Redesign Instant Messaging Platforms to be Used on Multiple Devices

POSTED AT JANUARY 29, 2011 // TECHNOLOGY

 

Most of the people who care about it have a smartphone and a data plan. They get their emails on the phone, browse the web and often also use instant messaging.

 

Software like Google Talk, Yahoo!Messenger, or Skype now exists for almost all devices and operating system: Windows, OS X, iPads, iPhones, Blackberry, Android, …

 

But what happens when you use it on multiple devices at the same time? Maybe you are on your PC, then get pulled in a meeting and bring your ipad, and then go out for a coffee and have your cellphone with you. Sounds familiar?

 

Today, either the platform sends the messages to all the devices or just to the last one from which you logged in. Annoying in both cases. It’s time to change.

 

The IM software should be written so that it knows what you are using. For example, as long as you type or use the mouse one can assume you are using the PC. If you start touching the ipad and not the PC, then switch to that. If the phone detect movements (GPS?) and there is no activity on the other devices, switch to that.

 

In addition, the chat logs should be kept on the sever, so that whatever device you use you always have them with you.

 

Privacy problems you say? Not really. You just need to encrypt the messages that you send and receive and use the same key on your devices, so that they can encode/decode them locally and on the server there is just and indecipherable series of characters. The Off-The-Record plugin, available for Audium and Pidgin, does just that.

 

It is not that hard. Who will get there first? A new startup or the IM companies?

 

via Redesign Instant Messaging Platforms to be Used on Multiple Devices.

The easiest solution by the way is to use VMware convert, point at source and destination and it will sort it out, but sometimes this isn’t an option.  In my case I had the vmdk file (the small 1kb descriptor file and the 20GB *-flat.vmdk disk image it references), and nothing else.  Except that I knew my source was a version 7 vmware disk image.   I had copied the vmdk image files to the esxi 3.5 host but on creating a new virtual machine it basically pretended it couldn’t see the disk image, browsing the datastore to add the virtual disk showed nothing, no clue it even existed.  As always, this is what I did, take a backup first, your fault if you screw it up, etc, etc.

Using vi, or any other text editor, open up the vmdk file (the small one, *NOT* the big one), eg in my case I had;

/vmfs/volumes/49b13e24-6619f880-49fd-00151798cc79/Linuxx64 # ls -hlat
-rw------- 1 root root 20.0G Jan 9 16:11 Linux x64 Clone-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 486 Jan 9 16:09 Linux x64 Clone.vmdk
drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 2.9k Jan 9 15:58 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 560 Jan 9 15:45 .
/vmfs/volumes/49b13e24-6619f880-49fd-00151798cc79/Linuxx64 #

It’s the highlighted orange one we want, the *-flat.vmsk is the actual disk image data.  Once opened you will have something like;

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=3
CID=7d8e12e8
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"
# Extent description
RW 524288000 VMFS "Linux x64 Clone-flat.vmdk"
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "7458"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "32635"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 93 7a c9 31 2b-8d 11 61 d1 30 66 5c 41"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "7"

Note the highlighted values simply change to;

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=7d8e12e8
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"
# Extent description
RW 524288000 VMFS "Linux x64 Clone-flat.vmdk"
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "7458"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "32635"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 93 7a c9 31 2b-8d 11 61 d1 30 66 5c 41"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"

That simple, honest, edit in a text file and you’d done.  If you try and and this to Virtual Machine under Esx or Esxi 3.5 it will now see the vmdk and work just fine, in my case at least

First off, a caveat, the data I had on my Terastation was not life or death, if this had failed the world would not have ended, in fact this had sat for 6 months un-attempted, that’s how un-important it was. Getting the data back was a ‘nice to have’, so this is not a safe or guaranteed process. If in doubt investigate using dd to backup partitions before atttempting – Don’t blame me! – But in essence Buffalo Terastation raid recovery is possible using an i386 generation donor box.

So, history, I had a Buffalo Terastation (model TS-1.0GL/R5) which is a Power PC (PPC) based NAS, fitted with 4x 250GB Western Digital drives. It went Pop

In my case it was configured to use all the drives as one large pot, although that’s not really important, underlying I knew it was basically software raid (mdraid) and the XFS file system.

First attempt was using a Centos 6 (32bit) box I had to hand, guess what, no XFS support under 32 bit, try again. So I used the Openfiler 2.3 install CD I had (intention was to present the recovered data as a NAS again – but never quite got that far). Importantly Openfiler supports XFS and software raid, and is in essence a minimised Linux distro with a web front end.

Once booted up (hasten to add boot / OS drive was another drive, I’ve literally added the Terastation drives as additional SATA drives and done nothing with them), I ran fdisk on the first Terastation drive and saw;

fdisk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
 /dev/sda1 1 48 385528+ 83 Linux
 /dev/sda2 49 65 136552+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
 /dev/sda3 66 30378 243481141 83 Linux
 /dev/sda4 30378 30401 192779 83 Linux

Which was promising, in fact all 4 drives had identical partition structures. The first partition (/dev/sda1) is actually a raw xfs partition and is the / partition of the Terastation if you want to be nosy.

/dev/sda2 is swap, if I’m honest I have no idea what /dev/sda4 is (/boot maybe? I didn’t look), but /dev/sda3 (and /dev/sdb3, /dev/sdc3, and /dev/sds3 are the big ones with my data, and the software raid). There was lots of poking, prodding, reading, giving up as a lost cause at this point. I’m more than comfortable hacking about in Linux, it’s part of my day job, but Software Raid and mdadm are not my regular toys, and whilst a Mac fan my indoctrination didn’t come till the Intel days, so am not a Power PC expert. But, end result was discovering that in essence a software raid array, created on a PPC (Big Endian) device was not going to ‘appear’ under an i386 Linux (Little Endian) appliance, so give up … or google a little more.

At this point mdadm –examine was seeing nothing, there was no hint of a software raid, it might as well have been not there, but I *knew* it was. Turns out that you can change the byte order (Big Endian vs Little Endian – google it if you want), you need to do this on all components of the array, so basically;

 mdadm -A /dev/md0 --update=byteorder /dev/sda3
 mdadm -A /dev/md0 --update=byteorder /dev/sdb3
 mdadm -A /dev/md0 --update=byteorder /dev/sdc3
 mdadm -A /dev/md0 --update=byteorder /dev/sdd3

At this point we can ask mdadm to have a look, and you should get something similar to;

mdadm --examine /dev/sdb3
 /dev/sdb3:
 Magic : a92b4efc
 Version : 00.90.02
 UUID : 39b220be:f9b75e99:849a28e5:f10c758f
 Creation Time : Sat Aug 29 11:09:31 2009
 Raid Level : linear
 Raid Devices : 4
 Total Devices : 4
 Preferred Minor : 1
Update Time : Sun Mar 6 17:05:45 2011
 State : active
 Active Devices : 4
 Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 0
 Spare Devices : 0
 Checksum : f8cc653a - correct
 Events : 0.8
Rounding : 64K
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
 this 3 8 51 3 active sync /dev/sdd3
 0 0 8 3 0 active sync /dev/sda3
 1 1 8 19 1 active sync /dev/sdb3
 2 2 8 35 2 active sync /dev/sdc3
 3 3 8 51 3 active sync /dev/sdd3

Bingo, we’re now acknowledging the raid array components, so stich back together with;

mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd3
 mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 4 drives.

Then give it somewhere to mount (but read only for now, to be safe);

mkdir /mount/md0
 mount -o ro -t xfs /dev/md0 /mount/md0
 mount: /dev/md0: can't read superblock

Cock At this point you may be laughing and busy copying off your data, but not for me. Am not an XFS filesystem expert, but some more googling suggested some options, and lots of warnings that *this may further corrupt your data* remember, I wasn’t too concerned if it ended badly, so you’ve been warned, at least twice!

xfs_repair /dev/md0
 Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
 Phase 2 - using internal log
 - zero log...
 ERROR: The filesystem has valuable metadata changes in a log which needs to
 be replayed. Mount the filesystem to replay the log, and unmount it before
 re-running xfs_repair. If you are unable to mount the filesystem, then use
 the -L option to destroy the log and attempt a repair.
 Note that destroying the log may cause corruption -- please attempt a mount
 of the filesystem before doing this.

You have now been warned three times! Pressing on …

xfs_repair -L /dev/md0

… followed by similar output to above, confirming that the log had been zapped and recreated, but nothing else fatal, then to be sure;

xfs_check /dev/md0

Again nothing, so, try again;

mount -o ro -t xfs /dev/md0 /mount/md0

Bingo!

Openfiler saw the software raid array we’ve just re-created, but I’m assuming that because it relies mostly on LVM volume groups on top of physical disks / arrays it couldn’t do anything for me with an array of existing data, so I just fired up an SFTP client and copied everything off.

Hope this helps, please heed my warnings if your data is critical, but then if it were critical you’d have a backup, right?

Link – Great North Run 2011 by Flish at RunKeeper

Official Chip Time was 2hrs 16 minutes and 14 seconds and was run in aid of Butterwick Hospice, sponsorship page still available at http://www.justgiving.com/Andy-Flisher-GreatNorthRun-2011

Official Chip Timing:

I was getting an error in the console:

com.apple.kextd[10]: Cant create kext cache under / - owner not root

This can be fixed by doing the following command:

sudo chown root:admin /

Note, you will almost certainly be prompted for a password, normally this is your Mac login password, but it may be a specific user with Administrator privileges’ password you need to enter

via I Found This Useful: Error message in OSX Console – Cant create kext cache under / – owner not root.

by Lex Friedman, Macworld.com   Sep 5, 2011 2:00 pm

Hints reader nathanator11 discovered that Lion includes a handy app that provides all sorts of diagnostic information surrounding your wireless network. Much of the information the software generates gets pretty technical, but even Wi-Fi novices may find some of the details that the utility aggregates useful.

Wi-Fi Diagnostics is tucked away in the /System/Library/CoreServices folder. To get there, I pressed Shift-Command-G in the Finder (the equivalent of going to the Go menu and choosing Go to Folder), and then typed in the /System/Library/CoreServices path and pressed Return. Once in the folder, I found Wi-Fi Diagnostics and double-clicked it. Alternatively, you could launch the Terminal and type open “/System/Library/CoreServices/Wi-Fi Diagnostics.app”, and then press Return.

However you find and launch it, Wi-Fi Diagnostics gives you four options: Monitor Performance (which shows you signal strength, noise level, transmit power, and data rate); Record Events (which can keep a log of network happenings); Capture Raw Frames (which records everything coming and going on your Mac’s wireless connection); and Turn on Debug Logs.

If you’re at all interested in what’s going on with your Mac’s Wi-Fi connection or your wireless network, Wi-Fi Diagnostics is freely included with your copy of Lion, and you can’t break anything by poking around the app—so enjoy!

via Monitor Wi-Fi with Lion’s hidden tool | Networking & Wireless | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld.

The embbedded route map is currently broken (Take note please Runkeeper, embedded maps still broken), so here’s a link to the actual page – Middlesbrough 10k 2011 Race

Official Chip Timing: