Recent content in Scott Leggett on @smlx's blog
I think this Hugging Face / OpenAI “model sandbox escape” drama is overhyped but not for the reasons I’ve seen written up in many places. And I think that we are still stuck on OpenAI’s preferred framing, which is that their model has scary capabilities that allowed it to escape a secure sandbox. Yes, this hack was objectively impressive. The exploit development, pivoting,…
## Introduction I picked up this book after reading an interesting blog post that mentioned it in passing. Given Lars’ recommendation I knew the book would be good. I usually don’t have much time for reading and this book sat on my desk for a week or so before I caught COVID again and suddenly found myself with time to kill while otherwise lying on the couch feeling very average.
## TL;DR I reverse-engineered the encrypted protocol GoodWe smart meters and solar inverters use to send metrics to the cloud. I used this research to build a prometheus exporter . ## The Sun: so hot right now I got a solar PV system installed in my house in mid 2023. I did the bare minimum of research beforehand - just talked to a couple of different installers about pricing, sizing and the…
## My NAS My NAS is cobbled together from an old workstation and a bunch of drives cannibalised from other machines over the years. Not only are the drives second-hand, consumer grade, and of varying ages and brands, but they are also all different sizes - ranging from 250 GB up to 2 TB in size. Any competent sysadmin would take one look and run away screaming, but it has held up surprisingly well…
## Managed Kubernetes restrictions Managed Kubernetes takes a huge operational burden off your shoulders. You can have perfectly elastic infrastructure where nodes scale in and out of your cluster as workload requirements change. It’s convenient, but it does come with limitations. One I ran into recently is running setup commands on the nodes in your cluster when they start. For example,…
## Motivation Wordle is a puzzle intended to exercise your vocabulary and logical reasoning skills. But what if you just want to procrastinate by writing some simple regular expressions? Read on to find out how! ## Prerequisites A word list matching the language of the puzzle is required. On Debian you will probably have a symlink at /etc/dictionaries-common/words pointing to a suitable list. If…
## The problem I had to migrate an old logging system to a new logging system, where one logging source was emitting syslog over UDP . During the migration we needed to keep the old system in place, and in parallel set up new system for validation and UAT before finally cutting over. The simplest solution I could think up was to duplicate the UDP syslog packets, and send them to both logging…
## The problem kubectl is the new, cloud-native ssh . That is, it’s the low-level tool to break out when you need to manually inspect or manipulate the state of your running applications. ssh makes it easy to pop open a few virtual terminal windows to perform different tasks on several systems at once. Each virtual terminal window and its PTY encapsulates its own running state. There’s…
Dahua are a white-label OEM who are apparently responsible for many common models of IP camera and Network Video Recorder (NVR) systems. Files exported from such a system have a .dav extension and a header identifying the manufacturer: $ hexdump -Cn 1024 NVR_ch1_main_20180416.dav 00000000 44 41 48 55 41 22 05 00 25 5c 21 49 da 60 21 49 |DAHUA"..%\!I.`!I| 00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00…
## Me Hi, I’m Scott, and I currently live in Western Australia. I blog about software, cloud, infosec, and miscellaneous other stuff. ### Contact I have a Github account, or you can contact me via Email or Mastodon