Flashing coreboot on MacBook Pro 10,1 using external SPI programmer
MacBook Pro 10,1 (15'' Mid 2012 Retina) is very easy to flash with SPI programmer and SOIC-8 clip, such as Pomona 5250. Open the laptop, detach the battery connector, then find the SPI chip: Attach the clip. Try to probe the chip with flashrom. It should see it and print something like the below:...
Disabling Sketch license verification
Disclaimer: this article is for educational purposes only. Consider buying the license to support developers. Sketch is a vector graphics editor for interface designers. It has a demo version that works for 3 days or so. When the demo period is over, a blocking modal window appears at startup:...
Flashing coreboot on MacBook Air 5,2 using external SPI programmer
Recently I ported coreboot on MacBook Air 5,2 (13'' Mid 2012). This model has WSON-8 packaged SPI flash chip, which means you can't just use SOIC-8 clip such as Pomona 5250. I'll show you how to flash it using the J5100 debug connector on the mainboard and SPI adapter....
Flashing coreboot on MacBooks without external programmer by using IFD hack
In this article, I will show how to flash coreboot on certain models of Apple MacBooks without disassembling and using external SPI programmer. All you need is Linux and root access. This is a very delicate procedure. Be very careful, check everything...
Flashing coreboot on ThinkPad T530/W530 without complete disassembly using custom IFD layout
The ThinkPad T530/W530 boards have two flash chips of 8M and 4M. To flash coreboot, you usually need to flash the 4M one. While on X230 it's very easy to access both chips by only removing keyboard and palmrest, it is not so on T530/W530 (on these models you can easily access 8M chip while the 4M...
Port knocking protected SSH without pain
I will briefly show how to setup knockd on Linux server to protect ssh daemon, and how to automate port knocking on the client side when using ssh, scp and rsync. First of all we need to generate random port sequence. A simple python script can handle it. #!/usr/bin/env python import random...
Reading stdout and stderr of AwesomeWM process
Sometimes you may need to read stdout and stderr of AwesomeWM process, e.g. when you're debugging your plugins. One way to do this is to create a new Xorg instance using Xephyr and launch awesome there, but it may not be very convenient. The other possible way is to trace awesome's write syscalls...
Non-root Xorg and modesetting driver on Gentoo (or any non-systemd system)
Gentoo Wiki explains a nice way to run Xorg under user account. While it works fine with intel driver it doesn't work with modesetting driver: (EE) modeset(0): drmSetMaster failed: Permission denied...