unixwiz

Windows 7 is naughty

unixwiz — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:24:49 +0000

Today I set out to see if Windows 7 would run MS Flight Simulator X any better than Windows XP did. I found that Windows XP on my Mac Pro (Dual Xeon with 10GB of ram) ran very sluggish. Partly because Windows XP (32-Bit) would only recognize about 3.5 Gig of the 10GB of ram that was installed in the machine. So since I recently got a Technet subscription (I seem to have to do a little more Windows stuff now at work, so thought I might as well learn what I have to manage) I downloaded the Windows Ultimate 7 to see how it would perform before going out and buying it. So I did a Time Machine backup of my data on my Mac Pro and then inserted in the Windows 7 disc and hit the “go”. It took a couple of hours to do the install, patch it, update boot camp stuff and install Flight Simulator. Once it was installed I was impressed that it actually performed much better than it did on Windows XP. I could actually turn the graphics stuff up on it and almost run it at 1900×1200 with out any jerking around. I then did a couple of flights and then it was time to boot back in to MacOS to get some real work done. This is when I about lost it..

See when I booted windows 7 it had found the other 3 data drives that were all HFS+ drives in my Mac. It decided to assign a drive letter to them all. I went in and un did that as I did not want Windows to touch those drives. I thought all was well, until I booted in to MacOS. When I logged in, it told me that the drives could not be read, and it couldn’t find my home directory (which was one of those drives). I was PISSED! So the first thing I did was pop up the disk utility and this is what I saw (minus the 2 1TB seagate drives):

What pissed me off was that every partition I clicked on, it said it was an MS-DOS partition. Surely Windows didn’t screw around and format all my drives.. I was at a loss, all my data was on there, 20,000+ pictures, all the video I was working on, everything… So I decided to see what I could see from the command line. So off to the command line, and I ran the “diskutil list” command and saw this:

Yup, Micro$oft had screwed with my partitions.. So I was hoping that maybe it just changed the partition type and my data was still there. So I poked around to see if there was a way to change the partition type. In the gui tool, the only way to do it is to “format” it over, which meant I would loose everthing, and I didn’t have any backups, as the disk2 in there was my Time Machine backup drive. So thinking to my Solaris side, I knew there was a program called “fstyp” that would tell you what a particular disk slice was formated as. So I gave it a shot and MacOS has that program:

So I ran the fstyp util againest one of the slices, and it came back saying it was HFS… Hot diggity dog.. Maybe my data is still all there.. So I did a mount on it as readonly and it worked. I could see all the data on the drive. So I immediatly started copying data from the drive to an external USB drive (the first 1TB seagate drive in the picture above). But the problem now was, I had 3 x 500GB harddrives of information. The 1TB drive only had about 400GB free. So off to Best Buy and I picked up a Seagate 1TB Firewire drive. Brought it home and mounted up the other partitions and started copying the data. It has been going on for about 2 hours or more now on the copy. I will say that the Seagate Firewire 800 drive is spanking the ass off of the Seagate USB drive.

Once I have backed up all the data.. (Hint use the ditto command) I will see if there is a way to change the partition type with out reformatting the drive. If there isn’t then I will have to reformat and then ditto the data back on to the Internal drives..

Hopefully this will help some one else if they get the same problem, and it (MacOS) tells you “you must initialize the drive”. DONT. Tell it to cancel and then you can save your data.. If you initialize it, you may end up loosing all your data.

—Update

As I waited for the data to finish copying I decided to test some stuff on my time machine drive. I read a bunch on the GUID labels that are on the disks. Using the gpt command i did a listing of the GUID info for the drive. Using that information I deleted the index 2 and added a new one with the Apple HFS GUID label:

gpt -r show /dev/disk2

gpt remove -i 2 /dev/disk2

gpt add -b 409640 -s 976101344 -i 2 -t "48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC" /dev/disk2

In the above, you can see I removed index 2. As soon as I did that, this window popped up:

I just selected ignore on it. Then went on to put in the new GUID label which was the third command in the shot above. The numbers (409640, and 976101344) are taken from the line that has index 2 on it above. You MUST use the exact same numbers, otherwise you are going to change the partition size and may corrupt your data. The value after the -t is the GUID value for MacOS HFS (HFS+), which I found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table, you can also see that the one that was listed before I removed it was a Windows Basic Data Partition.

As soon as I hit enter on the gpt command to add it in, the gui disk utility immediately changed and now showed me my data was there. It also mounted the disk like nothing had happened.

I am going to wait till the copying is done and then do the other two drives and then I should be back to where I was before I installed Windows 7.

More info on the Apple GPT is at : http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html

Seeing Red – RIP Sun

unixwiz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:06:57 +0000

Not sure how I feel now that Sun is no longer Sun. Kinda weird watching the Oracle web cast of their purchase of Sun and what is going to happen. One thing I can’t understand is they are all wearing badges saying “We’re Hiring!”. But yet they let go SO many good Sun employees. I just don’t think it is going to be the same old Sun that I have used since 1994.

RIP Sun 1982 – 2010

From http://blogs.sun.com/jag/

UHF antenna irony

unixwiz — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:28:44 +0000

Why is it that every-time I make a new UHF antenna to see if it works, we have a good tropo DX available? Tonight I tried to make a UHF yagi antenna specifically for UHF51 (WTAE TV 4) since it is usually the one that had the most signal, even though I could not get it all the time. So I spent about an hour making the make-shift antenna, hooked it up to the amp and the converter box and instantly had about 75% signal strength on it in my dining room. I thought wow that is awesome. So I went and grabbed the little Radio Shack Yagi that I had (rated for about 40miles) and plugged it in, damn it, it works too for just that one channel. So the test will be tomorrow when the tropo effect goes away if my home-made one still works or not. If it does, I might try modifying it to get some of the other channels.

The yagi was made using calculations on this site: http://www.k7mem.com/Electronic_Notebook/antennas/yagi_vhf.html. Since I was making a “tuned” antenna, it was basically only for one frequency. To find the frequency, I used http://www.csgnetwork.com/tvfreqtable.html and used the bottom number for the channel (i.e. 692MHz for Channel 51).

Also to see when DX’ing might be good check out http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html

Comcast Channel Frequencies

unixwiz — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:51:32 +0000

Spent the other night updating the list. It now seems that if you are using a cable box in the Morgantown area, it uses QAM for every channel on it. The only way to see the analog channels is to connect the cable directly to the TV. This is just them getting one step closer to requiring a cable box for every tv in the house. The only channels that will be left will be the local broadcast type channels. So here is a list of channels that I was able to determine what frequencies and qam channels they are on:

Comcast Channel Lineup for Morgantown WV

It is sorted by the frequency in case you are wondering why stuff is “out of order”.

Who’s knocking on your door?

unixwiz — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:10:52 +0000

It seems that the new “thing” on the internet these days is port scanning for port 22 (aka SSH). I was going through my firewall logs on my home router and over the last week or so, it is broken down as follows:

country	cnt
China	2123
Germany	1827
Italy	1460
United States	1115
Russian Federation	838
Korea, Republic of	738
Austria	692
Poland	618
Spain	502
Colombia	453
India	441
Czech Republic	323
Ecuador	286
Romania	282
Belgium	256
Chile	228
Panama	201
Pakistan	199
France	198
Argentina	170
Canada	148
Switzerland	138
Ukraine	129
Taiwan	128
Venezuela	111
Mexico	111
Denmark	105
Hungary	101
Slovenia	87
Brazil	77
Guatemala	59
Uruguay	53
Estonia	50
Croatia	48
Singapore	36
Australia	32
Portugal	32
Hong Kong	29
Greece	25
New Zealand	24
Ireland	18
Netherlands	17
Serbia	15
United Kingdom	13
South Africa	12
Malaysia	9
Thailand	8
Peru	7
Moldova, Republic of	6
Azerbaijan	3
Turkey	2
Malta	1
Total	14585

As a comparison, attempts that were blocked that weren’t ssh only totaled 1430. So are these bot’s or people looking for rogue iPhone’s or just trying to find new vulnerabilities in SSH? The interesting thing is it appears that each source IP tries 3 times. The second try is 3 seconds after the first and the third is 6 seconds after the second.

An interesting IP is 217.70.139.42, which has tried 303 times since the 14th. The IP is from Germany and also appears on several SSH dictionary attacks. So is it time to start running services on non-standard ports?

Another Internet Explorer exploit

unixwiz — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:10:54 +0000

Just released, another exploit to Internet Explorer 6 & 7, that allows “hackers” to install software on your machine… What do the major Antivirus people say:

“To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft,” Symantec said.

How many mom and pop’s out there even know how to disable java script, and only visit sites they trust? Let alone make sure their antivirus definitions are updated. I have seen some virus trick Symantec’s AV in to thinking the definitions were up to date, and then I go to find hundreds of virus’ on my parents computer. This is just another reason why building the web browser in to the OS is a bad thing and why it should be sandbox’d off in to its own little area.

Avenue Q

unixwiz — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:43:18 +0000

Went last night with some friends to see Avenue Q. For those who have never heard of it or seen it, think of Sesame Street for adults. It was a blast. Some how we ended up with front row center seats. If you ever get to New York city, London or select city’s in Australia you should really see it. (Assuming that adult humor does not offend you.) They also have some national tours going on right now which would be another way to see it.

I was so surprised at the number of kids that came with their parents. It was clearly labeled as not for kids, yet I saw parents bringing their kids assuming that since there are “puppets” that it was a kids show. If they didn’t find out in the first couple of minutes that it wasn’t a kids show, they surely found out when they did the bit about how the “Internet is for Porn”.

Some links for Avenue Q:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_q

http://www.avenueq.com/

http://www.avenueqgoods.com/

Travel update 2009

unixwiz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:30:09 +0000

Decided to update the map again, so far my total is 64341 miles. I have done 9,755 miles so far this year. I see a lot more coming up next year. This year also took me to 3 new states and 4 new airports.

Fast Hotel Internet Service

unixwiz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:21:51 +0000

Most of the time when you go to a hotel the internet service pretty much sucks, and if it is free it sucks even more. However this weekend I was greatly surprised by the service in the Residence Inn by Marriott in Charleston WV. In the room they had a DSL modem on the table. So I plugged in the laptop an to my surprise this was what speedtest.net showed:

I think this is the first time I had a ~3Meg connection in a hotel room. I was able to download stuff at over 250KB/sec from my house while there as well. So kudos to the Residence Inn for the awesome Internet connection.

The difference of 300 miles

unixwiz — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:59:25 +0000

This weekend I went to the southern part of West Virginia ( 37°38′15.41″N / 81°56′16.29″W , Mingo County) for a memorial for a Co-worker/Friend who passed away on October 21, 2009 from lung cancer (he was a non-smoker and only 33 years old.) This was the first time I had been to the southern part of the state (furthest south before that was Charleston). It was hard to tell that they had major flooding there back in May ( youtube video of floods). It is more of a shock to see how people live down there compared to where I live. Some of the most shocking is the sheer number of mobile homes (aka trailers) and the bridges that go over little creeks to their home. Those bridges look rather unstable to me. The other interesting sight was that in one small town I drove through there was a church that actually had a 6 foot tall fence around it with a fenched gate for the entrance to the parking lot. I always thought church’s were supposed to be an “open” place, but this present it as some what of a private church. Interestingly the house right next to it was completely fenched in as well. So I can only guess that it was a high crime area? Another site I saw, and didn’t get to take a picture of it, was a house that looked like it had caught on fire, but they hadn’t demolished it yet. It was leaning so far to the left it almost looked like it was going to fall on the house next to it.

The other weird thing is that the mountains are so steep in that area, that there is no cell coverage and it made my XM Radio cut out. And if you ever out for an adventure in driving, drive the stretch of road east on US-52 from where WV-44 meets US52. There is a reason they call it Horsepen mountain.
Probably about the closet video to represent some of what I saw is Jesco White Dancing Outlaw on youtube.

Finally just one to take a moment to mention that my Friend served his country for 11 years in the Navy. I had only known him for a year through work. He was a great person and will be missed, but never forgotten by any of his co-workers or family.