Mine the Harvest

So a few weeks ago I found this nifty utility to create a Fedora persistent live USB stick and thought I would give it a go tonight.

It runs in a simple GUI interface and lets you select the amount of space to dedicate to persistence. You can also choose which version of Fedora to install and it will grab the needed .iso automatically – which is very nice. All in all, it looked pretty cool. And it apparently will work on the OLPC too, which is also nice.

The site describes it as:

“The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. Works in Windows and Linux!”

Well, by “cross-platform” they apparently mean “this works if you are using Fedora already or Windows.” If you are using another Linux distro, you will encounter a few issues as it depends on some packages that are installed by default in Fedora and often are not available in other distro’s repositories.

Here is how I got this to work under Suse 11.1 The same general points may apply to other distros as well, and you will likely have to find the packages from your favorite sites – fortunately there are not many required.

How to make it work:

The README says to install python-qt4 so start with that if you don’t already have it.

Download, upzip and run liveusb-creator. Select your version of Fedora to install and the USB drive to install to. It will download the matching .iso to the working directory.

What follows are the various fixes I used for each new issue as it turned up. Note that you don’t have to download the .iso again on subsequent attempts, but you may rather browse to it – it puts .iso’s in the working directory the utility runs from.

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(You can find the first post here with a bit more info.)

After the Toorcamp officials negotiated it out, the owner (collectively known as Mr. Ass-Wee-Pay) finally allowed access to the missile silo today. This made a huge difference in the whole experience at Toorcamp. Otherwise, as my brother so perfectly put it, the event was a bit like:

“Come to a hacker fest at an abandoned nuclear silo!*”

(*Silo not included)

Fortunately all this changed today, and the site was fully opened to workshops, talks and tours. Way to go Toorcamp guys!

It was utterly awesome. While camping on the surface was pretty un-enjoyable with the extreme dust and heat, the silo was completely different. The temperature was easily 25-30 degrees F less in the silo. In fact you could only stay about 2 hours before you would become uncomfortably cold and want to return to the surface. Good thing I thought ahead enough to bring a fleece pull over to the desert!

I took many, many pictures of the silo and will cull a few of the best for this blog post, and others can be found on my gallery.

The Titan Missile Silo:

The entrance was a steel and concrete hatch easily a foot think. It was propped up (literally) on supports, themselves not bolted down. The ingress / egress safety briefing included strict instructions not to touch the hatch in any way. Think of a rabbit trap made out of a box and you get the idea.

You then proceeded down a very narrow passage and flight of stairs, forcing a single person to enter. This was engineered to allow a guard to be able to hold back any number of people attempting to infiltrate the entrance. A 10 year old with a slingshot could defend this entrance.

After this, at about 20 feet down you entered the main lift tower. The elevator of course was long since removed, so you descended the five flights of stairs – sturdy and steel plated until you arrived at the bottom of the lift and the main entrance. Here tunnels ran off in four directions. Two lead immediately into the control and power domes.

The power dome (above) was massive, originally housing the generators. A section of the ceiling of this dome had been opened (after being excavated) to allow access to the facility and removal of the generators and other equipment. All other parts of the facility are still completely buried. The moss growing is due to the ceiling being open to the sky.

(Just click below to read more.)

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[Want to see the pictures? They are here!]

Kyle and I arrived to Seattle late Wednesday and my brother Robert picked us up. After staying the night at his place we got up Thursday morning and road tripped across the cascades toward Moses Lake. The trip through the mountains was very nice, with beautiful scenery. I’ve not been in the cascades in over 20 years, and it was a plesent change of scenery from my current Tampa bay scenery.

We navigated easily to the site, about :35 outside of town. The environment is farmland, with crops (hey and alfalfa it seems) stretching into the horizons. It is semi-arid and pretty hot, in the low 90’s, and extremely dusty.

First thing on arrival: Assemble and solder your camp pass – a few resisters and two LEDs on a PCB with an inducer – then test by swipping in front of a credit card reader. Blink blink, you are a go.

Presentations yesterday and the Ignite! Toorcamp talks last night were very good – ranging from OSX & Linux stack protection and memory randomization in compiled apps, a Spacepunk talk showing low earth photos taken with a home constructed satellite made with a Sony cybershot camera and deployed via balloon by Hackerbot Labs – they are on site and I’ll be seeing them for more info on this! Also a very interesting talk by Psychesonics on binomial sound waves to sync brain wave activity – hack your mind.

We went to town this morning for supplies, returning for the first talks. I’m sitting in an iptables firewall class now, to be followed by muti-channel bluetooth hacking and then SQL injection.

Bad news: Apparently camp coordinators did not have a contract with explicit access rights to the Missile Silo itself, leaving all authority up to the discretion of the owner. This is bad. As a result, before the conference even started some guys went into the silo unauthorised, the owner paniced and decided to revoke ALL access to the Silo yesterday – so all the talks yesterday that were to be given underground were given on the surface instead. Now, the owner has so graciously allowed one group of people so far to tour the underground silo. It is unknown yet if there will be more tours offered.

Moral of the story: When hosting an event at speciality locations, get a contract to ensure your access rights, etc. Otherwise – just use the national forest which costs nothing and has full public access rights. And it’s a hell of a lot more comfortable environmentally in the mountians!

But the conference itself, the data and the attendees are all very interesting and entertaining and there is a lot more goodness yet to come.

Will update more later.

I am  just over a week away from attending Toor Camp ! W 0 0 T  ! ! !

Some friends of mine are considering starting a business which focuses on leveraging Open Source software solutions, commercial applications, server hosting and storage solutions to small businesses. They need a business name and domain name. Want to help them out by voting? See the poll to the right: “What is the best business name”

Their idea is to take available products and technologies, emphasizing Open Source wherever possible, and use them to enable small business to improve their operations by taking advantage of the tremendous Linux projects available.

A good presentation of this type idea is well presented in this article by Open Source advocate John Maddog Hall.

Please provide your feedback by voting in the poll! Fell free to leave any comments or suggestions as well.