Author Archive for Quin Rose

Restoring Motorola Xoom to 3.0.1 in Australia

Published on 1:20 am - Sunday 19 June 2011 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

A few days ago I posted about a get of jail free card, restoring your Motorola Xoom from the original disk images, available from http://developer.motorola.com/products/software/. I noted that you should download the bundle that matches your country of residence. Well, I’m in Australia, so naturally I would select (and was selecting) the Australian bundle (Build H.6.1-38-9 for Telstra Australia). I managed to get myself in some un-bootable trouble with my Motorola Xoom in the previous 24 hours up to this post, so I figured I’d follow my own words and restore back to the stock state. Two points to keep in mind.

  1. Some bundles are actually suitable (and will work even work!) on your Motorola Xoom, despite it not being your native country. For example, I just used the ‘Build H.6.1-38-1 for Retail Europe’ bundle to restore my Xoom. Why? Read on.
  2. The Australian Bundle ‘Build H.6.1-38-9 for Telstra Australia’ has to be broken some how. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. What I do know is that the ‘system.img’ file has an issue. I could never boot back into HoneyComb after restoring with this bundle. I’ve confirmed this by completing an entire restore with the ‘Build H.6.1-38-1 for Retail Europe’, and then restoring the system.img from the ‘Build H.6.1-38-9 for Telstra Australia’ bundle, and it won’t boot. To further confirm it, I completed an entire restore with the ‘Build H.6.1-38-9 for Telstra Australia’ bundle. It wouldn’t boot, so I restored just the system.img from the ”Build H.6.1-38-1 for Retail Europe’ bundle, and presto, I was back up and running again, SIM card recognised, the whole lot!

Following my restore with the ‘Build H.6.1-38-1 for Retail Europe’ I also noted the entire device felt much faster, and the Market app doesn’t crash anymore! Needless to say, I’m muchly enjoying my Motorola Xoom far more then I was the day I got it home and tried to add Facebook as my first app. I was not impressed when I realised I couldn’t install any apps, and Market would just keep crashing, which lead me to my hacking, and rooting attempts and finally my requirement to restore.

Had a similar experience? Why not share it in the comments?

Motorola Xoom Final Rescue!

Published on 1:00 am - Wednesday 15 June 2011 in Hints and Tips and Resources. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Oh no! Your Motorola Xoom is Bricked (or is it)

You’ve tried everything you can think of. Hard reset, soft reset, factory reset, factory restore, factory wipe and erase. Nothing works! I thought that too!

Please read this entire article before trying anything!

So long as you can still reach the ‘Starting Fastboot Protocol Support’, by powering the device on (or resetting with Power + Volume Up) while holding the power and volume down button, you are probably not in as much trouble as you may think.

Visit this link and download the zip file:

http://www.android.net/forum/downloading/67/guest/SDK_tools.zip
(leave me a comment if the file is unavailable, I’ll upload a copy to this website)

Extract it to your C:\ drive, so the contents exist in:

C:\SDK_tools

Visit this link:

http://developer.motorola.com/products/software/

Read this article for more information about the bundles.

Download the corrosponding bundle version for your location or region. I’m in Australia, so I downloaded the ‘Build H.6.1-38-9 for Telstra Australia’ bundle. Take a few moments to peruse the list, it’s a little confusing and I almost downloaded the wrong one. Make sure you download the right one. I’ve no idea what happens if you restore with the wrong files.

You’ll have to register to download the files. It’s free, which is not bad for something that is about to bring your Motorola Xoom back to life :-)

Extract the archive and dump all the files directly into the C:\SDK_tools directory.

Your directory listing should look something like this:

adb.exe
AdbWinApi.dll
AdbWinUsbApi.dll
boot.img
ddms.bat
fastboot.exe
recovery.img
system.img
userdata.img

Depending on the amount of damage you’ve done to your Motorola Xoom, you may or may not need to do all of the following commands:

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
fastboot erase cache
fastboot oem lock

Note 1. If you intend to root or otherwise modify the OS in the near or far future, skip the last command (fastboot oem lock).

Note 2. If no userdata.img file is present in your download, please issue the command:

fastboot erase userdata

I only managed to screw up my boot partition (I think) as I only needed to excute the first command. Try them one at a time and reboot the Motorola Xoom. Give it time to come back to life before re-entering ‘Starting Fastboot Protocol Support’ again. When I say give it some time, I mean wait at least 5 minutes.

Note: you can unlock your Motorola Xoom with the following command:

fastboot oem unlock.

As for rooting the device… well I’m sure that’s the reason some of you are here! Do some more research before attempting it again, I know I did!

Mounting /tmp and /var/tmp as a separate file system

Published on 5:00 pm - Friday 25 March 2011 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 0 Comments

After installing ConfigServer Security and Firewall, many of us try to achieve as many ‘green’ results as possible. The often tricky one (or two) options to achieve, is mounting /tmp and /var/tmp as ‘separate’ file systems. On a bare metal linux installation (no virtualisation) this is easy to achieve by creating a file system (partition or pseudo file system) and mounting it accordingly. Under virtualisation (openvz, virtuozzo etc) this is not so easy, in fact, it’s not actually supported at all. However, there are two things you can try.

  1. Nothing. Just leave it. After all, the message at the bottom of the check security page says ‘This scoring does not necessarily reflect the security of your server or the relative merits of each check’ In other words, getting all green doesn’t necessarily mean your server is secure.
  2. You can set up pretend mount points (this works on bare metal installations as well). Delete the /var/tmp directory and symlink it to /tmp (ln -s /tmp /var/tmp). Next, edit your /etc/fstab file and all the following line: /tmp /tmp   ext3    defaults,usrquota,bind,noauto,noexec,nosuid        0 0 Finally, be sure to change the permissions to 1777 (chmod -R 1777).

The second option above doesn’t really achieve anything except the green ‘OK’ from CSF. Traditionally, the /tmp and /var/tmp directory have been located on a separate file system, due to the volatile nature of the files and content that are temporarily stored there. If the server was compromised via this directory, it could be easy to stop the compromise by un-mounting the file system. Better still, if the file system itself was hacked or damaged, it would only be the /tmp and /var/tmp that was damaged, both of which are easily replaced and can be deleted, removed and recreated all while the system is still running, not to mention that no important data is ever stored in these directories either.

Upgrading PHP on CentOS/RHEL

Published on 10:30 pm - Saturday 29 January 2011 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Click Here if You are Looking for an official ‘CentOS’ repository to perform the upgrade, instead of a compatible repository.

Upgrading PHP (from 5.1 to 5.3 for example) on a variety of common RPM based linux distributions (CentOS/RHEL, Whitebox, Fedora, etc) can be a tricky process. After some searching and playing around, I come across a simple method which should meet the needs of most. There is a fantastic repository known as the IUS Community Project.

We are committed to providing up to date and regularly maintained RPM packages for the latest upstream versions of PHP, Python, MySQL and other common software specifically for Redhat Enterprise Linux and clones.

A Word of Warning: Do not attempt the following on a server that has cPanel/WHM installed on it. You will break your server! Use the Easy Apache Updater through the WHM interface or the Easy Apache Updater script: /scripts/easyapache on the command line, to upgrade your PHP version and features.

The following process should get you were you want to be.

  1. Download and Install the IUS repositories. You can start here: http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/. Pick your release version and architecture (execute the command 'uname -a' (as root without the quotes) on the command line if you are unsure which you version you are using).
  2. Download the two repository packages. The first package will have a file name starting with epel-release (epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm at the time of writing) and the second file will have a file name starting with ius-release (ius-release-1.0-6.ius.el5.noarch.rpm at the time of writing). On the command line, as root, you could execute the following commands: wget -c http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5.5/x86_64/epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm to download the EPEL IUS repository installer for CentOS (and variants) on the 64bit platform  and wget -c http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5.5/x86_64/ius-release-1.0-6.ius.el5.noarch.rpm to download the IUS repository installer for CentOS (and variants) on the 64bit platform.
  3. Install the repositories, starting with the epel-release repository first: rpm -ivh epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm and then rpm -ivh ius-release-1.0-6.ius.el5.noarch.rpm.
  4. Clear the system yum cache with this command: yum clean all
  5. Make sure the version want and related components are available: yum list php5*
  6. Remove any existing php and related components: yum remove php*
  7. Install the base php version you are after: yum install php52.x86_64
  8. Install any additional components or modules you may require: yum install php53u-eaccelerator.x86_64 php53u-ioncube-loader.x86_64 php53u-mbstring.x86_64 php53u-mcrypt.x86_64 php53u-mysql.x86_64 php53u-pdo.x86_64 php53u-xml.x86_64 php53u-xmlrpc.x86_64 php53u-gd.x86_64 and any others in the list that you want.
  9. Finished!

It is worth noting at this point, that both the IUS repository and the IUS EPEL repository are still enabled. Care should be taken in leaving them enabled, especially if you have yum automatically updating your software on a regular basis. If this is the case, or you don’t want to risk breaking your system with yum late one night, disable these repositories as follows:

  1. As root on the command line, navigate to the yum repositories directory: cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
  2. Edit epel.repo file and change the 'enabled=1' line to 'enabled=0' You could use ‘nano’ (yum install nano if you don’t have it): nano epel.repo change the line and press ctrl+o and then ctrl+x to save and exit
  3. Edit the ius.repo file and change the 'enabled=1' line to 'enabled=0' Again, you could use ‘nano’: nano ius.repo change the line and press ctrl+o and then ctrl+x to save and exit.
  4. Finally type: yum clean all
  5. Finished!

Leaving the IUS repositories enabled shouldn’t really cause you any problems. Then again, waking up one morning to find MySQL 5.0.x is now 5.1.x and everything on your server is now broken or not working, may be a good enough reason to disable them until needed, avoiding any accidental upgrades.

Official CentOS Repository for PHP

There isn’t one. But there is the testing repository. Edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file or create a new /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Testing.repo file with the following in it:

[c5-testing]
name=CentOS-5 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/$releasever/testing/$basearch/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing

# CentOS-Testing:
# !!!! CAUTION !!!!
# This repository is a proving grounds for packages on their way to CentOSPlus and CentOS Extras.
# They may or may not replace core CentOS packages, and are not guaranteed to function properly.
# These packages build and install, but are waiting for feedback from testers as to
# functionality and stability. Packages in this repository will come and go during the
# development period, so it should not be left enabled or used on production systems without due
# consideration.

Be sure to change the value of the line ‘enabled=0′ to ‘enabled=1′ when you want to use the repository. Change it back to ’0′ when you are finished, to avoid any accidental upgrades.

Feel free to post your comments and feedback. If you need a little extra help, please do let me know.