taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Tech: January 24th, besides being the date the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, is supposedly the day of maximal post-xmas misery. Well, it certainly was for me today.

I decided to power on my old desktop to set it up as a back-room fileserver, and twiddled the partition table accordingly to nuke a few unused Windows partitions and maximise usable space.

Somehow or other, some component of my system decided that it would henceforth be non-bootable. It seems some BIOSes don’t like partition tables where a high-numbered logical partition have a lower starting sector than a boot logical partition, or something… GRUB just errored out with an obscure ‘Error 17′, which apparently means that it couldn’t find its boot partition any more.

OK, so I needed a boot disk. But I had 1 laptop with a CD/DVD drive but no floppy drive, and a desktop with a floppy drive but no CD drive (due to hardware failure)… and the original linux boot floppy was long gone, seeing as I’d hardly booted this machine in the duration of two house moves. Argh.

A dinky little Cruzer mini 128MB USB flash drive saved the day. (R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible is a tiny Linux distro that fits into 27MB, well inside the USB drive’s limits; it has an exceptionally helpful and detailed README detailing exactly what needs to be done to create a bootable USB flash drive from its ISO image, using just the generic linux toolchain.

Together with fdisk and parted’s ‘rescue a lost partition’ mode, I was able to get the mangled partition table back into shape, mount the boot disk, change the fstab and grub configuration file, and reboot into a working system. phew!

Many thanks to Kent Robotti, who’s done a great job with RIP.

On the other hard — no thanks to whoever came up with the arcane rules behind the IDE partition table… argh.

Tags: boot, day, desktop, disk, drive, grub, linux, partition, table, tech, usb

Linux: so it seems one of the GNOME guys wants to rewrite the rc.d boot script system in Python. Eek!

• scary OSNews interview
• Slashdot story
• My comment
• Richard Gooch’s cool need(8)/provide(8) tools

Games: Someone has broken into Valve Software’s network and stolen the source code for Half-Life 2 — shacknews:

• 1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
• 2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
• 3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
• 4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
• 5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook’s preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn’t been seen anywhere else, and isn’t detected by normal virus scanning tools).

Insanely bad news for Valve. :(

Tags: account, boot, email, gnome, linux, machine, script, someone, source, valve, virus