Restoring fsarchiver images using /dev/loop

The last couple of days I’ve been making images of some hacked boxes. This involved using fsarchiver which is a great tool by the way. In order to check if the images that I created are actually ok and can be restored/mounted for forensic purposes, I tested it using the loopback device of Linux. This is necessary as fsarchiver operates on block devices, thus, you cannot just dump it into a file. First I created a file large enough to fit the fsarchiver image (10GB in this case) $ dd if=/dev/zero of=device.img count=10 bs=1G Next, I chose an unsued loopback...   read more

18 Jul 2013 | linux, fsarchiver, backup

FLAC to MP3

So I came across some FLAC files. Quite nice, however, too big for my MP3 player/phone. Conversion to VBR MP3 works like this: for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -V 0 - "${file%.flac}.mp3"); done Have phun!   read more

22 Apr 2013 | music, tools

pdflatex font embedding

So, publishing papers sometimes involves using IEEE’s PDF eXpress. Today I found that pdflatex is not embedding the font required for the publishing process. This seems to be a working solution: First convert your PDF file to Postscript: pdftops main.pdf main.ps Then, reconvert the PDF back and enforce font embedding: ps2pdf14 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dEmbedAllFonts=true main.ps main2.pdf To see if the fonts that you need are embedded, run pdffonts main.pdf   read more

09 Apr 2013 | latex

Pictures

So yesterday and today I set up something to host some pictures of my own. Since I like my static hosting setup, I searched for something static to generated albums from the pictures located in some folder. After fiddeling with llgal (which sucked), and jalbum (which sucked even more), I came accross Sigal. I also tried python photoweb which might do some good. Sigal came with some really nice out-of-the-box templates based off galleria and colorbox, a lightbox clone. Sigal Here are the the features I needed: batch processing of image directories resizing images thumbnailing generating static html using good...   read more

01 Apr 2013

SFTP SSH Jail

Filesharing in 2012 still sucks. I just wanted a friend to be able to download a large file, more or less instant with not setup hassel. It turns out this is not possible ;) Windows, Linux, MacOSX dafuq?! Due to serious firewall fuck-up at me friends place I decided to setup an account on my box. But my friend should still be jailed in his home and the transfer and the login should be secured. Enter SFTP and SSH. 1. Set up his user account friend and create a group stftponly ### 2. Add this to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file specifying...   read more

20 Jul 2012 | linux, ssh, sftp
Misc