felix (fkr) kronlage: not just hazardous.org

While updating machines at our colocation in Frankfurt last friday, Bernd and I hit a pretty harsh bug. Because of changes in the disklabel code, the disklabel of our main customer mailserver got updated by the OpenBSD kernel upon booting with the new OpenBSD kernel. After updating all packages and configurations on the machine we gave the server another reboot. Next the machine got stuck in the first-stage bootloader, complaining that there is no OS to boot.

Quite baffled, we booted bsd.rd kernel just to see that there is no disklabel present. Now, usually you have backups of /var/backups, where OpenBSD keeps informations like this around. Of course, these files were not in the backup (time to blush on my part). Thanks to a hint from Henning from OpenBSD, we tried out scan_ffs(8). Since scan_ffs is not present in the ramdisk kernels, we compiled it statically and placed in on a USB stick. scan_ffs(8) scans a disk and outputs the partitions it finds. With a bit of thinking, we could then create a disklabel with the correct data. Once we had /var mounted, we could use the saved disklabel there to make sure the label is correct.

The manpage for scan_ffs(8) contains the following advise:

The basic operation of this program is as follows:

1. Panic. You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over
with. Just don’t do anything stupid. Panic away from your machine.
Then relax, and see if the steps below won’t help you out.

Very true. While we did not panic, the best thing todo in such situations is to think and evaluate your options and possible recovery methods and don’t be quick on trying to fix it, likely you will make it worse ;)

Thanks scan_ffs!

Tags: OpenBSD, bytemine by fkr
1 Comment »

I’ve had my ThinkPad x60s for a few months now, but since the built-in 3G broadband device from Sierra Wireless was acting up a bit, I just got around now to actually set it up properly with OpenBSD. The device is a PCI MiniCard (in Germany the card is sim-locked to Vodafone. However, you can call IBM/Lenovo support and request the unlocking code, only effect will be, that you will not receive further support from Lenovo regarding the broadband device and configuration.).

Very common these days is, that these devices hold a USB hub behind the actual broadband chip sits:


[0:24] fkr(ripley):~ %> usbdevs -v
….
addr 1: full speed, self powered, config 1, UHCI root hub(0×0000), Intel(0×8086), rev 1.00 port 1
addr 2: full speed, self powered, config 1, Mini Card(0×6804), Sierra Wireless, Incorporated(0×1199), rev 0.01


The PCI Mini Card is a Sierra Wireless MC8755, in OpenBSD this device is driven by the umsm(4) driver that was initially written by Jonathan Grey. Since then I’ve added quite a few device ids (and have support for the Huawei E220 almost ready, but that is a different story ;)

From what I gathered, it will only work if you use a baudrate of either 115200 or 460800 when talking to it. All others yield a proper connection to the device, but ppp connections will fail.

My options file for pppd is linked here.
More interesting is actually the chat script:


ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT VOICE
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
'' AT
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.vodafone.de"
OK AT+CGQREQ=1
OK ATD*99***1#


Until I added the AT+CGQREQ=1 the connection succeeded, but was rather slow. The Sierra Wireless MC8755 is capable of HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) that allows speeds up to 1.8 Mbit/s. Vodafone offers HSDPA in various cities in Germany and it is quite fast. The AT+CGQREQ= command sets the requested service profile. Since I added that, the connections are way better. (still not as fast as possible, but I have to digg further for that).

Tags: 3G technology, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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The openbsd atheros (ath(4)) driver made it into the linux kernel. This is good news as apparently the linux people finally see again, that its good to have free drivers around. However, as undeadly reports, they also “changed” the license to GPLv2, while they were at it. (commit message). Oh wait, right, they can’t. Its Sam Leffler’s and Reyk’s Floeter’s code. While Sam originally released the code dual-licensed (BSD, GPLv2) the parts from Reyk (free HAL among them) are ISC-licensed. Judging from the questions on undeadly, quite few people seem to think, that BSD license does allow re-branding of the license. na, only the author can do that ;)
Anyways, unlike our (OpenBSD) own little mishap (see Slashdot covering te bc43xx incident) I’m sure, this was no accident.

Update:
KernelTrap as some coverage as well.

Tags: OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
2 Comments »

Tyrel from SitesCollide did an Interview with me during Confidence 2007. Here is a direct link to the mp3.

Tags: Conferences, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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Our OpenBSD booth bunny goes undercover.

Tags: OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
3 Comments »

It was my first time at the Confidence Conference. I was invited a long time ago and asked to give a talk. Confidence takes place in Krakow, Poland. I flew there from Hamburg on thursday, May 9th. On purpose I flew there a bit early, to have time to walk around in Krakow on friday. Andrzej, one of the organizers of Confidence, picked me up at the airport. The organizers booked an apartment right downtown at market square. It was an awesome idea to have an appartment right there, instead of staying at the conference hotel. First evening we went out for food and drinks with some of the other speakers. Of course the organizers introduced us to the nice vodka poland has :). We went to a Jazz Bar and once the band was done playing, one of the other speakers went up to the drummer and started talking to him. Before we knew it, we heard a short, but very nice drum solo played by one of the speakers of confidence. Dinis Cruz is one of the brains behind OWASP.Throughout the conference Dinis and I had various very interesting discussions. Dinis gave a talk on ASP.NET Security. Since I usually avoid Windows territory, it was a very interesting talk indeed. Dinis has fair clue about Security Design, Handling security issues and the associated politics with it. As I said, lots of interesting talks we had.
Friday was spent mostly with walking around and meeting with people I knew from previous conferences.
Saturday the conference started, it was a tad chaotic, yet it was obvious that the organizers put lots of effort into this their conference. The agenda had quite a few interesting items on it. One of the talks that I reallly did not want to miss, was the talk on VoIP Security by Shawn Merdinger. However, it seemed that Shawn was missing in action. Turned out, someone gave him a tad too much of the goooood polish vodka :)
The talk was moved to sunday, right after my talk. Sadly, I had to give an interview after my talk so I missed it :/
Wim gave a talk about OpenBSD deployed on Soekris, it was entitled “Calorie restricted OpenBSD”.
My talk was on “Secure Roaming for the modern Roadwarrior”. For some reasons, I was not really able to focus on my talk (too much of the polish vodka too?), yet the people seemed to have liked it. I’ve put the slides online.
All in all Confidence is a very nice conference to attend, the organizers are trying to move it to be more international, speaker- and attendee-wise.
I’m very much looking forward to Confidence 2008, I will definitly be there.

Tags: Conferences, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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Two weeks ago the Linux-Informationstag Oldenburg happened here. Despite the really good weather, lots of people came, visited the booths and attended the talks. On Saturday I gave a talk about “OpenBSD - Past, Present and Future”. Basically this was the same talk I gave at LinuxForum 2007. The crowd really liked it and I was amazed that everyone in the audience knew what OpenBSD was. For the talk, I translated the slides from LinuxForum (and had to correct them numerous time, thanks to Tobias Stoeckmann who kept finding grammar and spelling mistakes in them). The slides are available here.
The next upcoming conference is Confidence 2007 in Krakow, Poland. Of course I will be giving a talk, as well as a tutorial/workshop on deploying and using OpenBSD on Soekris appliances.
I’ve never been to Krakow, so I am really looking forward to this.

Tags: Conferences, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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The slides from my talk OpenBSD - Past, Present and Future at LinuxForum 2007 are available here.

Tags: Conferences, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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Since last night I am actually in copenhagen (and NO, I am not involved in any rioting going on currently here). While I sat in a talk about Samba, I pulled in some changes to ubsa(4) from netbsd. If you have an gprs/umts device from Option driven by ubsa(4) give this diff a spin.

Tags: 3G technology, OpenBSD, code, nerd et al. by fkr
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This year’s Linuxforum will happen on March, 2nd and 3rd in Copenhagen, Denmark. I’ve been told that this is a fantastic conference to attend. I was supposed to give a talk last year, that Wim had to substitute for me, as I had too much work to deal with.
However, this year I will there and will give a talk with the title OpenBSD - Past, Present and Future. So, come and see me!

Tags: Conferences, OpenBSD, nerd et al. by fkr
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