This guide will show you, in great detail, how to install both openiboot and Android on a 1st Generation iPod Touch. The video is below, it is best to watch this in full screen to see the fine details of the commands. The following files are required:

• uberamd_idroid_v1.zip
• iPod Touch 1G Firmware 3.1.2
• Blackra1n (click the Apple image)
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard (untested on Leopard but it will likely work)
• iPod Touch 1G
• About an hour of time

To prep, extract the uberamd_idroid_v1.zip file to your hard drive (I extracted mine in my Downloads folder). Also understand how the “cd” command works in terminal. If you watch the video closely, it all makes sense. Note that to quickly auto-complete a line in terminal, press the tab key. For example instead of typing the full filename “cache.img” you can type “ca” then press tab and it will auto-complete the name.

Enjoy the video!

You can also view this video on youtube (it is a 3 part series).

Cisco AnyConnect fails to properly connect under Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora were tested) due to the following reason:

connection attempt has failed due to a server certificate problem

Eventually I found a fix for it, and while it worked it was a slight pain in the ass as it required you to download and extract firefox from Mozilla.com, pull files from the archive, copy them, and create softlinks. I created a simple script (and a folder that contains the needed files) that will resolve this issue in no time flat. Simply:

1. Download the archive
2. Extract the archive: tar -xvzf cisco_anyconnect_fix.tar.gz
3. Go into the newly created folder: cd cisco_anyconnect_fix
4. Execute the script as root: sudo anyconnect_fix.sh
5. Connect to VPN as normal

I hope this works for you, I did test it in Ubuntu 10.04 & Fedora 13 with success. There is a check that will install via yum or aptitude the needed libraries.

Give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues.

Download (1MB): cisco_anyconnect_fix.tar.gz

Tweetie for Mac is certainly one of the best Twitter applications available, however it is lacking in one area: hiding the dock icon. Tweetie uses a Dock and menubar icon which is abnormal for many applications, usually they just use one or the other. Fear not, hiding the Dock icon and keeping the menubar icon is just a few quick steps away.

1. Quit Tweetie if you have it running
2. Go to your Applications folder using Finder
3. Right click on the Tweetie application and select “Show Package Contents”
4. Double click the Contents folder to go into it
5. Double click on the Info.plist file to open it in TextEdit
6. Under the <dict> tag add the following lines:
   <key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
7. Save, quit TextEdit, launch Tweetie again, and enjoy!

Here is a sample of what the top of your Info.plist file should look like with the edited lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>


Some common issues:

Q: Oh no, I can’t authenticate and my tweets aren’t showing up anymore?!
A: Fear not, open tweetie up, Press “Command + ,” to open preferences, navigate to Accounts, remove your user account and add it again. Problem solved. Strange bug, I know.

Q: Um… the Menubar icon is gone as well as the dock icon!
A: Try replacing LSUIElement with NSUIElement in your info.plist file.

Q: But something else went wrong…
A: Hit me up on twitter then @uberamd and I will help you.

Recently I changed the software the imaging server at work uses from Clonezilla to FOG. There were many reasons for the change such as a better web interface, image deployment queue, etc however one of the main things I was looking forward to was storage nodes which allows for distribution of images across multiple servers to extend storage.

Deploying the FOG server was easy enough, however one of the first things I noticed was that image creation (uploading a new image to the server) was incredibly slow in comparison to image deployment. Image creation would take nearly 2 hours while image deployment would take about 25 minutes. This frustrated me to no end as we were doing this over gigabit and it wasn’t utilizing hardly any of the pipe on image creation. A quick glance at the screen told me why: FOG automatically assumes you want to GZIP the image. This means a smaller image, but a drastically increased image creation time since the system needs to compress the data it is sending.

I searched high and low through the config files for a way to disable GZIP compression, but found nothing. Eventually I figured out how to disable the compression, however doing so was not well documented at all. Enter this post which will hopefully help others solve the same problem I ran into.

Simply follow these steps (type these commands in your Linux terminal, you may need to be root or sudo to run some of these):

cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tmp/init.gz
cd /tmp
gunzip init.gz
mkdir tmpMnt
mount -o loop /tmp/init /tmp/tmpMnt

Now using your favorite linux command line editor open the file /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog and find and replace all instances of -z1 with -z0. To do that with VIM do the following:

vim /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog
:%s/z1/z0/
:wq

Once you have replaced all -z1 with -z0 we need to recompress and replace your old init.gz file:

cd /tmp
umount /tmp/tmpMnt
gzip -9 init
cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz.old
cp -f init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz

Thats it. Now you have disabled compression upon image creation and you should notice a VERY large drop in image creation time! FOG does provide a script that assists in editing the init.gz file, HOWEVER the script requires you to have Nautilus installed (aka GNOME) and how many people really run a GUI on a server? Not many.

This script, as well as similar scripts can be found on the interwebs but I tend to keep losing the pages that have it. So for my own archival reasons, as well as making it a little easier for others to find, here it is.

This script uses winrar to recursively extract rar archives. This is very useful if you download seasons of shows and don’t want to extract each episode one by one.

Step 1: Open up the Windows Command Prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) or (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt)

Step 2: Change to the directory containing the folders for the episodes you want to extract. For example:
cd "\Users\Steve\Downloads\My Favorite Show - Seasons 1-6\My Show - Season 1"

Step 3: Now that we are in the folder containing all the sub-folders to each episode for your show, type in the following command to extract all of the episodes:
for /R %i IN (.) do "c:\Program Files\WinRAR\Rar.exe" x "%i/*.rar"

That command is a recursive for loop that looks for .rar files in each folder and extracts them, placing the extracted file in your current folder. If all goes well you will have every episode in your current folder, extracted and ready to watch!

Note: If you installed the 32-bit WinRAR and are running 64-bit windows your command will look like this:
for /R %i IN (.) do "c:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe" x "%i/*.rar"

It’s that simple.

Here is a quick video tutorial on how to enable and disable the OS X 3D dock (leopard only). There isn’t sound, I don’t talk on videos, however just follow along with the text.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

To get the best viewing experience, click the Full Screen button. Trust me, its easier to see it that way.

Many Universities, workplaces, etc are starting to take action against the use of torrent files. You can always change ports so port blocking is a worthless use of network time. However, places have started to restrict the ability to download files ending in the .torrent extension. This complicates things immensely.

Take for example a situation I encountered. On the Ubuntu 7.10 release date it was nearly impossible to find a server to download the ISO from as they were all getting hammered with requests. The solution many servers displayed was ‘download via a torrent’. When I tried that on my university network, I encountered the problem, I couldn’t download the .torrent file. This was annoying, as the University states that using the network to download and seed legal torrents is allowed. How did I get passed this? Using a simple php script I coded up, that can be found at http://steve.blogme.us/bypass.php

The script simply takes the URL to the .torrent file, saves it on the local server as a text file, and allows you to then download it, then all you need to do is change the extension to .torrent and load it up in the torrent client. It is that simple, and it works! Enjoy.

This guide will show you (yes show, it has pictures) how to configure a standard Ubuntu 7.10 install to act as a LLMP (Linux Lighttpd MySQL PHP) server. I will also show you how to install the Cacti statistics and server status software package.

Right away, open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) as everything we do will be in the terminal

First, make sure you have set the password to your root account. If you have not, do:

$ sudo passwd root

You will be asked to type in a root password, so come up with a password for the ‘root’ account and press enter. Confirm the password, press enter again, and your set.

Note: I know some people don’t like activating the root account, and thats fine. You can instead place a sudo in-front of every command if you want to, or do a sudo su it doesn’t matter to me.

Now that your root password is set, do:

$ su -
Password

And you should be at a prompt that looks something like this (note the # sign):

Now we will want to update our apt-get packages. Apt-get is the Ubuntu/Debian Package Delivery System for installing new packages from remote servers onto your system. Run:

# apt-get update

And you should see output similar to below:

Installing the Lighttpd Web Server

Your output may be more elaborate if you have never run apt-get update before but it will be relatively the same. Now that we are all up to date, we will install the Lighttpd web server. Follow the steps (what I typed is displayed after the # sign, remember that):

Press Y at the prompt below:

Once it is done installing you should see something similar to (note the Starting web server lighttpd [ OK ]):

At this point the web server is installed, and working. Going to a web browser and going to the URL: http://localhost/ SHOULD give you this page:

If you do not see a page like the one above, and get something like this, you encountered a problem:

Now that we have Lighttpd working, here are a few commands to control it:

The first command: killall lighttpd will kill the server (stop lighttpd from running). Thus, when you go to localhost you get the server problem page. To start the server up again you use lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf which forces the server to start using the config file found in /etc/lighttpd. It really is that easy.

Installing PHP

PHP is what almost every server has running. PHP is an engine that processes PHP code into browser-readable content. Because PHP is so powerful, we will be installing it onto our server. Lets get started. Perhaps you can guess what the command is, if not:

Then:

And:

And:

Now we have PHP installed, with CGI mode, MySQL, and CLI supported. Now we need to enable fastcgi mode in lighttpd:

And restart lighttpd (like the direction in the terminal says) using # /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload and we should see:

(Notice the 2 [ OK ]‘s, thats good). Now we can test and make sure PHP is working. Lets move into the www folder where our webpages will be stored:

# cd /var/www

And type: # pico test.php and you should get a blank editor window. Fill it in like shown below:

Then press Control O to save it and Control X to exit. Now go to your web browser and go to the URL http://localhost/test.php and you should see something similar to:

If you see something similar to the image above, you are doing great so far! The wording will be different but it should in general look similar. Congrats, you now have PHP and Lighttpd running together. The final step is getting MySQL going.

Installing MySQL

Much like how we installed PHP and Lighttpd, do:
# apt-get install mysql-server-5.0

It is going to download ~33MB of data so be patient as apt-get works its magic. You are going to want to setup a root password as well. After it is complete, you should see something similar to:

Note that if you were never prompted to set your mysql password you can use the command (if you have set the password, skip this set):

# sudo mysqladmin -u root password "YourPasswordGoesHere"

To check your mysql server, type (# mysql -u root -p):

If you get something like the image above, it works. \q will exit mysql. Now we will make a new database called trial:

To make sure the database was created we can try to delete it:

So we are able to create and delete databases! Yay. Now lets install phpmyadmin so we can easily manage our databases. Type:

# apt-get install phpmyadmin

You will get a screen like below, just go to OK, do not check any boxes:

Once it is done installing, we will need to move it to /var/www:

Now restart lighttpd (the commands are above), and in your browser try to go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin The output should look similar to the one below:

Wow, we have accomplished a lot so far. MySQL, PHP, and Lighttpd all working with phpmyadmin to manage databases. Whats left? Well, nothing really, However if you want to install cacti (server status and statistics) follow the steps below.

Installing Cacti

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Start with the following command:

When you reach the screen below, select ‘None’:

At the screen below select ‘Yes’:

At the screen below type in your MySQL root password (which you set above) and select ‘Ok’:

At the screen below, enter the same password as your MySQL root password and select ‘Ok’:

Then confirm the password:

Now we need to link the cacti folder to our web directory folder:

We can now go to http://localhost/cacti/site/ in our web browser and you should see a screen like below:

Follow the promps and you will get to the login screen. The username and password are both admin

Once you are logged in, you can manage the graphs. I will not go in depth about that as you can read the manual.

We are now done! Congrats, you have a WORKING Linux server running Lighttpd, MySQL 5, PHP 5 with phpmyadmin and Cacti installed! It really is that simple, all of that can be completed in under 30 minutes!

If you enjoy this tutorial, please say thank you and do not rip it off, I spent quite a bit of time going through the steps, checking my work, and making sure it was easy to follow by taking many screenshots and would like to receive a little credit. Enjoy the tutorial and the new server!