Monthly Archives: January 2021

Fixing Wifi not enabled in Linux Kali with Dell XPS laptop

This is a trick I share, as I see many students having problems with this.

Assuming that your Kali distribution is recent (Linux Kernel bigger than Kernel 5.3), the most typical problem student have is that laptops xps from Dell and other brands have a combination of keys to enable or disable the Wifi.

On the Dell xps is on the key PrtScr, so if your Wifi is disabled, you can enable it in Kali Linux press:

CTRL + ALT + Fn + PrtScr

As you can see in the PrtScr the is an icon of Wifi Signal.

The Fn key is on the bottom left, next to Ctrl.

This is a very simple to fix problem, but many people suffer this problem and go crazy trying to update drivers or even having to use an external USB dongle.

Extend existing Single ZFS disk with a mirror without losing the Data on the existing HDD

This is an answer that I did to a question in askubuntu.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1301828/extend-existing-single-disk-zfs-with-a-mirror-without-formating-the-existing-hdd/

Question:

I have one HDD formatted as single disc zfs system on my server. It looks like the following:

Now I want to convert this to a zfs mirror without formatting the original disk. Any ideas?

Result should be something like:

hdd0
   mirror0
       ata-........................
       ata-........................

Answer:

I reproduced your case in a VM and paste here step by step. :)

Note: First of all, please do a backup of your data. I added an empty new disk, so ZFS had no doubt what was the master drive. Although you should have no problem as the first drive already forms part of the pool, a backup is recommended.

Quick answer: You need the zpool attach command.

Basically:

sudo zpool attach hdd0 existinghdd blankhdd

After, do:

zpool status

And you will see that a mirror has been created. Your data on the already existing drive will be keep, and will be replicated to the new one (Resilvered).

As ZFS only copys the actual information this process will take more or less depending on the amount of Data.

In my VM 300 GB were replicated in 3 seconds, while my experience with SAS and SATA drives, I was Resilvering 10 TB in less than 24 hours (for that I was using drives from 10TB to 14TB SAS) .

Now the long answer with everything I did in my Virtual Box VM:

lsblk --scsi

identify the two empty drives by:

ls /dev/disk/by-id/

Select one of them and create a pool like your: sudo zpool create hdd0 id_of_mydrive

See that pool /hdd0 has been created and mounted on root.

sudo zpool status sudo zpool list sudo ls -al /hdd0

Fill with some random data (or better copy files there) to generate a drive like data like you. I generated from random:

sudo dd id=/dev/urandom of=/hdd0/file.000 bs=1M count=100 status=progress
sudo dd id=/dev/urandom of=/hdd0/file.001 bs=1M count=100 status=progress
sudo dd id=/dev/urandom of=/hdd0/file.002 bs=1M count=100 status=progress

Then I got the checksum and saved to verify later.

sudo su
# Please note I continue as root
sha512sum file.000 > file.000.sha512
sha512sum file.001 > file.001.sha512
sha512sum file.002 > file.002.sha512

zpool list shows nearly 100GB of space.

zpool attach hdd0 id_of_mydrive id_of_the_drive_to_add

zpool status will show:

pool: hdd0
state: ONLINE
scan: resilvered 301M in 0 days 00:00:03 with 0 errors…

   NAME                            STATE   READ WRITE CKSUM   
   hdd0
     mirror-0
       ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VBa8...   ONLINE     0     0     0
       ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VB8c...   ONLINE     0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I verified the checksums.

zpool list will return as well 99GB of space available, as two drives of 100GB are being used in mirror.

So as kaulex mentioned the format is: zpool attach

Where device is your previous vdev with data (the single hard drive with Data in the ZFS pool named ‘hdd0’).

As I did you want to use the Id of the device and not the name, so you will use the identifier in /dev/disk/by-id/ and not sdb, sdc… (Please note, adding /dev/ is not necessary). The reason to do not use device names like sdb, sdc, sdea, etc… is that those names may change why live is running or between reboots. The id never changes. In real systems, not Virtual Box, they may start by wwn or ata.

A simple Bash one line script to log the temperature of your HDDs and CPUs in Ubuntu

I’ve been helping to troubleshoot the reason one Commodity Server (with no iDrac/Ilo ipmi) is powering off randomly. One of the hypothesis is the temperature.

This is a very simple script that will print the temperature of the HDDs and the CPU and keep to a log file.

First you need to install hddtemp and lm-sensors:

sudo apt install hddtemp lm-sensors

Then this is the one line script, that you should execute as root:

while [ true ]; do date | tee -a /var/log/hddtemp.log; hddtemp /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd | tee -a /var/log/hddtemp.log; date | tee -a /var/log/cputemp.log; sensors | tee -a /var/log/cputemp.log; sleep 2; done

Feel free to change sleep 2 for the number of seconds you want to wait, like sleep 10.

Press CTRL + C to interrupt the script at any time.

You can execute this inside a screen session and leave it running in Background.

Note that I use tee command, so the output is print to the screen and to the log file.

Solving Windows 10 PRO running Active Directory as Domain Admin

This explains how to solve a problem if you logged in to the domain, via your computer, as a regular user, and then you need to run Active Directory with Administrator privileges as another user.

First open CMD.exe as Administrator.

Then type:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>runas /netonly /user:mydomain\carles.adm "mmc.exe dsa.msc /server=myserver.mydomain.com"

Assuming my regular user is: carles

And my Administrator user is: carles.adm

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux, WSL 2 on Windows 10 64 bit, with Ubuntu, solution to error WslRegisterDistribution failed with error: 0x80070057

You know I love Linux. I was compiling my own Kernels back in 1995, when it took more than 24 hours in a 386, and working on the first ISPs in Barcelona managing the Linux Systems.

For my computers I prefer Linux, no doubt about it, but many multinationals I worked for have Windows option only for the Laptops and Desktops.

During years I had to deal with sending files to Linux or Unix (HP UX, Sun Solaris…) to process them and getting back the result. Some sort of ETL and Map Reduce in the prehistory of personal computers, taking in count aspects like Networks speeds too, available space, splitting files for processing.

When I was working as Senior Project Manager in Winterthur Insurance, now Axa, I had to run a lot of ETL (Extract Transform Load) for considerably big files, or when I was project manager and later head of department in Volkswagen gedas or later helping Start ups like Privalia. I can tell you that Windows didn’t like you to open editors to work with 1GB text or CSV file, and doesn’t like it, even if your computer has 16GB of Memory, and even if they do the simplicity of Bash scripts and using pipes, grep, awk… is so powerful that is very convenient to have those files processed using Linux.

And honestly is a pain to send back and forth files to a UNIX System just for Data Crunch. And a VM will be slow and use memory, and you have enable some sort of sharing with it so it can access the Data. Not to talk if you need to split the data files in blocks to be processed in parallel by several computers.

There are many solutions, like using Virtual Machines, Docker, external Servers, etc…

WSL allows you to run Linux command line tools inside Windows.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL

Having WSL allows things to be done much more straightforward, processing the files in your local windows hard drives.

Please note: Maybe you have enough using GitBash.

Error installing: WslRegisterDistribution failed with error: 0x80070057

When I installed it I found this error and look for an answer online. I found no solutions and many people suffering from the same problem, so I decided to publish an article on how to make it work.

The instructions I detail are based on the documentation from Canonical https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL and from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 and the final solution I found.

Microsoft use Powershell to activate the features disabled in Windows, I did the same with Command Line, which I found more convenient for most of the non extremely tech people.

You will need:

  • For x64 systems: Version 1903 or higher, with Build 18362 or higher.

You can check your version of windows opening a Terminal (CMD.exe) and typing:

winver
  • For ARM64 systems: Version 2004 or higher, with Build 19041 or higher.

I’m not covering installing WSL for ARM, only for Intel/AMD Desktop/Laptops with Windows 10.

If you’re unsure, you can open a Terminal (CMD.exe) and run:

systeminfo | find "System Type"

If is a x64 system it will return: x64-based PC

Launch CMD.exe as Administrator and type:

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

Enable Virtual Machine Feature:

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart

At this point you have to Restart Windows to complete this part of the installation, otherwise next step won’t work.

Download the Linux Kernel Update Package from here:

https://wslstorestorage.blob.core.windows.net/wslblob/wsl_update_x64.msi

Execute wsl_update_x64.msi and grant permissions for modifying the system.

Now it’s crucial that you reboot again. Even if you’re not asked for.

That’s the tricky part.

Then set the version 2 of WSL as default:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>wsl --set-default-version 2
 For information on key differences with WSL 2 please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2

Installing Ubuntu (or Kali, or Debian, or openSUSE…)

Open the Microsoft Store or use Microsoft Store link to go directly to the installation of Ubuntu.

You have also several options as indicated in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL:

The recommended way to install Ubuntu on WSL is through the Microsoft Store.

The following Ubuntu releases are available as apps on the Microsoft Store:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) is the first release available for WSL. It supports the x64 architecture only. (offline installer: x64)
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) is the second LTS release and the first one supporting ARM64 systems, too. (offline installers: x64, ARM64)
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal) is the current LTS release, supporting both x64 and ARM64 architecture.
  • Ubuntu (without the release version) always follows the recommended release, switching over to the next one when it gets the first point release. Right now it installs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Each app creates a separate root file system in which Ubuntu shells are opened but app updates don’t change the root file system afterwards. Installing a different app in parallel creates a different root file system allowing you to have both Ubuntu LTS releases installed and running in case you need it for keeping compatibility with other external systems. You can also upgrade your Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 by running ‘do-release-upgrade’ and have three different systems running in parallel, separating production and sandboxes for experiments.

But if you prefer, instead of using the Windows Store, you can download the appx.

In the same page mentioned you can do it for several versions, I attach the link for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: https://aka.ms/wslubuntu2004

Assuming you used the Windows Store, if you did not reboot and try now to execute it for the first time, or you go to the Command Line and write bash, or open Ubuntu from Windows menu, whatever method you use, you’ll get the abovementioned error.

If that happens to you, just reboot and when you open it will work and will start the install and ask for a user and password:

From here you’re able to update the system, execute the text commands available in Linux, access to the Windows drives, launch htop, git, Python3, apt, wget… copy and paste between windows and Linux terminal, share PATH…

And of course you can run CTOP.py

Take in count that the space reported in / partition is not real, and that you have a 4GB swap.

You can access your C:\ Windows files from:

/mnt/c/

News from the blog 2021-01-11

Happy New Year to all.

Is something very simple, but will help my student friends to validate Input from Keyboard without losing too many hours.

The Input Validation Classes I create in PHP for Privalia or in my PHP Catalonia Framework, are much, much, more powerful, allowing the validation of complete forms, rendering errors, etc… although they were created for Web, and not for Keyboard input.

It recursively goes to all the subdirectories looking for .py files, and then it counts the lines.

  • I updated the price of my books to be the minimum allowed by LeanPub, to $5 USD, and created a bundle of two of them for $7 USD.

So people can benefit from this during the lock down.

  • I’ve updated the Python Combat Guide book with a sample of using Paramiko Libraries for SSH, and increased the Object Oriented Programing and Unit Testing, sections. I also added some books to the Bibliography.
  • I’ve read the postmortem initial analysis from Slack’s incident. It’s really interesting.

I cannot share it, but I guess that at some point they will publish it on their blog:

https://slack.engineering/

  • As I’m giving more Python Classes I decided to write a book to teach to code in Python for non-programmers.