Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi Crisis

We are all well aware of the tragic earthquake and tsunami that caused massive damage and great loss of life to the Japanese coastal areas. Also the situation seems very critical at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility where engineers are attempting their best to avert a possible meltdown. My prayers go out to all the people and their families affected and I pray that that they are successful in stabilizing the situation. Also I salute all the people currently involved in the rescue and stabilization process. You are the real heroes guys...

Dell Studio 1535 cleaning/disassembly

The temperature sensors on procyon [My Dell Studio 1535] laptop were constantly hitting abnormal values recently. CPU kept on idling at around 60C, even after my previous post on the fix for lm_sensors configuration applied. So I knew that it was time I opened the girl up and do her some good'ol fashioned cleaning. So I borrowed a cam, took out my toolbox, acquired some Thermal Compound [Shin-Etsu Microsi's G-751 Thermal Paste (thanks Shray!)] from a good friend, added some Pink Floyd on my playlist and got to work. Here are a few pics of the internals for anyone's viewing pleasure since I could not find any decent teardown images of the same model on the web. Enjoy....

Backplate opened, Fan/Heat-sink assembly and processor removed

 

 

Close-up of the first image.

The processor[Top]: Intel T5750 [2GHz, Socket-P, 2MBL2, 667 FSB]

The processor[Bottom]

Fan/Heat-sink assembly [Top]

Fan/Heat-sink assembly [Bottom] [Note the thermal pads for the MCH and GFX chips]

Fan/Heatsink assembly [Top, Fan Removed]

Fan/Heat-sink assembly [Bottom, Fan Removed]

Fan(Dirty) [Top]

Fan(Dirty) [Bottom]

Partially Cleaned Heat-sink Fins

ATI Mobility Radeon HD3450 256MB [The 2 chips on the left are the 128MBx2(Samsung) RAMDACs]

The Intel 965PM MCH

The Intel MCH and The Socket-P processor socket

The WPAN and WLAN[Broadcom BCM4312] cards.

Nanya 1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 @ 333 MHz x2 RAM Cards

The HDD [Western Digital WD3200BPVT] and The DVD drive

After a thorough cleaning and application of new thermal grease, the temps have dropped significantly by at least ~10C

End result: a cool and quiet system and a wholly satisfied conscience :)

detailed kernel bootup debug messages

Users like me prefer as much debugging output in applications as possible because this makes performance and stability issues easy to understand. This also allows one to see what all is going on behind the scenes for crash debugging. A few amendments can be added to the kernel boot parameters of a Linux kernel to allow for detailed messages and verbose output:

By modifying the 'kernel' line in grub or editing the relevant boot file under /boot/grub and adding the following[in bold]:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/Arch ro debug ignore_loglevel log_buf_len=10M print_fatal_signals=1 LOGLEVEL=8 earlyprintk=vga,keep sched_debug

heavy debugging can be easily activated.

debug = activates internal debugging.
ignore_loglevel =  ignores any sort of log level and maximizes debug output.
log_buf_len = increases the log buffer length to 10 MiB
print_fatal_signals = print any fatal signals.
LOGLEVEL = enables level 8 logging.
earlyprintk = enables early printing of messages to the vga screen
,keep = keeps the messages on for longer.
sched_debug = Enables verbose scheduler debug messages.

Ref:
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#Advanced_Debugging

customized slow output on a console

One of the primary scripts I run on my desktop embedded urxvt terminals is an active connections display script. Its primary function is to utilize 'netstat' and 'lsof' to display all TCP/UDP connections to/from my system. The problem comes with running apps such as firefox or feed readers where multiple connections are established that most of the output scrolls away very fast. So I customized the script to slowly output line by line:

#!/bin/bash
echo "" > connpoll.log
function read_file()
{
        count=0
        while read line  
        do
                echo -e "$line"  
                count=$[$count+1]
                sleep .15
                if [ $count -eq 12 ]
                then
                        count=0
                        sleep 3
                fi
        done < connpoll.log
}
while [ 1 ]
do
    echo ">>>>>>>>>>>==ACTIVE CONNECTIONS VIA LSOF==<<<<<<<<<<<" > connpoll.log
        lsof -w | grep -e TCP -e UDP >> connpoll.log
    echo ">>>>>>>>>>>==ACTIVE CONNECTIONS VIA NETSTAT==<<<<<<<<<<<" >> connpoll.log
    netstat --tcp --udp -e -e -a --raw --program -v >> connpoll.log
    read_file
    sleep 8
done

The infinite while loop runs the 2 commands, directs the output to a file (connpoll.log) and executes the function 'read_file'. 'read_file' takes the file and feeds it to an internal read in the while loop which simply echos a line from the file. The 'sleep .15' provides a small time break between each line and makes the output smooth.

The script works flawlessly and with the least overhead that I could accomplish.

exploitdb svn up again

For the past 2 weeks, a svn checkout of exploit db always resulted in:

svn: Network connection closed unexpectedly

Today, finally its up again. Grab a local copy via:

$] svn co svn://www.exploit-db.com/exploitdb

or to update a local copy, just do a 'svn update' in the checkout folder.