Um – they already are cattle-class, at best, during rush hour. How the hell could it get any worse?
Monthly Archives: October 2009
SSH and rsync on Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini v2
A couple of months back, I acquired a Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini v2 for backups – I’m planning to give it to a friend to plug in, so I’ll have a little self-contained box to back up to.
The drive is a pretty stylish-looking and very solid-feeling device.
However, it comes with rather limited software – a rather poor and ugly web interface (even worse when you see the code behind it), and it supports Samba (SMB/CIFS) shares, FTP, some kind of Apple file sharing protocol, and uPnP media streaming.
Ignoring all that though, what I want is the ability to back up to it by rsync – something it doesn’t support, out of the box. However, it’s an ARM-powered unit running Linux underneath, so with a little trickery, you can make it much more functional.
There are several guides on uncrippling it to get SSH access to make proper use of it – I followed this one.
Basically, the process consists of opening up the device, and temporarily hooking up the hard drive directly to your computer in order to add a telnet binary and a backdoor to the web interface. I used a little USB to SATA/IDE adaptor I bought from eBuyer, meaning I could hook it up happily to my laptop, and didn’t have to remove the drive from the Lacie unit, simply removing the outer case and unplugging the cables from the drive and plugging in the ones from the USB unit.
See the guide linked to above for the full process, but you basically drop in a shell script which you can call via its web interface once it’s back up to execute whatever you want. The webserver on it runs at root (ugh) so it can start whatever you want it to. Typically, you’ll start utelnetd so that you can then telnet to it, download some ARM packages to install OpenSSH, rsync and other bits, get SSH working, then disable telnet, the horrible web interface, and anything else you don’t plan to use (I disabled proftpd, Samba, and the uPnP media sharing software).
Once it’s all done, you have a small but usable Linux system you can SSH to:
Naturally it’s not super-fast, but it does the job well enough!
A few tech specs, for anyone interested:
davidp@EDmini davidp $ cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 0 (v5l) BogoMIPS : 266.24 Features : swp half thumb fastmult CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 5TEJ CPU variant : 0x0 CPU part : 0x926 CPU revision : 0 Cache type : write-back Cache clean : cp15 c7 ops Cache lockdown : format C Cache format : Harvard I size : 32768 I assoc : 1 I line length : 32 I sets : 1024 D size : 32768 D assoc : 1 D line length : 32 D sets : 1024 Hardware : MV-88fxx81 Revision : 0000 Serial : 0000000000000000 davidp@EDmini davidp $ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 61632 kB MemFree: 1380 kB Buffers: 188 kB Cached: 28924 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 17336 kB Inactive: 23328 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 61632 kB LowFree: 1380 kB SwapTotal: 128448 kB SwapFree: 128448 kB Dirty: 3472 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 14548 kB Slab: 16688 kB CommitLimit: 159264 kB Committed_AS: 56104 kB PageTables: 508 kB VmallocTotal: 450560 kB VmallocUsed: 716 kB VmallocChunk: 449844 kB
“White-label” Nominet tag? Not quite…
I still receive occasional newsletters from Heart Internet, after trying out their free web hosting a long time ago (actually, I seem to recall it being a plan to mirror some content there, and never actually getting round to it).
Anyway, their latest newsletter sings the praises of their new “generic Nominet TAG”:
Previously, because of Nominet’s rules surrounding the registration of .uk domain names, we have had to register our reseller’s domain names through our Nominet tag, HEARTINTERNET, thus potentially exposing ourselves to reseller’s clients. Not any longer! We have now added an additional Nominet tag to our control panel for our resellers to use called EXTEND. This allows all our resellers to register domain names or transfer domain names through a generic tag, helping maintain their brand’s integrity.
I’m not exactly sure how this is helpful – instead of your clients seeing HEARTINTERNET they see EXTEND; it’s still not your brand, and Nominet’s tag list page still clearly identifies the tag as belonging to “Heart Internet Ltd t/a eXtend”.
(I was however amused by the wording of “potentially exposing ourselves to reseller’s clients” – that’s probably something best avoided! :) )
Looking for Christmas Blackberry wallpapers *already*?
Someone came to my blog yesterday whilst searching for christmas blackberry wallpaper.
Christmas wallpapers, already? Sheesh, we’re not even half way through October yet, FFS. Why do Christmas preparations seem to get earlier and earlier every year?
Anyway, since apparently someone is looking, I posted one last year – maybe I’ll get round to making some more this year, nearer Christmas!
Jack Thompson is a fucking idiot
Jack Thompson, the muppet who made money-grabbing attempts to sue game producers for producing adult games has now decided to attempt to sue Facebook as he’s unhappy they haven’t immediately defended him from gamers speaking their mind on his stupid, money-grabbing antics.
Facebook groups he objects to include ones like:
Muppet.
Edit: I should add that this guy was permanently disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court after it ruled he “abused the legal system by submitting numerous, frivolous and inappropriate filings.”