Solution for One Trackpad Issue for the XPS 13

My new laptop is the beautiful new Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04.

It is not perfect, but it is getting close. Lightweight, beautiful screen and awesome battery life (nearly 8 hours the way I use it).

One thing that was killing me, though, was that after a certain amount of time (on the order of tens of minutes and not hours), the trackpad/clickpad thingie would start misbehaving under Gnome Shell, registering bogus clicks. There wasn’t an easy way to fix it outside of a) reboot or b) use an external mouse.

It seems that this issue has been addressed in the 4.1 kernel, so I decided to try it. I’m not sure if Ubuntu is going to support the 4 kernel series officially before 15.10 so I didn’t want to wait.

I downloaded the 4.1.1 kernel here (you’ll need three debs: the “all” headers deb and the image and headers debs for your CPU – I used “generic” and “amd64”), installed them with “sudo dpkg -i” and rebooted. The problem seems to be fixed.

But, my Broadcom wireless driver wouldn’t work. I had to download one more deb from here (via my phone – never play with kernels when you are on a long road trip), install it and now wireless is back.

Now if we could just get palm detection fixed …

OnePlus Class Action?

Ten days ago I did a post about touchscreen issues I’ve been having with my (previously) beloved OnePlus One smartphone. Since then all I’ve experienced from OnePlus customer “care” are delaying tactics and an obvious reluctance to address a systemic problem with their phone design. While I loved this handset while it worked, I won’t be owning another OnePlus product and I encourage my three readers to avoid the company like they would the plague.

I really didn’t expect much from the support process and I wasn’t disappointed. OnePlus has always struck me as a company with great ideas but they’ve always seemed a little over their head when it comes to actually implementing them. But I decided to soldier on and go through the process. I sent in a support ticket on May 11th:

One Plus Support Request 1

The next day (well, about 13 hours later) I got a reply. Not bad, actually, and I developed some false hope that this would work out.

One Plus Support Request 2

So “Kathy” wants me to send in a video. Okay, no worries. I made the video and sent them the link. This seemed to satisfy Kathy who escalated my issue, but then “Leah” also asked for a video.

One Plus Support Request 3

WTF? Okay, definitely a FAIL on reading comprehension, but I replied with a link to the original video and asked them what else they wanted to see. The next message, from Canoy Gem, asks for, you guessed it, another video:

One Plus Support Request 4

At this point it time it has become obvious to me that they are just stalling. There are a number of threads about this issue on their forums (here is the first one and now there is a second – both with pages and pages of comments). So I write back to Gem, again with a link to the video, and he replied with even more requests, this time for pictures:

One Plus Support Request 5

As I’ve seen with the replies from others on their forums, this seems to be pretty common – asking for videos and pictures. I waited until I had some decent light and took really nice pictures of my undamaged phone. However, I was unable to get the back cover off for the final picture. I’ve disassembled a number of devices over the years and while I could probably get this cover off it wouldn’t be without damage. If I damaged it, OnePlus would use it to deny warranty coverage. However, it looks like they are not going to proceed until I do.

One Plus Support Request 6

Note that in this entire exchange they have never mentioned that it might be corrected with a firmware fix (as talked about in the forums). I doubt this is the case with my phone as a) it just started happening and b) it seems restricted to the upper half of the screen, but I would have been willing to test it for them if they’d bring it up.

Also, I’ve noticed that most of the people responding to me have female names. This is a tactic in customer support as women are often treated better in such situations. While they may exist I’m pretty sure OnePlus technical support consists of one overworked guy named Zhang Wei.

I replied that my patience was at an end and either they would let me send them the phone that they could then examine to their heart’s content or I would pursue other actions. All I’ve done for now is replace it with a Nexus 6, but it seems to me that this is a prime example of a use case for a class action lawsuit: A large class of consumers has been apparently defrauded by a vendor supplying faulty products.

I’m talking to friends of mine with some experience in this, but if you have any suggestions for a firm to handle a class action lawsuit, please let me know.

Electronic Program Guide Changes at Schedules Direct

I just noticed that my OpenELEC, Kodi and Tvheadend based DVR was no longer updating the Electronic Program Guide (EPG).

I would get the error:

Service description 'http://docs.tms.tribune.com/tech/tmsdatadirect/schedulesdirect/tvDataDelivery.wsdl' can't be loaded: 500 Can't connect to docs.tms.tribune.com:80 (Connection timed out)

when running the fetch script.

Digging around, I found out the reason is that the Gracenote service is being discontinued and thus some URLs have changed.

I use a script called tv_grab_na_dd from the Debian (wheezy) xmltv-utils package. Version 0.5.63-2 doesn’t appear to use the new URLs. The link above suggests adding:

54.85.117.227  docs.tms.tribune.com webservices.schedulesdirect.tmsdatadirect.com

to /etc/hosts and that worked well for me. Of course, if the IP address for Schedules Direct ever changes it will need to be updated.

It looks like this is fixed in xmltv-utils version 0.5.66.

Building an Open Source PVR: Step Three – Electronic Program Guide

The most frustrating thing about this project was getting the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) to work. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy.

This was one of the things that TiVo excels at doing. You are basically paying for a very up to date program guide. They also offered something called a “Season Pass” which would cause all of the episodes of a particular program to be recorded without having to explicitly select them.

When I got my EyeTV system, this part was a snap. They partner with TV Guide to provide the service, and unlike TiVo’s $14.95/month fee it is a yearly fee of $19.95 (with the first year being included with the unit).

Even my Sony Bravia is able to get over the air EPG information, but I wasn’t able to get that to work with OpenELEC.

The actual EPG configuration occurs in the Tvheadend software. You get a screen like this:

There are three main areas of configuration: the “Internal Grabber”, “Over-the-air Grabbers” and “External Interfaces”.

The internal section displayed a cron job but no module options. None of the OTA grabbers seemed to work, and there wasn’t a module for North America. That left the external grabbers.

I started digging around and found that it really isn’t easy to get this running.

One tool that kept coming up was XMLTV. On the frontend configuration for the Tvheadend client in OpenELEC they even have a section on it:

XMLTV is a number of things, such as a format for representing TV listings, but it is mainly a set of tools “to obtain, manipulate, and search TV Listings”. It contains programs that will connect to an external source to gather EPG data.

Unfortunately, OpenELEC doesn’t ship with it. There is a script called “tv_grab_file” which is used to manage the XMLTV data, but not to actually acquire that data.

For me the easiest solution was to install XMLTV via apt on my home Debian server. It comes with a script called tv_grab_na_dd that can be used to fetch the data.

But I still wasn’t done. I needed a data source. It looks like all the cool kids use Schedules Direct. They are a non-profit that promotes open source software and provides, for a fee, access to EPG information. Since they had a free trial I signed up, configured my tv_grab_na_dd script to access their information, and voilà, I had an XML file with what appeared to be useful information.

I placed that in the webroot of my server, and then configured OpenELEC to point to it. Nothing happened. So I copied the file to the OpenELEC server, modified the client to use the “FILE” method (see screenshot above) and nothing happened.

I finally had to uncheck the XMLTV checkbox under “External Interfaces”. When I did that I finally had something under the “Internal Grabbers” section.

The last chore was to associate the channels I had discovered with the program guide.

Prior to getting all of that to work, the drop down for “EPG Source” had been blank.

So, to summarize my steps:

  1. Get an account at schedulesdirect.org
  2. Install the XMLTV tools somewhere (I used a Debian box)
  3. Configure XMLTV to access your Schedules Direct account
  4. Set up a cron job to periodically grab the updated EPG information and store it in a web root:
     0 1,13 * * * /usr/bin/tv_grab_na_dd --config-file ~/xmltv.conf --days 7 > /secure/html/xmltv.xml
    
  5. On the OpenELEC box, set up a cron to fetch the data:
    0 2,14 * * * wget http://172.20.10.12/xmltv.xml -O /storage/xmltv.xml
    

Whew. So far everything has been working well. You want to be sure not to fetch the data too often as that can overwhelm the Schedules Direct servers. My current seven day XML file is about 10MB.

I went ahead and signed up for a year account for $25, bringing my total to $705.92 (the hardware was $680.92 and the software was, yup, $0). It’s quite possible to shave off about $200 by going with less memory and a smaller SSD (or using an HDD) or if you already have a server to run the Tvheadend backend you could get by with a Raspberry Pi.

My next steps are to play with all the cool add-ons and to try and organize my pictures in a fashion where they would be usable with the system. More fun for me.

Building an Open Source PVR: Step Two – Software

So in my quest to replace my Mac-based PVR I wanted something lightweight that could be controlled via a remote. I had issues with my current setup when a keyboard or a mouse just had to be used, and I wanted to avoid that. Since this system would be dedicated to the PVR, I didn’t want to install anything that wasn’t necessary.

This left me two options: Kodi (formerly XBMC) and MythTV. I decided to try out Kodi via the OpenELEC project. OpenELEC aims to create a very lightweight instance of Kodi that can be installed (and probably even run) from a USB stick. Sounded like just want I needed.

The easiest way it install OpenELEC is to create a bootable install USB stick. This is pretty easy, if you read the instructions correctly. I actually spent a lot more time on this than I needed because of a failure to do so. Once you download the image you need (I used the new bundled “generic” version which works with Intel-based devices as well as most others), you insert your USB stick and then run the “create_livestick” command. You pass a parameter to that command which indicates the path to the USB stick, i.e. /dev/sdX where X is the drive letter.

This is where I screwed up. I could easily tell that the stick I used was mounted on /dev/sdh1, so that’s what I used. The problem was by adding the “1” I was specifying a partition and not the whole drive. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Once the stick was created, I just booted the Intel NUC with it and followed the on-screen instructions. Pretty soon I had a working OpenELEC system.

Now let me stress that OpenELEC is not designed as a dedicated video recorder. It is designed to run Kodi which is a media center, so most of its functions are aimed at managing libraries of media and not recording television. The menu is organized by media type:

You have a Pictures menu, and if you have the PVR add-ons installed, a TV menu item. Videos are movies, whereas TV Shows are media files that have been identified as TV Shows (different than things you have recorded on your PVR).

Then you have your Music files, any Programs you have added to the system (as in software programs) and the System menu itself.

The system information screen gives you a read-only overview of the system, including memory usage and frames per second.

To actually change things you need to go to the configuration menu:

You can add media sources via pretty much every network protocol currently in use. As I have a couple of UPnP servers on my home network I used that format, but I found that when I added new content the system wouldn’t pick up the changes. So I installed an add-on to update my library but it didn’t help:

I searched but couldn’t find any way to get the changes to show up. There is a menu that comes up when you hit the left arrow that is supposed to update the library but it wouldn’t work for me. Since my UPnP servers can also serve files over SMB, I tried that and it not only fixed the issue but opened up a whole new level of coolness.

You can scan for TV Shows in your media files, and when you do Kodi will try to “scrape” information off of the Internet for such things as artwork and episode synopsis. You have to have your library named in a particular fashion (which I do) but then it is pretty automatic:

This didn’t happen when I was using UPnP.

This is all well and good, but I still get a lot of content through Over the Air (OTA) television broadcasts and the whole purpose of this exercise was to get that working. In order to add PVR functionality to OpenELEC you need to install add-ons. This usually consists of a “backend” application that does all of the heavy lifting with respect to video capture and encoding, and a “frontend” or client application that connects with the backend and displays the video. I specifically chose more powerful hardware as I wanted both features on the same unit.

First I needed to install the backend, which is a piece of software called “Tvheadend“. It was a little hard to find in the menus as it is a “service” and not a normal add-on, so you have to find the “services” section of the add-ons menu:

and then you can find and enable your services:

Like most add-ons within Kodi, you will have an “information” screen:

and a configuration screen:

The configuration screen comes into play when you set up the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) but I’ve reserved that for a separate post.

To access the Tvheadend software, you have to browse to it via http://[openelec-server]:9981. That would be a different URL, of course, if you installed it on a server other than the OpenELEC box. This is where it got difficult as most of the documentation on-line is out of date and the menu options have changed. I’ll post what I did in the hope that it might help someone else out.

First, you want to go to the Configuration tab:

You don’t have to do anything on the “General” tab if you don’t want to, but you do need to see a TV capture device on the “DVB Inputs” tab:

If you have chosen a supported capture unit, it should be displayed here. If not you’ll need to either figure out why it isn’t or get another unit. My Kworld UB435-Q showed up with support for both DVB-C and ATSC formats. Since I am interested in OTA broadcasts in the United States, I chose to enable the ATSC interface as the other is used for cable, which I don’t have.

Note in this screenshot that there is a Network entry called “OTA”. This was not there when I first enabled the interface. I had to go and set it up on the “Networks” tab and then add it.

This took me a rather long time to figure out. You need to tell the Network what multiplexers to use, and it looks like you would need to add them individually under the “Muxes” tab. It turns out that there are a number of pre-defined muxes including one for North America ATSC called “United States: us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB” so I just chose that for my “OTA” network:

Once I associated it with my adapter in the “DVB Inputs” tab, I had a list of television channels:

Tvheadend is pretty cool on its own. If you notice on the screenshot there is a “play” button next to the channel name and if you click it you get a stream that will play on your computer. We recently had a bad weather day and I worked from home, and I was able to keep the local news up in a window while I worked. I haven’t really explored all of the features of Tvheadend, but once I got to this point it was time to head back to OpenELEC and set up the frontend client.

Going back to the configuration menu and looking through the Kodi add-ons, there is a section called “PVR Clients”:

I wanted the Tvheadend HTSP client:

Just like the backend, there is an information screen:

and a configuration screen:

In this configuration screen, you have to point to the Tvheadend backend, which in my case is on localhost.

If you get to this point, then you should see a new “TV” menu item:

You can watch live TV:

But the main reason I wanted a PVR was to time shift and store TV programs so that I could a) skip the commercials and b) make sure I didn’t miss anything. This requires access to the Electronic Program Guide and I could not figure out how to get it to work. I spend days worth of my limited free time working on this. The forums and the existing documentation were not much help.

I got so frustrated that I based the system and installed Mythbuntu – an Ubuntu-based distribution that focuses on MythTV in the same fashion OpenELEC focuses on Kodi. I figured that since MythTV was designed to be a PVR from the start, it might be easier.

There were a number of differences apparent right away. Mythbuntu is huge compared to OpenELEC. It includes a number of things that just aren’t required. It was, however, easy to install, and building on my newly earned knowledge with OpenELEC I was able to navigate the initial setup easily. I found that the MythTV documentation was slightly better than OpenELEC/Kodi/Tvheadend, but I still hit snags.

The first was that MythTV wouldn’t recognize the Kworld tuner I was using. It did, however, see the EyeTV tuner from my Mac-based install. But using it and having it scan for channels turned up nothing. The channel scan seemed to complete as expected but nothing was discovered.

I spent another day’s worth of free time trying to get that to work, but I gave up pretty easily. I wanted to use the Kworld tuner and possibly sell the EyeTV unit, so it bothered me that it wasn’t recognized. Plus, Mythbuntu just wasn’t the lightweight install I wanted, so I decided to go back to OpenELEC.

I did finally get the EPG working, but I’m going to reserve that story for the third and final post in this series. Once that happened I could see the guide in OpenELEC:

Yay!

Is it perfect? No. The OpenELEC TV frontend is pretty limited. While I can schedule a show for recording through the EPG by setting a “timer”, I have not found a way through the GUI to record a whole series. I can do it through the Tvheadend web interface by selecting the show in the EPG and choosing “Record Series”:

and then it will show up on the “Timers” section of OpenELEC:

You can access saved recordings through the menu as well:

but it frustrates me that there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete the recording once I’ve seen it. I have to do that through the Tvheadend web page.

(sigh)

Overall I’m happy with my new OpenELEC Kodi install. There are a large number of add-ons that I haven’t explored yet, and perhaps I’ll have the time one day. When I was younger and got a new piece of technology I would try out every single feature. Now I tend to do the bare minimum I need to have a viable solution and then stop. (grin)

If you don’t care about OTA television then OpenELEC is a breeze to set up. The only issue I see is that there are a number of closed solutions, such as Google’s Chromecast and Amazon’s FireTV that do pretty much the same thing, at least with respect to video, and they cost about as much as a nice meal versus several hundred dollars.

But I like OTA television. Between it and other services I have like Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, I always have something to watch. Plus, OTA HDTV signals aren’t compressed like those from cable and satellite providers, so the quality is excellent.

This experiment to create an open source PVR both emphasizes the good and the bad about free software. I consider myself pretty technically savvy but I had a lot of issues getting this to work. But I also learned a whole lot about four open source communities (OpenELEC, Kodi, Tvheadend and MythTV) and how OTA television actually works. My PVR is not some magical black box but a tool that I can control and manipulate to my benefit.

Technology is key to personal freedom and ceding the understanding of how it works to third parties can be dangerous. I know it sounds silly to sow fear about something as trivial as the ability to record “The Big Bang Theory“, but rarely does societal change happen in a huge way all at once. It is more a series of small things, chipping away at our freedoms over time, and getting this to work just made me feel like, at least in my life, that I was making a difference.

Many thanks to the people behind OpenELEC, Kodi, Tvheadend and their communities for making this possible.

Important Security Issue with OpenNMS

It is said that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, which is true, but the tricky part is finding enough eyeballs, especially useful ones and not the ones in that jar in Blade Runner.

Recently, an end user reported a rather severe security issue with OpenNMS.

The process that serves up the “Categories” section on the front page of the web interface is called RTC (for Real Time Console). The database queries that create the availability numbers on that page can be expensive in terms of resources, so the RTC daemon was created to periodically query the database and then cache the results so that lots of users wouldn’t create an undo load on the system.

We use a tool called Castor to process XML data within OpenNMS. Due to a bug in Castor, if Castor discovers an error when processing an XML file, it can throw an exception that includes the contents of the file.

This is very useful when the files relate to OpenNMS and you are trying to debug them, but you don’t exactly want the contents of /etc/shadow or /etc/passwd displayed indiscriminately. That’s exactly what this exploit allows.

Since the default username and password for the RTC user is “rtc” and exists on every system, a malicious person could use that information to obtain the contents of any file on the system. Note that as far as the OpenNMS application is concerned, the RTC user has very limited permissions, but this is caused by an issue with Castor and it has just
enough permissions to trigger it.

This has been reported as our first ever CVE: CVE-2015-0975

The best fix is to upgrade to OpenNMS 14.0.3. If, however, you are unable to upgrade soon, you can edit the Spring security file to limit requests from RTC to just the localhost, which should mitigate most of the issue. Full instructions and files can be found on the wiki.

To summarize, all versions of OpenNMS prior to 14.0.3 contain a bug where *anyone* with access to the webUI (port 8980 on the OpenNMS server) can retrieve any file that is on the system. While this isn’t the end of the world, it definitely could be considered bad and should be addressed.

Using an XML Parser

You know when the XML nerds say not to use regular expressions to parse XML? They’re right.

As part of a less is more project, we wanted to remove the tags from all of the OpenNMS event files. We spent much of the morning playing with a number of methods to find and replace with empty space those tags, and we failed. We came close a couple of times, but then some weird aspect of formatting (tags that spanned multiple lines, some with spaces and some without, etc.) would foil it.

Then I found out about xmlstarlet. We installed it and ran:

xml ed -L -d "/events/event/alarm-data" [filename]

and it just worked. Pipe that bad boy through find and you are good to go.

While I don’t think the option exists, it would be cool if instead of deleting the tag we could just comment it out, but that doesn’t seem to be currently possible.

Oh Nos! My Wireless Stopped Working!

I just had something a little scary happen, so I thought I’d share it in case anyone else hits this problem.

I’m in Portland for OSCON and suddenly the wireless networking on my laptop stopped working. The wireless status showed as “off” but it wouldn’t turn on. I’m running Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and no interfaces were showing up.

Now, one thing I like about open source is I always tend to learn something when trying to solve a problem. A quick search on my phone introduced me to the “rfkill” command:

# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: yes

For some reason, the interface was “Hard blocked”. I then figured out what must have happened.

I was trying to bring up a shell to diagnose another issue. On Linux this tends to be ALT+CTL+Fx where the function key chosen is the virtual terminal you want (i.e. F1 for the first one, F2 for the second, etc.). On my normal keyboard, which is an old Apple keyboard, the function keys default to softkeys and you have to hold down the Fn key to actually trigger F1, F2, etc.

This is not the case with my laptop, so when I hit Fn+F2 it turned on “airplane mode”. This was causing the hard block.

I hit it again:

# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
1: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

And then turned off the soft block:

orcrist interfaces.d # rfkill unblock 0

And it fixed my issue:

orcrist interfaces.d # rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

It would have really sucked to be on the road and have some serious software issue to repair with no network access, so I was extremely relieved to figure this out.

2014 Dev Jam – Day 4

First let me interrupt this blog post with a special announcement. A rather onerous security bug was discovered in OpenNMS that would allow any authenticated user to access pretty much any file on the system.

We felt it was bad enough to actually create a fix in the 1.10 branch as well as in the current stable, 1.12, so please consider upgrading at the earliest possibility.

Hat tip to Martin Laercher for reporting it.

Wednesday marked the halfway point in the week, and everyone seems to be in a good groove. With everyone able to work together in person, a lot of nifty things are getting done, including an upgrade to the latest version of Drools Expert.

The integration of OpenNMS with Drools allows for very powerful alarm correlation, and by migrating to Drools 6.0.1 it just got more powerful.

Wednesday also marked the day of the Twins game. For the past two years we’ve taken everyone to the Twins ballpark to watch a major league baseball game. It’s a beatiful place for baseball:

although they usually stuck us in far right field. Also, for the last two games the Twins played the Royals, and lost both times.

This year they put us in far left field:

and the Twins faced the Brewers. Since Milwaukee is close to Minneapolis there were a lot of Brewers fans in the stands, but the home team pulled it out for the win.

We got our name on the big board, too, which was cool, and Jeff was quick enough to catch a picture.