Recent content on sigmaris.info
Last year, I picked up a new ayn Odin gaming handheld, and ended up working on installing Linux on it (regular Linux, not Android). I thought the process and things I learned during it would make for some good blog posts, so part of the way through the process I started writing down what I was doing, in the hope it would be interesting to others when published. This post will be the first in a…
Recently I’ve been following progress on support for the Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Chip in mainline Linux. I have been using a RockPRO64 single-board computer based on Rockchip’s previous top-end SoC RK3399 for several years as a media centre running Kodi, on Debian with a mainline Linux kernel (plus some patches for improved multimedia support from the LibreELEC project). I’ve…
This weekend I figured out how to set up multipath routing with Oracle Cloud’s Site-to-Site VPN. I have been using Oracle Cloud for a while as they have a generous “Always Free” plan for their 64-bit ARM virtual servers. To create a site-to-site connection between my home network and the Oracle Cloud network, I use their IPSec Site-to-Site VPN service. This type of VPN is made up…
Following on from the post about AWS logins with Yubikey, I also wanted to share another helpful bit of code to automate typing TOTP codes from a Yubikey into web pages on macOS. The usefulness of this is hopefully on the decline as websites migrate to WebAuthentication - which interfaces directly with a token like a Yubikey instead of requiring a code input as text, and doesn’t require this…
If you’re working with Amazon Web Services, and want the highest level of security around usage of your AWS account, AWS recommends that you use IAM users instead of the account’s root user, set up Multi-Factor authentication (MFA) on the IAM users, and then require MFA for API operations . Typically this requires the person performing operations on AWS to provide a one-time code when…
I recently wanted to automate building a headless Debian testing (codename “buster”) virtual machine, hosted on macOS, and it turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I expected, so I thought I’d document it here for others’ benefit. Instead of installing VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels which are quite heavyweight virtual machine apps, I wanted to run a…
Wanting to compile a small program I’d written in Rust to run on my home router, I found this guide to cross compilation of Rust code. The router is a Netgear R7000 with an ARM processor, running FreshTomato, a distribution of Linux for ARM and MIPS architecture consumer routers. The top of that guide shows an example of installing the cross-compilation toolchain for ARM on Ubuntu, but it required…
On Debian, there’s a group named ssl-cert which grants access to TLS certificates and private keys, so that services that don’t run as the root user can still use TLS certificates. For example, the PostgreSQL Debian package installs PostgreSQL to run as a user named postgres , which is a member of the ssl-cert group, and so it can use certificates and private keys in /etc/ssl . The certbot Let’s…
Dnsmasq can be configured to add various types of records like SRV, PTR, and NAPTR to its internal DNS server by various directives in its configuration file. But what if there’s a less common type of DNS record that you want to serve, which dnsmasq doesn’t have a specific configuration directive to handle? Handily, dnsmasq also supports serving arbitrary DNS resource records using the dns-rr…
This is more for my own reference, but might be useful for others. 1.2.840.113554.1.2.2 – Kerberos v5 – RFC 1964 1.2.840.48018.1.2.2 – Kerberos V5 (incorrect, used by old Windows versions) 1.3.6.1.5.5.2 – SPNEGO – RFC 4178 1.3.6.1.5.2.5 – IAKERB – draft-ietf-kitten-iakerb-03 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.2.2.10 – NTLM SSP – Heimdal:lib/gssapi/oid.txt
The news of World IPv6 Launch Day last week prompted me to properly set up IPv6 for my home network. Unfortunately my ISP doesn’t offer native IPv6 connectivity — not many consumer ISPs do — but fortunately there are free services which will provide an IPv6 ‘tunnel’ over the IPv4 internet, to the wider IPv6 world. I signed up to Hurricane Electric’s service at tunnelbroker.net and was soon up and…
This is the second part of the guide to smartcard-based authentication on Mac OS X. In this part of the guide, I’m going to assume that following Part 1, you have installed OpenSC, initialised your smartcard, and loaded or generated some certificates and private keys onto it. Now I’m going to show you how to use the card for actual authentication.
Interested in using a smartcard for secure two-factor authentication on OS X? What about E-mail signing and encryption, SSH key authentication, and more? All of these applications are possible, using the built-in smartcard support in OS X and open source software. What follows is the first part of a guide to using smartcards on OS X, using software from the OpenSC Project .
A little while ago I had a problem. My phone is a Sony Ericsson K800i, with 64MB of internal storage and a slot for Memory Stick expansion storage. I was using it as an MP3 player, and so had an 8GB memory stick in there to store MP3s. When I connected it to my Mac in USB drive mode to transfer files, it appeared in the Finder as two storage devices, one for the internal storage and one for the…
Services are a means in Mac OS X for the user to pass small pieces of data out of one application to another. The pieces of data may be snippets of text, images or files. Applications can publish Services that accept certain types of data, and these Services can be passed data out of almost any other Mac application. In Snow Leopard, the role of Services has been expanded somewhat; they can now be…
On Wednesday, I gave a talk at the Student Techmeetup here in Edinburgh on DS homebrew development. As promised, I’ve uploaded the slides from that talk as a PDF here , with links to a few tutorials and resources included in them, along with some notes.
The emitSMS plugin has been updated with a small new feature – it will now strip out dashes and spaces from your phone numbers in Address Book before sending them to the phone, as most phones don’t seem to accept numbers in this format. Grab the new version here .
In the distant past, the Address Book app in Mac OS X Tiger could send mobile SMS messages directly from within the app, if you paired your mobile phone with your Mac via Bluetooth. Along came Leopard, and the feature mysteriously vanished without trace or explanation, and hasn’t reappeared since. Missing the feature, I found a roundabout replacement in the emitSMS dashboard widget. It offers SMS…
Here’s a new version of the Address Book plugin for SMS sending, with a small bug fix intended to stop it hanging after sending an SMS. If you’ve seen this problem with earlier versions, please let me know if this version has fixed it or not 🙂
The emitSMS plugin for Address Book has been updated to use native Mac OS methods to access the phone over Bluetooth, rather than using an emulated serial port. This should make it less flaky when used under Snow Leopard. You can get the updated plugin here , and the new source code is here .
In the distant past, the Address Book app in Mac OS X Tiger could send mobile SMS messages directly from within the app, if you paired your mobile phone with your Mac via Bluetooth. Along came Leopard, and the feature mysteriously vanished without trace or explanation, and hasn’t reappeared since. Missing the feature, I found a roundabout replacement in the emitSMS dashboard widget. It offers SMS…
Here is a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks to learn more about DS homebrew coding. It’s a remake of Deflektor, an old puzzle game that I played on the Amiga. I’ve tried to keep the retro feel of the original while updating it to use the touchscreen interface. The aim is to rotate the mirrors ( ) to reflect the laser beam from the source ( ) to blow up all the triggers ( ) and then…
I’ve built a Mac (Intel) binary of DesMuME, from the latest SVN code, with a patch to enable masscat’s GDB stub. With it you can load a homebrew rom, connect to DesMuME with the copy of GDB that’s provided with devkitARM, and start debugging your homebrew code while it’s running in the emulator. For more details check out this post on the official forums.