Quickstart Run the spider as: $ :> fprincipals.jl :> s.log; scrapy crawl active_foreign_principals -o fprincipals.jl --logfile=s.log This will truncate the output and the log file. JSON-lines output format is always appended to. Setup Install scrapy for Python3. $ virtualenv -p python3 py3 $ source py3/bin/activate $ pip install Scrapy ipython Now, create a crawler project $ mkdir ~/src/fara $ cd ~/src/fara $ scrapy startproject fara $ cd fara $ scrapy genspider active_foreign_principals efile. Read more

This was written as part of a job interview. This guide uses lxd as it is a test setup. KVM setup Since I lost my Fusion license along with alok@ideadevice.com I decided to give KVM a spin on the Thinkpad. Downloaded Bionic Beaver (18.04) LTS and set it up using virt-manager. Could not access the console Error connecting to graphical console: Error opening spice console, SpiceClientGtk missing Some googling and installing some packages didn’t help so I moved on by using virt-viewer. Read more

Debian multi-arch This is the AC3200 running Asus-Merlin. {% highlight shell %} $ sudo dpkg –add-architecture armel $ sudo apt-get update $ inst crossbuild-essential-armel {% endhighlight %} Try building a hello world program: {% highlight shell %} $ arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc -o hello hello.c $ file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB pie executable ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=c0a6f1e6a507d14337f1594657f795971706ef39, not stripped {% endhighlight %} Try it on the router: Read more

When you set the host name for your router, it reboots and doesn’t come back up. One of the reasons might be that samba sharing is enabled and the hostname is not changed there. When I changed the hostname on the media server page (/mediaserver.asp), the router hostname also changed.

When I first got this laptop in 2012, Debian would hibernate the laptop when the battery went too low. I didn’t set this up and it worked well until it didn’t work. On the X220, the battery LED is not visible to you when you are using the laptop, it is on the top side of the lid. Figuring this out would mean a lot of waiting and watching the output of acpi_listen and udevadm monitor. Read more

Start by reading the handbook. Grub is not used on the cubox so selinux-activate will not DTRT. Edit /etc/default/flash-kernel to add selinux=1 ... to the command line. Reboot. It will take a while for the box to come back up. I left it for an hour and came back to find that the box was still not up. Connected via serial console (remember to connect to minicom before powering the cubox on) to find that the boot was hung on some auditd messages. Read more

The Asus specific MIBS have been removed from Merlin as they are considered a security hole. Disregarding that, I want to monitor the router. So, I got the mibs from the 378.49_4 tag. First, we enable SNMP via the web GUI. It is under Administration. The community string you set will be used in the snmp* commands so in that sense, you can use it like a password. There is no real way to secure v2c and I have not figured out how to make this a v3-only installation. Read more