• ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) [41069265] revision 5 (ARMv5TEJ) 99.73 MHz
• Memory: 32M
• VIA Networking Velocity Family Gigabit Ethernet
• WD5000AAVS-0 500G HD

I believe 100MHz ARM CPU is powerful enough to drive this tiny box, but the limited capacity of memory cripples it as a lame duck. The sustainable file write(85G using lftp mirror) rate is approximately 3.8MB/s. It hardly qualifies any service beyond file server. Now, it is time to hack.

Jailbreak and SSH

The first thing to do is to create a user in the web interface of MyBook as root with null password is banned for security reason. Log on with admin and 123456, create a user JOE and setup the password for later use.

Run the script discussed in the wiki, and ssh with JOE. Now you can su to root with blank password, 0wned!

User management

MyBook takes a very intricate way to manage users:

All Samba users are granted shell access, but unix password sync = yes is not set, the /etc/shadow and /var/private/smbpasswd are updated individually by a Perl script via the web interface. The only reasonable explanation is the minimized Samba lacks PAM support.

All user names are capitalized. I assume this is a brutal force approach to address the difference between Samba and Linux native accounts: Windows user name is case insensitive, while Linux is case-sensitive.

As the password scrambled in /etc/shadow, it is easier to add/delete/update users via the web interface, then fine-tune the corresponding files. The user administration executives are hidden in /usr/www/nbin.

Share with Samba

The default exported directory is /share/internal/PUBLIC, the permission of the directory is set as rwsr-sr-x, and the owner is www-data, YMMV. So any file/directory created will be owned by www-data. If you are unhappy with the name, you may add a user, e.g joe as discussed before, then add joe to www-data group:

remember to change the default mask in /etc/smb.conf:

Package management

Though I am a big fan of Gentoo, it is a little bit paranoid to build everything from scratch. A precompiled package management, like Optware makes more sense. Check out this tutorial for bootstrapping.

The essential packages for daily administration imho are screen, lftp.

Feature requests

There are some itchy miss features, if you happen to know a solution or hint, please drop me a message in the comment:

Access Anywhere No mionet, just SSH. If you are a perfectionist, consider to port this Delphi application to MyBook to host MyBook in your preferred domain.

Download Manager A web front-end to listen to download requests from Firefox/IE plugins, then delegate it to wget backend with cookie support. A more aggressive approach may support megaupload happy hour.

It is most likely that the two application’s memory footprints exceed the limit. Yes, FastCGI would rescue; unfortunately, it is another advanced feature you have to pay for. There is no explicitly regulation when I signed up but I think it is quite reasonable to set the resource quota as virtual server is essentially shared hosting shared anyway. I would contact the custom service of Jumpline tomorrow for a better understanding.

Update: just contact the customer service of Jumpline, they seen have no QoS of the memory footprint or CPU load. I really have no idea whether this good news or bad news.

Further investigation focused on eyeD3′s __init__.py:

Either LOCAL_ENCODING is None or mysterious ANSI_X3.4-1968, the encoding is assumed as latin1. In my Gentoo box, with do_setlocale set False, getpreferredencoding just returns ANSI_X3.4-1968 though the locale is en_US.UTF-8 instead.

According to the documentation:

On some systems, it is necessary to invoke setlocale to obtain the user preferences, so this function is not thread-safe. If invoking setlocale is not necessary or desired, do_setlocale should be set to False.

I need to dig into whether Linux belongs to some systems. Right now, just apply the patch to eyeD3′s __init__.py:

And remember to specify the encoding of tags using –set-encoding , RTFM for more details.

Here is a chance for me to get a 2nd generation Zune which is powered by MTP. Although libmtp is still in very early stage to bridge the gap, we could predict its future from the history.

Amarok supports MTP if the USE flag mtp is enabled. However, the latest stable version 1.4.7-r2 has a bug when transfer file with CJK characters. The bug happens when interfacing with libmtp:

The bug is fixed in SVN (ticket), but if we take non-utf8-locale users into account, for example, MagicLinux takes GB2312 as the default locale, local8Bit may have more flexibility than hard-coded utf8, and it also worked in the UTF8 environment.

Here is the patch , and as usual, an ebuild for Gentoo users (manual).

I respect their decision, the player has no responsibility to clean the shit of lousy encoders, but we need to face the reality by all means. Here is my cruel life: Amarok is preferred in Linux, occasionally I am using mpg123 in console mode; using foobar2000 in Windows, sometimes Windows Media Player; portable MP3 player is Creative Zen Micro. No Mac, no iPod. To make things even worse, the locale in Linux is utf8, while in Windows, it is utf16-le. Last but not the least, I do respect specification.

So ID3v1 is not considered, it only supports ISO8859-1, that make it impossible to hold CJK characters. For ID3v2, the most popular version is v2.3, unfortunately, it does not support utf8 encoding. v2.4 supports this codec, but it is seldom picked up by the hardware manufacturer or the application developers.

Let’s start from the latest specification. ID3 v2.4:

The first bad news is a de facto id3v2 implementation, id3v2-0.1.11 does not support v2.4. That cost several hours to figure out why the newly added v2.4 disappeared mysterically, the answer is id3v2 is even unable to recognize v2.4 tags. EyeD3 is the remedy, this pure python library provides a very neat command line utility to manipulate id3 v2.4 tags. The good news is Creative Zen Micro support v2.4. In fact, I am not quite sure whether the honor goes to Creative Lab, or the libnjb developers.

Another option is v2.3, most popular implementation so far. Unfortunately, it only supports unicode-LE(i.e the default locale of Microsoft Windows), unicode-be and latin-1, no UTF-8 support. To make it even worse, id3v2 writes to the tag regardless the locale, that is really horrible!

Here is my effort to address this problem, eyeD3conv, as the name suggest, it depends on eyeD3 library. This small utility will convert mistaken-encoded tags to standard Unicode16-LE ID3 v2.3 tag.

And you need to apply this patch to fix the encoding bug in eyeD3-0.6.14. The patch has been submitted to the upstream.

Update: thanks to the author of eyeD3, Travis’ quick response, according to the specification, the url is supposed to be encoded in ascii, so we can simply ignore the URLFrame. Forget the patch, and use theupdated-version.

Other mis-encoded frames may throw an UnicodeDecode exception when frame is read/written that cancels the succeeding file rename action. Here are some pragmatic tips to work around this issue:

No idea which application inserts such crap into the tag.

Head over to the source

You can use git to sync the repository, or download it from online CVS repository. In fact, there is a simpler way to do so referred to Gentoo XML Guide: just add ?passthru=1 to the targeted GuideXML. For example, I am translating the Gentoo Linux ALSA Guide, fetch the original xml via:

.

However, we need the other pieces like xsl, css, dtd, so we may need checkout all of them from the repository:

Using po to translate

po is the standard for translation. We are using po4a as suggested. First, let’s move to the right path, i.e $ROOT/gentoo/xml/htdocs/doc, and the translated xml is going to stored in doc/zh_CN.

emacs has built-in supports for po mode. I am using vim, and found the po.vim plugin is quite neat as well.

Check before commit

po or GuideXML are designed for machines, not for human being. It is much easier for eyes to catch the errors when reading rendered HTML.

Before your checkin, ensure you have read through Translators Howto for Gentoo Documentation.

Happy localizing.

Gentoo enjoys the reputation for its source-based distribution and highly-customizable package management, portage. However, we pay the price for the flexibility: synchronizing the portage, building applications from source code. Both of the two tasks are I/O extensive, and the latter is also computation-extensive. The following tips aim to offload the burden to the desktop workhorses and eliminate the unnecessary I/O operation as much as possible.

Choose the right file system

I am a big fan of JFS regarding its comparable performance with low CPU consumption. Unfortunately, JFS does not support bad block relocation. This is essential since we may still use the hard disk with some dysfunctional sectors, though not suggested. So I decide to take reiserfs as the default FS with LVM.
Pro: I could tell the difference of booting time.
Con: when emerging the package, especially boost, the whole system just lost the responsiveness due to the high I/O traffic.
It is really a tough decision. I may go back to JFS if this hard disk is dead, *touch wood*.

Using tmpfs

Check this tip in Gentoo Wiki. The temerge works as a charm. It builds the application in memory instead of hard disk, the emerge time is shortened dramatically and the hard disk access is decreased.

Share the portage over network

Another I/O extensive operation is emerge –sync. According to this HOWTO, a shared portage not only save the hard disk access, but network bandwidth of the sync servers as well. The file server used in my home network, hippo servers the multimedia files using Samba for one Dell 700m laptop tiger and one Dell Dimension E521 desktop gorilla. Follow this HOWTO to get Samba works, and we may adapt the changes mentioned in this HOWTO to the system:
Add the emerge –sync task to the cron: /etc/cron.daily/emerge.cron

Export the portage to the public: /etc/samba/smb.conf

Auto mount the portage in tiger: /etc/fstab

If the laptop is roaming, local /usr/portage would be used. The distfiles and packages are left in the local disk just in case we may need them without network: /etc/make.conf

For eix users: /etc/eixrc

and put the update-eix into cron.daily

For layman users: /etc/layman/layman.cfg

Offload the build to desktop workhorse

TO BE CONTINUED…