All posts by nicholas

Hardware

IP Camera doorbell without a cloud subscription

4 Comments

I’ve been on a quest to find a decent looking doorbell camera that is easy on the wallet while also allowing for local storage recording (no cloud subscription.)

What I ended up with was the Hikvision DS-KB6003-WIP. It’s been great so far. The OEM version I got had a different firmware on it, so I flashed the official HikVision firmware just to stay proper.

Spec sheet:
HikVision Website
Alternate Link

Manual:
HikVision Website
Alternate Link

Device as listed on HikVisions website:
https://www.hikvision.com/Products/Video-Intercom/Wi-Fi-Door-Bell/DS-KB6003-WIP

Note this doorbell will ONLY work with MECHANICAL wired chimes. I could not get it to work with my digital chime (it would just chime incessantly or not power up the doorbell camera properly depending on how I used the dummy resistor provided.)

Installation was pretty straightforward. Make sure you have a good transformer and not a terrible one like I had. Connecting it to your WiFi network is a bit different. You have to use the Hik-Connect app to create a QR code with your wifi settings. The you simply need to point the QR code to the camera, and after a moment it will announce it connected to your network.

Once connected you can access the device via web browser by IP address (or continue using the hik-connect app.) The web interface requires a stupid plugin to work properly. Make sure you use IE or older Firefox version for plugin to work. The default username is admin, and the default password is admin+verification code found on the device sticker. For example, “adminHLPVTL”

Sign in on https://www.hik-connect.com/ and register device with hik-connect to get the doorbell button to do something instead of just saying “no account found.”

To configure with Zoneminder or other DVR software, the RTSP URL is as follows:

rtsp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@IP_ADDRESS:554/ch1/main/av_stream

CLI, OS, Virtualization

Fix Proxmox swapping issue

1 Comment

I recently had an issue with one of my Proxmox hosts where it would max out all swap and slow down to a crawl despite having plenty of physical memory free. After digging and tweaking, I found this post which directed to set the kernel swappiness setting to 0. More reading suggested I should set it to 1, which is what I did.

Append to /etc/sysctl.conf:

#Fix excessive swap usage
vm.swappiness = 1

Apply settings with:

sysctl --system

This did the trick for me.

CLI, Hardware, OS

Rasbperry Pi as a dashboard computer

Leave a comment

Here are my raw, unpolished notes on how I set up a raspberry pi to serve as a dashboard display:

Use Raspbian OS

Autostart Chrome in kiosk mode

Eliminate Chrome crash bubble thanks to this post

mkdir -p ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/
nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Add this line:
@chromium-browser --kiosk --app=<URL>

Mouse removal

sudo apt-get install unclutter

in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart add

@unclutter -idle 5

Disable screen blank:

in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf add

[SeatDefaults]
xserver-command=X -s 0 -dpms

Open up SSH & VNC

Pi / Preferences / Raspberry Pi Configuration: Interfaces tab

SSH: Enable
VNC: Enable

Increase swap file

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048M

Configure NTP

sudo apt-get install openntpd ntpdate
sudo systemctl enable openntpd
sudo ntpdate <IP of NTP server>

edit /etc/openntpd/ntpd.conf and modify servers lines to fit your NTP server

Disable overscan

Pi / Preferences / Raspberry Pi Configuration: System tab
Overscan: Disable

Hardware

Installing Android Auto / Apple Carplay retrofit in Mazda CX3

14 Comments

I just finished installing the Android Auto / Apple CarPlay retrofit kit into my 2016 Mazda CX-3 Grand Touring AWD. It’s sweet! The process to get it installed was a learning experience for me.

The CX-3 is not as popular as its bigger brother the CX-5 and therefore there wasn’t nearly as much information on how to do the retrofit. Of great help were various posts over at CX3 forum and this youtube video.

The steps to accomplish the retrofit are as follows, taken from the official Mazda guide

  1. Update Mazda firmware to latest 70.00+ version
    1. Firmware can be found here
  2. Remove glove compartment
  3. Remove Audio Panel 1
  4. Remove Audio Panel 2
  5. Remove Central display
    1. Be careful here. This will scratch up your dashboard. Do not ignore recommendations to lay down protective tape/other layer
  6. Remove Center Console Tray (or, in my case, the armrest attachment)
  7. Remove shift bezel
  8. Remove upper panel
  9. Remove/detach shift panel (Removal not necessary)
    1. I didn’t want to undo the shift knob, so I just unplugged the panel and rotated the whole assembly to the side. It was enough for the installation – no removal required.
  10. Remove console side panels
  11. Remove front console box
  12. Remove DVD/CD Player (if installed)
    1. Removal keys were not easy to find. I ended up using two small cutting knives I found in my kitchen. Insert into keyholes, angle them slightly, and pull.
  13. Remove Front Console
  14. Remove old USB hub from front console
  15. Replace USB hub in front console
  16. Wrap wiring in foam
  17. Route wiring and add zip ties
  18. Replace components in reverse order from how you removed them

The biggest challenges for me were the armrest and CD player. The rest of it was pretty straightforward. Here are some pictures of the process:

Mazda CX3 CMU removal
CX3 bezel removal
CX3 upper panel removed
CX3 front console removed
CX3 everything removed
CLI

Installing Gears of War 4 in Windows 10

1 Comment

Installing Gears of War 4 on Windows can only be described as a hellish nightmare. Here are my notes on how I finally got it to install and run.

  • Download file with fiddler and a download accelerator, as outlined here:

[GUIDE v2.0] How to download install package for Windows Store games (bypass Store download issues or for install on another PC)
byu/ShadowStealer7 inpcgaming

  • Once you have the file, begin installing / downloading the game from the Windows store. Get several hundred MB / a few GB, then pause download.
  • Open powershell (no need to be an admin) and run the following: 
    • Add-AppxPackage -path "<PATH TO GEARS FILE>"

After finish, close windows store and re-open, launch from there.

You may need to repeat removal and installation process many times, but now that you have the EAPPX file, it should be much less painful.

CLI, OS

Recover files from ZFS snapshot of ProxMox VM

Leave a comment

I recently needed to restore a specific file from one of my ProxMox VMs that had been deleted. I didn’t want to roll back the entire VM from a previous snapshot – I just wanted a single file from the snapshot. My snapshots are handled via ZFS using FreeNAS.

Since my VM was CentOS 7 it uses XFS, which made things a bit more difficult. I couldn’t find a way to crash-mount a read-only XFS snapshot – it simply resufed to mount, so I had to make everything read/write. Below is the process I used to recover my file:

On the FreeNAS server, find the snapshot you wish to clone:

sudo zfs list -t snapshot -o name -s creation -r DATASET_NAME

Next, clone the snapshot

sudo zfs clone SNAPSHOT_NAME CLONED_SNAPSHOT_NAME

Next, on a Linux box, use SSHFS to mount the snapshot:

mkdir Snapshot
sshfs -o allow_other user@freenas:/mnt/CLONED_SNAPSHOT_NAME Snapshot/

Now create a read/write loopback device following instructions found here:

sudo -i #easy lazy way to get past permissions issues
cd /path/to/Snapshot/folder/created/above
losetup -P -f VM_DISK_FILENAME.raw
losetup 
#Take note of output, it's likely set to /dev/loop0 unless you have other loopbacks

Note if your VM files are not in RAW format, extra steps will need to be taken in order to convert it to RAW format.

Now we have an SSH-mounted loopback device ready for mounting. Things are complicated if your VM uses LVM, which mine does (CentOS 7). Once the loopback device is set, lvscan should see the image’s logical volumes. Make the desired volume active

sudo lvscan
sudo lvchange -ay /dev/VG_NAME/LV_NAME

Now you can mount your volume:

mkdir Restore
mount /dev/VG_NAME/LV_NAME Restore/

Note: for XFS you must have read/write capability on the loopback device for this to work.

When you’re done, do your steps in reverse to unmount the snaspshot:

#Unmount snapshot
umount Restore
#Deactivate LVM
lvchange -an /dev/VG_NAME/LV_NAME
Remove loopback device
losetup -d /dev/loop0 #or whatever the loopback device was
#Unmount SSHfs mount to ZFS server
umount Snapshot

Finally, on the ZFS server, delete the snapshot:

sudo zfs destroy CLONED_SNAPSHOT_NAME

Troubleshooting

When I tried to mount the LVM partition at this point I got this error message:

mount: /dev/mapper/centos_plexlocal-root: can't read superblock

It ended up being because I was accidentally creating a read-only loopback device. I destroy the loopback device and re-created with write support and all was well.

CLI

Batch crop images with imagemagick

Leave a comment

My scanner adds annoying borders on everything it scans. I wanted to find a way to fix this with the command line. Enter Imagemagick (thanks to this site for the help.)

I found one picture and selected the area I wanted to crop it from. I used IrfanView to tell me the dimensions of the desired crop, then passed that info onto the command line. I used a bash for loop to get the job done on the entire directory:

for file in *.jpg; do convert $file -crop 4907x6561+53+75 $file; done

It worked beautifully.

CLI

Find video files in bash

Leave a comment

I wanted a quick way to search my files for video types. I found here a quick snippet on how to do so. I augmented it after finding out how to remove some info and make it case insensitive. Here is the result: 

find FULL_FOLDER_PATH -type f | grep -E "\.webm$|\.flv$|\.vob$|\.ogg$|\.ogv$|\.drc$|\.gifv$|\.mng$|\.avi$|\.mov$|\.qt$|\.wmv$|\.yuv$|\.rm$|\.rmvb$|/.asf$|\.amv$|\.mp4$|\.m4v$|\.mp*$|\.m?v$|\.svi$|\.3gp$|\.flv$|\.f4v$" -iname|sed 's/^.*://g'|sort
CLI, Hardware

Generate SuperMicro IPMI license

64 Comments

Thank-you, Peter Kleissner, for saving me from having to use my time machine to simply update my server’s BIOS: https://peterkleissner.com/2018/05/27/reverse-engineering-supermicro-ipmi/

https://twitter.com/kleissner/status/996955400787423232?lang=en

Supermicro IPMI License Key (for updating BIOS) = HMAC-SHA1-96(INPUT: MAC address of BMC, SECRET KEY: 85 44 E3 B4 7E CA 58 F9 58 30 43 F8)

echo -n 'bmc-mac' | xxd -r -p | openssl dgst -sha1 -mac HMAC -macopt hexkey:8544E3B47ECA58F9583043F8 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -c 1-24