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OSSIM 2.3.1 on a Dell Poweredge with a Broadcom NIC

August 19th, 2010

This should get filed under the ‘I need to remember this for the next time it happens’ category.

Installing  OSSIM 2.3.1 (Debian based Open Source SIEM system)  onto a Dell Poweredge 1950 would succeed but the network would not function.  Doing an ‘rmmod bnx2′ and ‘modprobe bnx2′ would resolve the problem but it was no useful answer for a production system.

It turns out that the firmware isn’t installed for the Broadcom NIC as shown by the dmesg entries:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw
bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw"

Simple answer to get running – download the firmware-bnx2 0.26 from http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-bnx2, copy it to the target system and perform a dpkg -i firmware-bnx2_0.26_all.deb.  This will trigger a rebuild of the initrd, so you should be able to do a restart and have networking available straight away:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw
bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-rv2p-06-4.6.16.fw
eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f4000000, IRQ 16, node addr 00:15:c5:eb:0f:d7

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Posted in Linux, Work

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Removing a password protected Symantec AntiVirus

December 2nd, 2009

The magic key I need to remember:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\Administrator Only\Security\UseVPUninstallPassword

Change to 0 (zero)  and run the uninstall program again.  Voila!

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Posted in Work

Domain Renewal Group – scammy smelling snailmail

November 28th, 2009

Another day, another letter from “Domain Renewal Group” sent to our house, warning that one of my domain names (my main work one) will expire on April 10th 2010.   Apart from the fact that it’s a wee bit early to renew (I’d prefer to keep my cash in the bank as long as possible, TYVM), they charge an outrageous £20 for a single year.  One & One charge me £8.99, so we’re looking at a 122% increase, yet they don’t host the web site or email, they just redirect these to ones I supply myself.

A pretty poor offer, yet their modus operandi seems to be:

  • Do a whois lookup for the billing contact for a domain that will expire in the next N months (N seems to be getting larger)
  • Send a letter on good quality paper to this address, vague enough to confuse a non-technical person.
  • Take their ridiculous cut for not doing very much.
  • Profit!

There’s more information over here about their dodgy practices. People are even implying that they won’t provide the basic service they claim, but I can’t comment on that since I’ll never use their service.

Parasites.

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Posted in scams, Work, WTF?

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VMWare Server 2.0 Console not working

March 19th, 2009

I’ve had a few issues recently  opening a VMWare Server 2.0 web based console with Firefox 3.07 running on OpenSUSE 11.1.  The console session just didn’t appear, which is a problem when you can’t SSH into the target VM due to lack of networking.  The answer is obscure but works well:

VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=TRUE firefox &

With this, the console works correctly as expected.  Lovely.

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Posted in Linux, novell, Work

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Speeding up a slow NVidia 8400 card in opensuse linux

November 27th, 2008

I was having dreadful problems on my HP Laptop with KDE4 or Compiz – jaggies, slow performance, difficulty switching tabs in Firefox, the whole experience was poor.  After a spot of Google trawling, I added these to the /etc/modprobe.conf.local on my installation of 11.0 (and 11.1)

#
# please add local extensions to this file
#

options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords=”PerfLevelSrc=0×2222″
options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=1

This was with a Geforce 8400M GS which shows up in lspci as:

05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M GS (rev a1)

The difference was pretty dramatic.  KDE 4.1is usable with KWin display effects turned on, tab switching is smooth and generally it’s pretty usable again.  All using the NVidia 177.82 driver.

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Posted in Linux, novell, Work

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