Abandoned Projects | Flyn Computing

appliance-config

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Configuration system for a network appliance

Overview

Appliance-config is a web-based configuration system intended for use on network appliances. The core functionality of the system provides the following features:

Fileserver (WebDAV, NFS and SMB)
CUPS-based print server
Backup and restore system

The backup system can replicate data to an external disk or an external host that also runs appliance-config. When backing up to a remote host, appliance-config can encrypt the data so that the owner of the remote host can not read it. In this way, two people can help each other by hosting a backup without nessessarily sharing the data that is backed up.

Additional functionality may be implemented as a module. Appliance-config uses a CGI-based tool to present configuration options to an administrator. After configuration options are saved, the system invokes a backend to implement any necessary changes to system services. The system's backends are written primarily as bash shell scripts.

Nasty Details

As documented in the overview, the appliance-config system consists of a daemon that runs as root and modules that handle configuring services.

The daemon waits for notification that a configuration has changed. After receiving a notification, the daemon executes the modules' backend scripts.
Each configuration module consists of:

CGI Program: When executed by a GET, the program displays a form. When executed by a POST, it writes configuration data to a file or directions to a spool and notifies the daemon of the change.
Configuration File: Configuration files are written by the CGI programs.
Backend Script: Executed by the daemon after the daemon receives a notice. Reads appliance-config configuration files and writes system configurations based on templates. Reconfigures and restarts system services. May also read a spool and perform some action based on its contents.

army_tex

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Army_tex is a set of LaTeX classes for generating U.S. Army documents, compliant with AR 25-50. The army_tex package provides classes to create documents such as memorandums and letters.

arty

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Arty is an artillery simulation game. It is currently in the infancy of its development. Arty takes advantage of OpenGL and the X Window System.

backup-scripts

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

A series of scripts for performing backups of servers and workstations

bbb

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

Burn_baby_burn's replacement, bbb, is a set of utilities for burning to CD-R and CD-RW media. The package allows one to easily perform tasks such as burning the contents of a directory, burning an audio CD, burning a CD image and copying CD media from the command line. Bbb differs from burn_baby_burn primarily in the interface it presents the user. Bbb is designed as several simple tools that may be used easily in standard UNIX pipelines.

Nasty Details

Bbb provides a mechanism for keeping the system load down during CD burning. A file, /tmp/be_nice, exists when a CD is being burned. Cron and other similar systems should check for the existence of this file before executing jobs. Bbbnice is a tool provided by bbb that waits until /tmp/be_nice no longer exists before executing a task.

Here is an example of a crontab that uses bbbnice:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root

01 * * * * root bbbnice run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root bbbnice run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root bbbnice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root bbbnice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

For burning bootable backup CD-ROMS, I recommend Gratien D'haese's Make CD-ROM Recovery. For encoding audio CDs into MPEG 1 Layer III or Ogg Vorbis files, I recommend autorip by Jonathan Mayer.

cryptoswap

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

The cryptoswap package supports building an encrypted swap partition when a system boots. This may be necessary on systems that use encrypted filesystems because plaintext secrets may be written to disk when memory is swapped to disk.

Nasty Details

Cryptoswap.sh should be installed in /etc/init.d. During system boot, cryptoswap.sh should execute right before checkroot.sh. When shutting down, cryptoswap should execute after sysklogd.

This package also includes an initialization script for building loopback encrypted /tmp. This may be necessary if a system contains encrypted filesystems but / is not encrypted. A link from directories like /var/tmp to /tmp may be appropriate. There are a few other alternatives for systems such as these:

Tmpfs is a Linux kernel feature that allows /tmp to exist in memory. This is a good solution for systems with a lot of memory and/or (encrypted) swap.
If you have a system that uses encrypted home directories, per-user temporary directories inside $HOME could be used. This would ensure that user's data is protected but would require that all applications use $HOME/tmp instead of /tmp.

Finally, the project may be used to create an encrypted root filesystem. Doing so requires two special partitions. First, create a small partition to hold your kernel and initrd image, /dev/hdaX. Second create a large partition to contain the root of your filesystem, /dev/hdaY.

Next configure and install an initrd-based boot system:

Ensure romfs is compiled in your kernel (not a module).
Create a kernel-supported filesystem on /dev/hdaX and copy your kernel to /vmlinux.
Download busybox and extract it as initrd/busybox.
Update initrd/src/etc/modules.initrd to include any modules needed to boot.
Build cryptoswap's initrd image (cd initrd && make initrd) and copy it to the filesystem on /dev/hdaX at /initrd.img.gz.
Make sure you use literal = "root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc rw" or liLO equivalent.

Finally, create a proper encrypted filesystem on /dev/hdaY:

Randomize the partition: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdaY.
Set up a loopback device: openssl enc -d -aes-256-ecb -in initrd/src/etc/efsk | losetup -p0 -e aes /dev/loop0 /dev/hdaY.
Create the root filesystem: mkfs.ext2 /dev/loop0.
Mount your new root filesystem: mount /dev/loop0 <mountpoint>.
Populate your new root filesystem.

FES

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

The Flyn Entertainment System, or FES, is a piece of software that provides entertainment in the form of an arcade, television, and audio player. Rather than provide a traditional computer interface, FES acts like a DVD player or other appliance, presenting a simple, joystick controlled menu.

hunt_n_gather

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Hunt_n_gather is a script which attempts to determine the entries within a filesystem that should be backed up. It does this by noting which files are not listed in a system's rpm database, have been modified if installed as part of an rpm, etc. Once hunt_n_gather has a list of such files, it copied them to the directory given on the command line.

kupgrade

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Kupgrade.sh is a simple script which automates upgrading one's Linux kernel. The script saves the current and previous kernel build configuration files. Kupgrade.sh greatly eases maintaining kernels for several non-heterogenous machines by maintaining configuration files and building custom kernel RPM files.

Kupgrade.sh also supports plugins for compiling drivers such as the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture modules.

libss

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Libss is a cross-platform library for controlling screensavers. It allows one to temporarily disable a screensaver. This is useful for fullscreen, visual applications that take little input.

luks-tools

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

The luks-tools package contains various utilities for working with LUKS-protected filesystems. HAL uses these utilities to automatically mount encrypted volumes when they are attached to a system, provided the user can produce the correct passphrase. These utilities are written as separate programs to allow MAC systems like SELinux to have fine-grained control over them.

Screenshot

luks-format: A utility that formats a filesystem to contain a LUKS encryption header.
luks-is-encrypted: A tool that can determine if a filesystem contains a LUKS encryption header.
luks-setup: A utility that sets up the dm-crypt device map for a partition.
gnome-luks-format: A GNOME front-end for luks-format.

Details

The following is an example of how to create an encrypted filesystem and prepare it for mounting:

luks-format -v -t ext3 -c aes -l 256 -n MyLuksVolume /dev/sda4

The luks-format step may take quite some time because it overwrites the partition with random data before it does anything else.

Once luks-format has been run, a device mapper entry should exist in /dev/mapper. This device may be mounted as any other appropriate block device:

mount /dev/mapper/luks_crypto_f20d9b37-ebe6-42c9-9665-CV035a81f0f3 /mnt

A volume that has already been initialized with a LUKS header and formatted may be mounted as follows:

luks-setup /dev/sda4
mount /dev/mapper/luks_crypto_f20d9b37-ebe6-42c9-9665-cb035a81f0f3 /mnt

magic_numbers

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

A collection of magic numbers for Ian Darwin's file implementation.

mkCDrec2

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

This is the second version of Gratien D’haese’s mkCDrec. This version adds support for OpenBSD, doing so in such a way that should make adding support of other platforms easier.

I recommend using livecd-tools on Fedora Linux and no longer maintain the mkCDrec2 package.

nautilus_scripts

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

This package contains several nautilus scripts to do various fun things with your files.

burn_cd_cue: Burns a cdrdao CUE file to disc.
burn_dir: Burns directory to disc.
mail_file: Send files by email. May transform files if necessary. For example, images a shrunk to 640x480 scale.
make_svcd_image: Creates an SVCD image from video files.
make_vcd_image: Creates an VCD image from video files.
new_extension: Prompts for a filename extension and renames files using that extension.
print: Prints files.
push_file: Uses scp to copy files to another host.
rotate_image: Rotates images clockwise or counter-clockwise.
search_n_replace: Searches files for a regular expression and replaces it with a string.
set_read_only: Sets files read-only.

Nasty Details

Install the scripts in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts and let 'er rip.

nautilus_thumbnailers

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

This package provides scripts to generate thumbnails for several file formats commonly used in the GNOME environment. When using these scripts with the nautilus file manager, for example, icons for PDF files will present the same appearance as the document itself. This has long been the case with images, but this package extends this technique to formats like PDF, PostScript and GIMP XCF.

Nasty Details

This package provides a gconf schema and several scripts. The schema tells GNOME filemanagers like nautilus of the scripts' existance. The scripts do the dirty work of creating 128x128 pixel PNG thumbnails for documents at the file manager's request.

osdd

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Osdd polls one's mixer device and provides an on-screen display when the mixer's volume levels change. It requires XOSD, which is available at http://www.ignavus.net/software.html.

This application has been superseded by osdsh.

print_filter

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Print_filter is a simple filter which handles several file formats. Print_filter is designed to be as simple as possible, allowing one to easily modify or expand the source code.

Print_filter was originally written out of frustration with Red Hat's print filter, which was difficult to modify without using its GUI tools. Print_filter is small, simple, and easy to work with on a console system.

qtutils

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

Qtutils currently contains the following applications:

qtsg: Generates a QuickTime video from image files and a soundtrack.
qtconv: Changes the codec used by a QuickTime video.
qtsplit: Splits a QuickTime file into smaller files.
mpegize: A script which generates an MPEG stream from QuickTime input.
vcdize: A script which generates a Video CD disc image from QuickTime input.
screenqt: A script which generates a QuickTime file from a series of screenshots.

Details

ima4: The ima4 compressor reduces 16 bit audio data to 1/4 size, with very good quality. This is the preferred codec for low bandwidth audio.
raw: Unsigned 8 bit encoding.
twos: Twos is the preferred encoding for audio. It stores 8, 16, and 24 bit audio, interleaved for multiple channels. The 8 bit mode is signed. The 16 and 24 bit modes are big endian signed.

raw: RGB packed frames.
jpeg: JPEG is preferred for low bandwidth video. This format writes a seperate JPEG photo for every frame.
mjpa: MJPA stores each frame as two JPEGs, interlaced. The real advantage is that it can split compression and decompression across 2 processors, doubling the frame rate.
png: This consists of one PNG image for every frame. Like ram this codec supports 32 bit depths.
yuv2: The human eye percieves brightness much more accurately than colors. YUV2 downsamples the color components by 50% for a total compression of 33% with virtually no image degredation. This is preferred for intermediate storage. YUV2 is sometimes called Component video.
yuv4: YUV4 is planar YUV, identical to MPEG. It downsamples the color components by 75% for a total 50% compression. This is the preferred intermediate format for working with MPEG.

Currently, qtsg can take JPEG images and Ogg Vorbis audio files as input. It renders a QuickTime video with JPEG encoded video frames and raw audio frames. This output is suitable for encoding into MPEG with MJPEG tools.

scald

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Overview

Scald can assist lazy developers. Scald is a tool to generate program code from an HTML-like XML description. For example, scald will process an XML description into C code that prints an HTML form and saves user input data into a configuration file.

Details

There are many XSLT processors available to developers. The following examples use xmllint from libxml2 and xsltproc from libxslt. Here is example.xml, an example XML document that follows the scald schema:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE webapp PUBLIC "-//Flyn Computing//DTD Scald XML Unstable//EN"
                        "http://www.flyn.org/xml/dtd/unstable/webapp.dtd">

<webapp name="/cgi-bin/example.cgi" short-name="example" description="Example">

	<form name="example" save-data-as="config" save-to-dir="/tmp/">
		<input name="example-input" type="text" label="Example Input"/>
		<submit value="Save"/>
	</form>

</webapp>

The file example.xml may be validated with the command xmllint –noout example.xml and processed with xsltproc http://www.flyn.org/xml/xslt/unstable/webapp-c.xslt example.xml. The result will be several functions, written in C:

void print_form(char *sidebar): Creates and prints an HTML form, selecting default values from a configuration file, if available.
void save_data(s_cgi *cgi): Reads a form and saves its values to a configuration file or spool.
char *get_post_mode(s_cgi *cgi): Returns the CGI mode of execution.

After you process an XML file to generate C code, you should write a main function that calls these three functions. One useful technique is to write a system configuration daemon. After running save_data, the main function may notify this daemon, which will then reconfigure a system service based on the updated configuration file (it may be a bad idea to allow your webserver the rights required to update system configurations directly).

The scald schema also allows for dependencies between inputs. For example, the fragment below describes an input, password, that is only enabled if another input, authenticate, is selected. This dependency is enforced by Javascript code that scald automatically generates.

<input name="authenticate" type="checkbox" label="Use Authentication"/>
<input name="password" type="password" label="Password"
       enabled-by="document.formname.authenticate"/>

The call-print- entites allow one to generate custom HTML at run runtime. The following fragment indicates that options should be generated at runtime by a custom function:

<form name="initialize" save-data-as="config" save-to-dir="/tmp/">
	<select name="device">
		<call-print-options-fn/>
	</select>
</form>

Scald will generate code that expects the function print_document_initialize_device_options() to be defined in a separate file and linked against the C output that scald generates. Here is a simple implementation of print_document_initialize_device_options():

void print_document_initialize_device_options(char *obj)
{
        printf("<option value=\"foo\">Foo</option>");
	printf("<option value=\"bar\">Bar</option>");
}

A more general-purpose entity is call-print-input-fn. This may be used to generate any HTML input tags:

<form name="initialize" save-data-as="spool" save-to-dir="/tmp/">
	<call-print-input-fn name="example"/>
</form>

This requires one to define both a print and save function:

void save_to_spool_document_initialize_example_input(s_cgi *cgi,
                                                     char *dir, char *obj)
{
	/* Code to read data from s_cgi *cgi and write it to spool file
	 * in char *dir
	 */
}

void print_document_initialize_example_input(char *obj)
{
	/*  Code to print HTML form */
}

The onclick option is available to the input tag. This may be set to a Javascript function that will execute when the input is clicked. The Javascript function may be either provided by the XML document or dynamically generated using a call-print- entity as in the following example:

<form name="initialize" save-data-as="config" save-to-dir="/tmp/">
	<input label="Host" name="destination" value="host" type="radio" onclick="populate_with_hosts"/><br/>
	<input label="Disk" name="destination" value="disk" type="radio" onclick="populate_with_disks"/><br/>
	<select label="Destination" name="dest">
		<call-print-options-fn/>
	</select>
</form>

The following is the implementation that will be called by the code generated by the call-print-options-fn entity. It prints the two Javascript functions that are referenced by the onclick options above. It also calls the populate_with_hosts function that it defines in order to initially populate the options list. Clicking between the radio buttons defined above will switch the options available.

void print_document_initialize_dest_options(char *obj)
{
        printf ("<script type=\"text/javascript\">");
	printf ("function populate_with_hosts() {");
	printf ("document.backup.dest.length = 0;");
	/* C Code to print Javascript that assigns hosts, e.g.: */
	for (i = 0; i < num_opts; i++) {
		printf ("%s[%d] = new Option(\"%s\", \"%s\", false);\n", obj, 
			i, "example.com", "example.com");
	}
	if (0 == i) {
		printf("for (i = %s.options.length; i >= 0; i--) { 			%s[i] = null; 			}\n", obj, obj);
	}
	printf ("}");
	printf ("function populate_with_disks() {");
	printf ("document.backup.dest.length = 0;");
	/* Code to print disks */
	printf ("}");
	printf ("populate_with_hosts(%s);", obj);
	printf ("</script>");
}

swap

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Swap allows one to easily change CD-ROM media with one command or click. Issuing the command swap unmounts a device, ejects the media, waits for the drive to close, and mounts the new media. Also included is a C library which gives the programmer access to swap's functionality.

wnc

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:02:58 -0400

Wife's Network Controller is a GNOME applet to control diald. The applet allows you to choose from three states: auto, on, and off. When using the included scripts the auto state gives dial-up control to diald, the on state forces the dial-up link to come and stay up, and the off state closes the dial-up link.