Sysadmin Ramblings

This is my first android phone, so I thought I’d share my experience of rooting the phone. All credit to Zinx Verituse over on Alldroid.org

Note: I just updated to the update released December 10th for the droid and was able to reapply the update.zip.

The instructions are here

• Download this file and rename it update.zip on the sdcard.
• turn off the phone
• turn on the phone holding down the x key on the keyboard
• When you see the Motorola symbol, press Vol+ and Camera buttons together.
• An onscreen menu will appear, use the d-pad to navigate to update.zip and type return to apply
• After the phone reboots, Go to Settings -> Applications -> Development and enable USB Debugging
• Connect the droid to your desktop, download the sdk
• unpack the sdk and navigate to tools directory
• as root/administrator run adb start-server
• next run adb shell
• su to root /system/bin/su
• remount the root filesystem rw

  
# mount
rootfs / rootfs ro 0 0
tmpfs /dev tmpfs rw,mode=755 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,mode=600 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /sqlite_stmt_journals tmpfs rw,size=4096k 0 0
none /dev/cpuctl cgroup rw,cpu 0 0
/dev/block/mtdblock4 /system yaffs2 ro 0 0
/dev/block/mtdblock6 /data yaffs2 rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/block/mtdblock5 /cache yaffs2 rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/block/mtdblock0 /config yaffs2 ro 0 0
/dev/block//vold/179:1 /sdcard vfat rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,uid=1000,gid=1015,fmask=0702,dmask=0702,allow_utime=0020,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 0
# mount -o remount -o rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock4 /system


  I don’t know if the device will always be the same (/dev/block/mtdblock4), best to check first.
• now make a copy of sh and call it su-something or replace su

  
# cd /system/bin
# cat sh > su
or
# cat sh >su-fake
# chmod 4775 su
or
# chmod 4775 su-fake
# exit


You now have either su or su-fake that you can run from terminal emulator on the phone and become root. To start using your new privileges, install busybox and symlink to it for all the tools that are missing…

After upgrading to 0.25, the following error occurs:

Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Could not intern from pson: Could not convert from pson: Could not find relationship target ”

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I don’t really see the benefit of using adsense anymore. Everyone knows they’re ads, no one clicks. It doesn’t pay my isp bills anymore, so I’m dropping it. They were only annoying anyway.

The problem I was trying to fix here was that I had a package that required a much newer version of a library than the system had installed on it. I didn’t want to ruin the stability of the system by updating the library so I build it and placed it in a non standard location (harkening back to the solaris days I guess). If you can’t guess what the problem was, I called the library package qt4-vlc…hint hint. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted some additional material on building rpms in the appendix of the book. I cover how to build an example spec file from scratch. This is similar to what I did in my presentation, just with a lot more detail. I hope to expand this section to cover nested packages and kernel modules. Those sections are not done yet…read it here.

I’m still working with my own kvm implementation even though RedHat has released their own in RHEL 5.4, they are, however, at version 83, I’m on 88. I’d rather stay current since kvm is moving so fast that each new version fixes bugs and adds many new features. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a server that many people are mistaking for my login (ssh) machine, so I decided to forward attempts to ssh into this machine to my real login machine. I found a few posts on this but they were all somewhat incomplete for my purposes Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a talk I gave on creating/building rpms. It covers spec files and some basics of how an rpm is organized. Hopefully it’s useful to someone. This includes a tutorial on how to make a spec. I plan of having a more detailed tutorial in the appendix to mybook, I’ll post that here when I finish it. rpm-talk

There’s nothing special to do here, the only caveat is that you need to enable the non-free repo from fusion and install wl for the wireless driver. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, I accept a little bit of the blame for this one. I started to import my photos using picasa. The first three pictures that were imported were poor, so I decided to delete them. At that point they were the only pictures in the folder, so Picasa decided to delete the folder, even though an import was going on to that folder. All the rest of the pictures went into the abyss. Pretty lame IMHO. Picasa should probably check that it’s copying the files to a good location before deleting them from the card. Read the rest of this entry »