Booting The Heron from a U3

Well, one day last week, I got bored and decided to tinker with my Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB with U3. Normally, when you jam one of these in your USB port, it shows up as a 6MB CD-ROM drive and the rest of the space as a USB Mass Storage Device (USB Harddrive).

Now, here's the neat thing: It does this all in hardware.
The chipset inside registers as two distinct devices, a CD-ROM with autoplay software for windows with the fancy U3 launchpad, and the actual flash drive. Windows Device Manager shows two devices, and jamming it in my Ubuntu 8.04 installation also displays as two drives. So, thinking about this, I walked over to a friend's PC, rammed it in the front panel USB, hit the power button, and whacked F12 to show the boot drive selection menu.

Imagine my surprise when even the BIOS recognized it as two distinct devices...
So, I started tooling around google, and discovered the "U3 Universal Customizer".
Normally, people would use this to patch in a new ISO under 6MB to replace the existing one.

I began screwing around with some of the other software from the Hak5 site, and poked around with the USB Switchblade & USB Hacksaw software...

Basically, what they are, is a replacement for the 6MB portion of the drive that contains some 'malware' that will bleed a windows system dry -- swipes all the passwords, sets up an encrypted stunnel, and emails it all off to an address of your choice. Interesting, but not terribly useful unless you're a vengeful 14 year old intent on swiping some other kiddie's myspace passwords for fun and pr0fit. Big deal. Since I run Ubuntu primarily now, it wouldn't affect me, even with WINE installed, due to the very nice "This disc has autoplay, do you want to execute it?" dialog.

So I tinkered around with it some more... And then I found out by trial and error that the U3 Universal Customizer can change the domain size of the CD side of the device! The first time I tried this was with a 10MB ISO containing Process Explorer and some other bits including DiskTrix's Ultimate Defrag. From everything I read, I was told this would brick the unit, but I tried anyway. It worked!

So then I figured, hey, wait a minute. If I can shoehorn 10MB on there, what about 700MB?
Well, first try, it didn't work... but LPUninstaller managed to unbork my drive and LPInstaller got me back to the standard U3 Launchpad.

Then I thought... Hey, what if there's a signature stuck on the ISO somewhere that the U3 bits are looking for?

I dug up a copy of MagicISO, which can normally remaster ISOs, opened up cruzer-autorun.iso, deleted everything but the autorun.inf, dropped process explorer in there, edited the autorun.inf, opened up my Ubuntu 8.04 ISO, saved the bootsector to a BIF file, copied all of the files out of the ISO to C:\Ubu804, loaded the bootsector.bif into the cruzer-autorun.iso, and dropped all the files in C:\Ubu804 in there, and ran U3 Universal Customizer...

*45* minutes later, SUCCESS!

So I jammed the drive into my friend's PC, hit the power button, whacked F12 to get to the boot menu, and selected the U3 Titanium CDROM device...

And bricked my pants as Ubuntu's CD Bootloader came up. Hit enter twice, and about 45 seconds later, I'm staring at the Ubuntu 8.04 desktop, grinning my ass off like an idiot. Plus you can use the rest of the Mass Storage side for "persistant" mode! Now if I could just figure out how to get "toram" working again, and dump openoffice from casper, I'd be one happy camper!

To sum it all up:

Edit the existing cruzer-autorun.iso with MagicISO instead of creating a new ISO.
"Burn" the ISO onto the Cruzer with U3 Universal Customizer.

This should work with just about any bootable ISO that doesn't rely on things expecting hard coded ISO9660 LBA addresses.

(And it should even work on an UBCD4Win / BartPE / OpenSolaris Indiana or Nevada /Nexenta ISO under 4096MB!)

The only thing you need is unrestricted access to a Windows NT5.x (Windows 2000 / Windows XP) machine for about an hour.

Good luck, beware of bricking your $50 keychain bootable CD-ROM!

Forcing Vista Home Basic/Premium to play with SAMBA

After spending hours trying, I finally managed to come up with a solution...
From my posting in the MSDN forum:


[quote user="Jim Frost"]

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel

controls the security level mandated or allowed for logins. In Vista it defaults to 0x3, which means "NTLMv2 only". This is not supported by Samba, or at least not supported by any of the Samba servers I use (Mac OS X, Debian Sarge, or Buffalo TeraStation). This is despite the fact that the Samba documentation implies that it should work.
[/quote]

NTLMv2 did not work reliably until recent samba 3.0.2X releases.
Vista Home Basic/Premium does not have secpol.msc. Ultimate does.

[quote user="K Frazier"]

I had the same issue with my Linksys Media Server Router (WRTSL54GS) which offers SAMBA based NAS.

In addition to the suggestion to change the LSA Compatability from 3 to 1 (NTLMv2 required to NTLMv2 if available), which reverts back to XP type of authentication, I also found that treating the UserID as that of a foreign domain controller works.

That is...If your NAS is a member of the FOO workgroup, when you pass your authentication info, you can specify the format of "FOO\userid" in the username field. It is important to use the Workgroup name and not the NAS server machine name. This should work for most current generation SAMBA implementations.

[/quote]

The full solution for Vista Home Basic/Premium+ SambaV2/V3:

Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel from 0x3 to 0x1 to switch from "0x3: Try NTLMv2" (Confuses samba) to "0x1: Negotiate NTLMv2 if possible, Try NTLMv1, else use MSLANMAN".

Vista also REQUIRES a domain identifier before the username:
For all of us home users without a domain controller, use your WORKGROUP name instead of a DOMAIN identifier:

If I wanted to log in on a machine named "SERVER", one would assume you would use "SERVER\username" but this is incorrect.
What you actually want to do is login as "WORKGROUP\username" with Vista AFTER setting LMCompatibilityLevel to 0x1.

So, for many people this would look something similar to:
"MSHOME\Owner" or "MSHOME\Administrator"

Remember, you need both the registry edit AND the identifier\username!

Good luck!

--Kamilion

1.19.1 has gone required!

If you were reading the blog post about this on the SL blog, some of my comments may not have made it through. Here's the entire posting:

All I can say is, you should have ran some of the SIX MONTHS of firstlook and RC builds and reported hardware problems.

First things first, nvidia card users using a 5 series (FX) or above (5200 - 9800): go get the latest nvidia beta drivers here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.74.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_174.74.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_174.74.html

On both my 6600 and 8800GT, I've seen a 2X performance increase and the vertex vomit from normal prims is gone.

ATI users, Get the March 5th release here, it fixes a MAJOR shader performance problem on X and HD series cards:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

If you're constantly crashing or having other general problems, pop off the side of your PC and clean the dust from your fans and metal heatsink bits using a can of compressed air.

Often times a poor quality power supply is the blame for crashy behavior. A cheap fix for a great many computers I've worked on is replacing the power supply with a brand such as Enermax, Antec, Fortron, or Coolermaster -- And I've repaired thousands of PCs.
Sometimes this can cost as little as $30-40 and PC owners are amazed to find windows has stopped crashing as much.

If you're unsure if your hardware or drivers is causing the problem, go download Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta from:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
or
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso

If you need to test your memory for errors, select the Memory Test from the boot screen to launch memtest86. It could take a day or longer to test your memory if you have a lot, but you should do this at least once to make sure your memory is not causing problems.

So far, Ubuntu Hardy been able to launch second life 1.19.1RC1 to final on at least 60 machines I have access to at work with completely different hardware configurations. It's become my standard test in repairing PCs -- Sitting at the login screen, SL runs MD5s on the client files which will use 100% cpu: Good CPU test. Also tests audio, network, and graphics while running.

You can get a free ISO burner from here:
http://download.imgburn.com/SetupImgBurn_2.4.1.0.exe
http://www.imgburn.com/

Burn the ISO to a CDR or DVDR (Doesn't matter, DVD just makes it slightly faster) then boot your PC from it.
When the desktop comes up, it should say something about restricted drivers in use.

This indicates it has found your video card and/or wireless.

You may need to connect to your access point to access the internet.
In the upper right of the screen, you will notice an icon that looks like two computers. Left click on it to display a list of wireless access points to connect to. The icon should change to a signal strength bar once you are successfully connected.

There is a link to start Firefox in the upper left corner. Click on it.
Firefox should start, then type in:
http://get.secondlife.com/

The latest viewer will download to your temporary desktop.
Right click on it, and select "Extract Here".

A folder window will open up containing Second Life.

find the file called "secondlife", and double click on it.
You will see a dialog box:

Do you want to run "secondlife", or display its contents?
"secondlife" is an executable text file.

with four buttons. Click "Run", the fourth button.

Second life should start and you should be able to login without problems.

Hold CTRL-ALT-SHIFT and press D to activate the Advanced menu.
Hold CTRL-SHIFT and press the 1 key to show the FPS counter in the top right.

Compare this to your performance in windows -- if it is drastically lower in windows, chances are you need to find the proper drivers.

If anyone would like some help with this, please feel free to IM me politely, and read my profile first! I'm happy to answer questions unless I'm busy-mode! Feel free to offline me as well, I check my mail regularly and may reply without logging in.

RELEASE IS HERE!

We're now open for signups.
IM Kamilion Schnook for a signup token or obtain one from a running vendor!
Vendors & item servers are independent of signup -- they're owned by your Agent UUID as far as the database is concerned.
When you get a signup token, attach or rez it and it will present you with a link to the signup page -- but it will also pass along your Agent UUID which will be associated with your VersatileVendor user account. Only one VersatileVendor user account will be allowed per UUID!
Signups with blank UUIDs will prevent you from creating an account.

You can only edit your own items, and only items from servers you own will appear in the item editor. The interface will be improved as time goes by, for now it's just plain functional.

Currently you can add your item to any category but this will change soon as our item approval admin workflow is written. If I find any stolen items or inappropriate items, I will remove them.
Keep in mind I do have direct access to the item servers and if I catch anybody screwing around, I can remove items from your server or force the server to delete itself.

Getting close to release...

Okay, I've pretty much nailed everything down for tomorrow's open beta release.
Keep in mind in this beta period, new object versions will be popping up every so often, please be ready to upgrade your vendor, because it *will* destroy itself a set time after a new release.
I'll try to get the upgrader working soon.

Clear Skies

Well, just nailed the last two major bugs, Vendors & servers not tracking purchase counts and multi-item delivery.

To deliver multiple items while in the beta state, enter a list of item names separated with }={
For example:
Pink Box}={Orange Box}={Yellow Box

This would deliver three items:
Pink Box
Orange Box
Yellow Box

The first item listed is the 'primary' item. If this item doesn't exist, the whole transaction is aborted. If any secondary items are missing, the purchase continues, but the receiving user will get the primary item, and error messages for any missing secondary items.

Also, split payment can be done in a similar way:
50%ba278c50-9f20-4359-b321-cab5e7df3231|50%6137331b-6eaf-45ea-bd28-763877581972

Wow! Ugly, isn't it!
Let's split that up.
50%
ba278c50-9f20-4359-b321-cab5e7df3231
|
50%
6137331b-6eaf-45ea-bd28-763877581972

Each entry is split with a |. Within an entry, you have a percentage separated from the key with a percentage sign: %. So, in this example, 50% goes to fyrepunx Leader, and 50% goes to Kamilion Schnook. Remember that this is stored as a float, but NOT currently treated as a float, so a few lindens may be 'lost' if you do a 3 way split for 33% each (where's that other 1% go? It stays with SLLabs Backer.) so make sure you use 33.3%!

Eventually this will be automated with dropdowns and fancy UI, but for now it's bare bones. Sorry!

Public Beta

Allllllllrighty then!

We're now moving from Alpha status to Beta status!

Please IM Kamilion Schnook if you'd like to take part in the open beta!
*Note: Beta vendors are nocopy/notransfer and they will be forcibly removed when the final vendor client object is released.