2 Bit Hacker

I set out with a simple goal this evening, to change my Eye-Fi card’s upload destination from Facebook, where it was putting each image in it’s own album, to simply uploading to Hindenburg via FTPS. This led to a fun filled evening of debugging and data recovery!

The configuration change on the Eye-Fi Manager side was easy enough, simply selecting FTP as the upload mechanism and filling in a few fields. For the server side of things, I decided to go with ProFTPD, largely because I’ve used it in the past and the configuration is pretty simple. I’d never used FTPS before, but it’s pretty easy to enable with ProFTPD, just a few configuration directives:

TLSEngine on
TLSLog /var/log/proftpd/tls.log
TLSProtocol SSLv3 TLSv1
TLSRequired on
TLSRSACertificateFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.cert
TLSRSACertificateKeyFile /usr/local/etc/kyzoku.2bithacker.net.key
TLSVerifyClient off
TLSRenegotiate none

However, this doesn’t appear to work. Based on the xferlog and tls.log, it appears the Eye-Fi client was connecting, but the data session was failing, but it did give the helpful message of “client did not reuse SSL session, rejecting data connection (see TLSOption NoSessionReuseRequired)”. This option is undocumented, and is actually “TLSOptions NoSessionReuseRequired” (note the plural), but it does solve the problem. Apparently clients are expected to reuse the TLS session between the control and data channels, but Eye-Fi doesn’t.

So, that’s working, but now my Eye-Fi card isn’t able to be read in either of our cameras or my laptop. Not sure what happened, but it appears the partition table became corrupt this evening. The card still had the only copy of a lot of our Comic-Con photos on it, and I really didn’t want to lose them. First, I decided to get a disk image of the SD card using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility. Then, I had remembered hearing about some open source software for recovering images from damaged cards, and after a quick Googling, I came up with PhotoRec.

PhotoRec is extremely easy to use. It opened up a terminal window with a curses interface, prompting through selecting a disk to scan, a place to save the found files, then initiating a scan of the Eye-Fi, turning up all of my missing images, along with a handful of other files that I didn’t realize were on the card (including an SQLite database, maybe used by Eye-Fi?) So happy I didn’t lose all those photos, and will have to work on getting them uploaded. Unfortunately, I think I’ve lost the ability to geotag those photos though…

Earlier tonight was the first meeting of the new ManchLUG chapter of the GNHLUG at Wings Your Way in Manchester. I’d been tossing around the idea of organizing this chapter for a while, but hadn’t found the round tuits. Kenta came along and wrangled things together, and this first meeting at least turned out pretty well. We had 18 people registered for the event beforehand, and I think our total turn-out ended up being around 26 people.

The meeting itself was pretty casual, just some announcements and just general chatter for most of it. I’m hoping to have more organization for next month, perhaps with some discussion topics or a quick presentation. One person brought up the topic of media center computers, so maybe we can find someone to talk about their experience building such a thing with open source tech. I’ve taken a stab at it in the past with my MythTV box, but was never terribly happy with the results, and just use a WD HD TV Live to stream stuff from my storage server today.

Overall, I think everyone had a good time, and I’m hoping this will be a successful chapter.

Sitting on the front steps of the house, enjoying the cool evening. I’ve just finished trimming the lawn and sweeping the driveway, and am waiting for Meg to get home from work. Growing up I always hated doing yardwork, and while I’m still not a fan, there is a certain feeling of satisfaction that goes along with mowing the lawn and keeping the place looking decent.

We just received our first check for the first time homebuyer’s tax credit (we each claimed half) last week, so we rushed out to buy some items we were waiting on; some new chairs, a couple tables, and some much-needed lawn equipment. Being the proud owner of a brand new Troy-Bilt, I of course had to use it last weekend. The grass was nearly knee-high when I started, but after 5 hours of walking every inch of the lawn it was cut down to size and looking much more lawn-like. Last night we went out and picked up a string trimmer to get all the little places I couldn’t mow, a Black & Decker corded electric. I was on the fence between gas and electric, but we don’t have a lot to trim and I didn’t want to muck about mixing gas. It did an adequate job, and I’m overall rather pleased with the lawn at this point.

We also had our first plumbing related fun with the house this past week. The drain from the shower stall in the master bath was leaking into our kitchen ceiling. This is covered under our builder’s warranty though, so we just had to call up and he sent out a plumber, who just tightened up something in the drain, and so far it seems to be better.

Other than that, we’ve just been running around like headless chickens. Somehow we’ve found ourselves with a fairly full social calendar between movie nights and game nights and various cookouts. To help contribute to the chaos, we’ve decided to throw a housewarming party near the end of summer, currently scheduled for late September. If you haven’t already been invited, drop me a line so we can correct that.

The bugs are starting to come out now, so I think it’s time for me to get off the stoop and head indoors.