I did a little reasearch at that time and…

• it appears there are a number of players based on the Sigma 862X series chips - most of which don’t support mkv but some apparently do.
• there is a new Sigma 863X series chips which do support HD up to 1080p with mkv support.

DVICO TViX currently has the PVR M-4130SH and PVR M-5130SH (both available in Aus) which use the EM8623 but they state they have mkv support. It’s a PVR as it also has a HD tuner in it. They are also bringing out their new M6500-A with the SMP8635 which definitely supports mkv’s and other good stuff.

Popcorn Hour have their Networked Media Tank A-100 (only available in limited qty online) also based on SMP8635 which on paper looked absolutely awesome featurewise (esp for price). A good review is available here.

Tomacro limHD200i HD media player indicates support for MKV’s and perhaps uses the SMP8634? The huge AVS thread though indicated that some people are having general issues with this player.

Mvix currently only have players based on the older chipset but rumours are it will have a newer player soon.

Same for Ziova.

The Popcorn Hour Networked Media Tank A-100

Back in January I signed up on the Popcorn Hour “waiting list” and about a month ago my number came up and I ordered one of these online - it cost me just over $240 Australian delivered.

Apparently this wasn’t some elaborate online scam and a week or two later my shiny new NMT A-100 arrived.

In my next post I’ll talk about my experience with the unit and my view of it’s positives and negatives.

Last night I installed SXCE Build 85 and behold it includes the 3.1.2 Xen codebase and better still I could now boot the xVM kernel - looks like it is now time to play with virt-manager.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing however as I had some issues doing the initial install. When using my normal settings in the GUI/wizard install of OpenSolaris the installation would fail early on. The error logs weren’t exactly helpful, however it did mention the inability to create my user account. I restarted the install a few times and changed various answers during the wizard process and eventually the install completed successfully. I’m not exactly which change fixed the installer however I believe that in the last attempt in the screen where you select the properties of your user account I made sure that my Username (not loginname) contained no spaces and for my Locale I didn’t choose my normal selection (of English(Australian)) but rather used the default of English(US).

Something I did notice was that when running the xVM kernel I could not properly install the 64bit version of VirtualBox as usual - it would install but it couldn’t load the kernel module and whilst the VirtualBox client software would start up you couldn’t run the VM (no kernel module running). I’d be interested if anyone knows if and how you can run the xVM kernel AND VirtualBox at the same time.

As a starting point for those of you interested in taking a look at xVM I found the following links to be handy introductions:

The Sun System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System - especially part IV which has the chapters on xVM (the PDF version is also available).

A Comprehensive Overview of Sun xVM outlines Sun VM, including products, installation instructions, and using Windows XP on Sun xVM. The article defines Sun xVM as a family of technologies that addresses both desktop and server virtualization, leveraging work from open source communities like Xen that is being built on proven Sun technology.

The blogger explains his choice of Sun xVM over VMware and Linux+Xen and he also discusses the two types of virtual machine: Hardware Virtual Machine and Para Virtual Machine. He also outlines the starting of domainU configuration and its cloning, noting that one can clone domU in as little as one minute. He shows as well how to set up cifs server if one is running Windows domU and the use of virt-manager as a GUI interface to manage Sun xVM.

Previously I mentioned I had installed OpenSolaris SXDE (79b) however I was unable to get xVM to work. I thought I would give the newer Community Edition (SXCE) (build 84) a try and see if there was more joy there.

The various OpenSolaris builds can be downloaded from here. Burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting the DVD and installing SXCE is very simple (especially using the new graphical installer).

Unfortunately it looks like build 84 includes the same (version 3.0.4) version of the Xen kernel as the SXDE build I was using before and does not include the newer 3.1 Xen code. As such xVM still won’t boot on my Ultra 24.

ZFS

Previously (during the previous OpenSolaris b79b install) I had setup a three disk raidz zfs pool (for /data) on the machine:

# zpool create data raidz c0d1 c1d1 c2d0
# zpool list
# zpool status

After reinstalling the OS this time I simply re-imported the existing ZFS pool and all my data (including my home directory which I put into /data) is back:

# zpool import -f data

I also wanted to share the volume via NFS read only by default to my home LAN segment but read/write to my MacBook Pro. Zfs’s set options now make this extremely easy (rather than screwing around with /etc/dfs/dfstab and the share command or even the newer sharemgr command)

# zfs set sharenfs='ro=@192.168.0.0/24,rw=MBP_IP‘ data

In Kernel SMB (Samba)

I also decided to give the new in Kernel CIFS (Samba) Service a try.

Start the CIFS Service:

# svcadm enable -r smb/server

Edit /etc/pam.conf and add:

other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn

After the PAM module is installed, the passwd command automatically generates CIFS-suitable passwords:

# passwd rodney

Enable SMB sharing for an existing ZFS file system:

# zfs set sharesmb=on data

and we are done - how easy is that. For more information check out Getting Started with the Solaris CIFS Service.

BIOS Joy

I noticed that the machine has a number of potential boot menu options which appear on startup (you can press F2/F8/F12 to go into Setup/Select the boot device, after that times out you are presented with the option of pressing Ctrl-S to setup the Intel Boot Agent and after that times out you can press Ctrl-P to do something else and finally you get the Grub menu). I thought that I would reduce the BIOS boot time by disabling the PXE Boot (Intel Boot Agent) since I don’t ever want to network boot this machine anyway. If you are thinking of doing the same thing - DONT!!!

After disabling the PXE boot the various operating systems I’ve got installed on this box (OpenSolaris and Windows 2003) could not enumerate or activate the onboard e1000 NIC. That was it - networking game over man!

Some google searching turned up a few results indicating others who had the same problem with their Ultra 24’s and the basic jist was they couldn’t fix the problem (even via Sun support) and they had to RMA their machines.

The following is what I did which appears to have fixed this:

Download, burn and boot the latest (ver 1.1) Sun Ultra 24 Workstation Tools and Drivers DVD:

and in the boot menu choose to Flash the BIOS (I had previously already updated my BIOS when I first got the machine a few days ago anyway) - it goes and flashes the BIOS anyway and on reboot the PXE menu is back at the default (2 second menu) and the NIC is once again working - lucky…

Solaris Express is where the development of the next version of Solaris (11) happens. OpenSolaris has three main streams:

1. Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) - is Sun’s tested release built from the OpenSolaris bits and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. It is released every three to four months and replaces the Solaris Express monthly release.
2. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) - is Sun’s binary release for OpenSolaris developers (code named “Nevada”). It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base. This release is unsupported. It is updated every other Friday.
3. OpenSolaris Developer Preview - is the first milestone of Project Indiana. It is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system.

Indiana is to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat. It is a frequently updated distribution that will become the next version of Solaris every three years. The new Image Packaging System (IPS) will debut in Indiana replacing the old System V packaging system.

OpenSolaris SXDE (79b)

The various OpenSolaris builds can be downloaded from here. Burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting the DVD and installing SXDE is very simple (especially using the new graphical installer).

Compiz Fusion

Erwann Chénedé has thankfully packaged up an easy install bundle for compiz fusion 0.6 + emerald 0.5.2 which is available for download from here. All you need to do is run the shell archive to complete the installation.

xVM

I was originally planning on using xVM on this machine however I couldn’t get the machine to boot into the xVM mode at the GRUB bootloader - it would start and then hang every time I tried. After some serious google research I noticed a number of threads detailing issues with xVM causing serious issues with the Ultra 24 hardware (basically killing the gigabit NIC interface at the BIOS level such that the interface was no longer even available to the machine when running in non xVM mode). I’ve decide to let this one rest till this is resolved and patches/etc are forthcoming.

VirtualBox

You can download the relevant VirtualBox archive from here - the only thing you need to be careful of is installing either the 32bit version (the x86 download) or the 64bit version (the AMD64 version) depending on what version of OS you’re running. On my Ultra 24 I’m running 64bit SXDE so I installed the AMD64 version (even though it is an Intel box ). The output of “isainfo -k” will tell you which instruction set is being used on your machine.

Installation is as painless as a pkgadd of the package and then running “VirtualBox” at the command line.

Since it could run on OpenSolaris (and OS X), I thought I’d give it a try and test both VirtualBox AND the latest release of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (Indiana).

VirtualBox installs (from the very sleek 21MB download) like any normal Mac OS X application on my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard) and the application is extremely easy to use (much like VMware and Parallels).

When creating my New Virtual Machine I tinkered with the default settings (giving myself 1024MB of RAM (up from the default of 128MB), a 12GB expanding disk (up from 8GB) and upgrading the video memory from 8MB to 64MB for the virtual machine).

Started up the virtual machine with the OpenSolaris Developer Preview Live CD and shortly OpenSolaris is running. You can then double click the “Install OpenSolaris” icon and follow the wizard and in 15 minutes you’re installed and up and running.

Well almost! - there are a few things which don’t work as well as you would like including:

• Xorg comes up by default in 16bit with a resolution of 1024×768 - see below for more on this
• Networking doesn’t work at all - see below for the fix
• USB support isn’t working yet for Solaris guests
• Audio is not working yet for Solaris guests
• The Shared folders functionality is not working yet for Solaris guests

Some Google searching and I’ve discovered that Alan Burlison had already looked at this, so I grabbed his xorg.conf file. To get the Indiana screen resolution up to 1280×1024 - for me on OS X all I needed to do was put the tweaked xorg.conf into /etc/X11 and restart the X server (log out and back in). I’ve also tried further tinkering with this to get resolutions like 1152×864 (which does work); 1440×900 and 1680×1050 working but with little success so far - if anyone knows how to get these (later two) working with OpenSolaris under VirtualBox (on OS X or OpenSolaris) I’d be happy to hear about it.

The network devices used by the Virtualbox need the pcnet device driver (pcn on Solaris). Unfortunately, this is a closed source driver, so it’s not supplied with OSDP - Alan details using the drivers from an SXDE iso image. Masayuki Murayama however has supplied a huge list of Free NIC drivers for Solaris - one of which is the ae driver for AMD am79c97x PCNET ethernet chipset series. Unfortunately you’d have to build this from source (which you could do) - but made easier even still - Moinak Ghosh has precompiled and packaged all of Masayuki San’s drivers. You can either run the included installer script or just install the required package with:

# pkgadd -d . SFEnicdrv-ae

To make all these files accessible to your VM, they need to be made into an ISO image that you can mount in the VM, using Devices -> Mount CD/DVD-ROM -> CD/DVD-ROM Image… To make this a little easier I’ve prebuilt an ISO of the drivers and xorg.conf files which you can download from here.

One very cool thing with this new Indiana Developer Preview of OpenSolaris is that by default the root filesystem is using ZFS - as you can see from the output of zfs list in the screenshot below.

Some of the most interesting information I heard were from the Virtualization Technologies sessions. I was already aware of technologies like Domains, LDOMs and Zones/Containers and had planned to take a serious look at the Hypervisor style technologies like Sun xVM/OpenSolaris xVM (based on Xen) which are now built into the latest OpenSolaris SXDE and SXCE builds.

I use and am quite familiar with the common Type 2 Hypervisor (HVM) style products like VMware and Parallels. I’ve used both predominantly on my MacBook pro, however I was previously unaware of the VirtualBox product which Sun only very recently acquired from Innotek. These guys have apparently been around for some time however it is only since the Sun acquisition that word has really started to spread. There are two really compelling features of VirtualBox which make it very interesting:

1. Whilst it also has Windows and (many) Linux versions like some other competing products, and even a Mac OS X version like some others - VirtualBox also works on OpenSolaris!
2. VirtualBox is Open Source (GPL2) and FREE!

I plan to blog soon about my experience with running the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (Indiana) using VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and later on I plan to try out both VirtualBox and xVM on a new Sun Ultra 24 running OpenSolaris (Solaris Express Developer Edition Build 79b) with various guests (Windows, OpenSolaris, Linux and perhaps even OS X).

A new peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet even more powerful and stealthy than the infamous Storm has begun infiltrating mostly U.S.-based large enterprises, educational institutions, and customers of major ISPs.

Truecrypt 5.0 released

The popular open source privacy tool, TrueCrypt, has just received a major update. The most exciting new feature provides the ability to encrypt an entire drive, prompting the user for a password during boot up; this makes TrueCrypt the perfect tool for non-technical laptop users (the kind who are likely to lose all of that sensitive customer data). The Linux version receives a GUI and independence from the kernel internals, and a Mac OS X version is at last available too.

Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers

Heads Up Internet Explorer Users

A plug-in for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser that helps users upload photos to popular sites such as Facebook and Myspace contains multiple security holes.

When Security Improvements Backfire

Recently, when conducting an (authorized) security review at a small web hosting provider, I ended up as “root” on all their Unix systems within a matter of hours, and did not even need any l33t buffer overflow or the like. Well-meaning system administrators had tried to improve security of their servers, and had unwittingly ended up making life much easier for the bad guys.

The number of legitimate Web sites that have been hacked and seeded with code that tries to infect visitors PCs with malware now exceeds the number of sites specifically created by cyber criminals.

Drive-By Pharming In the Wild

Symantec reported Tuesday that the first case of drive-by pharming, in which a hacker changes the DNS settings on a customer’s broadband router or wireless access point and directs the link to a fraudulent Web site, has been observed in the wild. The first drive-by pharming attack has been observed against a Mexican bank.

Spies In the Phishing Underground

Security researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios, who recently managed to infiltrate the phishing underground. What started as a simple examination of phishing sites turned into an extraordinary tour through the ecosystem that supports the business of phishing.

Every year gets its share of major, jaw-dropping security blunders. This is a retrospective for the 21st century so far, with special attention on 2007.

Zero-Day Exploit For Apple’s QuickTime Posted

Vulnerability affects both Windows and Mac OS X versions of Apple’s QuickTime software.

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points.

Malware Distribution Through Physical Media a Growing Concern

In the past month, at least three consumers have reported that photo frames - small flat-panel displays for displaying digital images - received over the holidays attempted to install malicious code on their computer systems.

Most Home Routers Vulnerable to Flash UPnP Attack

GNU Citizen have been researching UPNP Vulnerabilities in home routers, and have produced a flash swf file capable of opening open ports into your network simply by visiting an unfortunate URL.

Years ago, attackers would often have one or two really important machines that were the centerpiece of their criminal money-making schemes. The bad guys, thus, often faced one or more single points of failure in their criminal infrastructures. So, how have today’s enterprising bot-herders, making millions of dollars from their criminal empires, responded to the single points of failure? Two words: fast flux.

Eavesdropping on Bluetooth headsets

Few users realize that Bluetooth headsets can be exploited granting a remote attacker the ability to record and inject audio through the headset while the device is not in an active call.

New iPhone Trojan Spreading

Seen more as a prank than an actual threat, a Trojan horse for the Apple iPhone, has already come and gone. Still, users should be on the look out for a package called “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep,” described as something you need to install before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware.

Master Boot Record rootkit

Matt Richard from Verisign’s iDefense sent us some information regarding the Master Boot Record (MBR) rookit that’s been found in the wild in the past weeks.