Eye-Fi Madness
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…
