Before You Sudo Rm -rf /, Take Some Precautions

April 21, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 40 Comments

Maintaining or administering a computer system remotely is a common enough task these days, but it’s also something that can go sideways on you quickly if you aren’t careful. How many of us are guilty of executing a command, having it fail, and only then realizing that we weren’t connected to the correct computer at all? [Callan] occasionally has this issue as well, but in at least one instance, he deleted all of the contents of the wrong server by mistake. To avoid that mistake again, he uses color codes in the command line in a fairly unique way.

The solution at first seems straightforward enough. Since the terminal he’s using allows for different colors to be displayed for the user and hostname on the bash prompt, different text and background colors are used for each server. The only problem with this is that his friends also have access to these servers, and one of them is red/green colorblind, which led to another near-catastrophic mix-up. To ensure no edge cases are missed, [Callan] built a script which runs on every new server he spins up which selects two random colors, checks that they contrast well with each other, don’t create problems for the colorblind, and then applies them to the bash prompt.

For a problem most of us have had at some point or another, it’s a fairly elegant solution that helps ensure we’re sending the right commands to the right computer. This adds a layer of automation to the process and, while some color combinations do look similar, there are enough to help out most of us in some way, especially since he has released the source code on his GitHub page. For other helpful server administration tips, we’d recommend the Linux-Fu article about deploying your own dynamic DNS.

Restore Your Formerly Useless Ouya Console

August 3, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

Plenty of electronics end up in the junk drawer or even landfill after their useful life ends, but in the modern world of planned obsolescence a lot more devices are thrown out simply because of lack of support. Sometimes it’s even worse than that as some products are designed to “phone home” and will lack critical functionality if the original producer of that product gets purchased by someone else, wants to sell its customers more products, or goes out of business. The latter is essentially what happened to the Ouya console, but if you still have one of these around you might be able to get it running again.

The Ouya was a commercial failure but an ambitious take on a new kind of gaming console. With little more processing power than a smart phone, the idea was to produce a console for the casual gamer that also could play retro games and other games available for Android. It had a low price point but eventually couldn’t sell enough units to stay in business. These devices needed to see a specific server to gain full functionality, and [Christian] has created essentially a spoofed server that allows users to sign in to their consoles and install games again. All that is needed is to modify a few config files on the Ouya to point to a different address and the Ouya boots up just like it’s 2012 again.

This project goes a long way to show that there are plenty of serviceable electronics out there that have just been needlessly borked, and with a little elbow grease it’s sometimes possible to get them working. The state of this machine is a little surprising given that the original machine promised to be hacker and developer friendly.

Thanks to [Josiah] for the tip!

Remote Screen Viewer Is Text-Only

May 31, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

Have you been slowly falling down a rabbit hole of Stallman-like paranoia of computers ever since installing Ubuntu for the first time in 2007? Do you now abhor anything with a GUI, including browsers? Do you check your mail with the command line even though you’re behind seven proxies? But, do you still want to play Minecraft? If so, this command-line-only screen viewer might just be the tool to use a GUI without technically using one.

This remote screen viewer is built in Python by [louis-e] and, once installed, allows the client to view the screen of the server even if the client is a text-only console. [louis-e] demonstrates this from within a Windows command prompt. The script polls the server screen and then displays it in the console using the various colors and textures available. As a result, the resolution and refresh rate are both quite low, but it is still functional enough to play Minecraft and do other GUI-based tasks as long as there’s no fine text to read anywhere.

The video below only shows a demonstration of the remote screen viewer, and we can imagine plenty of uses beyond this proof-of concept game demonstration. Installing a desktop environment and window manager is not something strictly necessary for all computers, so this is a functional workaround if you don’t want to waste time and resources installing either of those components. If you’re looking for remote desktop software for a more specific machine, though, take a look at this software which enables remote desktop on antique Macs.

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Flashing TI Chips With An ESP

April 3, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 29 Comments

Texas Instruments is best known to the general public for building obsolete calculators and selling them at extraordinary prices to students, but they also build some interesting (and reasonably-priced) microcontrollers as well. While not as ubiquitous as Atmel and the Arduino platform, they can still be found in plenty of consumer electronics and reprogrammed, and [Aaron] aka [atc1441] demonstrates how to modify them with an ESP32 as an intermediary.

Specifically, the TI chips in this build revolve around the 8051-core microcontrollers, which [Aaron] has found in small e-paper price tags and other RF hardware. He’s using an ESP32 to reprogram the TI chips, and leveraging a web server on the ESP in order to be able to re-flash them over WiFi. Some of the e-paper displays have built-in header pins which makes connecting them to the ESP fairly easy, and once that’s out of the way [Aaron] also provides an entire software library for interacting with these microcontrollers through the browser interface.

Right now the project supports the CC2430, CC2510 and CC1110 variants, but [Aaron] plans to add support for more in the future. It’s a fairly comprehensive build, and much better than buying the proprietary TI programmer, so if you have some of these e-paper displays laying around the barrier to entry has been dramatically lowered. If you don’t have this specific type of display laying around, we’ve seen similar teardowns and repurposing of other e-paper devices in the past as well.

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Against The Cloud

February 19, 2022 by Elliot Williams 58 Comments

One of our writers is working on an article about hosting your own (project) website on your own iron, instead of doing it the modern, cloudy-servicey way. Already, this has caused quite a bit of hubbub in the Hackaday Headquarters. Who would run their own server in 2022, and why?

The arguments against DIY are all strong. If you just want to spin up a static website, you can do it for free in a bazillion different places. GitHub’s Pages is super convenient, and your content is version controlled as a side benefit. If you want an IoT-type data-logging and presentation service, there are tons of those as well — I don’t have a favorite. If you want e-mail, well, I don’t have to tell you that a large American search monopoly offers free accounts, for the low price of slurping up all of your behavioral data. Whatever your need, chances are very good that there’s a service for you out there somewhere in the cloud.

And that’s awesome if you only want the service provided. But what if you want to play around? Or learn how it all works under the hood? This is Hackaday!

For instance, you could run your own mail server just for your friends and family. The aforementioned search monopolist will probably flag all of your e-mail as spam, partly because they don’t trust small e-mail providers, and partly because that’s the “m” in monopoly. But if you can get folks to whitelist the addresses, you’ll be in business. And then you open up a world of fun and foolery. You can write hooks to automatically handle mail, or you can create an infinite number of mail accounts, even on the fly as per Spamgourmet, the most awesome anti-spam tool of the last 30 years. Or you can invent your own. Run a mailing list for your relatives. Or do something stupid.

I used to run a service where, when a particular account received an e-mail, the attached photo was pushed up to a website with the subject line as the caption. Instant photo-blog, of the strangest and least secure sort. Getting it running was a few lines of Bash scripting, and an afternoon of fun. Is there a service that does this, already existing in the cloud? Probably. One that allows you a little privacy and doesn’t track your every move? Maybe. But even if there is, would I have learned about sendmail by using this service? Nope!

I hear you saying “security” under your breath, and you’re right. This system was secured by lock made of purest obscurity. But still, in seven years of running the service, nobody guessed the magic e-mail address, not once. Knowledge of the e-mail address was essentially a password, but if I needed extra security I probably could have implemented it in a few lines of Bash anyway. The webpage itself was static HTML, so good luck with that, Hackerman! (The site’s been down for a while now, so you missed your chance.)

If you just want a service, you can be served. But if you want to be a server, a first-class Internet citizen, with your own cloud in the sky, nothing’s stopping you either. And in contrast to using someone else’s computers, running your own is an invitation to play. It’s a big, Internet-connected sandbox. There are an infinity of funny ideas out there that you can implement on your own box, and a lot to learn. If you hack on someone else’s box, it’s a crime. If you hack on your own, it’s a pleasure.

I know it’s anachronistic, but give it a try. (PDF, obscenity, uncorrected typos.) Be your own cloud.

Dial Into The Internet Like It’s 1999

February 18, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

Restoring classic hardware of any sort is a great hobby to have, whether it’s restoring vintage cars, tools, or even antique Apple or Commodore computers. Understanding older equipment can help improve one’s understanding of the typically more complicated modern equivalents, plus it’s just plain fun to get something old up and running again. Certainly we see more retro computing restorations around here, but one thing that we don’t typically see much of is the networking equipment that would have gotten those older computers onto the early Internet. [Retrocet] has a strong interest in that area, and his latest dial-up server really makes us feel like we’re back in the 90s.

This home networking lab is built around a Cobalt Qube 2 that was restored after it was gifted to him as a wedding present. The Qube had a cutting edge 250 MHz 64-bit processor with up to 256 MB of RAM, and shipped with a customized Linux distribution as an operating system. The latest upgrade to this build sped up the modems to work at their full 56k rates which involved the addition of a DIVA T/A ISDN terminal and some additional hardware which ensures that incoming calls to the modems are digital. Keeping the connections digital instead of analog keeps the modems from lowering their speed to 33k to handle the conversions.

Until recently, [Retrocet] was running some of the software needed for this setup in a custom virtual machine, but thanks to the full restoration of the Qube and some tweaking of the Red Hat Linux install to improve the Point-to-Point Protocol capabilities of the older system, everything is now running on the antique hardware. If you are like [Retrocet] and have a bunch of this older hardware sitting around, there are still some ISPs available that can provide you with some service.

Voice-Controlled Smart Home From The Foundation Up

August 16, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

Smart homes are becoming an increasingly popular way to automate one’s home, whether it’s turning on lights, closing blinds, or even feeding pets. But the commercial offerings often rely on an internet connection to reach servers in order to work, which invites a lot of privacy concerns for a large percentage of us as well as being inconvenient when the internet is down. Essentially the only way to have a privacy-respecting, self-sufficient smart home is to build one on your own from the ground up, which is exactly what [Xasin] has done with this project.

This build is based on ESP32 modules with a Raspberry Pi as a hub, but it’s not as simple as a MQTT implementation. Not only does the self-contained home automation setup not rely on any outside services, but a failure of the central Pi server will not impact the nodes either as they are configured to continue operating independently even without central control. This allows for a robust home automation implementation without a single point of failure, and also includes some other features that are helpful as well including voice control, all while retaining a core design philosophy that makes it relatively easy to build.

Not only is the build technologically impressive for its standalone capabilities and its elimination of privacy concerns, but [Xasin] also did an excellent job with the physical design as well, adding plenty of RGB and a hexagonal enclosure that gives it a unique look wherever its is placed. If you’re renting right now or otherwise unable to interface any automation with your current home, be sure to take a look at some projects that do home automation without making any permanent changes.

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