Sunday 9 November 2014

haste-server Base URL Hack/Patch

Recently I came across haste-server, a server behind hastebin, which is a pastebin clone written in node.js. The application is minimalistic, fairly simple and works really well, except for one rather major glitch - it takes over the root directory of the whole website.

I've noticed that several people raised an issue on GitHub asking the author for help, but so far nobody shared fully working solution. Some people tried to work reverse proxy magi, others tried to patch the code - with moderate success. Instead of adding to the problem area I thought I'll try to offer a solution - keep in mind I don't know JavaScript ;-)


Tuesday 28 October 2014

Wake-on-Lan issues with Intel PRO Series NIC

Over the last few months I was experimenting with setting up my ham-radio station for completely remote operation, so once the rare DX comes on air I can work it regardless of where I am at the time.

The idea seems simple but this means that for a start I need to be able to remotely turn on and off all of the devices. Leaving the design itself for another post, the core element of my remote control concept is rather old ThinkPad x60s laptop. This one comes with Intel PRO/1000 Ethernet NIC and I want to use WoL to boot it up remotely.

What is WoL?
It's a simple way to turn on a machine connected to the network by sending it a single ethernet packet. Very useful if you want to boot up a machine for out-of-hours maintenance run or something similar - like in my case.

Problem
WoL works great but only once, so after you shut down the OS there's no way to do remote start again. This is something that many have encountered judging by the amount of forum posts and questions asked about the same issue.

Once I wasted more time than I should on trying to figure out what's going on, the fix turned out to be "trivial". Lesson learned for sure.

Saturday 1 March 2014

Running AirView2 [EoL] on Windows 8.1

This is purely "note to self" type post for getting End-of-Life AirView2 device (introduced here) to run under the latest version of Windows.


The AirView2 requires an app and a driver. AirView tool installer (msi format) that checks the OS version and aborts installation if it's different than XP or Vista. The viewer app is written in Java but the AirView2 needs a driver as well (technically it will show up as simple COM port afterwards).

Manual Installation:

  1. Download and install Java JRE (ouch!)
  2. Download the latest software (32 or 64bit) from http://www.ubnt.com/airview/downloads
  3. Manually unpack the MSI file to some location. In command line window this goes like:
    msiexec /a AirView-Spectrum-Analyzer-v1.0.11_win32-setup.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\AirView2
  4. Plug in the dongle into USB port and go to the Device Manager - you will see AirView2 having driver issues. Update driver and tell Windows to look for a new one under C:\AirView2
  5. Double click on airview-o.jar to run the app - happy scanning!
AirView app doesn't care where it was unpacked so you can move it anywhere you want to ;-)