gTLDs and the death of URLs

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve read ad nauseum about the overly optimistic predictions for the new gTLDs. Some say it’ll the the digital renaissance; others claim it’s the best thing to ever happen to the web, after the browser itself. This video summarizes well the sentiment: This is wrong. ...

August 30, 2014

Entering Single User Mode On A Synology

I hope this will be my last post about Synology for a while. After dealing for a few weeks with an unstable environment, then hacking a serial console to troubleshoot, then cracking the secret recovery telnet password just for fun, and finally solving the weird mistery of SSH not accepting /bin/bash as default shell, I thought I finally had a stable environment. Wrong. But this time I was the one to blame. After solving the conflict with bash, I changed /etc/passwd user shell to /bin/bash. The only problem is that Synology wipes the system partition during firmware upgrades, so when I upgraded to DSM 4.1.2668, my custom `/bin/bash``was gone. Of course this locked me out of the system. No SSH, SCP or FTP. Great. ...

January 26, 2013

Reverse Engineering Synology's OpenSSH

Trying to use a non-standard shell in your Synology DS212+ NAS may be an exercise of frustration. I’m a bash-lover, and have a bunch of scripts to automate backups, so I wanted to set up default shell to /bin/bash. It worked well with root, but when a regular user tries to log in, the connection is terminated with “Permission denied, please try again.”. Weird. Maybe /etc/shells? Nops. Maybe sshd_config? No. PAM modules, then? Also not. I even tried compiling bash from source (which took me a full day, just to get ARM GCC to cross compile properly). Nada. ...

January 21, 2013

Synology's "secret" telnet password

If you have a Synology NAS and had some sort of disk crash in the past, you’ve probably encountered the famous “Cannot format system partition” and “Please configure your router to forward port 23 to DiskStation and contact Synology online support”. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks even more when you know the disk is perfectly fine, and you still have hopes to recover your data. Or you simply don’t like the idea of having your port 23 open to the world for god-knows-how-long until a Synology tech support can look into your case. ...

December 8, 2012

Recovering a Failed Synology Diskstation with a Serial Console

I thought I’d post this here for anyone looking for help on troubleshooting a failed Synology Diskstation NAS. I’ve been a happy user of a Synology DS-212+. The software is robust and much better than my old DroboFS, and the fact that it is entirely open source is a big plus. I recently upgraded the firmware to DSM 2661. Everything worked fine. For 12 hours. The next morning, the device was dead, with the blue blink of death). ...

December 2, 2012

EW-7811Un wireless adapter on Raspberry Pi

After upgrading my Raspberry Pi Wheezy to the latest kernel 3.2.27+, my wireless adapter EW-7811Un stopped working. Here’s the fix: su - root mkdir ~/drivers cd ~/drivers wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80256631/8192cu-latest.tar.gz tar zxvf 8192cu-latest.tar.gz cd 8192cu-latest install -p -m 644 8192cu.ko /lib/modules/3.2.27+/kernel/drivers/net/wireless depmod -a cat <<EOF >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf blacklist rtl8192cu EOF cat <<EOF >> /etc/modules 8192cu EOF shutdown -r now After reboot you should have wlan0. You may need to configure your wireless network if you didn’t so already, by editing /etc/network/interface. Recommended that you use wpa_passphrase to generate your encrypted wifi password: ...

September 16, 2012