I walked to the shops earlier. I took my mp3 player with me, which I haven’t used in a while. I keep all local copies of my (new) music in Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, which means that when I transfer to my mp3 player, I have to convert the tracks. Previously, I’ve bashed together a shell script that does the conversion, but today was different. Today I got graphical.

I had a quick search for audio converters for GNOME, and found AudioFormat and audio-convert-mod. audio-convert-mod is in the Fedora repos, so I used that. It was surprisingly enjoyable. It automatically detected the encoders and decoders that were available on my system:

The program takes the form of a wizard, which first asks for the files to convert, then the format to convert to, and the destination directory. Then it converts them. That’s it, no hassle.

R.

Tags: GNOME, linux, tools

I sent my “sendkey” script to Ivor. This script automates the injection of one’s ssh public key into a remote host’s authorized_keys file (to allow password-less login). It didn’t work very well when Ivor ran it. I’ve now updated the script:

#!/bin/bash                                                                     

KEY=`cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub`

ssh $1 bash <<EOF                                                                                                                               
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod u=rwx,g=,o= ~/.ssh                      
echo $KEY >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod u=rw,g=,o= ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
EOF

It can be run like this:

% ./sendkey remoteusername@remotehost

15/02/2007 Update: I fixed the script so that it made the .ssh directory first… kind of important.

29/02/2007 Update: Klaus pointed out that it might be useful to write how to generate one’s ssh keys:

/usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -N ''

Tags: hacking, linux, tools

Recently I needed to log the calls to read() and write() calls that a program made, including the data that went through them. I hacked together a small program, called “iomon”. It runs on Linux (or at least on my Fedora 8 install anyway). What makes it exciting is that I can use it without modifying the program I’m monitoring.

It uses features of the dynamic linker (the thing that’s resposible for loading the shared libraries that a program needs during execution – see man ld.so) to interpose a monitoring function between a call to a library function and the actual library function. When read(), write() or open() are called, an event is logged.

You can get iomon by checking it out like so:

git clone http://xgoat.com/proj/fiu/iomon/iomon.git/

You can build it by just running “make”:

% cd iomon
% make

You might need to install the glib 2.0 headers (in Fedora, they’re in the glib2-devel package).

Example Usage

I thought it might be useful to demonstrate how to use it with an example. After building iomon, build the following C program (also available here) using gcc:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

int main( int argc, char** argv )
{
        int f, g;

        umask( 000 );
        f = open("test-file1", O_RDWR | O_CREAT);
        g = open("test-file2", O_RDWR | O_CREAT);

        write(f, "test", 4);
        write(g, "second file", 11);

        return 0;
}

This is the program that we’re going to monitor. As you can probably see, the program just opens a file called “test-file1” and another called “test-file2”. It then writes “test” and “second file” to the first and second file respectively. Not really a very useful program, but it will suffice for this demo.

The next thing to do is set the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to contain iomon.so. The dynamic linker needs to be able to find the shared object file, and so the easiest thing to do is to put the full path into LD_PRELOAD:

% cd iomon
% export LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/iomon.so

Now every time that you run a program in this shell, iomon.so will be loaded first. At the moment iomon will default to dumping all the read, write and open calls to standard output in raw format. I suggest that you don’t run anything in this mode… iomon is configured through the IOMON environment variable. This takes a list of arguments just like any command line program:

% IOMON="--help" cat /dev/null
Usage:
  iomon [OPTION...] 

iomon

Help Options:
  -?, --help         Show help options

Application Options:
  -f, --file         File to monitor access to.
  -l, --log          Log file
  -t, --text-log     Log in text, instead of binary
  --times            Include times in the log

There’s some helpful information on how to use it. I’ll explain the arguments in a little more detail:

• -f FILE, --file FILE
  Instead of logging all file access, just log access to FILE. iomon will monitor calls to open() to get the file descriptor assigned to FILE, and will only log calls to read() and write() that use that file descriptor. At the moment, iomon only supports one file descriptor per file (patches welcome!).
• -l FILE, --log FILE
  Send log output to FILE, rather than standard output.
• -t --text-log
  This makes the log human-readable. All data is converted into readable hex strings before writing to the log file.
• --times
  Prepend every log event with a timestamp. The timestamps are relative to the first interposed function call. Only implemented for text-based output (--text-log)

Right! Now we can run the test program:

% IOMON="-t --times -f test-file2" ./test
0.000016 open: 74 65 73 74 2D 66 69 6C 65 32 
0.000138 write: 73 65 63 6F 6E 64 20 66 69 6C 65 

And there we see the call to open for test-file2, followed by the filename in hex. Then there’s the data sent to it through write() also in hex. The logged call to open() happened 16μs after the first call to open(), and the write() call we were interested in happened 122μs later.

Hopefully I’ll be writing about why I needed this utility later.

Tags: hacking, iomon, linux, tools