprint.

Setting aside the debate about the problems in such a thing—no commitment to how long the information is held, who has access, etc—we’ll just focus on the amount of time it took for anyone to make it through immigration. We heard repeated calls for passengers to board our flight, heightening the stress as we’re convinced the airline will find a reason to take off our baggage and leave without us. It didn’t matter that we had US passports, we just had to wait like everyone else.

The two people in front of us divide up, going to each of the two INS staff. After a long wait, we saw the first immigration officer left her station with the person she’d been assisting. A few minutes later, the same thing happened with the other INS employee, leaving our side empty. About three minutes later, the second INS officer came out and told us we had to queue up on the other side. We couldn’t believe we’d just wasted all of this time, only to have to go to the other line and wait even longer. It was with great relief that we saw the first INS officer from our side materialize, and signal for us to come back. In less than one minute, she’d swiped each of our passports, given some idle chatter, and flagged us on.

While we were stuck in line, and when we got transferred to the other line, we were able to commiserate with our fellow passengers, all of whom were not US citizens and had to go through the fingerprinting exercise. Without exception, they all voiced their opinion that this did nothing at all to encourage them to want to visit the United States. Nor, they said, did it give them any confidence in the ability of the US government to treat foreign nations as anything other than second-class citizens of the world.

Sometimes this kind of crap makes you feel ashamed to be part of the land of the not-really-free.

For a word geek, searchspell is a cool toy. For example, if you visit www.searchspell.com/sites/wordid/, you’ll find a list of the pages for a variety of words that begin with the letter “i“.

Seen on a wall in Dublin, which really drives home (sic) the high prices for rental or purchase:

I landed back in Ireland from California on Monday evening. We left San Francisco at a bit past 7pm PST on Sunday, and finally came into Dublin at 5:30pm GMT on Monday, making the first day of the week effectively vanish. I slept really well on the 10-hour flight, went to bed Monday night at a reasonable hour, and woke up Tuesday morning with a brief sleep-in from E. I had a full day Tuesday, and went to bed around 10pm….and found myself wide awake at 2am after only a bit of sleep.

Gahhhhhhhhhh. Now it’s 5am, and I might be tired enough to be able to fall back to sleep—for a couple of hours maybe. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as well-adjusted (open to interpretation) as I thought. The flight went so well, and Tuesday was on a good schedule, that I thought I was all set. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think it would be quite that easy. Another guy on the trip slept for 11 hours straight once he was home after resting for only one hour on the flight. Even though he suffered a lot by being awake for so long, I bet he’s not awake right now… 🙂