Author Archives: neozeed

Three tonnes of mini computers

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4

It looks almost religious doesn’t it?

I just received this note from the HECnet mailing list, and I thought I’d broadcast it out..

This is a shameless plug for something I and the Update Computer Club 
have been working on this spring and opened yesterday.

The exhibition "Three Tons of Minicomputers" at Museum Gustavianum in 
Uppsala, Sweden.

http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/node13

We have collected computers primarily used by the university at some 
point in time. Highlights include a Linc-8 and a DECSYSTEM-2060 with 
peripherals.

Here are some pictures from the opening:

http://www.update.uu.se/~jeppe/tmp/vernissage/

I strongly recommend anyone nearby Uppsala this summer to take a swing 
by Gustavianum. If you want a guided tour, let me know and we'll figure 
something out.

It's only open for a few months, so don't wait to long.

Regards,
Pontus.

I don’t know when I’ll be in Europe next, but now I really want to go to Sweden!

Triumph of the Nerds

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Since it’s summer time, may as well enjoy another olde computer based flick, Triumph of the Nerds.

Granted its pretty revisionist no Commodore or Atari.. I wonder if Apple PR always slipped these kinds of documentaries some uh ‘contributions’ to write out the 80’s and 90’s competition.

[Xen-announce] Xen Security Advisory 7 (CVE-2012-0217) – PV privilege escalation

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Xen Security Advisory CVE-2012-0217 / XSA-7
version 9

64-bit PV guest privilege escalation vulnerability

UPDATES IN VERSION 9
====================

Public release. Previous versions were embargoed.

ISSUE DESCRIPTION
=================

Rafal Wojtczuk has discovered a vulnerability which can allow a 64-bit
PV guest kernel running on a 64-bit hypervisor to escalate privileges
to that of the host by arranging for a system call to return via
sysret to a non-canonical RIP. Intel CPUs deliver the resulting
exception in an undesirable processor state.

IMPACT
======

Guest administrators can gain control of the host.

Depending on the particular guest kernel it is also possible that
non-privileged guest user processes can also elevate their privileges
to that of the host.

VULNERABLE SYSTEMS
==================

All systems running 64 bit Xen hypervisor running 64 bit PV guests on
Intel CPUs are vulnerable to this issue.

Systems using AMD CPUs are not vulnerable to this privilege
escalation. AMD have issued the following statement:
AMD processors’ SYSRET behavior is such that a non-canonical
address in RCX does not generate a #GP while in CPL0. We have
verified this with our architecture team, with our design team, and
have performed tests that verified this on silicon. Therefore, this
privilege escalation exposure is not applicable to any AMD
processor.

While investigating this, it was noted that some older AMD CPUs will
lock up under similar circumstances, causing a denial of service. See
XSA-9 for details.

MITIGATION
==========

This issue can be mitigated by running HVM (fully-virtualised)
or 32 bit PV guests only.

RESOLUTION
==========

Applying the appropriate attached patch will resolve the issue.

These patches also resolve the issue described in XSA-8 (CVE-2012-0128).

These changes have been made to the staging Xen repositories:
XSA-7: XSA-8:
xen-unstable.hg 25480:76eaf5966c05 25200:80f4113be500+25204:569d6f05e1ef
xen-4.1-testing.hg 23299:f08e61b9b33f 23300:0fec1afa4638
xen-4.0-testing.hg 21590:dd367837e089 21591:adb943a387c8
xen-3.4-testing.hg 19996:894aa06e4f79 19997:ddb7578abb89

PATCH INFORMATION
=================

The attached patches resolve both this issue and that reported in
XSA-8 (CVE-2012-0128).

xen-unstable 25204:569d6f05e1ef or later xsa7-xsa8-unstable-recent.patch
xen-unstable 25199:6092641e3644 or earlier xsa7-xsa8-unstable-apr16.patch
Xen 4.1, 4.1.x xsa7-xsa8-xen-4.1.patch
Xen 4.0, 4.0.x xsa7-xsa8-xen-4.0.patch
Xen 3.4, 3.4.x xsa7-xsa8-xen-3.4.patch

 

http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-announce/2012-06/msg00001.html
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-announce/2012-06/msg00003.html
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-announce/2012-06/msg00002.html

Be sure to patch up if you run Xen, and I have a feeling the fallout is far from over..

20 year old OS/2 sales video…

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2

lol the fun starts some 3.5 minutes in.

And true to IBM's poor sales skills they go on and on about it, without SHOWING it.. I mean it took up to 8 minutes in to get a glimpse of OS/2.  Its like they were scared of it for some reason.

Maybe OS/2 2.0 would have had a shot, if Windows 3.1 wasn't released on its heels.

(Video in MPEG-1/Audio MPEG-2 care of JSMpeg).

KOTOR for MacOS X crashes…

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So part of my 2Ghz G5 purchase was to be able to play KOTOR… The $5 version I got on steam just crashes on launch so that… lame.

Anyways it crashes like crazy on OS X, not sure if the intel version is as bad, but on the PowerPC, I found this little nugget in the crash log.

Version: 1.03 (45217)

PID: 248
Thread: 5

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000000

Thread 0:
0 libSystem.B.dylib 0x9000af48 mach_msg_trap + 8
1 libSystem.B.dylib 0x9000ae9c mach_msg + 60
2 IOKit 0x90af0de4 io_connect_method_scalarI_str
uctureI + 216
3 …apple.ATIRadeon9700GLDriver 0x072614c4 gldFinish + 84
4 GLEngine 0x07161850 glFinish_Exec + 636
5 com.aspyr.kotor 0x002dc340 aglRestoreContext() + 20
6 com.aspyr.kotor 0x002e9428 GLRender::FinishSoftShadowsAT
I() + 1584
7 com.aspyr.kotor 0x00338318 Scene::RenderShadows(int, int
, int, int) + 528
8 com.aspyr.kotor 0x003399b4 Scene::RenderSinglePass() + 7

That’s right, it looks like SoftShadowsATI causes the thing to bomb out.  So disabling shadows has lead to a much better experience so far. Whats also odd, is the driver says its for a 9700, while the hardware is a 9600 … But I don’t know enough about ATI stuff to say anything about that…

I never did get around to KOTOR on my quad G5 with the Nvidia card…

reviving a G5

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This has to be one of the more convoluted things I’ve ever done.

So basically, it starts like this, I left my quad G5 mac in storage, some 1,600 miles away.  I wanted to see if I could get a cheap mac, and I managed to get a $100 mac out here in Las Vegas.  Part of the reason it was cheap is because the OS was screwed up.. You’d be surprised how many people ditch good machines, because the OS is messed up.

So, I figure I’d just pop in a 10.4 or 10.5 DVD set and boot up, format and all will be well, right?  It turns out the DVD drive doesn’t work properly.  And I don’t have any old ATA/parallel style DVD drives on me.  So, I’ve basically got a $100 paper weight.

Until I decide to try something insane, so I get the great emulator PearPC, and install 10.4 into that.  Sadly, PearPC doesn’t support raw disks, otherwise my original plan of popping in the disk to my PC, running PearPC and having it install to \\.\PhysicalDrive2 didn’t work so well.  But at least I could create a small install of 10.4.6 which will boot on a G5.

Next, I dug out the ancient ancestor of all the hackintoshes, the deadmoo 10.4.1 image, and got it running on VirtualBOX (set the IDE to P3 mode, otherwise its SLOW!), after converting the raw 6GB image into a VMDK.  I then could use Qemu’s disk image conversion program to convert the 10.4.6 disk I installed with PearPC into a VMDK which I could then mount under the deadmoo image.

With that setup, I could then use the diskutil program on OS X deadmoo, and create a compressed disk image of the PowerPC 10.4.6 .  Then VirtualBOX will let you link to a physical drive, with a command something like this:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename drive2.vmdk
      -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive2

With that done, I then could boot back into deadmoo with the G5’s disk attached, remove all the files/directories from the G5 disk (I didn’t format as I wondered if I format from an intel machine, would the endian be backwards making the filesystem unnecessarily slow?), doing the ‘repair permissions’ shuffle from the diskutil program, and then finally I could restore the PearPC compressed image of 10.4.6 onto the G5’s hard disk.

It worked.

It’s a shame the PowerPC machines cannot boot from USB disks, otherwise there may have been an easier way…  Well that or order a DVD drive, but that’d take time…

So thankfully with emulation, disks that can work between machines, I was able to get the box up and running.

Only because it was requested….

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5

I wasn’t going to make this some kind of cat obsessed blog, but I guess this being the internet everyone knows it eventually degenerates into some kind of cat obsession…

KC

I’m backing this whole thing up, and that’ll take a while… so in the meantime…

**EDIT 3/9/2016 .  My ex emailed me to let me know that KC is not doing well.  He stopped grooming himself, and barely eats.  Such a sad update.  It won’t be long.

Sick KC.
Sick KC.

***FINAL EDIT 9/9/2016.  I just received the word from my ex:

K.C. has passed. Vet said nothing more we can do for him. He went painlessly

Good bye KC. :(
Good bye KC. 🙁

Good bye K.C.  You are already missed.