dd9e - various things

Recently I needed to retrieve a mysql-password I had stored in SQLyog, but nowhere else. First I "feared" I had to change the password and update it in some places, but luckily SQLyog is open source, so a had a quick glance at the source to see how the password was stored. I suspected that it couldn't be a very good encryption because you don't have a master-password. I'd have guessed as a windows-only application they'd use the protected storage to be a bit secure against offline attacks, but it quickly turned out that the passwords are only obfuscated with a simple bit-manipulation.

The relevant function is DecodePassword in CommonHelper.cpp which just decodes the Base64-encoding and then rotates the bits of each character one bit to the left. I used this python-script to decrypt my password.

import base64
import sys

def deobfuscate(c):
  b = ord(c)
  return chr(((b << 1) & 0xFF) | (b >> (8 - 1)))

encoded = sys.stdin.readline();
print(''.join(map(deobfuscate, base64.b64decode(encoded))))

BTW: if you ever want to generate a configuration from an existing source, you could of course do the reverse of this (rotate right, then base64).

I searched a while on how to use SHA-512 for password-hashing in /etc/shadow on Gentoo. After a while I noticed that I don't have to configure anything - just reset the password with "passwd" and be done. Easy :-)

I just wanted to setup my Tomato-Firmware to provide a PPTP-based VPN. Naturally I used the HOWTO, but sadly I ran into a problem where Google couldn't help. The log only showed

pppd[8449]: unrecognized option 'local'

But my config did not contain "local"! After I'd already given up and tried without PPTP, I stumbled over a post that made the problem obvious, although it did not offer a solution. The problem seems to be, that my router has to use PPPoE and therefore already has a config in /tmp/ppp which is then used for the VPN-connects. No wonder that didn't work.

It seems that the path is hardwired into the pppd-binary. So the only solution I came up with, was to copy and modify the binary. Dirty of course, but at least working :-/

So here is what I did:

cp /usr/sbin/pppd /opt/sbin/
# be careful: the replacement has to be exactly 3 chars!
sed -i -e 's#/tmp/ppp/#/tmp/xxx/#' /opt/sbin/pppd 
cat > /opt/etc/config/vpn.wanup <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -f /tmp/xxx/chap-secrets ]; then
   mkdir -p /tmp/xxx
   ln -s /opt/etc/ppp/chap-secrets /tmp/xxx
fi
/opt/etc/init.d/S20poptop restart
EOF
/opt/etc/config/vpn.wanup
# now edit /opt/etc/pptpd.conf
# and set "ppp /opt/sbin/pppd"
/opt/etc/init.d/S20poptop restart

I hope that's all. Good luck!

I just tried to compress the data from my CD of Broken Sword to use it with scummvm, but I stumbled over an issue that made me mad.

$ scummvm-tools-cli --tool compress_sword1 --flac --best .

Unable to find speech files.
Please copy the SPEECH.CLU files from Broken Sword CD1 and CD2
into the game directory on your disk or into a "SPEECH" subdirectory
and rename them to SPEECH1.CLU and SPEECH2.CLU

If your OS is case-sensitive, make sure the filenames
and directorynames are all upper-case.

But I had done everything that was obvious: The files hat the right name (even in uppercase) and the right location, but I still got that message. So finally I debugged the compress_sword1.cpp and noticed that the tool was not using my full path. The solution was to use a trailing slash in the path (e.g.: ./) or even append a filename (e.g.: ./SPEECH1.CLU). So the tool seems to expect a file-name, but then works on all files in that directory. Very strange behavior.

I wanted to clone a svn-repository with mercurial using my preferred hgsubversion, but I was only interested in on directory. I noticed that there was a --filemap option but I found no documentation for this until I discovered that it is the same syntax the ConvertExtension has. So if you want to use a filemap check their documentation on filemaps.

If you want to exclude all directories by default and only include specific directories like me use this:

exclude /
include foo/bar

Another Hint: As mentioned by danchr in the ticket #175 your next pull will not obey this filemap. So make sure you place your filemap in .hg/svn/filemap and add this to the .hg/hgrc of your clone:

[hgsubversion]
filemap = .hg/svn/filemap