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26.02.2013
10:25

Sony Xperia Ray with CyanogenMod 10 (Jelly Bean)

Last weekend, I decided to get rid of Sony Ericsson default firmware on my Xperia Ray phone (from 2011). Biggest problem with the Sony firmware was the so called "bloatware" like WhatsApp, Facebook etc. you couldn't remove.

There are plenty of manuals on the web to do this, but it's rather confusion if you're not used to flash your android phone.

This is, what I used and how I got it working to swith to cyanogenMod 10 (nightly).

First the online resources:

  1.  http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_urushi: The Manual on Cyanogenmod - specific for my phone
  2. http://www.themobimag.com/how-to-get-cm10-jellybean-on-sony-ericsson-xperia-rayst18i/: good HowTo
  3. http://www.themobimag.com/flash-85-baseband-on-sony-ericsson-xperia-rayst18i/: HowTo flash even the baseband firmware part

The steps:

  1. Unlock the bootloader:
    • You have to download the Android SDK to have the tiny tool "fastboot".
    • Test if fastboot is working with your computer->usb->phone. To enter the fastboot mode you have to switch off the phone. When the phone is off you press down the volume key AND you plug in the USB-cabel. The LED flashes blue now and you are in fastboot mode.
    • You have to apply for an unlock code from Sony with your phonen IMEI. This code is sent by email to you.
    • With the unlock code you can flash the bootloader. All user settings are gone afterwards!
  2. Get current CyanogenMod nightly and place the zip-archive to /sdcard. Boot your phone as usual to do this.
  3. Put the Google Apps too: Gapps flashable zip
  4. Get the file boot.img from the zip-archive and place it on your PC.
  5. Put the phone in fastboot mode and flash the boot.img onto the device and reboot it afterwards:
    • fastboot -i 0xfce flash boot boot.img
    • fastboot -i 0xfce reboot
  6. Wipe data/factory reset and install the zip-archive and afterwards the Google Apps.
  7. Reboot and wait... 10 minutes for the first time

 

This way, I couldn't make any backup before from the Sony Firmware. With CyanogenMod you can use the new installed ClockworkMod Recovery to make backups and restore them (or parts like /data).

 

My phone is now faster, there is more memory space and I'm really satisfied with this step.

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28.09.2011
15:41

[Review] BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide by PACKT publishing

new PACKT publishing book about BackTrack 5

PACKT publishing, September 2011

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide!

 

I received a copy of this book one month ago. Due to other projects, I couldn't start reading immediately.

 

Vivek Ramachandran wrote this book.  Vivek is a security researcher originally from India who seems to be good known on all security conferences.

The book is not too big (about 200 pages) and you find many screenshots of terminal outputs. And you will need these screenshots because they explain many things even better than a long description.

 

Why BackTrack Linux? The author writes his motiviation in the preface. BackTrack is a distribution with lots of security utils already on board. I tried it with Debian stable because this was already installedon my laptop. This works too, but you have to download and build several tools by your own.

 

I read the book like a thriller! Every chapter has several sections where you get step by step deeper into the wireless analytics. I knew most basics before. But didn't know how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network. And I learned that hidden ESSIDs help absolutely nothing!

It's good to know the handling of wireless on the linux console and to understand basics of the protocoll. But if you don't: you learn it quite fast with the book howto bring up your wireless interface with iwconfig, wpa_supplicant and co.

 

But It's not only reading. It's practical beginner's guide. It makes fun to follow the steps described. And I was happy to fail to crack my WPA2-protected network with the dictionary attack.

 

There is a sample chapter online about the advanced WLAN attacks. There you can enjoy the screenshots even in color :-)

 

In the last chapters you start working on RADIUS networks. This complex topic is made a little easier with BackTrack Linux because there is already a preconfigured freeradios-server installed.

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02.08.2011
18:54

Trim-Slice Arrived - First Steps

Trim-Slice in UPS Package
Trim-Slice unpacked
Trim-Slice First Boot into Ubuntu 11.04

Last week, I read again some forum posts about the Compulab Trim-Slice and.... Yes, I ordered one Trim-Slice Pro directly from Compulab in Israel! It costs $370 including shipping to Germany.

 

It was quite fast with UPS Saver in Dresden. Compulab shipped it on Sunday, 31th July and it arrived today on Tuesday, 2th August. Yesterday, UPS from Cologne called me to get my customs-tariff-number. I have never heard about this but I applied for one and this was enough for UPS and the customs. I only had to pay the import VAT (19%) but this will be refunded later.

 

Puh, it was quite easy to start the Trim-Slice. I just connected my monitor with an DVI-HDMI-cable, plugged the power and after approximately 2 minutes the Ubuntu desktop was seen. There is no boot-logo, splash-screen or text console to follow. I don't know yet, howto edit e.g. the u-boot parameters. I will see later.

 

The system works, even wireless seemed to work at the first glance. But later I noticed that it is quite unstable with my WPA2 protected network. I'm not sure why, but I started to compile the trimslice-kernel and to replace the included rt2800usb driver with the rt2870sta from RaLink. With no success until now :-(

 

At the moment, the Trim-Slice seems to be slower than my Fit-PC2 and it's getting hot because the power management is not working yet. Unfortunately, I cannot measure the power consumption at the moment. This and many other details will follow in this blog.

 

So stay tuned!

 

Update:

Accessing the u-boot is so easy. That's why the Trim-Slice has an ordinary serial port! Connected with a null-modem-cable and an USB-serial-converter, you can access the console with minicom. There you follow the boot process and you login automatically as root user. Great! My own, native compiled kernel is working now.

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24.07.2011
20:43

Kernel 3.0.0 out and running on fit-pc2

fit-pc2 running with LXDE and kernel 3.0.0

I just realized that kernel 3.0.0 is available since friday. So I just compiled it with my config from 2.6.39 and... trara: it's working! Here you can find my new config-3.0.0 for the fit-pc2.

 

Compared to the last kernel upgrade, this one was quite easy. The psb_gfx driver comes still from the psb-dkms package.

 

What's new in kernel 3.0.0? First: the version numbering. After 2.6.39 follows now 3.0.0. Ok, if Linus like so, why not. We are working to long with 2.6. But I hope, the linux kernel is not following now the version numbering inflation like chrome and firefox...

 

There is a quite good site where the changes are explaned: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

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22.07.2011
16:07

Bash Commandline Completion - Bugfix for Ubuntu 11.04

Bash completion is action

Since my update to Ubuntu 11.04 I missed a very, very useful and important feature for people like me, working most of the time on the console.

 

I don't care which window-manager-system-style I'm using. GNOME, KDE, LXDE or whatever as long as the terminal is starting fast.

 

In Ubuntu 11.04 is a bug with the bash_completion. This helps you completing the filenames with the TAB-key. Especially with filenames and directories with spaces or German "Umlaute".

Right now, I spent half an hour to google for a solution and it's so simple. There is only an error in /etc/bash_completion (line 1587):

 

# makeinfo and texi2dvi are defined elsewhere. 
for i in a2ps awk bash bc bison cat colordiff cp csplit \
curl cut date df diff dir du enscript env expand fmt fold gperf gprof \
grep grub head indent irb ld ldd less ln ls m4 md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod \
mv netstat nl nm objcopy objdump od paste patch pr ptx readelf rm rmdir \
sed seq sha{,1,224,256,384,512}sum shar sort split strip tac tail tee \
texindex touch tr uname unexpand uniq units vdir wc wget who; do
have $i && complete -F _longopt -o filenames $i
done

 

This bug has been discussed on the bugtracker at launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash-completion/+bug/769866

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[ 26.02.2013 ]