assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

I just spent 15 minutes of my limited life chasing a frigging Safari bug. Apparently on my last logout, Safari didn’t close the PubSub [that’s Apple’s framework for dealing with RSS feeds] sqlite3 database properly. This led to a hang upon the next startup, and every subsequent startup. After a little bit of fun with gdb and lsof, I figured out that it was lock that was held on the PubSub database (located in ~/Library/PubSub/Database). I simply moved that heap of bitrot away and everything is dandy again. As expected, Safari recreated it.

I just set up a cross-compiling environment for the iPhone and compiled dns2tcp for the iPhone. Dns2tcp is a DNS tunnel written in C that I can heartily recommend, it however could be a little bit more stealthy. Using DNSSEC KEY RRs clearly is NOT stealthy. If you trust me somewhat, you can download the iPhone binary for dns2tcpc. I should roll that in a package, but I’m too lazy to do that at the moment.

I really have to say: from a usability perspective, this baby rocks. Putting my security researcher hat on, I however have to say: Shame on you, Apple! I’m taking bets as to how long it takes till we see the first worm for the iPhone. What’s interesting is that the baseband firmware of this phone is one of the few that I’m aware of that is ARM-based and which largely seems to be written in C. In my opinion this phone is an ideal platform for the A5/1 cracking project.

As for MobileScrobbler: yes, it really rocks. It actually far exceeds my expectations! Overall, I fear a decline of software quality with the release of the iPhone SDK. Thus far, every piece of third party software I tried simply was a pleasant experience…

Fuck. I so want this! And I don’t even have an iPhone yet. last.fm on your MP3 player! And I want that A2DP profile to work, dammit! Apple, hear me?

Apple just released the Darwin 9.0 source tree!

So I was quite heartbroken about my favourite Mail plug-ins, GPGMail and Mail-Act-On being disabled after the Leopard upgrade. Turns out there’s a very easy way to fix this (found in the MAO forum). Simply move the bundles back from the Bundles (Disabled) directory to the Bundles directory (in $HOME/Library/Mail, I had to create the Bundles directory first) and change the following defaults:

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

Great. The world is in order again

Update: Not quite. GPGMail is still broken (no content is shown for PGP encrypted and/or signed mails), but apparently the author is already working on an update. Mail-Act-On is working fine thus far.

Just upgraded to Leopard doing a clean reinstall. Before I copied my sparseimage FileVault container (/Users/$USER/$USER.sparseimage) to an external USB drive, after the reinstall I copied it back. Then I remembered that FileVault in OS X 10.5 uses a new format (as reported in FileVault doesn’t use Sparse-Images anymore) and thought better of it. The new format apparently splits the image into 8MB big chunks, called bands which should make deallocation of free space much easier.

After a look into the man page of hdiutil(1) I had located the name for the new SPARSEBUNDLE format and converted the container into the new format using the following command:

hdiutil convert /mnt/$USER.sparseimage -encryption CEncryptedEncoding -format UDSB -o /Users/$USER/$USER.sparsebundle

Note well: your data no longer is accessible with the system-wide FileVault recovery certificate/private key. If this feature is of importance to you (it is to me, in the opposite way: I’m glad that the recovery key now is invalid), look into the -recover and -certificate options of hdiutil(1).

Upon the next login I realized that my UID had changed, meaning I could no longer access the data contained in the FileVault. Argh! Turns out that there’s no more messing around with niutil(1) under Leopard. NetInfo is gone, replaced by Directory Services. The command line utility for Directory Services is surprisingly pleasant: As simple as 1,2,3, I changed my uid…

dscl -change . /Users/$USER UniqueID
 

Dear Lazyweb,

in order to set up full-disk encryption, I want to boot my trusty ol’ Powerbook off a USB stick. This is a PB G4 FW800, 1.25GHz with a Powerbook5,2 4.7.1f1BootROM. This is the latest Open Firmware release for this model, according to The List. If I choose to believe a macosxhints article I found, someone managed to do it for a 12″ Powerbook with 1.3GHz (what’s that anyway? a rounding error?). Alas, it doesn’t work for me. No ud device to be seen in Open Firmware. Any ideas, or am I simply out of luck?

I’ve been having major Mail.app problems on my Powerbook the last couple of days. I’m running Mail.app version 2.1 (752/752.2) on MacOS X 10.4.8. Having my primary work IMAP account enabled resulted in 100% CPU usage, eventually forcing me to kill Mail.app. Disabling the account allowed me to use Mail.app normally. Nothing seemed to be able to cure this problem, not even deleting the account and setting up a new one with the same parameters.

Solution: I had to delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index and ~Library/Mail/Envelope Index.journal. These are the SQLite3 databases that Mail.app uses for storing message properties such as header information.

So I’ve been running Gentoo on my shiny new iMac Core Duo the last two days and I already have several issues biting me.

The ATI Radeon X1600 is completely unsupported under Linux right now, which means you need to run your X11 using fbdev and the framebuffer hack the xbox-linux.org guys have come up with. Even the  current proprietary ATI drivers (from the manufacturer itself, for chrissakes!) do not support Radeons with a R500/R600 chipset. This sucks. Hard. fbdev is working, but it’s slow. Also, I the scroll-ball of the Mighty Mouse does not trigger any events in xev at all, which means you have a regular 3-button mouse without scrolling functionality. I reckon Apple is using its own protocol here.

Another major pain is the Broadcom BCM4310. Neither can I find appropriate Windows drivers for the PCI device 14e4:4312 to be run under ndiswrapper, nor have my attempts at getting the free bcm43xx drivers to work with this chipset been successful. All I’ve been able to extract after some quick-and-dirty patching of the driver was to find out that the BCM4310 seems to be using 4 cores, all of which have Core IDs and revisions that are currently not known to the bcm43xx driver. This was after several OOPSen and reboots. Sigh. Gotta contact the mailing list, I guess.

The infrared receiver and the iSight are hanging of a USB bus. This means that the Linux Firewire iSight drivers need to be adapted as well. I haven’t toyed with the IR receiver yet, so I don’t know yet how hard it is to get that one working.

Oh, and yes. Everything else seems to be running fine. Even Windows XP in a VMware in full-screen mode (with both cores, whoot!) 

Of course, some of you might argue that I’ve been lucky to get that much of Linux running on this machine at all. To this I counter that I bought this machine for exactly the purpose of being able to dual-boot x86 Linux and OSX and that I have great faith that we will get driver support for all of the components eventually.

Because all sites mention the installation on an external USB HDD: My installation is on a partition of the internal hard drive and dual-boots just with with OSX.

Update: I do have the Broadcom working with ndiswrapper now. Try the Broadcom 802.11a/b/g drivers supplied by Hewlett-Packard for the tc4200 tablet PC. They work just fine, even with WPA-PSK.

technorati tags: imac | core duo | gentoo | mactel