rockstarmode

rockstar mode - [noun] 'räk'stär 'mOd: Expressing the insanity of living with your knobs permanently cranked to eleven.
 

Getting Tor onion routing + Chrome working

*** EDIT *** I used Google Chrome version 6.0.453.1 dev from their official yum repository, YMMV

I spent about an hour figuring this out tonight so I figured I'd send it along.  Up until now I've never really gotten the combo of Tor, a browser and a proxy working to my liking.  This is how I did it:

  1. Install Tor, get Vidalia if you can, this makes it a couple clicks to get going
  2. Install the Switchy! extension for Chrome
  3. Use Vidalia or whatever to start Tor, make sure the onion turns green
  4. Disable DNS pre-fetching in Chrome -> Options -> Under the Hood (ignore this if you don't care who sees the domains you are looking up)
  5. Restart Chrome (I couldn't get #4 to kick in without a restart)
  6. Configure a proxy in Switchy!  I named mine "Tor", under "Manual Configuration" I filled in "127.0.0.1" and port "9050" as the SOCKS Host, click SOCKS v5, leave everything else blank and save
  7. Click the Switchy! icon and choose your new proxy, visit the Tor Project to confirm, you might have to wait a second after choosing a proxy for the settings to start working.
SOCKS v5 and v4a have the ability to forward DNS lookups but apparently the threading model in Chrome makes it difficult to catch and forward the prefetched DNS queries so you must disable that feature (source)

I've verified with wireshark that the DNS queries and all other browser traffic (HTTPS included) also go through the proxy.

Filed under  //   fedora   howto   proxy   security   tor  
Posted August 24, 2010 by rockstarmode 
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Fedora 12 preupgrade issues

If you are having issues with upgrading Fedora from 11 to 12 with error messages saying that your /boot partition is full *and* this walkthrough doesn't help I may have a solution for you:

  1. Boot into your Fedora 11 kernel
  2. remount /boot as read write (mount -o remount rw /boot)
  3. move the file /boot/upgrade/install.img to unencrypted storage, I used a USB key
  4. Reboot into the Fedora 12 upgrade kernel, when it errors out with a message claiming it can't find the installation image point it at the place you moved the install.img file to. 
  5. Have a beer, the upgrade takes awhlie

The walkthrough on Fedora Project was for people preparing to upgrade, I however was stuck halfway though an upgrade so their solutions didn't help me.

Filed under  //   fedora   howto   linux   nerd  
Posted November 19, 2009 by rockstarmode 
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a2dp on Fedora 11 and Pulseaudio

*** UPDATE *** Fedora 12 has this same issue, this isn't surprising as this is likely going to be solved by the PulseAudio people

Earlier today I kind of got bluetooth audio (a2dp) working with Pulseaudio on Fedora 11, the solution can be found here. As that solution involved using a .asoundrc file with an ALSA device I was less than enthused.

A little research and a helpful push in the right direction and I figured out how to use the new-ish pulseaudio 'module-bluetooth-device'. To get this working in Fedora 11 without using ALSA:

  1. Make sure you have the pulseaudio bluetooth package installed (yum install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth)
  2. Download the attached perl script and mark it executable.
  3. Pair your bluetooth device with your computer. Have it remember the PIN, etc.. 
  4. Open a terminal and run the perl script 
  5. When the script prompts you to connect the device use the bluetooth applet, command line, whatever you use to get hcitool to connect. Hit <enter>. 
  6. The script will attempt to unload modules that interfere with getting a2dp working. 
  7. Try to play something with sound. If you see the bluetooth device in pavucontrol under "Output Devices" but still don't have sound try setting your "Internal Audio" profile to "Off"


The details:

I was attempting to use the Dell BH200 headset that comes with some of the laptops in their XPS line. The headset paired and connected without any issues but refused to show up under "Output Devices" in pavucontrol. I learned that pulseaudio bluetooth support wasn't installed by default on all Fedora 11 machines so I went yummed the correct package. After uncommenting the 'module-bluetooth-discover' module in
/etc/pulse/default.pa stuff was still broken, just differently.

It turns out that the pulse people prefer to default devices to the HSP/HFP profile which is used for monaural telephone conversations. For some reason when pulse sees that my headphones are A2DP capable it tries to change profiles and ends up just disconnecting them instead. When I connected the bluetooth device it would show up under "Output Devices" but disappear after a few seconds, no sound would work in the interim. Catching it and changing the profile before it had a chance to error out didn't help.

I guess the bluetooth-device module works just fine if you tell it exactly what you want (A2DP), and that the 'discover' module was the culprit. My script just unloads the discover module long enough for the user to connect the device and then sets the correct profile before exiting.

I'm not sure why the pulse people have things set up this way and I'm not sure why Fedora hasn't made this automagic. Hopefully this script will be helpful to someone else.

Click here to download:
bh200-a2dp.pl (2 KB)

Filed under  //   fedora   linux   nerd   pulseaudio   software   sound  
Posted November 15, 2009 by rockstarmode 
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