BlackBerry have a password policy set?

My BlackBerry is attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that passes a password policy to it.  My profile on the BES was messed up and I needed to remove the password policy from the BlackBerry.  Well, I came across an entry on the BlackBerry forums that gave detailed instructions on how to remove this.  Here they are…

1. Make sure you have the most updated BlackBerry Desktop Software on your computer.  You can download this software from the BlackBerry site, just search for it.
2. Download the file policy.bin and save it in your Blackberry installation directory (C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry).
3. Wipe your Blackberry, creating a backup if necessary. Select Options/Security/Wipe on the Device.
4. Close the Desktop Manager if it is open.
5. From the Windows Start Menu select Run…, and at the prompt type regedit. In the tree on the left hand side, navigate to:

   HKEY_Current_Users\Software\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\PolicyManager

   Right-Click the Policy Manager Folder and select New/String Value. Name the value Path. Now, Double-Click the Path Subkey and set Value Data to:

   C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\policy.bin

6. Open the Desktop Manager.
7. Connect the Device.

Now, this process worked on my 8830, but I am not guaranteeing that it will work on your BlackBerry.  I am not responsible for any data loss/corruption/bricking that can occur with the steps above.  If you hose up your BB, then you are on your own.  Don’t send me emails stating that your BB is broke and asking questions on how to fix it.  As my boss says, “Not my problem.”

Also, I am not responsible if you get in trouble with your work for removing a corporate policy.  The steps above are for those that purchased their BB on the web and it came with a policy installed on it and they need to remove it.

Don’t blame me.  You are doing this at your own risk.

USB on VirtualBox 2.4.4 with OpenSuSE 11.1

I was browsing the Internet with a problem that I had with USB on VirtualBox. The USBs were greyed out and I could not select them. I came across two possible solutions. I did both, and it worked. Now, you may just have to do one of them, but I was trying everything that I could to get it to work. Here are the solutions:

Search for rule 50-udev-default.rules
and change the permissions as follows:

# libusb device nodes
#SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ENV{DEVTYPE}==”usb_device”,
NAME=”bus/usb/$env{BUSNUM}/$env{DEVNUM}”, MODE=”0664″

I did the following also:

Look in the directory /etc/udev/rules.d/ for the file 10-vboxdrv.rules. Create a backup of this file by:
cp 10-vboxdrv.rules 10-vboxdrv.rules.bak
and then do the following:
mv 10-vboxdrv.rules 60-vboxdrv.rules

then reboot, and hopefully everything works. Good luck!

OpenSuSE 11 and a Pinnacle 800i

A while back I bought a Pinnacle PCTV 800i for my box.  Now, mind you, I had Windows XP installed on this box; but I could NEVER get the damned thing to work.  I am not kidding!  The card was designed for Windows XP, but Pinnacle really dropped the ball on this one.

Well, I recently pulled this machine back out and installed OpenSuSE 11 on it.  Everything works like a charm.  I remembered that I still had that card boxed up; so I pulled it out, blew the dust off of it, and put it in the machine.  I have installed some usb tv cards for my laptop, so I decided to do the same steps from before with this card, even though it’s a PCI card (Steps are below).

I could not believe it, but when I fired up TVTime, the damn card worked.  Absolutely unbelieveable!  So finally, if my fiance’ is watching TV in the living room, I can escape to my office and watch football!

To get this working, just visit http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Pinnacle_PCTV_HD_Card_(800i)

Or follow these instructions:

Run lspci -vvnn (to make sure the card is recognized)

You should see some output that looks like:

00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller [0400]: Conexant CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [14f1:8800] (rev 05)
	Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Unknown device [11bd:0051]
	Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
	Latency: 32 (5000ns min, 13750ns max), Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
	Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 19
	Region 0: Memory at dc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
	Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2
		Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)

		Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

Next, go to this website, http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/ and get the firmware.  There are three seperate files, and I suggest you take a look at the README.

Now, go grab the bzip or gzip from http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb

There are instuctions on that site on how to install.  Mainly, copy the tar to /lib/firmware and extract.  Run make and make install.

Now, you should be cooking with gas.  One drawback to using TVTime, is that the sound will not be produced until you install sox from yast and run this command:

sox -c 2 -s -r 32000 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp2 -t ossdsp -r 32000 /dev/dsp

Cheers, and a big screw you to Pinnacle for making me sit on this thing for soooo long.  A huge HELL YEA to SuSE for doing it the right way for soooo long!

Getting 02Micro CAC Reader to work with OpenSuSE 10.3

In Yast, install:
libusb
libusb-devel

 From source, compile and install:
ccid-1.3.6

 From Yast, install:
coolkey
coolkey-devel
    (Now, Yast will ask you if you want to install pcsc-ccid, and answer
yes to it)

Go back into Yast and remove pcsc-ccid.  Yast will want to remove
coolkey, but you have to IGNORE THIS REQUIREMENT

Finally, go back into ccid-1.3.6 and re-compile and re-install.

This is how I go it working...good luck to you all, and have a great
day.

Update:  I have found out that this process works with OpenSuSE 11.0 also!

Convert video with VLC and drag and drop batch script…

Courtesy of lifehacker.com, I came across an article about the many uses of VLC.  My favorite was the ability to convert any video with a drag and drop batch script.  Here’s some of the article…

“If you regularly convert files to a specific file format—say, for your iPod—you can set up a batch file with VLC that will make video conversions as easy as dragging and dropping the to-be-converted file onto the script.

Create a new text file and save it as VLC Converter.bat. Make sure your filesystem is showing file extensions so you aren’t saving it as a text file (you don’t want to end up with something like VLC Converter.bat.txt). You need to make sure it’s saving with the BAT extension.

If you were building the script from scratch, at this point you’d open up the file you just created and paste “C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” %1 in the first line. Now you need to get the command line options that describe how VLC should convert the file. For that, you can use the text generated by the Target textbox at the top of the Stream/Save Settings window described in steps two and three of the DVD ripping guide above, which displays the command line options you need for your batch file. Luckily a user at the iPod forums at iLounge already put together a VLC batch conversion script for iPods, so we can just use those settings, which look like this:

“C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” %1 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1,height=240,width=320,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=%1.mp4}}”

Ultimate Boot CD on Thumb Drive…

Here is an easy how-to on installing and running the Ultimate Boot CD on a thumb drive.

Bastille Hardening Program

You have heard of DISA’s Gold Disk as a tool to harden a Windows machine.  Well, Bastille is a program specifically designed to harden a Linux box.  Users can choose to run the program through command line or a GUI.  Bastille is designed for use on Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, HP-UX, or Mac OS X.  The web site offers an easy how-to for installation.  On my OpenSuSE 10.3 machine, I had to add Perl-TK and the Curses packages for the GUI to work.

Through the GUI, Bastille asks the user a set of questions, and the user’s answers determine what settings are applied to the system.  One of the best features of Bastille is the ability to revert to previous settings if unwanted settings are applied.

Bastille

Tor using Firefox and Opensuse 10.3

There are those times when anonymous web browsing is needed, and when this time arises, I use Tor. If you don’t know about Tor, go to their website and do some research on it and anonymous browsing. It really helps when you are behind a firewall that won’t allow some sites to be accessed.

I got Tor working using the Torbutton plugin on Firefox, Privoxy, and Tor on Opensuse 10.3. I first had to download Tor and Privoxy; you can get Tor from here and Privoxy from Yast or here.

After installation, Tor might tell you that it cannot access the torrc file from /etc/tor/, so all I did was “touch torrc” into that directory and Tor ran fine. Also, you may have to go into the /etc/privoxy/config file and add “forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050.” to it (do not forget the “.” at the end of the line).  I was having trouble with it until I did these two steps.  I then set Tor and Privoxy to start at boot by going into Yast and setting them to boot at startup.

I can now click on “Tor Disabled/Enabled” for a quick switch to and from anonymous proxy browsing.

USB support in VMware Workstation 5 and OpenSUSE

Another one courtesy of Chris, but this one is not tested…but should work.

If you would like USB support for VM Workstation 5 on OpenSUSE follow the directions below. If it works/does not work, please make note in the comments section, so I can correct this problem.

• • Mount the USB file system with parameter auto with this line in fstab:
  usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
• • Each Guest O/S has its virtual configuration storage, including the virtual hardware config file with extension .vmx. Ensure that .vmx file contains this line:
  usb.present = “TRUE”
• • After installing VMware Tools: GoTo the the top menu –> VM –> Settings –> Hardware: Make sure that USB Controller is listed as Present and if not then Click to Add –> USB Controller.
• • Now you can view and install your USB devices/drivers at Menu –> VM –> Removable Devices –> USB Devices –> select to install.

VMware Workstation 5 and OpenSUSE 10.3

A huge thank you to Chris for this one.

I received an email from Chris the other day because our group was having a hell of a time trying to install VMware Workstation 5 on our OpenSUSE 10.3 machines. Well, he worked it out. Now, you have to search for the newest any-any patch for VMware, I am using 116, and Chris is using 115, for this to work. Here are the steps…hope this helps…

Installing VMWorkstation 5.0 from source in OpenSUSE 10.3

1. Using YAST, ensure that kernel-source, gcc, and make are installed

2. Open a terminal

3. run “su -”

4. run “rpm -qa kernel* gcc* make”

5. Ensure that all versioning information corresponds exactly (eg. kernel, gcc)

6. run “cd /usr/src/linux”

7. run “make mrproper; make cloneconfig; make modules_prepare”

8. Install application by running “./vmware-install.pl”

9. Use default answers except for the one regarding vmware-config.pl

10. DO NOT RUN vmware-config.pl – ANSWER NO

11. Install any-any file by running “./runme.pl”

12. DO NOT RUN vmware-config.pl – ANSWER NO

13. run “cd /usr/src/linux/include”

14. Determine the ASM directory that corresponds to your version (eg. asm-i386)

15. run “ln -s /asm/i386 /asm”

16. In line above note where the spaces are…..

17. Now run “vmware-config.pl”

18. I used the default answers to all of the rest of the questions. The only problem that I’ve had so far is that under Preferences, I can’t set updates to “Never”. It just silently crashes.

19. Remember, if your kernel ever does an update, VMware will quit working. You will probably have to go back to /usr/src/linux/include and rerun the ln -s command again. Then you must rerun “vmware-config.pl” Then it should fire right back up for ya.

Thanks again Chris! And Mike, next time you and I are having trouble, we’ll just let Chris find out a way to do and save our time.