All posts by nicholas

Hardware

Manually configure D-Link DCS-930L wireless camera

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I recently acquired a pair of D-Link DCS-930L wireless cameras for cheap. I got them to supplement my iSpy home security setup. These cameras come with all sorts of cloud management software that I’m not interested in. I just want to configure them to be wireless cameras for my iSpy system to handle.

There is a trick to configuring these cameras for wi-fi without installing any software or buying a D-Link cloud router. You simply have to plug the camera into an enternet connection, configure your computer to be on the same network as the camera, navigate to the camera’s management webpage, and make a few changes. Let’s begin. (I got my information from the manual for this device, located here.)

  1. Use the supplied ethernet cable to plug the camera’s ethernet port into your computer’s ethernet port. You will have to manually configure your computer’s IP address to be on the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet (something like 192.168.0.2.)
  2. The default IP address for this camera is 192.168.0.20. Go there in a browser.
  3. Default username: admin, blank password
  4. Navigate to the Setup tab (at the top), then click Wireless setup (on the left)
  5. Join your AP by doing a site survey and connecting to your wireless network. Enter your security key (if any) in the passphrase box.
  6. Reboot to have settings take effect (Maintenance (top) System (left) reboot the device)
  7. Un-plug ethernet cable (it doesn’t appear to connect wirelessly if ethernet is plugged in)

Now that we’re up and running we need to tell iSpy (or any other camera software) to connect to the camera. A very helpful guide to URLs these cameras use is located on iSpy’s webpage.

 

The URL for MJPEG capture is:

http://<IP ADDRESS>/MJPEG.CGI

The URL for JPEG capture is:

 http://<IP ADDRESS>/image.jpg

Be sure to fill in <IP ADDRESS> with the IP your camera gets from Wi-Fi, of course.

Success!

I read you can install openwrt on these devices.. but that’s a post for another day.

Hardware, OS

Install fresh Windows 8.1 on Lenovo G50-S70

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Inspired by Lenovo’s bone headed move to install the superfish malware on its machines, I decided to wipe my mother’s Lenovo G50-S70 laptop and start anew. It was supposed to be easy but I ended up running into some issues with this new fangled hardware.

Microsoft has released a very easy tool to create boot ISO images and / or USB media to install Windows 8.1. For Windows 8.1 certified devices like the Lenovo G50 this is extra nice because the key is embedded in the UEFI BIOS – no need to write down or memorize a key.

After creating a USB drive, however, I was greeted with a lovely error message:

Select the driver to install.

It seemed that the install media didn’t see the G50’s hard drive. I could not get past this error message. All drivers on Lenovo’s website are .EXE files which don’t extract well – even when extracted, the installer didn’t like them.

The solution is to boot into a Windows PE environment and run the Windows installer from there. I chose this PE image, which worked quite nicely. Once booted from this PE disk, I was able to mount the install media and run setup.exe manually. This time the installer saw the hard drives and installed Windows 8.1 as you would expect. Success.

OS

Make Notepad++ open files in separate windows

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I love Notepad++. When working in Windows it’s my go-to text editor. One thing I don’t like about it, though, is that it seems to only work in one window by default.

It turns out there is a way to change Notepad++ to work more like Notepad – that is, each file you open opens up in a new window instead of a tab in the same window. There doesn’t appear to be a menu option to enable this functionality; however it is still possible to get Notepad++ to behave more like Notepad that way, thanks to this post.

The trick is to create an empty file named asNotepad.xml and to place that file in the directory where Notepad++ is installed (C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++ in my case.)

That’s it! once the empty asNotepad.xml file is in the Notepad++ program directory, it acts more like notepad in the sense that each file is opened in a new window. Handy.

CLI, Networking

Migrate from Sophos UTM to pfSense part 1

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I’ve been using a Sophos UTM virtual appliance as my main firewall / threat manager appliance for about two years now. I’ve had some strange issues with this solution off and on but for the most part it worked. The number of odd issues has begun to build, though.

Recently it decided to randomly drop some connections even though logs showed no dropped packets. The partial connections spanned across various networks and devices. I never did figure out what was wrong. After two days of furiously investigating (including disconnecting all devices from the network), the problem went away completely on its own with no action on my part. It was maddening – enough to drive me to pfSense.

As of version 2.2 pfSense can be fully virtualized in Xen, thanks to FreeBSD 10.1. This allowed me the option to migrate. Below are the initial steps I’ve taken to move to pfSense.

Features checklist

I am currently using the following functions in Sophos UTM. My goal is to move these functions to equivalents in pfSense:

  • Network firewall
  • Web Application Firewall, also known as a reverse proxy.
  • NTP server
  • PPPOE client
  • DHCP server
  • DNS server
  • Transparent proxy for content filtering and reporting
  • E-mail server / SPAM protection
  • Intrusion Detection system
  • Anti-virus
  • SOCKS proxy
  • Remote access portal (for downloading VPN configurations, etc)
  • Citrix Xenserver support (for live migration etc)
  • Log all events to a syslog server
  • VPN server
  • Daily / weekly / monthly e-mail reports on bandwidth usage, CPU, most visited sites, etc.

I haven’t migrated all of these function over to pfSense which is why this article is only Part 1. Here is what I have done so far.

Xenserver support

Installing xen tools is fairly straightforward thanks to this article. It’s simply a matter of dropping to a shell on your pfSense VM to install and enable xen tools

pkg install xe-guest-utilities
echo "xenguest_enable=\"YES\"" >> /etc/rc.conf.local
ln -s /usr/local/etc/rc.d/xenguest /usr/local/etc/rc.d/xenguest.sh 
service xenguest start

PPPoE client

The wizard works fine for configuring PPPOE, however I experienced some very strange issues with internet speed. Downstream would be fine but upstream would be incredibly slow. Another symptom was NAT / port forwarding appearing not to work at all.

It turns out the issue was pfSense’s virtualized status. There is a bug in the virtio driver that handles virtualized networking. You have to disable all hardware offloading on both the xenserver hypervisor and the pfSense VM to work around the bug. Details on how to do this can be found here. After that fix was implemented, speed and performance went back to normal.

DNS server

To get this working like it did in Sophos you have to disable the default DNS resolver service and enable the DNS forwarder service instead. Once DNS forwarder is enabled, check the box “register DHCP leases in DNS” so that DHCP hostnames come through to clients.

Syslog

Navigate to Status / system logs / settings tab and  tick “Send log messages to remote syslog server” and fill out the appropriate settings.

Note for Splunk users: the Technology Add-on for parsing pfsense logs expects the sourcetype to equal pfsense (not syslog). Create a manual input for logs coming from pfsense so it’s tagged as pfsense and not syslog (thanks to this post for the solution on how to get the TA to work properly.)

VPN

OpenVPN – wizard ran fine. Install OpenVPN Client Export utility package for easy exporting to clients. Once package is installed go to VPN / OpenVPN and you will see a new tab – Client Export.

Note you will need to create a user and check the “create certificate” checkbox or add a user certificate to existing user by going to System / User manager, Editing the user and clicking the plus next to User Certificates. The export utility will only show users that have valid certificates attached to them. If no users have valid certificates the Client Export tab will be blank.

Firewall

One useful setting to note is to enable NAT reflection. This allows you to access NATed resources as if you were outside the network, even though you are inside it. Do this by going to System / Advanced and clicking on the Firewall / NAT tab. Scroll halfway down to find the Network Address Translation section. Change NAT reflection mode for port forwards to Enable (Pure NAT)

It’s also very helpful to configure host and port aliases by going to Firewall / Aliases. This is roughly equivalent to creating Network and Host definitions in Sophos. When you write firewall rules you can simply use the alias instead of writing out hosts IPs and ports.

So far so good

This is the end of part 1. I’ve successfully moved the following services from Sophos UTM to pfSense:

  • Network firewall
  • PPPOE client
  • Log all events to a syslog server
  • VPN server
  • NTP server
  • DHCP server
  • DNS server
  • Xenserver support

I’m still working on moving the other services over. I’ve yet to find a viable alternative to the web application firewall but I haven’t given up yet.

Networking, Virtualization

Fix NAT not working with pfSense in Xenserver

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After a few very frustrating experiences I’ve decided I want to migrate away from Sophos UTM for my home firewall. I enjoy Sophos’ features but do not enjoy the sporadic issues it’s been giving me.

My colleagues all rave about pfSense and how awesome it is so I thought I would give it a try. I have a completely virtualized setup using Citrix Xenserver 6.5 which has prevented me from trying pfSense in the past. The latest release, version 2.2.2, is based on FreeBSD 10.1, which includes native Xen device support. Now we’re talking.

Installation was quick and painless. After some configuration, the basic internet connection function was working swimmingly. As soon as I tried to forward some ports from my WAN interface to hosts on my network, though, things did not go well at all. I began to doubt my ability to configure basic NAT.

It looks simple enough – go to Firewall / NAT, specify the necessary source and destination IPs and Ports, and click apply. Firewall rules were added automatically. Except it didn’t work. I enabled logging on everything and there were no dropped packets to be found, but they were clearly being dropped. I thought it might be something weird with Sophos being upstream so I built my own private VM network but the issue was the same. NAT simply didn’t work. Silently dropped packets. I am not a fan of them.

I was about to give up on pfSense but something told me it had to be a problem with my virtualization setup. I ran a packet capture via Diagnostics / Packet capture and after much sifting I found this gem:

checksumAll of my packets sent to the WAN interface returned [Bad CheckSum] that I was only able to discover via packet capture – they weren’t in the logs anywhere.

Armed with this information I stumbled on this forum post and discovered I am not alone in this. There apparently is a bug with FreeBSD 10.1 and the virtIO network drivers used by Xen, KVM, and others that causes it to miscalculate checksums, resulting in either dropped or very slow packets (I experienced both.)

The solution is to disable tx checksum offloading on both the PFsense side and the hypervisor side. In pfSense this is done by going to System / Advanced / Networking and checking “Disable hardware checksum offload”

To accomplish this on the xenserver side, follow tdslot’s instructions from the forum post linked above, replacing vm-name-label with the name of your pfSense VM:

Find your PFsense VM network VIF UUID’s:

[root@xen ~]# xe vif-list vm-name-label="RT-OPN-01"
uuid ( RO)            : 08fa59ac-14e5-f087-39bc-5cc2888cd5f8
...
...
...
uuid ( RO)            : 799fa8f4-561d-1b66-4359-18000c1c179f

Then modify those VIF UUID’s captured above with the following settings (discovered thanks to this post)

  • other-config:ethtool-gso=”off”
  • other-config:ethtool-ufo=”off”
  • other-config:ethtool-tso=”off”
  • other-config:ethtool-sg=”off”
  • other-config:ethtool-tx=”off”
  • other-config:ethtool-rx=”off”
xe vif-param-set uuid=08fa59ac-14e5-f087-39bc-5cc2888cd5f8 other-config:ethtool-tx="off"
xe vif-param-set uuid=799fa8f4-561d-1b66-4359-18000c1c179f other-config:ethtool-tx="off"

Lastly, shutdown the VM and start it again (not reboot, must be a full shutdown and power on.)

It worked! NAT worked as expected and a little bit of my sanity was restored. I can now make the switch to pfSense.

CLI, Mobile, Networking

Use a freedompop phone for OOB management

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I’ve been wanting to have an out of band (OOB) way to manage my home servers for some time now. Why OOB? Sometimes the regular band fails you, like when the internet connection goes down or when I remote into my firewall and fat finger a setting causing the WAN link to go down. Everything is still up, I just can’t get to it remotely. I then have to drive home to fix it all like a luser. This is especially difficult if I’m out of town.

Enter Freedompop. Freedompop is as Sprint MVNO that offers data-only 4g access for cheap – in this case, completely free if you stay under 500 MB of data a month. I got a freedompop phone so my wife could play Ingress before the iOS client came out. Once the iOS Ingress client was released, the freedompop phone began collecting dust.

Note that this would all be a lot simpler if I just did things the “proper” way, such as purchasing a freedompop access point or paying for a tethering plan.. but what’s the fun in that? My solution is quite convoluted and silly – it uses all three types of SSH tunnels –  but it works.. and it was fun!

Hardware

  • Local, out of band server: An old laptop with a broken screen running Xubuntu 14.04
    • Ethernet cable attached to my local network
  • Remote, regularly banded SSH server: My parents’ dd-wrt powered router (any remote ssh server you have access to will do.)
  • Phone: Sprint Samsung Galaxy S3 activated on the Freedompop network
    • Attached to the out of band server via USB

Software

  • openssh-server: Install this on your out of band server so you can SSH into it
    • ssh-keygen: used to generate RSA private/public key pair to allow for passwordless SSH logins
  • screen: Allows programs to keep running even if SSH is disconnected (optional)
  • autossh: Monitors the state of your ssh connection and will continually attempt to re-connect if the connection is lost, effectively creating a persistent tunnel.
  • tsocks: Allows you to tunnel all traffic for a specified command through a SOCKS proxy
  • Android SSH Server (I use SSH server by Icecold apps.) This is an SSH server for android devices, no root required.

Procedure

My strategy uses a system of tunnels through the intertubes to accomplish what I want.

  1. Install the OS, openssh-server, autossh, and tsocks on your OOB server, then disconnect it from the internet while keeping it on your local network (I manually configured the IP to not have a default gateway.)
  2. Install an ssh server on your phone
  3. Tether your phone to the computer via USB
  4. Create a dynamic SOCKS proxy tunnel between the OOB server and your phone (Freedompop appears to block internet traffic through USB tethers unless you have a tethering plan, so I had to get creative.)
  5. Configure tsocks on your OOB server to point to the socks proxy established in step 4
  6. Use autossh in conjuction with tsocks to initiate a reverse tunnel between your OOB server and the remote SSH server over the 4G connection from your freedompop phone
  7. (From some other network) SSH into your remote SSH server and create a local tunnel pointing to the remote tunnel created in step 6.
  8. SSH into your locally created tunnel, and… profit?

Adventure, here we come.

Create private / public keys

First, since we’re going to be creating a persistent tunnel, passwordless login is required. We do this by generating an RSA private/public key pair. Create the key pair on your server as per these instructions:

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/nicholas/.ssh/id_rsa): oob
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in oob.
Your public key has been saved in oob.pub.

Copy the public key generated (oob.pub in my case) to your phone.

Configure phone SSH server

Create an SSH server on your phone. Configure the user you created to use the public key generated above. Once that’s configured, start the ssh server on the phone, plug the phone into USB cable and plug the other end into server, and activate USB tethering in Android settings.

On the OOB server, find out IP address of tether by issuing the route command. Look for the gateway on the usb0 interface.

route
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
default 192.168.42.129 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 usb0

In my case the gateway IP is 192.168.42.129.

Configure OOB server

Initiate an autossh connection to the usb0 gateway, creating a dynamic (socks) proxy in the process.

autossh 192.168.42.129 -l nicholas -i ~/.ssh/oob -p 34097 -D9999

Argument breakdown:

  • -l  username to log in as
  • -i keyfile to use (passwordless login, optional but recommended)
  • -p port to ssh to. This will be random and told to you by the android ssh server on the phone.
  • -D port for your dynamic (socks) proxy to bind to. This can be anything of your choosing.

The phone <-> OOB server tunnel is now established. This tunnel will be used to provide 4G internet access to your server.

Next, configure tsocks to use our newly created tunnel. The options we want to modify are Local Networks, server, and server_port.

sudo vi /etc/tsocks.conf

local = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 9999

You can now use the 4G internet if you prepend tsocks in front of the program you want to use the internet.

Update 07/01/2015 I discovered my off site router changes SSH host keys every reboot. This was causing SSH to fail due to host key mismatches. Disable strict SSH host key checking per this post to get around this:

vi ~/.ssh/config

Host *
    StrictHostKeyChecking no

Update 08/04/2015

I found an even better way than the one above to avoid SSH key changing errors. Simply add the following options to your ssh command:

-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null

That takes care of changing ssh keys for good. Thanks to this site for the info.

Establish tunnel with external server

Now that we have 4g internet we can use autossh to call out to an external SSH server (my parent’s router in my case.) This time we will be initiating a reverse tunnel. It will cause the remote server to listen on a specified port and tunnel all traffic on that port through the SSH tunnel to your local server. Note that you will have to copy your public key generated earlier to this remote host as well.

tsocks autossh <remote server IP/DNS> -p <remote port> -l<remote user> -i <remote keyfile> -R5448:localhost:22

The local <-> remote server tunnel is now established. The remote port to listen on (-R argument)  can be anything of your choosing. Remember what port you used for the last step.

Automating connections

Since the SSH connections are interactive I’ve found it easier to run these commands via screen as I outline in this post. To have these tunnels form automatically on startup we will have to make a quick and dirty upstart script as detailed here and further clarified here.

vi /etc/init/tunnel.conf
author "Your name goes here - optional"
description "What your daemon does shortly - optional"

start on started dbus
stop on stopping dbus

# console output # if you want daemon to spit its output to console... ick
# respawn # it will respawn if crashed/killed

script
 screen -dm bash -c "autossh 192.168.42.129 -l nicholas -i /home/nicholas/.ssh/oob -p34097 -D9999"
 sleep 5
 screen -dm bash -c "tsocks autossh dana.jeppson.org -l root -p 443 -i /home/nicholas/.ssh/oob -R5448:localhost:22"
end script

sudo initctl reload-configuration

Accessing your server out of band

Now that we have a tunnel established between our local and remote servers, we can access our local server through the remote server. On the remote server:

ssh localhost -p5448

The -p command of ssh specifies which port to connect to. Since we have a reverse tunnel listening on port 5448, the server will take the ssh connection you’ve initiated and send it through the intertubes to your OOB server over its 4G connection.

If you would rather SSH into your OOB server directly from your laptop instead of through your remote SSH server, you will need to create more tunnels, this time regular local port forwarding tunnels. Why would you possibly want more tunnels? If you want to access things like SSH, VNC or RDP for servers on your network through your OOB tunnel directly to your laptop, it will be necessary to create even more tunnels through the tubes.

First tunnel (to expose the OOB server’s SSH port to your laptop)

ssh <remote server> -L2222:localhost:5448

-L specifies which port your laptop will listen on. The other two parts  specify where your laptop will send traffic it sees on that port (from the perspective of the remote SSH server.)

Second tunnel (to expose ports of servers of your choosing to your laptop as well as give you shell access to your local OOB server) You can add as many -L arguments as you wish, one for each address/port combination you wish to access.

ssh localhost -p2222 -L3333:192.168.1.10:3389 ... ...

Why?

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. This was an exercise in accessing my home network even if the internet connection goes down. You could bypass half of these tunnels if you set up an openvpn server on your out of band server, but that’s a tutorial for another time.

If you followed this madness you would have the following tunnels through the tubes:

  • SOCKS proxy tunnel from server to phone
  • Remote port forward tunnel from OOB server to remote server
  • Local port forward from remote server to your computer
  • Local port forward(s) from your computer to anything on your local network through the tunnel created above
Analytics

Determine what a Splunk forwarder is forwarding

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I recently came across a need to determine exactly what is logging to a forwarder in Splunk. I had a hard time finding out what to search for so I thought I’d share what I found.

The key to discovering where data is coming in from is in Splunk’s metrics.log files. Searching these files gives us what we need. This search reveals anything coming in over UDP (you can also change it to be TCP if desired) and totals it by host (forwarder.)

source=*metrics.log group=udpin_connections | stats count by host

Oddly enough Splunk doesn’t have a field extracted for its own metrics.log. A key useful field is missing – sourceHost. I used the field extraction tool to create it and it generated this field extraction:

^[^,\n]*,\s+(?P<sourceHost>\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)

Field extraction in hand, I was able to generate the report I was looking for: devices actively sending logs to my forwarder over UDP.

source=*metrics.log group=udpin_connections  host=splunk | stats count by sourceHost sourcePort

where host is the forwarder you want to investigate. Useful.

OS, Virtualization

Fix Xen VGA Passthrough in Linux Mint 17.1

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I wrote in my last post about how I upgraded from Linux Mint 16 to 17.1. I thought everything went smoothly, but it turns out one feature did break: VGA passthrough via Xen. For the past year or so I’ve had a Windows 8.1 gaming VM with direct access to my video card. It’s worked out nicely in Linux Mint 16 but broke completely in 17.1.

I followed the advice of powerhouse on the Linux Mint forums on how to get things up and running, but it wasn’t quite enough. After much banging of my head against the wall I read on the Xen mailing list that there was a regression in VGA passthrough functionality with Xen 4.4.1, which is the version of Xen Mint 17.1 uses.

I finally came to a solution to my problem today – upgrade to Xen 4.5. I couldn’t find any pre-built packages for Ubuntu 14.04 (the base of Mint 17.1) so I ended up compiling Xen 4.5 from source. Below is what I did to make it all work.

Fix broken symlink for /usr/lib/xen-default

sudo rm /usr/lib/xen-default
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/xen-4.4/ /usr/lib/xen-default

Update the DomU CFG file

A couple things needed tweaking. Here is my working cfg:

builder='hvm'
memory = '8192'
name = 'win8.1'
vcpus=6
cpus="2-7"
pae=1
acpi=1
apic=1
vif = [ 'mac=3a:82:47:2a:51:20,bridge=xenbr0,model=virtio' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/mapper/desktop--xen-Win8.1,xvda,w' ]
device_model_version = 'qemu-xen-traditional'
boot='c'
sdl=0
vnc=1
vncpasswd=''
stdvga=0
serial='pty'
tsc_mode=0
viridian=1
usb=1
usbdevice='tablet'
gfx_passthru=0
pci=[ '01:00.0', '01:00.1' , '00:1d.0' ]
localtime=1
pci_power_mgmt=1
on_xend_stop = "shutdown"
xen_platform_pci=1
pci_power_mgmt=1

For some, that’s all they had to do. For me, I had to do a few more things.

Compile Xen 4.5

This step was thanks to two different sites, this one and this one.

Install necessary packages

sudo apt-get install build-essential bcc bin86 gawk bridge-utils iproute libcurl3 libcurl4-openssl-dev bzip2 module-init-tools transfig tgif texinfo texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-recommended texlive-fonts-extra texlive-fonts-recommended pciutils-dev mercurial libjpeg-dev make gcc libc6-dev-i386 zlib1g-dev python python-dev python-twisted libncurses5-dev patch libvncserver-dev libsdl-dev libpixman-1-dev iasl libbz2-dev e2fslibs-dev git-core uuid-dev ocaml ocaml-findlib libx11-dev bison flex xz-utils libyajl-dev gettext markdown libaio-dev pandoc

Checkout Xen source

git clone git://xenbits.xen.org/xen.git xen-4.5.0
cd xen-4.5.0
git checkout RELEASE-4.5.0

Build from source

./configure --libdir=/usr/lib
 make world -j8

When I tried this the make failed with this error:

/usr/include/linux/errno.h:1:23: fatal error: asm/errno.h: No such file or directory
 #include <asm/errno.h>

The fix (thanks to askubuntu)  was to install linux-libc-dev and make a symlink for it:

sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev
sudo ln -s /usr/include/asm-generic /usr/include/asm

It then compiled successfully.

Install freshly compiled Xen 4.5

sudo make install
sudo update-rc.d xencommons defaults
sudo update-rc.d xendomains defaults
sudo ldconifg

Set grub to boot from new Xen kernel

sudo update-grub
sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Edit GRUB_DEFAULT to match wherever update-grub put your new Xen kernel (in my case it was the second entry, so my GRUB_DEFAULT=1), then run update-grub again

sudo update-grub

Reboot

Success at last. Enjoy your VM gaming once more with Xen 4.5.

CLI, OS

Upgrade Linux Mint 16 to 17.1

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I realized recently that my desktop system is quite out of date. It has worked so well for so long that I didn’t realize for a while that it was end of support. I was running Linux Mint 16 – Petra.

Thanks to this site the upgrade was fairly painless – a few repository updates, upgrade, and reboot. Simple! The steps I took are below

Update all repositories

Use sed in conjunction with find to quickly and easily update all your repository files from saucy to trusty, and from petra to rebecca, making a backup of files modified.

sudo find /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -type f -exec sed --in-place=.bak 's/saucy/trusty/' {} \;
sudo find /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -type f -exec sed --in-place=.bak 's/petra/rebecca/' {} \;

Update your system

This took a while. It had to download 1.5GB of data and install it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get upgrade

Cleanup

After running the upgrade I had a notice that I had many packages that were installed but no longer required. To remove unnecessary packages after the upgrade:

sudo apt-get autoremove

Install new language settings:

sudo apt-get install mintlocale

Install gvfs-backends (for Thunar)

sudo apt-get install gvfs-backends

Reboot

Flawless! It worked on the first try. Awesome.

CLI

Use BASH to append an incremental suffix to directories

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In migrating Splunk indexes I came across the need to add an incrementing suffix of _(numbers) to a bunch of directories. For example, renaming directories

test
test1
test2
test3

to

test_100
test1_101
test2_102
test3_103

After a bunch of searching I settled on this approach of using a simple bash loop to accomplish this:

I=100; for F in db_*; do mv $F $F\_$I; I=$((I+1)); done

There is an initial variable, I, which is set to 100. The for loop goes through each file beginning with db_ and then renames it adding the proper suffix in the iteration (_###). The last step is to increment the value of I.

Replace I for whatever you want you suffix to begin with and change db_* with whatever the criteria for the files you want to rename are. Simple, but it works.