Tag: bash

Dealing with a picture frame that freezes.

I recently bought myself a (1920×1080 pixel) digital picture frame, that had rave reviews among other customers, but that began the habit of freezing after about 12 hours of continuous operation, with my JPEG Images on its SD Card.

This could signal that there is some sort of hardware error, including in the internal logic, or of the SD Card itself. And one of the steps which I took to troubleshoot this problem was, to try saving the ‘.jpg’ Files to different SD Cards, and once even, to save those pictures to a USB Key, since the picture frame in question accepts a USB Memory Stick. All these efforts resulted in the same behaviour. This brought me back to the problem, that there could be some sort of data-error, i.e., of the JPEG Files in question already being corrupted, as they were stored on my hard drives. I had known of this possibility, and so I already tried the following:

 


find . -type f -name '*.jpg' | jpeginfo -c -f - | grep -v 'OK'

 

Note: To run this command requires that the Debian package ‘jpeginfo’ be installed, which was not installed out-of-the-box on my computer.

This is the Linux way to find JPEG Files that Linux deems to be corrupted. But, aside from some trivial issues which this command found, and which I was easily able to correct, Linux deemed all the relevant JPEG Files to be clean.

And this is where my thinking became more difficult. I was not looking for a quick reimbursement for the picture frame, and continued to operate on the assumption that mine was working as well, as the frames that other users had given such good reviews for. And so, another type of problem came to my attention, which I had run in to previously, in a way that I could be sure of. Sometimes Linux will find media files to be ‘OK’, that non-Linux software (or embedded firmware) deems to be unacceptable. And with my collection of 253 photos, all it would take is one such photo, which, as soon as the frame selected it to be viewed, could still have caused the frame to crash.

(Updated 1/16/2020, 17h15 … )

Continue reading Dealing with a picture frame that freezes.

About Downloading Shell-Scripts From My Server

On occasion I’ve made shell-scripts for Linux available within this blog, and not used code-blocks to do so, rather linking to an actual .SH File, with which URLs on my server may end.

This brings up the issue, that under Windows, any sort of plain text-file will have its lines terminated by a ‘Carriage-Return’, ‘Line-Feed’ sequence, while Linux tends to terminate them just with a ‘Line-Feed’ character.

If a Windows user downloads a Linux-formatted text-file and tries to open it, chances are that the absence of carriage-returns will prevent any Windows application from even displaying it correctly. Conversely, if a Linux-based ‘bash’ interpreter is given a Windows-formatted file to interpret, there have been reports about errors. At the same time, there is little chance that a Windows user will ever try to get a ‘bash’ shell-script to run under Windows.

So, in certain cases it’s trivial for me to convert my Linux-formatted newlines, into Windows-formatted newlines. This can be done for .CPP Files, which any compiler will still compile fine, even on a Linux-based system. But, I disabled this procedure for .SH Files, because those will never be run on Windows-based systems.

As a result, Windows users may experience difficulties, just getting the .SH Files to display correctly – and then imagining how well they might run under Linux.

Dirk

 

WiFi on Laptop named Klystron, RTL8723BE

One subject which I have commented on often, but which in recent months I have gotten little or no new information about, was the stability of the WiFi chip-set on my laptop ‘Klystron’, which is driven by the kernel modules known as ‘RTL8732BE’.

Here is an earlier posting on this subject.

Since that posting, there have been 2 firmware updates to that laptop specifically. One, to version 1.159, and the next, to version 1.160.

What I found was that firmware version 1.159 actually seemed to make the WiFi very unstable again – a regression. But firmware version 1.160 seemed to make it stable again.

In the meantime, I have a script in directory

/lib/systemd/system-sleep

which is intended to deal with A Different Problem that laptop has, which was, that after resuming from sleep, the laptop system clock would seem to jump ahead exactly 68 hours. I had changed that script as an experiment. But now I have changed it back again, to:


#!/bin/bash
#
# fixing https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173487

case "$1" in
  pre)
    date +%s > /tmp/suspend.log
    ;;
  post)
    was=`cat /tmp/suspend.log`
    now=`date +%s`
    # time shifts for 68 hours
    if [ $now -gt `expr $was + 244800` ]; then
      date -s "`date -R --date="68 hours ago"`"
    fi
    /bin/sh -c "sleep 20; /etc/init.d/nmbd restart; /etc/init.d/smbd restart" &
    ;;
  *)
    ;;
esac

I often did suspect that problems which I had specifically associated with the kernel module, may not in fact stem from the kernel module. On my LAN, I use a router which is not owned by me, but rather by my ISP, and that router has numerous settings – as well as its own Firmware flashing – under the control of my ISP rather than under my direct control.

This router is still useful to me, because I subscribe to “Bell Fibe” and get to watch TV through it, in 1920x1080i resolution, which I could not do, if I was to try switching to a router owned by me.

But many of the problems which Klystron has on my WiFi, may all be policy issues with this router. Since I cannot get deep into the router settings, I am left guessing as to what router policies the laptop may not be abiding by.

But what this can do is lead to Samba problems specifically, which seem to mimic general WiFi connectivity issues, but which are not really examples of that.

Dirk

 

It is possible to mistake a configuration file for a shell script.

One source of error which I’ve observed, was even recommended in the old ‘linpopup’ package documentation.

ICYMI, “Linpopup” was a Linux extension to the Samba server, meant to allow messages to be passed directly from one computer to another on a LAN. It was based on the old “WinPopup” feature, which Microsoft discontinued with Windows XP (Service Pack 2 ? )

I think that one of the problems with the original WinPopup was, that its messages were allowed to be rich text, including URLs, which users were tricked into clicking on, because users did not recognize that pop-up windows they were getting, were in fact intended as a feature, but that these messages were eventually sent out to blocks of IP addresses as a form of spam, sometimes carrying a payload of malware.

Unlike its Windows predecessor, LinPopup only allows Plain Old Text to be sent. But this posting is not meant to describe this, as a feature of Samba. I’m intending to showcase this as an example of a type of mistake, which modern-day thinkers make when creating configuration files. In order to ready a Samba server to receive these messages, a Linux user is given the suggestion to put the following into their /etc/samba/smb.conf, near the end of their [global] section:

message command = /usr/local/bin/LinPopUp "%f" "%m" %s; rm %s

I know this, because I custom-compiled the old package, and this was stated in the documentation.

Now, it is possible to configure some other program to receive the message, which Samba leaves in the temporary file ‘%s’, as long as we remember that any message command which Samba runs, will be run as user ‘nobody’, with the privileges of user ‘nobody’. That’s not a problem. But there is a problem with this configuration line, which users ran in to, and which users had trouble pinpointing.

This is meant for a configuration file, but the above syntax would be suitable for a shell script. A configuration file will often allow for an executable program to be specified, and will even go so far as to allow command-line parameters to be passed in. But a configuration file will not go so far, as to allow two programs to be executed in sequence. That is a luxury which too many modern coders take for granted, apparently.

The two programs referred to above are

/usr/local/bin/LinPopUp

rm

In fact, this configuration mistake will pass in the semicolon, as part of the parameters to /usr/local/bin/LinPopUp , thereby mangling the ability of this program to identify the file the message is in. And then it will pass in the string “rm” as well…

What I had to do myself, was something like

message command = bash -c '/usr/local/bin/linpopup "%f" "%m" %s ; rm %s' &

The one program I’m telling Samba to run, is ‘bash’. It, in turn, can run several other programs synchronously, asynchronously, etc..

Also, it should be noted that the ‘&’ at the end of my line, is not equivalent to its use in shell scripts, where it tells a running instance of ‘bash’, to disconnect the child process immediately, and to continue running the rest of the script. My ‘&’ does not assume that ‘bash’ is already running, and appears as a parameter to ‘bash’ itself.

For all I know, ‘bash’ could simply ignore this. But I do know, that this ‘&’ does not interfere in my message command working…

Dirk

(Edit : ) And, It is up to the way the Samba server parses its configuration file, whether it expands the variables, which begin with ‘%’ , inside single quotes. It doesn’t matter that ‘bash’ would not do so.