More Zonkyness

“Mounting” A VDI Image Under Linux

Feb 042014

So I found myself in the position of wanting to poke around the file system of a virtual Windows machine – the kind of poking around you would prefer I didn’t if it were your Windows machine – and needed to make a VDI disk image available as a block device under Linux so it could be mounted in the normal fashion.

Googling around found some instructions; which didn’t work properly. Solutions were also available, but I’m writing up the ‘fixed’ instructions here to save myself time in case I need it again.

First step is to become root; if you need help doing that, this is probably the wrong page for you!

Next step is to install the Debian package qemu-utils which contains the tool qemu-nbd which we’ll need later. We also need to load the network block device module with a parameter :-

apt-get install qemu-utils
modprobe nbd max_part=16

This parameter is the key here – for some reason the default on at least some of my Linux machines is not to create additional block devices for any additional partitions that show up.

The next step is to ‘attach’ the VDI image (or presumably anything supported by qemu-img which covers pretty much everything popular) and tell the Linux kernel that there may be some new partitions to create device files for :-

qemu-nbd -n -c /dev/nbd0 disk.vdi
partx -a /dev/nbd0
partx: /dev/nbd0: error adding partitions 1-2

(Added the “-n” flag after reading about some more problems and a work-around; as I haven’t tested it, be careful!)

The error from partx indicates that qemu-nbd managed to create the partitions itself, but there are hints that this sometimes doesn’t happen so I’ve included the command here “just in case”. Once the partition block devices are present, they can be used as any ordinary devices.

Once finished, unmount anything mounted and release the block device with :-

qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
rmmod nbd

Amanda Knox: The Murderer On The Run

General No Responses »

Feb 022014

The recent Italian court verdict has found that Amanda Knox is guilty of murdering Meredith Kercher together with her accomplices, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede. One of the accomplices is in prison, and the other is in Italy so it is unlikely that he will escape imprisonment but what about Amanda Knox?

The key fact here is that a court one assumes to be reasonably competent has found Amanda Knox guilty of murder.

So she is a murderer on the run.

You may believe she is innocent, but is that because you have taken a long hard look at the evidence and made a considered judgement? Or is it because she looks cute? Or because you have certain prejudices about the justice systems in foreign countries?

And It Turns Out That Journalists Can’t Count Up To Three …

Media No Responses »

Feb 022014

The Independent is claiming today that the government’s cut in the means tested council tax is being described as “poll tax mark II”.

But what they really mean is “Poll Tax Mark III” :-

The first Poll Tax was in fact a series of taxes charged during the late medieval era in Britain. Some were genuine flat rate taxes where everyone pays the same; some were in fact progressive taxes although the first “step” may have been so distant to normal people it would have looked like a flat rate tax.
The second poll tax was the Community Charge which was probably the most reviled tax of modern times with mass protests against it’s implementation and huge non-payment movements.

Remembering Pete Seeger

General No Responses »

Jan 282014

So I learnt today that Pete Seeger has died, and was somewhat surprised to hear the one line obituary only mentioned his 1960s protest songs.

It is somewhat understandable because just about everyone knows a Pete Seeger song even if they don’t know the name. His protest songs (and protest songs he popularised) were covered by others before, during and after the 1960s.

But he was more than that. He was also a deeply committed political activist from the 1930s all the way through to his death. With his banjo labelled “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”, Covering issues such as racism, fascism, environmentalism, and war, he was one of the few people of whom you could say: “When the barricades go up, if you’re not on his side of the barricade, you’re probably on the wrong side”.

If you work through the list of awards he received during his lifetime on the Wikipedia article (link at the top), the ones for music leap out at you. But if you look closer, only 1/2 are directly for music; many are for his activism or children’s writing.

There was a lot more to Pete Seeger than just a few popular folk songs.

“There is hope for the world.”

The New Cold War

Computing, General, Politics, Security No Responses »

Jan 272014

I’m old enough enough to remember the tail end of the real cold war between the West and the old Soviet Union when we were waving nuclear missiles at each other. And threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.

So it is a bit of an exaggeration to speak of a new cold war when the threat is nowhere near as apocalyptic. But if you take a look at how the old cold war was fought – with espionage, and signals intelligence – you begin to realise we do have a new cold war. Intelligence agencies around the world are cooperating in fighting against a new enemy.

Us.

Oh, they’ll defend themselves by saying that it’s not the normal man or woman in the street they are worried about, but but the terrorists in our midst they are targeting. But to do that they have to spy on us.

They’ll say that they are not spying on the people in their own country; just on those sneaky foreigners. But when GCHQ spies on US citizens, they pass the information they obtain to the NSA; and the NSA passes information on their spying activities to GCHQ.

Which means that what little protection we have against our own intelligence agencies spying on us is effectively meaningless.

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