Recent content in Blog Posts on ./Sam_Stelfox.sh
Recently I found my desktop motherboard was vulnerable booting malicious payloads due to the use of a developer reference key in production firmware . I have a Gigabyte Aorus X570 Elite motherboard which is known to have a rather problematic UEFI BIOS. Turning secure boot on, without the Microsoft keys present, would prevent any graphical output. The system was booting behind the scenes and I…
While using a tool that unexpectedly was running part of its build using the docker daemon on Linux. I need to quickly come up with a workaround. Most Linux distributions have natively moved away from Docker in favor of the more secure and community maintained "podman" project. The specific error I was seeing was: 1 requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', FileNotFoundError(2,…
found top level header in "/blog/2023/04/chained-tracing-subscribers/" that didn't match meta title ("Combining "Subscribers" in Rust's Tracing Library" != "Combining \"Subscribers\" in Rust's Tracing Library") Tracing is a fantastic Rust library that I've found immensely useful. At first glance, the distinctions and roles of Subscribers, Layers, Filters, and Writers seem clear and…
While attempting to automate some filesystem creation that involved LVM I kept running into an issue occasionally with some holding open the logical volumes. I would attempt to disable the volume using the following command: 1 2 $ lvchange -an system/storage Logical volume system/storage contains a filesystem in use. All of the mounts for the filesystems that were on the volume were unmounted, so…
It's been a hot second since I've dived into the lands of initramfs and as is the way of things, it has gotten a tad more complicated. The simple way that used to work wonders (and is still required) to start with, was to identify if the file is compressed: 1 2 $ file /boot/initramfs-current.img /boot/initramfs-current.img: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC) In this case the file appears to be…
I've recently been playing around with Blender (following this tutorial series ). In Part 4 of the Level 1 series, the host Andrew Price is teaching about loop selects which very simply is holding down Alt while clicking on a vertex. The issue wasn't working for me though I found quite a few other users experiencing the issue. The most common fix was when people had three button mouse emulation…
While cleaning up some tech debt, a curious issue cropped up. Nginx was running in an alpine container as a front end load balancer. It had a dynamic config that got periodically updated by a sidecar, and had filebeat shipping logs out to a central collector but otherwise was just a very simple Nginx config. Every now and then the container would crash, it would automatically recover fast enough…
I recently began trying out Cinnamon as my desktop environment and I've been thoroughly enjoying it. The only issue I was having was occasionally a page's form input fields would have a dark background while still having dark text making it impossible to read, and very difficult to write. It wasn't happening everywhere, and I couldn't track down what about a website would cause the issue. Most…
Once upon a time there was a single AWS account. In this AWS account was several regions but a single VPC. To make sure expansions into other regions was possible this VPC chose to use the largest private subnet which just so happened to also be the default ("10.0.0.0/8"). Another AWS account enter the picture and while they were single they came to the same conclusion and followed the best…
One of the Cisco Catalyst 3750 I had to work on recently had it's flash completely wiped. When this happens you can only flash the filesystem using the XMODEM serial console. This is a fairly well documented process on Windows. On Linux most of the documented ways involve switching between multiple utilities and can be tricky. I wanted to documented how I did this and possibly help other in the…