Author: john

Categories
Admin Network Technologies

The IT Detective Agency: the case of the Is it the firewall? or routing? or switch? or layer 2?

Intro
This is yet another tale of things in the IT world often do not turn out the way it seems at first blush. Or possibly a tale of just when you think you’ve seen it all after decades in the industry, something new (to you) occurs.

What’s going on
The firewall team was all busy so when this strange problem occurred Friday they called in the second string: me. I consider some of the team to be less-than-customer focused so I try to compensate for them and for my lack of knowledge about the firewall by applying a more customer-first attitude. In other words, a sympathetic listening ear. These days it can be hard just to find someone to complain to about your It problem, and I am keenly aware of that.

There was some strange communication which wasn’t working, mediated by a firewall I had never accessed and was not sure i even had access to. So of course I was asked to join a big conference call where an ongoing debugging session was taking place.

I refused.

I hate being blindsided, and i hate not having answers, making me sound even less competent than I already am.

But what I did do is being my research to see what the system is, if perhaps I had access, etc.

Yes. I found that through a management system I have access to I had access to view the policies on that particular firewall and view the logs as well.

So once I had that up, I agreed to join the call.

They had one server communicating to three different systems. Only one of the three systems was being reached. Yes the other two were on the same subnet. Two of our firewalls were between the system and the three servers.

And, yes, i could see some drops. The interesting TCP error stated: TCP packet out of state, first packet isn’t SYN.

No problem. routing must be screwed up such that we have asymmetric routing. It happens all the time. Right? well these systems are really appliances with only some basic networking information configurable, not real debugging facility, and really no ability to add a host route.

I could not establish a shell session onto the firewall – not sure what the password naming scheme was that they used.

Then a real firewall guy comes on the call. But his connectivity is messed up, so I keep with the debug session, if nothing else than to support him since four eyes is more effective than just two. He shares the routing tables of our two in-line firewalls. It’s hard to understand as these are all new subnets for me, some are ones that don’t look right. But just focusing on possible host routes for any of these three servers, I don’t see anything amiss.

Firewall policy
And, in firewall policy I see the entire subnet has this traffic permitted. There is no rule specific to one or the other of these systems.

So what do we have up until now?
A purist firewall administrator attitude would be as follows:
The firewall treats all these systems the same, therefore this cannot be a firewall problem. Talk to your networking or system people. Have a nice day.

Well, in fact there was some serious question about the network switch as well. So we had a network guy on the call. So they dug up the MAC addresses of these systems, from which they found the switch ports. Then they checked the port configuration. Ah, some complex 802.1x authentication was configured. As I understand this means the device would not even be allowed onto the subnet until it passed some kind of Radius authentication. So they removed this 802.1x stuff and just made sure that port was assigned to the right vlan.

Still, the problem persisted.

I think the other firewall guy was also new to this equipment. Eventually, though, he tries to do a packet trace of the one that’s working versus the one that isn’t.

You know, I never saw the results of those traces, but I’m pretty sure, reading between the lines, that they surprised him, meaning, they did not fit the hypothesis of the asymmetric routing.

In these situations there is the main communication in the mian session, then side communications going on, like between me and the firewall guy. But it is all chaotic. Acoustics are mediocre, accents are hard to understand. So the net transfer of information is pretty low. Statements, even important ones, often have to be repeated multiple times (rebroadcasts) to assure everyone “gets it.”

Typical questions were asked. When did this last work? what had changed? There were a couple changes. Some kind of networking thing (I forget what), and then the firewalls changed management systems after that. The firewall change seemed closer in time to the last known success.

You acquire more and more information as you dig into problems. It’s hard to judge which is relevant at the time and which lines if inquiry are a complete waste of time. A good incident manager or project manager can sense which are the more productive lines of investigation and nurture those discussions while suppressing the noise.

Actually it was the networking guy who found the Checkpoint link below. I looked at it. the firewall guy was muttering something about badly behaved, older applications that might exhibit this behaviour.

So we agreed to take the suggested steps, which would basically allow these out of state packets. Drat. The firewall returned an error.

But I continue to refresh the firewall logs. The communication was occurring about every minute. Lo and behold, I see the older drops, and then accepts for the last few minutes! I think it worked. I tell them to check.

They check their end. Sure enough. Communication beginning to work…

The customer tries to make assertion that this was a firewall problem all along. Not so fast. Firewall guy says, well, the firewall is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. who’s right?

We’re all good for now, but we state this is a kludge for today and a follow-up meeting needs to occur.

So what happened?
I think the single most important thing is that the firewall guy switched his problem hypothesis from Must be asymmetric routing, to Maybe it’s a badly behaved application. Meaning what? What if you have an application that establishes a TCP connection, and then to beat idle timeouts, sends a KEEP ALIVE packet every minute? Well, now, suppose your firewall is rebooted in the middle of that because it has changed management stations and needs to reload policy? What might the situation look like to it?

It you were unlucky, it just might see these KEEP ALIVE TCP packets without having the connection in its connection table, in other words, exactly the situation we are observing!

What should have happened?
It would have been great if the communication were forced to be re-established form time-to-time, even once a day. This problem had been going on for days.

But, given this very stupid behaviour on the part of this application, if the app people had been aware they should have forced their application to re-establish the TCP connection after the firewall reboot. Probably, for the one that did work, it had been forced to re-establish.

A firewall person has to be sufficiently aware to realize this could be happening, and advise the app owner on what to do to prevent it.

Conclusion
So whose problem is it?

To the app people it looks like a firewall issue, cut-and-dried. To a firewall guy it looks like an application issue, cut-and-dried. I see both sides. It is some of both. An app owner has to understand enough about firewalls to see that this type of thing can occur. Assigning blame to one side or the other, as most people are wont to do, is not productive. Only a team effort could have revealed this issue. And recall that the “fix” is actually a kludge that lowers security.

Case: almost closed.

References and related
Checkpoint’s note on TCP packet out of state first packet isn’t SYN: https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/General-Topics/TCP-packet-out-of-state-First-packet-isn-t-SYN-tcp-flags-SYN-ACK/td-p/37166

The IT Detective agency cases are still coming fast and furious. Here’s another recent case. Failed to convert character

Categories
Admin Network Technologies

The IT Detective Agency: WebEx and the case of the mysterious reset

Intro
A company known to me was a contented user of WebEx until they noticed a strange behaviour: their calls were losing quality or even dropped exactly after one hour. No one, most especially the vendor of WebEx, had the slightest idea of the root cause. Read on to see how this fascinating case is playing out.

Scene: company offices, Sao Paolo, Brazil
Triago, a very competent IT professional located in Sao Paolo was the first to report the problem. More-or-less it went like this:

– when he uses the call-my-computer feature in WebEx the call quality is fine, until he has been on the meeting for one hour. At the one hour mark the voice quality of others (from his perspective) dropped dramatically. Sometimes the call was completely lost. Then, about five minutes later, the quality was OK again.
– the problem only occurred when in the office or using VPN, i.e., when using the company network
– others in South America are having the same issue
– he can use the same company laptop, on the Internet, and will not have the problem

After the usual finger-pointing amongst various vendors a debugging plan was created.

It’s going really well. There have been about 12 test calls, stretched out over the last five months. You have to admire the chutzpah of US software vendors who sell to major customers and then still manage to treat them like crap come time for support.

The pattern, more-or-less, goes like this. test call with several vendors plus Triago and I in the US. Wait around for an hour, produce the problem. Wait for software vendor to “analyze”. Wait for two weeks. Some small insight may be gleaned by them. Conclusion: another test is needed, we didn’t have all the traces we need. rinse and repeat.

Scene: A soulless office park somewhere in northern New Jersey
To be continued, literally…

Scene: an enterprise-class server room somewhere in Research triangle Park, North Carolina
If one uses the company’s guest WiFi, one uses the company’s firewall, but not the company’s proxy server. This test succeeds. But, unfortunately, one also uses UDP rather than TCP for the communication because that is the default. See the references for communication requirements.

So one thought is to knock out the ability to use UDP by blocking UDP port 9000, thereby forcing use of TCP. Testing that today….

References and related
Networking requirements for WebEx: https://help.webex.com/en-us/WBX264/How-Do-I-Allow-Webex-Meetings-Traffic-on-My-Network

Categories
3D Printing Admin

What I’m Working on Now: building my own 3D printer

Intro
Because someone else on the team had a good experience with it, and so i can exchange notes and get some tips form them, I went ahead and ordered the Anet A8 3D printer + an extra roll of PLA. That is, despite the vocal negative reviews which exist.

Although normally I don’t consider myself very mechanical, I guess I’m pretty good at following instructions. So I’m watching their detailed Youtube video and mimicking their actions, step-by-step. And I’m having a blast! It’s like having an erector set all over again.

And I’m in constant awe that so much could be had for so little. There must be, what, a couple hundred parts, including five stepper motors, several limit switches, a circuit board, lcd, power supply, steel rods, belts, arylic(?) parts, and 0.5 Kg of PLA – all for $140?? I feel like its raw value is several times that. Hey, I just bought two m5 screws and nuts from Home Depot and paid almost $3.

Not exactly like the video
Things were going great, until the kit actually deviated form the parts shown in the video! Especially where the kit provided a two 3D-printed parts shaped significantly differently from what they show. Assembly slowed down after that.

The rods did not fit through the 3D parts as they should have – I had to bore them out a bit with one of the yet-unused threaded rods that came with the kit! Which did work by the way + a lot of muscle and hand strength.

Partially assembled – extruder not yet inserted.

Many gray hairs later I finished the assembly. If you’re familiar with furniture assembly of a semi-complex piece like a desk with top shelves, this is about three times more complicated. You keep hoping that OK, now it’ll get easier and I’ll cruise through this. But it never does! Every stage features unique steps presenting their own unique challenges.

In my case my cooling fan on the extruder, which looks suspiciously like a 3D part, hangs below the extruder nozzle, so I don’t think I can use it.

Then once it was assembled my first test print, a simple box, went awry. Around the third layer the whole thing started moving around on the print bed! Once again I was hoping that the hard part was the assembly and then I could cruise to printing to my heart’s content. Wrong. Now comes a whole new set of challenges unique to 3D printing, and you have to master that as well. This is nothing at all like going to Staples to get an ink jet printer where the most challenging thing you’ll have to do is change an ink cartridge. Nothing at all like that. This is more like constructing a model railroad yourself.

Things get smoother
So I took everyone’s advice and installed Cura 3D as my slicer. Then I just decided to go for it and print out my first upgraded part: a center nozzle fan. It worked really, really well!

My very first print – a center nozzle fan

You can almost see form the picture that the quality was really good. I had to sandpaper the chute a little for it to fit – apparently ABS sandpapers easily – and voila, it snapped into place.

Next I printed a filament guide. Also no problems there.

Then my filament broke.

Some terms
slicer – software which takes an STL file an translates it into a series of layer-by-layer movements. Cura 3D is the slicer I use.
gcode – the file format that the anet a8 printer understands. You take an STL file, put it into your slicer, and have it produce a gcode file for you that you print.
PLA – the type of plastic most often used for 3D printing at home

References and related
Amazon link to what I purchased – now only $135! https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N5D2ZIB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Assembly video, part 1
Part 2.
Anet test guide: part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB5Q3_sJ-Tk

Someone’s additional first steps guide – has some useful tips: https://www.instructables.com/id/Beginners-Guide-to-3D-Printing-Anet-A8-DIY-3D-Prin/

Note that the included microSD card has PDFs for assembly instructions, usage instructions and troubleshooting guide.

Upgrade part: center nozzle fan download: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1620630

I am contemplating using openscad to build my 3D models. www.openscad.org. This is really good tutorial: http://www.tridimake.com/2014/09/how-to-use-openscad-tricks-and-tips-to.html

3D printing some parts for my house

Categories
Network Technologies Web Site Technologies

The IT Detective Agency: the case of Failed to convert character

Intro
A user of a web form noticed any password that includes an accented character is rejected. He came to use as the operator of the web application firewall for a fix.

More details
The web server was behind an F5 device running ASM – application security manager. The reported error that we saw was Failed to convert character. What does it all mean?

One suggestion is that the policy may have the wrong language, but the application language of this policy is unicode (utf-8), just like all our others we set up. And they don’t have any issues. I see where I can remove the block on this particular input violation, but that seems kind of an extreme measure, like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I wondered about a more granular way to deal with this?

Check characters on this parameter value is already disabled I notice, so we can’t further loosen there.

Ask the expert
So I ask someone who speaks a foreign language and has to deal with this stuff a lot more than I do. He responds:

Looking at the website I think that form just defaults to ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 and that causes your problem.
Umlauts or accented letters are double byte encoded in UTF-8 and single byte in ISO-8859-1

To confirm the problem with the form, he enters an “ä” as the username, which the event log shows encoded to %E4 which is not a valid UTF-8 sequence.

Our takeaway
To repeat a key learning from this little problem:
Umlauts or accented letters are double byte encoded in UTF-8 and single byte in ISO-8859-1

So the web form itself was the problem in this case; and I went back to the user/developer with this informatoin.

So he fixed it?
Well, turns out his submission form was a private page he quickly threw together to test another problem, the real problem, when he noticed this particular issue.

So, yes, his form needed to mention utf-8 if he were going to properly encode accented characters, but that did not resolve the real issue, which remains unresolved.

It happens that way sometimes.

But, yes, the problem reported to us was resolved by the developer based on our feedback, so at least we have that success.

Conclusion
If like me, your eyes glaze over when someone mentions ISO-8859-1 versus UTF-8, the differences are pretty stark, easy-to-understand, and, just sometimes, really, important! I think ISO-8859-1 will represent some of the popular accented characters in positions 128 – 255, but not utf-8. utf-8 will use additional bytes to represent characters outside of the Latin alphabet plus the usual special characters.

We’ll call this one Case Closed!

References and related
I like to do a man ascii on any linux system to see the representation of the various Latin characters. I had to install the man-pages package on my RHEL system before that man page was available on my system.

Categories
Web Site Technologies

How to POST with curl

Intro
For the hard-core curl fans I find these examples useful.

Example 1
Posting in-line form data, e.g., to an api:

$ curl ‐d ‘hi there’ https://drjohns.com/api/example

Well, that might work, but I normally add more switches.

Example 2

$ curl ‐iksv ‐d ‘hi there’ https://drjohns.com/api/example|more

Perhaps you have JSON data to POST and it would be awkward or impossible to stuff into the command line. You can read it from a file like this:

Example 3

$ curl ‐iksv ‐d @json.txt https://drjohns.com/api/example|more

Perhaps you have to fake a useragent to avoid a web application firewall. It actually suffices to identify with the -A Mozilla/4.0 switch like this:

Example 4

$ curl ‐A Mozilla/4.0 ‐iksv ‐d @json.txt https://drjohns.com/api/example|more

Suppose you are behind a proxy. Then you can tack on the -x switch like this next example.

Example 5

$ curl ‐A Mozilla/4.0 ‐x myproxy:8080 ‐iksv ‐d @json.txt https://drjohns.com/api/example|more

Those are the main ones I use for POSTing data while seeing what is going on. You can also add a maximum time (-m I think).

Example 6

If you’re sending JSON data, you ought to declare it with a content-type header:

$ curl ‐A Mozilla/4.0 ‐H ‘Content-type: application/json’ ‐iksv ‐d @json.txt https://drjohns.com/api/example|more

POSTman
Just overhearing people talk, I believe that “normal” people use a tool called POSTman to do similar things: POST XML, SOAP or JSON data to an endpoint. I haven’t had a need to use it or even to look into it myself. yet.

Conclusion
We have documented some useful switches in curl. POSTing data occurs when using APIs, e.g., RESTful APIs, so these techniques are useful to master. Roadblocks thrown up by web application firewalls or proxy servers can also be easily overcome.

Categories
Admin IT Operational Excellence Network Technologies

No Internet, secure WiFi status message in Windows 10

Intro
Finding out how Windows decides if there is an Internet connection or not can be a challenge often posed by trying to do an Internet search comprised or words that are common and therefore used in many other contexts. I have to give credit to someone else who found most of these pertinent links that help explain how Windows decides whether or not your PC has an Internet connection.

What they don’t tell you
I think there are a lot more tests microsoft does than what they’ve documented. In my opinion, based on observation, in addition to the sites they recommend to whitelist, also whitelist

www.msftconnecttest.com

Some PCs get stuck in a loop requesting www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt indefinitely, which isn’t good for anyone.

Here’s one they don’t mention, of the same ilk:

ipv6.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

I’m thinking to just leave that one alone, unless you really are fully running on ipv6.

Now if you have a PAC file, what you’re going to see are accesses for
<PAC-file-address>/connecttest.txt

I don’t think that one’s documented either. I’m not yet sure how best to have the PAC file web server respond, where best means the reply which would make the PC most likely to decide Yes I really do have an Internet connection.

References and related
This Pulse Secure article is pretty good. You start with an Internet connection, then launch Pulse Secure vpn, then find you are told there is no longer an Internet connection. This explains why it might be, but in my opinion it is incomplete as it does not even consider the case where an authenticating proxy is the sole gateway to the Internet:
https://kb.pulsesecure.net/articles/Pulse_Secure_Article/KB43805

These are two more articles about VPN tunneling
https://community.pulsesecure.net/t5/Pulse-Desktop-Clients/Pulse-Secure-blocks-Windows-10-apps-from-internet-access/td-p/11944
https://docs.pulsesecure.net/WebHelp/PCS/8.3R1/Home.htm#PCS/PCS_AdminGuide_8.3/About_VPN_Tunneling.htm

network Location Awareness (NLA) and Network Connection Status Indicator (NCSI) are explained in these articles
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4494446/an-internet-explorer-or-edge-window-opens-when-your-computer-connects
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2778122/using-authenticated-proxy-servers-together-with-windows-8

Categories
Admin Linux Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Recovery Mode or interrupting the boot process

Intro
If you installed Raspbian from the NOOBS distribution as I do, then you may occasionally “blow up” your installation as I just have! You have an out, sort of, short of re-imaging the disk, though about with the same impact.

To interrupt the boot process and enter recovery mode, attach a USB keyboard and repeatedly hit the Shift key. You should come to the NOOBS OS install selection screen. Just re-install Rasbian again… But if you’re using WiFi first configure your WiFi setup before re-installing Raspbian.

Symptoms
When I powered up, I got the initial multi-color screen. Then a two-line text message popped up – too quickly to be read, then a grayish screen, then it split into a lower and upper part, then both halves faded away and there it stayed… At that point it was not responsive to any keyboard inputs or mouse clicks.

Conclusion
While doing my advanced slide show and rotating display project, I somehow managed to blow up my OS. finding the way to interrupt the boot-up was not so easy so I am amplifying the answer that worked for me on the Internet: repeatedly hit the Shift key during the boot, until you see the NOOBS image selector screen.

Categories
Apache

apache as reverse proxy under SLES

Intro
Just got my SLES 12 SP4 server. That’s a type of commercial Linux I needed to set up a secure reverse proxy in a hurry. There’s a lot of suggestions out there. I share what worked for me. The version of apache that is supplied, for the record, is apache 2.4.

The most significant error

[Tue Aug 13 15:26:24.321549 2019] [proxy:warn] [pid 5992] [client 127.0.0.1:40002] AH01144: No protocol handler was valid for the URL /. If you are using a DSO version of mod_proxy, make sure the proxy submodules are included in the configuration using LoadModule.

The solution
In /etc/sysconfig/apache2 (in SLES this is a macro that sets up apache with the needed loadmodule statements) I needed a statement like the following:

APACHE_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic authn_file authz_host authz_groupfile authz_core authz_user autoindex cgi dir env
expires include log_config mime negotiation setenvif ssl socache_shmcb userdir reqtimeout authn_core proxy proxy_html proxy_http xml2enc"

In my first crack at it I only had mention of modules to include up to proxy. I needed to add proxy_html and proxy_http (I know it doesn’t display correctly in the line above).

In that same file you need a statement like this as well:

APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS="SSL"

The highlights of my virtual host file, based on the ssl template, are:

<VirtualHost *:443>
# https://www.centosblog.com/configure-apache-https-reverse-proxy-centos-linux/
<Location />
            ProxyPass https://10.1.2.181/
            ProxyPassReverse https://10.1.2.181/
</Location>
 
        #  General setup for the virtual host
##      DocumentRoot "/srv/www/htdocs"
        #ServerName www.example.com:443
        #ServerAdmin [email protected]
        SSLProxyEngine on
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error_log
        TransferLog /var/log/apache2/access_log
 
        #   SSL Engine Switch:
        #   Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
        SSLEngine on
# from https://superuser.com/questions/829793/how-to-force-all-apache-connections-to-use-tlsv1-1-or-tlsv1-2 -DrJ 8/19
        SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLV3 -TLSv1
#SSLCipherSuite HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5:!RC4
        SSLCipherSuite ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
 
        #   You can use per vhost certificates if SNI is supported.
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/vhost-example.crt
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/vhost-example.key
        SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/vhost-example-chain.crt
 
 
        #   Per-Server Logging:
        #   The home of a custom SSL log file. Use this when you want a
        #   compact non-error SSL logfile on a virtual host basis.
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/ssl_request_log   ssl_combined
 
</VirtualHost>

except that I used valid paths to my certificate, key and CA chain files.

Errors you may encounter
$ curl ‐i ‐k https://localhost/

HTTP/1.1 500 Proxy Error
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:10:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 442
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>500 Proxy Error</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Proxy Error</h1>
The proxy server could not handle the request <em><a href="/">GET&nbsp;/</a></em>.<p>
Reason: <strong>Error during SSL Handshake with remote server</strong></p><p />
<p>Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</p>
</body></html>

I traced this error to the fact that initially I did not tell apache to ignore certificate name and other related mismatches. So inserting these directives cured that problem:

SSLProxyVerify none
SSLProxyCheckPeerCN off
SSLProxyCheckPeerName off
SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire off

This is discussed in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18872482/error-during-ssl-handshake-with-remote-server

I finally got past the SSL errors but then I still had a 404 error and an xml2enc error.

When I ran a service apache2 status I saw this:

Aug 15 16:09:31 lusytp008850388 start_apache2[28539]: [Thu Aug 15 16:09:31.879604 2019] [proxy_html:notice] [pid 28539] AH01425: I18n support in mod_proxy_html requires mod_xml2enc. Without it, non-ASCII characters in proxied pages are likely to display incorrectly.

Not certain whether this was important or not, I simply decided to heed the advice so that’s when I added xml2enc to the list of modules to enable in /etc/sysconfig/apache2:

APACHE_MODLUES=actions alias auth...proxy proxy_html proxy_http xml2enc"
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

And that was when I put in a URI that worked just fine if I entered it directly in a browser hitting the web server.

I had a hunch that this could occur if the web server was finicky and insisted on being addressed by a certain name. So originally I had statements like this:

            ProxyPass https://10.1.2.181/
            ProxyPassReverse https://10.1.2.181/

I changed it to

            ProxyPass https://backendalias.example.com/
            ProxyPassReverse https://backendalias.example.com/

except in place of backendalias.example.com I put in what I felt the web site operators would have used – the known working alias for direct access to this web site. Of course I first made sure that my apache server could resolve backendalias.example.com to 10.1.2.181, which it could.

And, voila, no more 404 error!

Redirects going to the backend server name rather than the public hostname
This was my bad. I actually had in my ProxyPassReverse statement

            ProxyPass https://backendalias.example.com/
            ProxyPassReverse https://publicalias.example.com/

That’s just not right. And it caused public Internet users to get redirects (the Location HTTP response header) to the private back-end server hostname, which of course they could not resolve or reach. Once I re-read how this was supposed to work and corrected it to

ProxyPassReverse https://backendalias.example.com/ ,

it was all good.

Conclusion
An SSL reverse proxy to an SSL back-end web server was set up under SLES 12 SP4, using TLS 1.2 and apache 2.4.23, in other words, pretty current stuff.

References and related
Compiling apache2.4

Categories
Uncategorized

Solution to NPR puzzle using Raspberry Pi

Intro
Take a common five-letter word. If you add an “e” to the end you’ll get a common six-letter word. or add an ‘e” after the second letter to get a different six-letter word, or an “e” after the fourth letter. what word is it?

The technique
I used the strange dictionary built in to my Raspbery Pi, in /usr/share/dict/american-english.

Key command
$ egrep ‘^[a‐z]{5,6}$’ jhwords > /tmp/five‐six

That leaves us with 11897 words (use wc command to learn this).

Now just look at the six-letter words containing an “e” at the end:

$ egrep ‘^[a‐z]{5}e$’ five‐six > e‐at‐end

Down to 784 words.

Now strip off the terminal “e”.

(steps skipped)

And then…

Candidate word list

ameba
ampul
aorta
avers
blond
brows
cloth
corps
demur
expos
fauna
final
flora
fondu
grill
hears
hydra
karat
larva
loath
local
madam
moral
pleas
psych
regal
scrap
sever
sooth
spars
strip
swath
teeth
tibia
uvula
vulva
zombi

You can scan by hand – the answer jumps out at you.

Conclusion
Another NPR Weekend Edition puzzle is solved by use of some simple linux commands.

References and related
Another NPR puzzle similarly solved.

If you don’t have that dictionary on your RPi, you can install it: sudo apt-get install wamerican .

Categories
Linux Network Technologies Raspberry Pi

OLD: Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive

Intro

This posting is messed up. I’ll have to re-post. Working on it… Try this post instead.

All my spouse’s digital photo frames are either broken or nearly broken – probably she got them from garage sales. Regardless, they spend 99% of the the time black. Now, since I had bought that Raspberry Pi PiDisplay awhile back, and it is underutilized, and I know a thing or two about linux, I felt I could create a custom photo frame with things I already have lying around – a Raspberry Pi 3, a PiDisplay, and my personal Google Drive. We make a point to copy all our cameras’ pictures onto the Google Drive, which we do the old-fashioned, by-hand way. After 17 years of digital photos we have about 40,000 of them, over 200 GB.

So I also felt obliged to create features you will never have in a commercial product, to make the effort worthwhile. I thought, what about randomly picking a few for display from amongst all the pictures, displaying that subset for a few days, and then moving on to a new randomly selected sample of images, etc? That should produce a nice review of all of them over time, eventually. You need an approach like that because you will never get to the end if you just try to display 40000 images in order!

The scripts
Here is the master file which I call master.sh.

#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 8/2019
# call this from cron once a day to refesh random slideshow once a day
RANFILE="random.list"
NUMFOLDERS=20
DISPLAYFOLDER="/home/pi/Pictures"
DISPLAYFOLDERTMP="/home/pi/Picturestmp"
SLEEPINTERVAL=3
DEBUG=1
STARTFOLDER="MaryDocs/Pictures and videos"
 
echo "Starting master process at "`date`
 
rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
mkdir $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
 
#listing of all Google drive files starting from the picture root
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Listing all files from Google drive; fi
rclone ls remote:"$STARTFOLDER" &gt; files
 
# filter down to only jpegs, lose the docs folders
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Picking out the JPEGs; fi
egrep '\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]
 
Needless to say, but I'd better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.
 
Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn't know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.
#!/bin/sh
# -f : full-screen; -R : disable deletion; -s : slideshow; -d : delay ; -i : status-bar;
# -m : zoom; [-r : ranomdize]
# this doesn't handle filenames with spaces:
##cd /media; qiv -f -R -s -d 5 -i -m `find /media -regex ".+\.jpe?g$"`
# this one does:
export DISPLAY=:0
if [ "$1" = "l" ]; then
# print out proposed filenames
  find . -regex ".+\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$"
else
# args: f fullscreen d delay s slideshow l autorotate R readonly I statusbar
# i nostatusbar m maxspect
  find . -regex ".+\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$" -print0|xargs -0 qiv -fRsmil -d 5
fi

Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
my %opt=();
getopts("df:j:r:",\%opt);
$nofolders = $opt{f} ? $opt{f} : 20;
$DEBUG = $opt{d} ? 1 : 0;
$jpegs = $opt{j} ? $opt{j} : "jpegs.list";
$ranpicfile = $opt{r} ? $opt{r} : "jpegs-random.list";
print "d,f,j,r: $opt{d}, $opt{f}, $opt{j}, $opt{r}\n" if $DEBUG;
open(JPEGS,$jpegs) || die "Cannot open jpegs listing file $jpegs!!\n";
@jpegs = ;
# remove newline character
$nopics = chomp @jpegs;
open(RAN,"&gt; $ranpicfile") || die "Cannot open random picture file $ranpicfile!!\n";
for($i=0;$i&lt;$nofolders;$i++) {
  $t = int(rand($nopics-2));
  print "random number is: $t\n" if $DEBUG;
  ($dateTime) = $jpegs[$t] =~ /(\d{8}_\d{6})/;
  if ($dateTime) {
    print "dateTime\n" if $DEBUG;
  }
  $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-2];
  $Pic = $jpegs[$t];
  $postPic = $jpegs[$t+2];
  print RAN qq($priorPic
$Pic
$postPic
);
}
close(RAN);

Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.

There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.

My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!

@reboot sleep 25; cd ~ ; ./m2.pl &gt;&gt; ./m2.log 2&gt;&amp;1
24 16 * * * ./master.sh &gt;&gt; ./master.log 2&gt;&amp;1

Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.

qiv – an easy install
To install qiv

$ sudo apt-get install qiv

Rclone shown in some detail
The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.

$ sudo apt-get install rclone
$ rclone config

2019/08/05 20:22:42 NOTICE: Config file "/home/pi/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q&gt; n
name&gt; remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex" 
Storage&gt;7
 
Google Application Client Id
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_id&gt;
Google Application Client Secret
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_secret&gt;
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine or Y didn't work
y) Yes
n) No
y/n&gt; N
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?client_id=202264815644.apps.googleusercontent.com&amp;redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob&amp;response_type=code&amp;scope=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fdrive&amp;state=07ab6a457efc9384772f919dca93375
Log in and authorize rclone for access

You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.

After sign-in you see:

rclone wants to access your Google Account
<your_account>@gmail.com
This will allow rclone
to:

See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files

Make sure you trust rclone

After clicking Allow you get:

Please copy this code, switch to your application and paste it there:
 
Enter verification code&gt;4/nQEXJZOTdP_asMs6UQZ5ucs6ecvoiLPelQbhI76rnuj4sFjptxbjm7w
--------------------
[remote]
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"access_token":"ya29.Il-KB3eniEpkdUGhwdi8XyZyfBFIF2ahRVQtrr7kR-E2lIExSh3C1j-PAB-JZucL1j9D801Wbh2_OEDHthV2jk_MsrKCMiLSibX7oa_YtFxts-V9CxRRUirF1_kPHi5u_Q","token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token":"1/MQP8jevISJL1iEXH9gaNc7LIsABC-92TpmqwtRJ3zV8","expiry":"2019-09-21T08:34:19.251821011-04:00"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d&gt; y
Current remotes:
 
Name                 Type
====                 ====
remote               drive
 
e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/s/q&gt;q

Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.

Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.

Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:

./master.sh
-bash: ./master.sh: Permission denied

Some noteworthy rclone commands
rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE
rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive
rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)

Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:
$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete

real    1m12.201s
user    0m15.270s
sys     0m1.816s

My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.

Some encountered issues
Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.

Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.

Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation
I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.

Conclusion
Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.

The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.

Long Todo list

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.

References and related
PiDisplay

RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.

The rclone home page.

A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.

files |awk '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}'|grep -i -v /docs/ &gt; jpegs.list # throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting # names into a file if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi ./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE # copy over these 60 jpegs if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi cat $RANFILE|while read line; do rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL done # kill any qiv slideshow if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv slideshow; fi pkill -9 -f qiv # remove old pics if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER #run looping qiv slideshow on these pictures if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start qiv slideshow in background; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/qiv.sh &amp; if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "And now it is "`date`; fi

Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.

Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.



Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.



files |awk '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}'|grep -i -v /docs/ &gt; jpegs.list # throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting # names into a file if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi ./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE # copy over these 60 jpegs if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi cat $RANFILE|while read line; do rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL done # rotate pics as needed if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Rotate the pics which need it; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ~/rotate-as-needed.sh cd ~ # kill any qiv slideshow if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv and fbi slideshow; fi pkill -9 -f qiv sudo pkill -9 -f fbi pkill -9 -f m2.pl # remove old pics if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER #run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start fbi slideshow in background; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m2.pl &gt;&gt; ~/m2.log 2&gt;&amp;1 &amp; if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "And now it is "`date`; fi



Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.

files |awk ‘{$1=””; print substr($0,2)}’|grep -i -v /docs/ > jpegs.list


# throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting

# names into a file

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi

./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE


# copy over these 60 jpegs

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi

cat $RANFILE|while read line; do

rclone copy remote:”${STARTFOLDER}/$line” $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP

sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL

done


# rotate pics as needed

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Rotate the pics which need it; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ~/rotate-as-needed.sh

cd ~


# kill any qiv slideshow

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv and fbi slideshow; fi

pkill -9 -f qiv

sudo pkill -9 -f fbi

pkill -9 -f m2.pl


# remove old pics

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi

rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER


mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER


#run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start fbi slideshow in background; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m2.pl >> ~/m2.log 2>&1 &


if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo “And now it is “`date`; fi


Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related


Current approach and writeup for this photo frame effort.

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.