Monthly Archives: February 2012

February 21, 2012

Getting Windows 7 to see Linux hostnames via tomato router

Our house is mostly Linux, but recently we’ve added a couple of Windows 7 machines. We’ve had no problems with Linux machines communicating with other Linux machines to this point. If I type ping whisky I get the proper ping response from the machine called whisky. But if I typed the same thing into a Windows 7 console Windows didn’t know what I was talking about.

The tomato firmware for Linksys WRT54GL routers has a “Basic”/”Static DHCP” option that allows you to set up static IP addresses for each of your boxes behind your router. But this is what I actually set before adding the Windows machines and the Windows machines didn’t seem to reference this. Luckily I found some information about dnsmasq, which is an advanced option in tomato: Advanced configuration / DHCP / DNS. The format is as follows:

local-ttl=1
address=/whisky/192.168.1.10
address=/tequila/192.168.1.11
address=/brandy/192.168.1.12
address=/vodka/192.168.1.13

It’s simple and our Windows 7 machine recognized the addresses immediately, even when I created a shortcut and started typing the \\hostname for the host I wanted to connect to.

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Filed under Linux, Technology, Windows

February 9, 2012

TWC adding ancient hardware to line-up

UW SCSI 18.2GB SCA hard drives

The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project has always had interesting parts available for enthusiasts, but a lot of our computer building effort has been oriented towards building functional machines for Internet use and  Microsoft Office training. We set a bit of a minimum bar as to what we’d spend extra effort to get going (and some machines need lots of love). Over the past few months we’ve seen an increase in requests for legacy hardware we haven’t looked at in years (386, 486), and at the same time seen in increase in supply of older equipment: an Apple Macintosh LC II came in just yesterday.

So we’ve decided to spend a little effort trying to get some of these legacy machines going rather than passing them on to our Ontario Electronic Stewardship partners. Some of these machines won’t even come close to correctly rendering a page on the Internet, but they’re part of computing history, a history that’s worth keeping up. Many older machines are perfectly functional for certain tasks: word processing, 8-bit gaming, even desktop publishing (old Macs with DTP software).

Of course we’ll continue to provide our regular lines of Ubuntu Linux 10.04-LTS computers and Microsoft Registered Refurbisher (for low income families) Windows XP computers. Our MRR and Linux systems will continue to be the bulk of what we offer, but from time to time don’t be surprised if we have a Timex Sinclair or ancient Apple available.

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Filed under Hardware, Refurbishing, Technology

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February 7, 2012

Synchronizing my Blackberry Bold 9780 bookmarks with Ubuntu 11.10

BlackBerry Bold 9000One of the jobs I’ve been meaning to tackle for some time is sychronizing my Blackberry Bold 9780 bookmarks with my Ubuntu Linux system. I had hoped the bookmarks would be in a simple XML format that could just be copied over and parsed, but from what I can tell bookmarks are stored in a binary database blob (I could be mistaken on this).

At any rate my Bold 9780 pretty much automounts when I plug it into my notebook. I looked through the directory tree structure and couldn’t find any indication of browser data. Then I remembered Net Direct’s Barry tool. Checking the Ubuntu repositories I saw there was a Gtk gui to back up a Blackberry, but I took this to mean making a raw backup, which I could just do with tar.

I checked out the barry man(ual) page and discovered that if you issued:

btool -t

Barry would list all the types of databases it stored, one of which turned out to be ‘Browser Bookmarks.’ To dump the database I just needed the -d switch and to redirect it to a file:

barry -d ‘Browser Bookmarks’ > raw-bookmarks.txt

What I discovered is that barry dumps the database as a binary+ascii file that resembles the following:

Raw record dump for record: 75200bac
00000000: 06 00 a9 00 40 01 44 01 0b 00 ac 0b 20 75 00 6b  ….@.D….. u.k
00000010: 00 11 87 a9 80 97 2c 08 04 01 00 28 57 65 6c 63  ……,….(Welc
00000020: 6f 6d 65 20 74 6f 20 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65 61 74  ome to freshmeat
00000030: 2e 6e 65 74 20 7c 20 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65 61 74  .net | freshmeat
00000040: 2e 6e 65 74 81 b9 fc f8 f6 c2 e3 a4 d5 08 00 05  .net…………
00000050: 01 00 20 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 66 72 65 73 68 6d  .. http://freshm
00000060: 65 61 74 2e 6e 65 74 2f 66 61 76 69 63 6f 6e 2e  eat.net/favicon.
00000070: 69 63 6f 00 a6 b2 ee 84 df 65 00 00 00 29 00 12  ico……e…)..
00000080: 00 15 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 66 72 65 73 68 6d 65  ..http://freshme
00000090: 61 74 2e 6e 65 74 2f 01 c2 21 00 00 00 00 00 00  at.net/..!……
000000a0: 00 04 00 00 8f ff ff ff 7f                       ………

It’s readable, but still in an unfriendly format. I may as well just browse to each site on the device and type its URL into Firefox on my notebook.

I’ve gone down 3 paths trying to parse this file: hexdump, od, and xxd. So far I haven’t had a lot of luck. The closest I got was Brendan Zagaeski’s hexdump examples:

hexdump -v -e ‘”%010_ad |” 16/1 “%_p” “|\n”‘ raw-bookmarks.txt

But this seems to remove some data and it maintains the addressing in front of each line, so cutting and pasting isn’t so easy.

For now this is as close as I’ve gotten to synchronization. I hope someone with better sed/awk skills will shame me by posting a solution.

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