Entries by Raymond P. Burkholder

• DebianInstaller - wiki starting point for many things installer
• Debian Installer Internals - introduction to the inner workings of the installer when it is running, its components (udebs) and its build system.
• Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide - installation instructions for the Debian GNU/Linux system for the 64-bit PC (“amd64”) architecture. It also contains pointers to more information and information on how to make the most of your new Debian system.
• Netboot Assistant - provides a tool to simplify the preparation of files for TFTP net booting
• UEFI - describe UEFI for Debian purposes: what's supported in Debian and how to use it, plus some troubleshooting tips.
• Installing Debian using network booting - describes installing a new Debian system with no CD, DVD, USB at all. By the end of the installation process, the new machine is able to run without the support of the server. During the installation, you will need a network boot server.

There are sites for that!

• BlockChain check for 1F1ptimEAvcQPFoPsAckmrKiYL6c6h5NcN - and with the ability to use that string as a content filter!
• Supposedly something similar can be performed at https://www.spamhaus.org/query/hash/
• By using it as a dnsbl,

  $ host 1Mw9bvuPpVqM6vkQwaq4JQZCYe4ZmZse1R.bl.btcblack.it
  Using domain server:
  Name: 8.8.8.8
  Address: 8.8.8.8#53
  Aliases:
  
  1Mw9bvuPpVqM6vkQwaq4JQZCYe4ZmZse1R.bl.btcblack.it has address 127.0.0.2
  
    

phoronix had an item on Software-Defined Radio Benchmarks, Other Updates This Week in terms of, since SDR is becoming popular and compute intensive, phoronix has added bencharks to their workload test tools.

Some interesting links originating from here:

• Open Benchmarking - LuaRadio - is a lightweight software-defined radio (SDR) framework built atop LuaJIT. LuaRadio provides a suite of source, sink, and processing blocks, with a simple API for defining flow graphs, running flow graphs, creating blocks, and creating data types.
• Open Benchmarking - gnuradio - is a free & open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios.
• Open Benchmarking - srsLTE - Open-source LTE software radio suite developed by Software Radio Systems (SRS).
• Open Benchmarking - liquidsdr - is home to liquid-dsp, a free and open-source signal processing library for software-defined radios written in C. Its purpose is to provide a set of extensible DSP modules that do not rely on external dependencies or cumbersome frameworks.

Somewhat associated: Noise Mapping with KSQL, a Raspberry Pi and a Software-Defined Radio - ADS-B capture, RTL2832U radio

It is relatively simple to switch between Graphical Window Manager and a text based console. The first command identifies current state.

$ sudo systemctl get-default
graphical.target

To switch to console mode:

$ sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

Then to switch back (may require reboot):

$ sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

From Key Takeaways:

• Open source programs are typically platform-agnostic, allowing them to be used in nearly any cloud and run with any application.
• Encryption is a fundamental security feature.
• Open source programs like Let’s Encrypt use encryption to ensure website domains and other programs have secure communication protocols.
• Virtualized security functions are best used with software-defined security orchestration because that brings out benefits like automation and function scalability.
• By using an open source update system framework like TUF, attackers have a harder time manipulating the update system and corrupting software.
• An open source policy controller works across clouds and platforms and enables application policies to be more uniformly applied and enforced in those environments.
• A modern open source runtime security program can better protect a cloud-native application because it can work with many cloud-native applications across multiple clouds.

References to:

• Open Security Controller Project
• The Update Framework
• Open Policy Agent - meat and potatos of policy evaluation and deployment

When you purchase a Treasury note you are lending money to the government for a specified period of time (i.e. 30 days to 30 years) at a fixed rate of interest or yield. The risk of default on Treasuries has generally been considered nonexistent.

The federal government, with assistance from the Federal Reserve, can always print money to pay its debts. But this isn’t without risks. Because printing dollars to pay debts devalues the existing stock of dollar. So while the nominal return is preserved…the inflation adjusted return goes negative.

In short, inflation destroys Treasury values for investors. To account for expectations of rising inflation, yields rise. But this presents another problem for long term Treasury investors.

When Treasury yields go up, Treasury prices go down. Over the last eight months, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note has increased from 0.5 percent to over 1.54 percent – or 104 basis points.

Treasury investors stand to face major losses. Moreover, as interest rates rise, and borrowing costs become more expensive, several other things happen.

High priced stocks become less attractive. In addition, higher borrowing costs make it harder for over leveraged zombie corporations, state governments, municipalities, and Washington to roll over their debts.

... the great monetary inflation has already happened. The great price inflation is picking up, regardless of what the Bureau of Labor Statics’ bogus CPI report says. Thus, it is certainly possible that the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note could increase another 50-basis points come summer.

There could be corporate debt, hedge fund, and pension fund financial blow ups galore. But this is exactly what the Fed is trying to avoid. The Fed wants inflation without higher interest rates.

-- Fifty Basis Points To Disaster - ZeroHedge

Bringing this back to security—instead of thinking “I need a firewall,” you should be thinking “I need a Policy Enforcement Point that can control network traffic, and a way to define that policy across my infrastructure.” Or, from another angle—instead of thinking “I need to deploy an IDS here to examine my web app traffic for SQL injections,” you should be thinking “I need to make sure that the web application traffic is scanned for SQL injections before it is processed by the app. I have several PEPs in my architecture that may be able to accomplish this goal.” -- Zero Trust Security, An Enterprise Guide, p51

In fact, where is the Clifford Chance call to investigate the fact that a trading strategy of buying at the New York close silver price and selling at the New York open silver price (New York Overnight Index) would have returned 12,000% since 1970 (or 120 times), whereas a strategy of buying at the New York open and selling at the New York close (New York Intraday Index) would have lost nearly 90% of your investment since 1970.

$ lsusb
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0a2b Intel Corp. Bluetooth wireless interface
Bus 001 Device 029: ID 03f0:1a47 HP, Inc USB2.1 Hub
Bus 001 Device 028: ID 03f0:1a47 HP, Inc USB2.1 Hub
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 03f0:1a47 HP, Inc USB2.1 Hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 03f0:1a47 HP, Inc USB2.1 Hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 045e:00db Microsoft Corp. Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 V1.0
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0424:3fb7 Microchip Technology, Inc. (formerly SMSC) Babyface (23509439)
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Device are mainly identified using a pair of hexadecimal numbers, like 04b3:3108.

The 4 first hexadecimal digits are the Vendor ID (04b3 = IBM). The 4 last hexadecimal digits are the Device ID (3108 = ThinkPad 800dpi Optical Travel Mouse).

$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/usb/devices | grep -E "^([TSPD]:.*|)$"

T:  Bus=01 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#=  1 Spd=480  MxCh=16
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1
P:  Vendor=1d6b ProdID=0002 Rev= 5.10
S:  Manufacturer=Linux 5.10.0-3-amd64 xhci-hcd
S:  Product=xHCI Host Controller
S:  SerialNumber=0000:00:14.0

....

And reduced the size of global negative-yielding debt (reducing the attractiveness of zero-yielding crypto)...

“The move in precious metals prices is most often in direct correlation with the direction of interest rates, particularly on sovereign interest rates, and particularly on U.S. sovereign interest rates. So, any firming in the interest rate is good for the precious metals price. Speculators need to determine whether this move higher in interest rates will continue.” - Historic Washout in Bond Market Clearly Impacts Precious Metals

From USB drive that contains a partition table, when installing firmware from a USB drive, there is the following note:

   - Workaround is to format the USB drive without a partition table,
     e.g. "mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdc" (mkfs.vfat actually expects a
     partition table, -I override forces it to use the entire device)

Miscellaneous:

• Mounting the root filesystem via NFS (nfsroot) - n order to use a diskless system, such as an X-terminal or printer server for example, it is necessary for the root filesystem to be present on a non-disk device. This may be an initramfs (see Documentation/filesystems/ ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt), a ramdisk (see Documentation/admin-guide/initrd.rst) or a filesystem mounted via NFS.

A key resource to keep: Part-UUID - Persistent device naming for block devices has been made possible by the introduction of udev and has some advantages over the use of traditional bus-based names.

A basic overview of which devices are associated with which persistent names simply by invoking:

$ ls -lR /dev/disk

When in the grub prompt, these two commands provide good situational awareness:

• run the 'set' command to see what the current boot and network variables are.
• run the 'ls' command to see what devices and partitions are available

Then something like 'ls (hd0,gpt1)/boot' can show files in that partition

When running manual boot operations in the grub menu on a Dell Wyse 3040, something along the lines of the following might be used:

grub> linux (hd0,gpt2)/vmliunz root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ro
grub> initrd (hd0,gpt2)/initrd.img
grub> boot

At Grub not loading config file or booting into linux automatically shows the trick of starting the grub menu:

grub> configfile (hd0,gpt4)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

• iPXE installation and EFI - building menus
• 4.1 Installing GRUB using grub-install - from the Grub manual
• iPXE and Debian PreSeed
• netboot.xyz is a way to PXE boot various operating system installers or utilities from one place within the BIOS without the need of having to go retrieve the media to run the tool. iPXE is used to provide a user friendly menu from within the BIOS that lets you easily choose the operating system you want along with any specific types of versions or bootable flags.
• Index of boot.ipxe.org - up to date files for for use, note the iso is for legacy boot only
• Debian UEFI - intended to describe UEFI for Debian purposes
• Emedded scripts -
• Debian Debootstrap - is a tool which will install a Debian base system into a subdirectory of another, already installed system - uses chroot to make and modify images
• ipxe-scripts/boot/linux/debian.ipxe -
• Booting CoreOS Container Linux via iPXE - many descriptive details
• Automated Install with Debian Preseed - well documented preseed for a number of scenarios
• -
• -
• -

Some items to look into:

• Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) -

For the life of me, even though there is a menu option the Dell Wyse ThinClient 3040 to EFI PXEBoot, it pulls DHCP information, but never requests the boot files from the PXE server.

Probably the most detailed account of innards of the Wyse 3040 (N10D): Hardware.

Instead, as a work around, the goal is to keep a USB stick inserted into the 3040 to act as a PXE boot mechanism to install Debian on to the local drive.

After building a USB filesystem, Install IPXE files (as a side effect, it adds an ipxe menu item to grub.cfg):

$ apt install ipxe

Mount the partition:

$ mkdir mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 mnt

Create the EFI BOOT directory:

$ sudo mkdir -p mnt/EFI/BOOT/

Copy the IPXE EFI boot file natively, and as a required name:

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/ipxe/ipxe.efi mnt/EFI/BOOT/
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/ipxe/ipxe.efi mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
$ ls mnt/EFI/BOOT/
BOOTX64.EFI  ipxe.efi

The rename to BOOTX64.EFI is required as this is hardcoded in the boot menus for the Wyse 3040. During the tail end of a Debian Expert install, there is a question of whether to install into a legacy EUFI boot directory. This performs that /EFI/BOOT/... build.

Install Grub (see --removable reference:

# sudo grub-install /dev/sda --removable  # may solve the above problem with BOOTX64.EFI, needs to be tried
$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.

Unmount the drive for use:

$ sudo umount /dev/sda1

BIOS entries for the Dell Wyse 3040 to use with this iPXE USB (default password Fireport):

• General -> Boot Sequence -> disable both IP6&IP4 Realtek GBE
• System Configuration -> UEFI Network Stack -> uncheck Enable UEFI Network Stack
• System Configuration -> Integrated Nic -> Enabled (no PXE)
• System Configuration -> USB Configuration -> check Enable USB Boot Support
• Secure Boot -> Secure Boot Enable -> Disabled
• Power Management -> Wake on LAN -> LAN Only
• Virtualization Support -> Virtualization -> Enable