Tag: Ubuntu

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Technology Tutorial Ubuntu Ubuntu Touch

Getting Started With Quasar and VueJS on Ubuntu

After watching this recommended tutorial I decided to try out this Quasar thing. My true hope is that we can eventually add Ubuntu Touch as one of the buildable outputs at the end of app creation as it apparently might not be that hard with Cordova… but I digress…

I’m not an experienced developer yet so getting started with all these different ‘things’ I had to install with the terminal was getting a bit concerning. I decided to document my journey so that others can hopefully follow along and save some research and time.

So, if your goal is to be able to, without a great deal of pain, create a good looking app to run on Ubuntu, this might just help.

Without further adoo here are the steps that I took to get set up on my Ubuntu 18 LTS machine so that I’m ready to start using the Quasar framework. I left very brief notes to show what you are actually doing so that it’s not some random terminal script from some random blog:

  1. Install npm
    sudo apt install npm
  2. Download and install NVM (a thing to help you install and manage nodejs. Ubuntu repository for NPM is apparently not reliably up to date so that’s why we are using NVM. NOTE: Before beginning, check this page to make sure the following script I’m about to give you is up to date as it changes from time to time. Oh, and if you want to have a dance party and learn more about the details of NVM, this video is good. curl -o https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.3/install.sh | bash
  3. Install LTS version of Nodejs (you can do whatever version you want as well easily but I’m not bothering to show that in this tutorial): nvm install --lts
  4. Check to make sure what you installed was what you wanted nvm ls
  5. Install the Vue CLI which is apparently what real developers developing VueJS stuff use. I got a few ‘warning’ messages after running this about my OS but probably life will continue…note also that when running this script my whole computer slowed down: sudo npm i -g @vue/cli
  6. Install Quasar – the framework that apparently makes doing a lot of stuff easier: sudo npm i -g @quasar/cli

Now I’m off to try to actually do this tutorial

Some Follow-Up Updates from the first tutorial Journey

Might as well leave a few notes that might help you along the way. If you were doing this Quasar tutorial and had an issue with hot reload not opening, I figured out how to get it working by just running quasar dev again and that seemed to kickstart the hot reload option. I had this happen a few times when i made changes and nothing new showed on the hot reload app.

In order to get highlights working properly in VS Code like teacher’s you should get the extensions for Vue and Sass since they may not be installed. I used:

octref.vetur (Vetur) for Vue because this has html auto-complete as well (another one I tried didn’t…) and

syler.sass-indented for sass stuff

Converting your New App into an Electron App and then Building for Ubuntu with a Debian package

For some reason it doesn’t really say explicitly anywhere in the tutorial above nor on the Quasar site, how to build for Ubuntu / Linux. I assume most developers ‘just know’ this but I didn’t so I had to search and find. For your benefit,

Installing for Ubuntu

Very hard to figure this out for a noob but after a full day of time spent I figured out how to turn this Electron app into an ubuntu native app running in the launcher and everything (exciting moment for a noob, I say!)

I feel like there should be a way to do this right in Quasar with a terminal tag during the build but it seems not.

First, you need to install this by running this on your Quasar dev machine:

npm install -g electron-installer-debian

Then, you build the app with the Quasar electron instructions, but for me it was as simple as running this:

quasar build - m electron

After you run that you’ll find two directories, one of which I still don’t know what it does. The two directories were “my-app-name-linux-x64” and “Unpackaged”

I then created a directory in my quasar project folder at the top level called ‘installers’

I then took the following command which I pulled off the read me page above:

electron-installer-debian --src dist/app-linux-x64/ --dest dist/installers/ --arch amd64

And adjusted the ‘src’ (source) to point to my app-named directory in the electron folder and the ‘dest’ (destination) to the installer directory I created. You can do what you’d like but mine looked like this therefore:

electron-installer-debian --src dist/electron/my-app-name-linux-x64/ --dest installers/ --arch amd64

The result was a fully effective .deb installer file which installed without a hitch and really ended the above tutorial on a high note.

Important note: I had this error:

Creating package (this may take a while)
Error: could not find the Electron app binary at “dist/electron/Quasar App-linux-x64/my-app-name”. You may need to re-bundle the app using Electron Packager’s “executableName” option.

This took a long while to trouble shoot but the issue was nothing more than opening the package.json file and making sure that the following two entries match and probably have dashes in the names (haven’t confirmed that need but it worked with them so I’m sticking to it!)

“name”: “my-app”,
“productName”: “my-app”,

Hope this also saves someone some hair pulling

Cordova Stuff and Ubuntu Touch (raw notes for later)

Cordova is apparently our best hope to get Quasar stuff to be able to convert easily to the Ubuntu Touch framework so I’ll leave my quick notes although they are quick, dirty, and probably fairly useless. I don’t think it can support Electron as per above.

First, apparently… cordova was not installed yet when I ran quasar build -m cordova it never told me that… I had to install cordova with some command that I cannot seem to now find…

Also interesting is that the build let’s you build without error even if you have caps problem in command such as typing ‘Cordova’ instead of ‘cordova’. Neato.

A little late in the game this link was sent to me which I somehow didn’t find before beginning even though I searched. I would have started right here so hopefully this documentation link helps someone save some time.

More to follow, hopefully…

Categories
Technology Tutorial

HOW TO CLICK AN ITEM IN A SUBMENU (UL) LIST USING PYTHON, SELENIUM

I spent literally 3 days trying to simply click a logout link with Selenium. I searched every stackoverflow post I could find until I found this one.

I had tried pretty much everything I could to try to click the logout link which was the fifth item down in the move-over list.

I tried find_element_by_xpath, find_element_by_id, find this, find that, blah blah blah

Finally, it was indeed the find_element_by_css_selector that worked.

The only thing is I still do not know WHY the xpath option didn’t work for this list while the others did. Hmm. Whatever. Probably will figure it out later….HOW TO CLICK AN ITEM IN A SUBMENU (UL) LIST USING PYTHON, SELENIUMThe only thing is I still do not know WHY the xpath option didn’t work for this list while the others did. Hmm. Whatever. Probably will figure it out later….

so, here is a code block of what worked for me to move to a mouse-over menu and click the menu’s submenu item using Selenium and python (my css selector is just a fake example of course so paste your correct one in):

Edit: I also realized I had to click on the button *above* the actual unordered list (UL) element to trigger the drop down. This tip for the ‘main_menu’ element below might also help someone.

main_menu = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//*[@id='with-label']")

actions.move_to_element(main_menu).perform()

time.sleep(2)

WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".css-selector-thing > ul:nth-child(2) > li:nth-child(6) > a:nth-child(1)")))

driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".css-selector-thing > ul:nth-child(2) > li:nth-child(6) > a:nth-child(1)").click()
Categories
Freedom and Privacy Life Skills Nextcloud Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

HOW TO MAKE A NEXTCLOUD PI BOX WORK AS REVERSE PROXY TO YUNOHOST

Background

The situation was that I wanted to test out the very cool project Yunohost but I already had Nextcloudpi (another awesome project!) running on my local network. I already had a DDNS service (No-ip) running which was pointing to my Nextcloudpi (“NCP” moving forward) box, and a second DNS service that I set up which pointed to my router for the purpose of Yunohost (“YH” moving forward). You can read about that cool DNS solution in my other blog post, by the way, as it works really well and gives a bit more power.. and it’s free.

The problem was that ports 443 and 80 were being used by NCP but YH needed them as well. The only options appeared to be:

a) change the ports of one of the machines (complicated because clients outside of the LAN in the world webs won’t know those ports) or
b) figure out what a ‘reverse proxy’ is and then make it work

The challenge was that NCP was using Apache whilst YH uses NGINX – both of which are capable of reverse proxy. So, in order to do this I ended up doing some learning of both although it turns out it wasn’t really needed after all. C’est la vie…at least I learned some things!

At the end of the journey of trying about 10,000 different settings in the Apache default configuration file that comes with NCP (and other Apache installs) called “000-default.conf” it started working after adding just two lines to my configuration which seemed not to be in any other tutorial online for some reason. The key two lines that were needed were:

SSLEngine On
SSLProxyEngine On

Without those two lines it would just never work even though the rest of my settings were right.

Ok, enough of my hard journey story, let’s log the actual configuration and steps so that anyone who wants to do the same setup can save the pain!

Assumptions

Before we begin, I will assume that you already have the following set up:

  1. Server A (in my case NCP) running Apache which is already successfully reachable and working from the outside world. Through this machine Server B will be reached.
  2. Server B (in my case YH) running whatever (I think) but in my case it’s running NGINX and this box is the one we are trying to make visible to the outside world through ports 80 and 443
  3. You have a domain (nameofyourdomain.com in this tutorial) which you own and which is already successfully hitting your router (You can test by pinging the domain and seeing the IP address of your router show up). You can do this with my other tutorial mentioned above as well. You can also get a free ‘domain’ from services like No-ip if you don’t care what the domain looks like.
  4. You have full access to SSH into both machines, but in this case Server A is the critical one.
  5. You are using an Ubuntu environment and have know how to open a Terminal and use it (roughly)
  6. You are willing to learn and try things if this doesn’t perfectly work as per this specific example. I’ll give you a few resource links as well to help you in case your set up needs tweaking.

Let’s Begin – Setting up Apache Default Config on Server A

  1. ssh into Server A (format ssh username@your.IP.Address )
  2. Change directory (cd) to your Apache2 sites-available directory. In my case it looks like this but if you aren’t using NCP it might be different
    cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
  3. Type this command to back up your Server A apache settings. If you mess anything up you can restore this one and delete the default and rename it back to original name.

sudo cp 000-default.conf 000-default.backup

  1. Check to make sure the new file with .backup is showing up by typing ‘ls’. If it’s there then proceed.
  2. Copy the sample configuration below into your clipboard
  3. Open the default Apache config file with this command (if you haven’t used nano before probably good to do a quick online overview) for editting:
    sudo nano 000-default-conf
  4. you may have some settings already in this file (you should) at the top. Scroll down to the bottom of whatever is there and then paste in the sample you have copied from below with the control + shift + v (If you don’t hold shift it won’t paste)
  5. Go through the newly-pasted configs and adjust to your settings changing domain names and ip addresses to yours.
  6. Control x to save and exit, ‘y’ to save modified buffer and ‘enter’ key to write your changes
  7. Restart apache with this command to see if it works (this will shut down whatever stuff is running on Server A so probably good idea to do this wisely if the server is currently being used by others…:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

If you get nice silence from your terminal, and no ‘journalctl’ messages, then things are going the right direction.

Run Let’s Encrypt Manually for SSL certs on Server A

For this step, to be honest, I’m not sure if you need to do it because certs are already on both boxes for NCP and YH. But you might not have that so I’ll provide the steps since after I did them nothing was worse and everything was working… I would love to get some feedback on this step.

  1. Install Let’s Encrypt tools:
    sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache
  2. Run it
    sudo certbot --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com

Let’s Finish – Test Server B

Go to your domain from outside your LAN (just to make sure you are getting a real test) and try to hit Server B. I find mobile phone data plans are good for this kind of testing, otherwise, call your grandma and ask her what happens when she goes to nameofyourdomain.com…

If it works, you’re done.

If it doesn’t you might need to tweak your settings.

Sample Configuration – copy this and adjust to your set up

Your IP address will obviously be changed to the correct one where your Server B is. Copy everything in the code block below.

 <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin name@nameofyourdomain.com
    ServerName nameofyourdomain.com
    ServerAlias www.nameofyourdomain.com

   ProxyPreserveHost on
   ProxyPass / http://192.168.1.37:80/
   ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.37:80/

</VirtualHost>

#Listen 443

<VirtualHost *:443>

    SSLEngine On
    SSLProxyEngine On

     ServerAdmin name@nameofyourdomain.com
     ServerName nameofyourdomain.com
     ServerAlias www.nameofyourdomain.com

     ProxyPreserveHost on
     ProxyPass / https://192.168.1.37:443/
     ProxyPassReverse / https://192.168.37:443/
</VirtualHost>

FULL Sample Configuration Reference (DO NOT COPY THIS ONE)

This is what my config looked like when everything was done and working.

The ‘Rewrite engine’ stuff here was added by Lets Encrypt when it was run so it ‘should’ appear in your config after you run it after initial settings have been added. Same with the ‘Include’ stuff and the SSL certificate stuff at the bottom of the second entry.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin name@nameofyourdomain.com
    ServerName nameofyourdomain.com
    ServerAlias www.nameofyourdomain.com

   ProxyPreserveHost on
   ProxyPass / http://192.168.1.37:80/
   ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.37:80/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =nameofyourdomain.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www.nameofyourdomain.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]

</VirtualHost>

#Listen 443

<VirtualHost *:443>

    SSLEngine On
    SSLProxyEngine On

     ServerAdmin name@nameofyourdomain.com
     ServerName nameofyourdomain.com
     ServerAlias www.nameofyourdomain.com

     ProxyPreserveHost on
     ProxyPass / https://192.168.1.37:443/
     ProxyPassReverse / https://192.168.37:443/

Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/nameofyourdomain.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/nameofyourdomain.com/privkey.pem
</VirtualHost>

Random Keywords and messy spam from the Journey

This next section is merely a copy/paste of all the steps I was trying to try to get this working. The purpose is not to follow any of these instructions but merely to leave as keywords in hopes that other people trying the same things will end up finding this blog and save themself the pain! 🙂 So, don’t use the next section for any form of tutorial but feel free to read and learn.

  1. set up individual virtual host conf files on box 1 else:

We were unable to find a vhost with a ServerName or Address of mydomain.ca.
Which virtual host would you like to choose?

1: nextcloud.conf | mydomain.hopto.org | HTTPS | Enabled
2: ncp.conf | | HTTPS | Enabled
3: 000-default.conf | | | Enabled

Select the appropriate number [1-3] then [enter] (press ‘c’ to cancel):

Select the appropriate number [1-3] then [enter] (press ‘c’ to cancel): c
No vhost exists with servername or alias of mydomain.ca. No vhost was selected. Please specify ServerName or ServerAlias in the Apache config.
No vhost selected

hmm.

finding apache config…

seems like one shouldn’t mess with this… and that lets encxrypt probably does it for you

  1. sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache (apparently not installed on ncp somehow..)
  2. created basic conf file in /sites-available
  3. restarted apache – worked
  4. added symlink to sites-enabled, restarted apache, breaks
  5. run certbot without enabled…with usual
    sudo certbot –apache -d example.com -d www.example.com

pi@nextcloudpi:/etc/apache2 $ sudo certbot –apache -d mydomain.ca -d www.mydomain.ca
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator apache, Installer apache
Cert not yet due for renewal

You have an existing certificate that has exactly the same domains or certificate name you requested and isn’t close to expiry.
(ref: /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/mydomain.ca.conf)

What would you like to do?

1: Attempt to reinstall this existing certificate
2: Renew & replace the cert (limit ~5 per 7 days)

choosing option 2

fail. same error above

now trying to go back to simply 443 config in 000-default but wtihout ssl engine stuff.

now running:
sudo certbot --apache -d mydomain.ca -d www.mydomain.ca

this is something… progress….

the bad part:

Failed redirect for mydomain.ca
Unable to set enhancement redirect for mydomain.ca
Unable to find corresponding HTTP vhost; Unable to create one as intended addresses conflict; Current configuration does not support automated redirection

the good part

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • We were unable to set up enhancement redirect for your server,
    however, we successfully installed your certificate.
  • Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
    /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.ca/fullchain.pem
    Your key file has been saved at:
    /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.ca/privkey.pem
    Your cert will expire on 2019-09-14. To obtain a new or tweaked
    version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot again
    with the “certonly” option. To non-interactively renew all of
    your certificates, run “certbot renew”
Categories
Freedom and Privacy Life Skills Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

How to Encrypt a Password Around and Merge Multiple PDFs in Ubuntu

For some reason, this is way harder than it should be. I thought I would be able to find a simple ‘pdf stitcher’ software in the Software Centre and just put them in there, arrange them and then export to PDF – with a password. I think this used to be possible with PDF Sam but anyway. This tutorial will hopefully be a long term and reliable way that we can do this in a pinch from any machine.

This is all terminal based so get ready to pump up your terminal skills.

1. Stick PDFs in a Dedicated Folder

Assemble into one directory all the PDFs you plan to stitch together and wrap up with a password. I think the command will only work if they are in one place so this step is important.

2. Install PDFTK

sudo apt install pdftk… I think… but you might need some other package these days… remind me in comments if this is wrong 🙂

3. Go to your PDF directory

Using the CD (change directory) command, navigate to the directory you made in step 1.

4. Run the Command for One Page Only.

This is the basic format for PDFTk showing one file being output with a new name and a password

pdftk [mydoc_old].pdf output [mydoc_new].pdf user_pw [awesomepasswd]

In this case you”ll swap out the filenames accordingly.

*Special note! do not put the square brackets in there. those are just to show you what needs to be swapped out. I actually did this and wasted a lot of time (lol)

Also, take note of this, you ‘might’ get a warning that the PDF has a user password and you can’t do these tasks because you don’t know the owner password. It seems banks do this on their bank statements, which is funny, because they don’t supply a secure way to send banking documents to them and ask me to email…

Error will look like this if you need to work around it:

filename.pdf
has set an owner password (which is not required to handle this PDF).
You did not supply this password. Please respect any copyright.

I found a nice work around to stick it to these bankers which is to use the Ubuntu ‘print’ (ie. printing to your printer) and then change from your printer to ‘print to file’. Side note: If you didn’t know about this built in and super easy PDF feature and you only need to do one PDF at a time and no encryption, this is the way to do it.

The output PDF from this method seems to strip away any of the ‘owner password’ annyoyances. Hint: this is also a good time to rename your individual pdfs to a number in the order you want them to appear in the final merged PDF. I do 001, 002, 003 during this phase making the next section way, way easier.

5. Run the Command for Merging Multiple PDFs

The process is the same as above, but now that you have your folder full of 001, 002, 003 numbered files, here is what you do:

pdftk [001].pdf [002].pdf [003.pdf] output [mydoc_new].pdf user_pw [awesomepasswd]

Once you hit ‘enter’ a new file will appear in the same directory with name ‘mydoc_new.pdf’ and will have 001, 002, 003 in it and be locked behind the password ‘awesomepasswd’.

Pretty handy especially when you have to deal with ‘owner passwords’ in the PDF.

Hope this helps!

Categories
Freedom and Privacy Life Skills Mesh Networks Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

How to Flash OpenWRT onto a Zsun Card

Background

EDIT JAN 7, 2019
Warning! Before beginning this tutorial, note that I have **fried** two Zsun devices nearly immediately after doing these steps. My theory appears to be correct that as soon as you flash to OpenWRT the default power output is way, way too high and so it starts heating up and frying it. Within about 15 minutes of flashing both devices were dead and inaccessible – their SSID didn’t even show up. I am now testing another one where I dropped the power to low and it’s still alive after about 45 minutes. Therefore pay special attention I’m going to test another one now, but in case you find this blog today, you might want to wait a few days for my findings….

I found a lot of pages on the internet showing that it’s possible to flash OpenWRT onto a Zsun Smart Card Reader. A friend gave me a couple and I wanted to try some mesh network ideas. However, for some reason I couldn’t find everything in one spot for Ubuntu, so I’m writing this guide for anyone else who might want to try. There was also a significant bug I encountered which I overcame which might help you if you have tried and failed in the past.

I also recommend staying fully disconnected from your home wifi while you are doing this to avoid confusion. If you have access to an ethernet cable and router this will make things a bit more simple.

What You Will Need

  1. Zsun Reader
  2. micro SD card to insert into reader – BONUS! I just discovered you only need this for the flashing process and then can remove and use again for flashing other devices (microSD not required to function as extender!)
  3. Ubuntu machine with understanding of how to open a Terminal
  4. (optional) A dedicated folder/directory on your computer where you can ‘do all your actions’. I find this reduces risks and helps you keep your files in one place. You can even download this blog to PDF and put it in the same folder.
  5. All the stuff you need in one place on local machine (because your internet will go down while flashing)

Step 1: Download to local machine the File you will need to flash onto the Zsun

I found it really hard to find the file on this page. Here is a direct link to the file and save this in a memorable location on your computer as we’ll need to access it soon.

Direct link to download

Step 2: Make sure your micro SD card is formatted to FAT32

On ubuntu you can do this by pressing the super key, typing ‘disk’and using the disk utility. Note – always unplug all external drives you do not want to accidentally kill! Also pay super-special attention you are not accidentally formatting your own computer’s hard drive (I’ve done this hard life lesson and you don’t want it)

Step 3: Insert empty and correctly formatted card into the Zsun card reader

Self explanatory

Step 4: Plug in Zsun card reader into your computer (or any powered usb slot)

Self explanatory

Step 5: Connect the Zsun to your WIFI network

This is funny because I totally missed this step and (obviously) it has to be connected to the network in order for it to show up in network and be able to access the admin page. I had an attempted connection which failed and then the second time it connected. You connect to it like any wifi network but it won’t ask for a password.

Step 6: Make Card Accessible to Admin

I ‘guess’ that this step in one of the tutorials I read preps the card to be able to access via Samba. Not sure, I could not access the files on the card until I performed this step so let’s do that now. In a browser, copy/paste this:

http://10.168.168.1:8080/goform/Setcardworkmode?workmode=0

It should spit back this:
{"status":"0"}

Note: if you get ‘connection refused’ message in the next step you may have to re-try this command a few times. Make sure you are actually connected by wifi to device. One time I had to do a full computer reboot too and then it seemed to work.

Step 7: Access the Zsun via Samba (SMB)

(reminder this is an Ubuntu tutorial so you might have to do it a different way on your machine if it isn’t the same)

The super painful part of this tutorial for me is that this easy part was subject to a weird Ubuntu bug that tracks back nearly 10 years. If you are bored you can read about it here, but probably, like me, you just want to hack this zsun and then put evertyhing back the way it was. So let’s do that:

Step 8: Overcoming the Ubuntu Samba Username password bug

  1. in a terminal enter this:
    sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
  2. Scroll down into the ‘Authentification’ section.
  3. at the very bottom in the space just above the “Domains” section, paste in (with control shift paste) this:

security = user
client use spnego = no

  1. ctrl x to get out
  2. ctrl y to agree to write the changes

Step 9: Continue with Tutorial and Accesss the Zsun via Samba

  1. Open Nautilus (called ‘Files’ on the launcher) (the file cabinet icon thing…)
  2. Go to ‘Other locations’ on the left menu at the bottom. A ‘Enter server address’ field will appear.
  3. Type in zsun address as follows: smb://10.168.168.1
  4. enter admin/admin pass/user (don’t worry about ‘workgroup’)
  5. when greeted with ‘public’ enter that directory
  6. hit ‘contrl h’ on your keyboard which will show hidden folders. If you don’t do this step you might not think the next step will work since it’s a hidden folder.
  7. You should see ‘trash~’ something. But if you don’t… whatever. Seems to work if it’s fully blank too… Here is where you create the following folder (with the dot/period in front):
    .update if it doesn’t appear after creating this folder, review step 6 above…
  8. Drag and drop the file you downloaded way above (SD100-openwrt.tar.gz) into this new .update folder. Yes, the whole tar file, don’t extract it.
  9. CRITICAL STEP! Before doing step 10, make sure you skip ahead, and deeply familiarize yourself with the steps following it because you will have a short time to do those steps before the device fries and dies. Once you have read it all (especially big step 11 below) then come back here and execute step 10.
  10. After you are sure that the file is done copying in, go to a browser and enter this:

http://10.168.168.1:8080/goform/upFirmWare

When you see this, things should be working:
{"status":2}

Here is a fair-use paste from buddy’s blog

Wait for the reboot into OpenWRT

Wait for long LED flash, then multiple fast flashes – now OpenWRT is booting for the first time.
There will be a long period of (normal slow) flashing, then one long flash, then a whole bunch of very fast flashes. The ZSun Wifi network disappears, and eventually re-appears as OpenWRT.

What he didn’t add that I discovered was when everything is totally done it will be a solid light colour.

SUPER IMPORTANT NOTE (in case you missed my other 20 warnings…) immediately as quickly as possible and reduce transmission power on device! Learn how to do this in Big Step 11 below …if it’s not too late.

Step 10: Log into your new OpenWRT Mini Router!

I have another OpenWRT router going in my house so right away I’m going to log into the new little guy here and change it’s IP address to something different to make sure they don’t conflict. The default OpenWRT is 192.168.1.1 so we’ll access it there now.

You’ll get a browser warning that it’s not secure. No problem, add exception, move forward.

You’ll be greeted with a log in screen with no password set.

Log in.

Step 11: Turn Down Radio Transmission Power to Prevent Deep Fried Zsun!

IMMEDIATELY reduce the transmission power of the device. The default is set to the maximum power and it will fry/kill this device in less than 10 minutes after you flash it. I lost two devices this way so act quickly as follows:

1. Go to network

2. go to ‘wifi’

3. click ‘edit’ on the ‘OpenWRT’ entry

4. Drop transmit power to 4 (lowest)

5. ‘save and apply’ button at the bottom

This will momentarily disconnect you from the device while it makes these settings. From here, assuming my theory above is true, you can start doing other things now such as resetting your device access password:

Go to ‘system’ and ‘system administration’ and create a new user/password

Step 12: Undo whatever we did to that Samba bug above (If you want)

Remember when we fixed that Samba bug above? I’m frankly not sure if that was a secure thing to do so let’s undo it in your computer just in case by going back in the same way, deleting those lines you added, and then saving.

Step 13: Remove microSD

As mentioned above, the microSD is no longer required if you are just using device as a wifi range extender (see this tutorial). You can unplug, remove microSD and plug it in now.

Step 13: Enjoy!

The rest, my friends, is up to you. Hope this helps!

Thanks to the following resources

  1. This nice video helped me create this Ubuntu guide
  2. This great blog entry mentioned at the beginning.
  3. Of course the awesome people who hacked this thing here

Categories
Freedom and Privacy Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

Fixing Wrong Monitor Display in Ubuntu 18.04

What a pain in the hindquarters… I lost about 2 hours of my life after I plugged in a Samsung 40″ monitor after having been using a Samsung 20″ Monitor. When I went back to my 20″ in my office, Ubuntu (I’m using Gnome currently until Unity8 is ready) my laptop continued to falsely detect the monitor as a 40″ still . The result was a bad display of the wrong size. I could not adjust the settings, nor save any changes, etc, etc.

Thankfully, a friend in the UBports community (awesome, awesome community and project by the way) just saved my day, and what was most nice (is that English?) is that it took less than 30 seconds to fix.

So, if you want to erase or delete or get rid of some false monitor detection in your ubuntu machine, this might also help you 🙂

Note before beginning: The monitor may/will still display as the wrong size/name but it will work as it should regardless of the name it has in the display settings.

  1. Open a Terminal
  2. Enter this command rm .config/monitors.xml
  3. Press enter (of course)
  4. Reboot
  5. Enjoy your life again

PS – After searching for hours and blogging this someone did point out that there was an official page with this solution, but yeah. If you don’t find it hopefully this blog will help solution be found.

Categories
Freedom and Privacy Mesh Networks Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

Flashing OpenWRT onto a D-link DIR-615 – The Sequel!

The funny part about this blog is that I spent an entire day searching for how to do this and then I ended up landing on a blog post with the answer… written by ME. in this 2015 blog post Lol or something?

This tutorial assumes you are using Ubuntu and know how to access your terminal and do some basic commands. If not, do a quick study on that before you begin. If you aren’t using Ubuntu on your computer I’m not sure what I can do to help other than encourage you to switch immediately.

This tutorial also assumes that your computer/laptop is plugged directly into the DIR-615 router by ethernet cable and not by wifi. It could probably be done with wifi, but I don’t know and I know it adds an extra layer of complexity I don’t like. So find a cable and plug in to do all this.

1. Download the appropriate image from OpenWRT to your computer.

I got mine by refining a search here.

2. Extract the file into it’s raw ‘.bin’ format.

Mine looks exactly as follows at the time of this writing when it’s sitting in my directory but as versions change and improve this could slightly change be aware:

lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-dir-615-c1-squashfs-factory.bin

3. Using your terminal cd (change directory) to the location where the file is you just extracted in step 2.

4. Make sure your computer is set to a static IP address.

If you don’t know how to do this, search it online as I don’t have a quick link to it right now. “How to set static IP address in Ubuntu’ should find something. Make sure that your static IP address you are setting does not conflict with another device on the router, nor with the router itself at 192.168.0.1.

192.168.0.2 static

NOTE: After this router is flashed you will need to get rid of this static IP address since it won’t match your new router!

5. Pre-enter the following command into your terminal so you are ready to press enter

curl -0vF files=@lede-17.01.4-ar71xx-generic-dir-615-c1-squashfs-factory.bin http://192.168.0.1/cgi/index

Again, the part after the @ symbol in the command above might change depending on the .bin file you are flashing on. This tutorial will likely get old at some point so you may need to swap out a different file name into the command above but the rest should work long term.

6. Power off the router by unplugging the black power cable

Warning. You are about to forever wipe your router’s ‘operating system’ so if you have anything in there you care about this would be the time to get those out!

7. Put pen in the reset button of router and hold it there

8. While still holding reset button, plug in the power cable.

Keep holding the reset button! Don’t let go. The light will be a solid colour (orange, I recall?) but you are waiting for the first flash before executing the next step.

9. As soon as the solid light starts to flash hit the enter key in your terminal and run the curl command you pre-entered in step 5 above

After you hit this command at the perfect moment, things should start to work. When they do, you’ll see some funky html stuff come on the screen that looks like this:
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Trying 192.168.0.1…
* Connected to 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) port 80 (#0)
> POST /cgi/index HTTP/1.0
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: 192.168.0.1
> Accept: /
> Content-Length: 3932431
> Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=————————464dbec1925a46d8
>
* HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
< HTTP/1.0 200 OK
< Server: uIP/0.9 (http://dunkels.com/adam/uip/)
< Content-type: text/html
<
backup loader Device is Upgrading the Firmware

  • Don’t turn the device off before the Upgrade jobs done !
` `

More notes for this step
The screen will stay with this html/> script on there and at this point you can keep your eyes on the router as nothing will happen on the screen.
You should see lights flashing and reboots. Wait, wait, wait. Failure seems real but it’s not yet…. For me I was stuck on a green light for a really long time and no updates in terminal.

If after 5 minutes (or so) things appear to be ‘stuck’ at that point you could try unplugging the power cable and plugging it back in again to test.

To test to see if it worked, go to the new access IP address which should be 192.168.1.1. If you are prompted for user/password you succeeded.

A few troubleshooting notes

Something didn’t work? Read these next few points for some inspiration:

  • Did you really make a static IP address in step 4? You might think you did but maybe it didn’t work. Check with ifconfig command and see what IP address your computer/laptop has. If it’s not static, things won’t work right.
  • Were you too fast or too slow with the timing of the curl command in Step 5? Timing is a bit finicky here so you may have to try a few times to nail it.
  • If things are really goofy you ‘may’ need to install the original Dlink .bin file and start from there. I doubt it but there are records of this online so I thought I would mention it. You could get this on there by finding this .bin file online and using your new curl skills from above to flash the original .bin on there first.

Bin file name for DIR-615 = dir615_revC_firmware_311NA.bin

command to flash it on:
curl -0vF files=@dir615_revC_firmware_311NA.bin http://192.168.0.1/cgi/index

Follow up notes

  • Reminder! Turn your computer/laptop back to DHCP mode from static IP otherwise you might not be able to connect at all to your new router! I made this mistake way too many times and easy to forget.
  • After getting things up and running and if you need ddns, reboot device via ssh. when it comes back, then you could try this tutorial I wrote for the No-ip service. Here is a link to that tutorial.

Categories
Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

Doing a Really Big and Fast First Upload on a Fresh Nextcloudpi Install (the Samba Way)

EDIT 190515: Oops. Apparently in the instructions below in the Nautilus section I failed to say how to actually connect. Adding that now. Sorry.


Nice long title. Thankfully the speed of getting your first big upload to your new Nextcloudpi (NCP) server won’t be so long, thanks to this tutorial! By spending 10 minutes and doing this tutorial you will be uploading 95% faster (that was my experience).

Assumptions Before Beginning

  • You have full 100% admin access to your NCP (ie. you are the master admin and probably created the server and installed it, or are close friends with the person who did)
  • You have SSH access to your NCP, and you know how to SSH into your NCP. If you don’t… you’ll need to research that first.

1. Confirm the Username in NCP Who Will receive the Big File Shipment

This major upload will need to be associated with a username. In my case, I have created a ‘master-master user’ for this kind of reason. So I will be shipping this big upload to my ‘master-master user’ so that after it’s done that user can assign which files are to be shared with whom (and how). I think this is the right way to do it, even if you are the admin yourself. Topic is open to discussion, but that’s how I roll…

Make sure this user exists in NCP is the key point.

2. SSH into your NCP

NOTE!  Apparently you can do steps 2, 3, and 4 via the NCP web admin so this means you might not need SSH, plus it might be easier.  I won’t have a chance to test myself for a while but try that out first maybe! Otherwise, learn SSH and do the next few steps the way I write.

3. Setup Samba in NCP

  • sudo ncp-config

The first screen is informative and the ‘yes/no’ answers don’t make sense if you read it for grammatical sense. Just chose ‘yes’ which means “I understand that I have to force NCP to ‘scan’ the files when I’m done putting files on the box” This has now (Dec 2018) been fixed by the developers and it now says ‘I understand’ in the option box. Nice and thanks!
You will see:
ACTIVE: NO
PASSWORD: ownyourbits

Type ‘yes’ (no quotes) overtop of ‘no’ in ‘active’ and type in a strong password. You will use this password later and probably you don’t want to give this to anyone else because if you do, that user can go in and mess with other people’s files (I think) Use the Tab key until you arrive at ‘yes’ and press ‘enter’

It should automatically create the ‘samba shares’ for each username you have already put into the system. This means that every user in your box can also access files on the cloud this way and not just with a nextcloud client user features. But the main point is that we’ll be able to move files quickly across the Local Area Network (LAN)

Once this part is done, press any key it will bring you back to your ncp-config screen.

Tab twice until you hit ‘finish’ and then press enter. That will bring you back to your terminal.

4. Do your Samba Shares (and I don’t mean the dance….)

In this example I will be using Ubuntu desktop, so if you are using some other operating system – tough bananas – and you’ll have to search some other tutorial about how to connect your computer to your NCP using Samba.

First, open Nautilus (also called ‘Files” if you mouse-over it. The thing that lets you browser your files on your computer and looks like a file cabinet.

Next, go down to ‘Other Locations’ on the left panel and click it. In this case we want to use the LAN IP address because that’s the whole point of this exercse – fast transfer across LAN instead of going through the internets…

  • EDIT 190515: enter into the ‘connect to Server’ field at the bottom smb://ipaddress (ie. smb://192.168.1.30) where the ip address is, of course, the address of your nextcloud box
  • Enter in the credentials for the Samba user you made.

As soon as you enter it in, assuming your box is on, it will find all those usenames and folders for them automatically. Double click the one you want to dump all the files into (probably your master-master admin account). The next part, although it seems easy – is not! But the reward is great so let’s do it.

I realized that what you need here for the username is indeed the NCP username but, but, but.. the password is the one you created in step 3 above! So tricky but alas…

5. “You like to Move it, Move it.”

Let’s move the files now. In Nautilus, middle mouse click wherever your main dump of files are. That will open up a new Nautilius tab from where you can drag, drop stuff into the other tab you just logged into. I just find this a nice and easy way but you can drag drop files there however you like.

Now, select everything you want to move and move them into your NCP user’s Nautilus tab.

Note: You should consider doing this piece by piece unlike me who tried to move 13 GB at a time. You don’t have an easy way to check the progress in this way so consider doing these moves small pieces at a time so you can see progress more easily.

While this is file move is happening, read on to the next section because you’ll have to tell NCP to scan the files when it’s done.

6. Scan the Files

After the move is completely finished from step __ above, in your Nextcloudpi web admin area, scroll down to the ‘nc-scan’ section and run it. It took much less time than I expected. It quickly scans all the files associated with all the users and (I guess) says ‘hey, there is a file here connected to this user’. After running the scan NCP is ready to roll.

7. Start your sharing

Log into the account you just put the files in and start sharing as you like and normally do.

We here at wayne(outthere) hope this made your day shiny and bright. Have a nice day.

Categories
Technology Tutorial Ubuntu

Setting up Nextcloudpi (NCP) with an Encrypted Hard Drive

The following tutorial is how you can setup an encrypted hard drive to work with Nextcloudpi. Please note that there are a few steps you will have to perform every time your pi goes down because the drive will require decrypting. Basic understanding of the command line will be required for this so if you don’t have these skills locate someone who does. One step that should be complete before beginning is formatting your encrypted drive. We recommend following this tutorial for setting up your drive.

1. Flashing Nextcloudpi onto the SD Card using Etcher

Go and find Etcher. There are other ways to do it but Etcher works really well and fast. They seem to have deb packages now if you are Ubuntu/Debian

2. Download the appropriate NCP image

Here is the repository for the NCP downloads. Make sure to get the right one as there are different ‘flavours’ of raspberry pi’s out there. Consider asking a community member. Generally it will be the generic RPi version if you are on a raspberry pi.

3. Extract the image from the downloaded archive

This extraction of the downloaded archive takes a bit more time than I expected so maybe get a coffee or play with your cat. Just saying. The extracted version is what you’ll flash to the card in the next steps, however, I think Etcher can use the raw archive but I’m too lazy to research that…

4. Flash the NCP Image to the SD Card

The instructions are pretty hard to mess up with Etcher in terms of how to use it. Just do it, but read the next important note (seriously read it, that’s why i put it bold and I’m mentioning it before you even read it)

Important usefule note!! It’s very easy to create a tragedy when flashing an image onto an SD card since Etcher doesn’t care that much what you are flashing on. I recommend physically removing any drive you don’t want to screw up. If you don’t it’s possibe to accidentally flash this onto your drive and completely kill it. Again, physically remove the drives you don’t want to kill and you’ll be a happier person.

  • Optional Step if you have previously attempted an Installation on this computer (clearly out your history)
    If you have already accessed a nextcloud server from Firefox and accessed it via ssh. While image is flashing onto the SD, remove historical garbage that will screw things up:
    • Remove cached stuff in Firefox (assuming Firefox)
      By going to settings and preferences / privacy & security / Cookies & Site data-Manage Data, then search IP address of your box and ‘remove’ and then ‘save’. It will give a warning which you say ok to. Not doing this might prevent you from accessing your box on same IP address with new install
    • Remove ‘known_hosts’ from SSH.
      This makes sure your old SSH keys and such don’t get in the way of a new SSH setup. In terminal go to /home/user(whatever it is) / .ssh.
      Now you are in the .ssh folder. Now type rm known_hosts.

5. Plug in Encrypted Drive

This step assumes you have already encrypted your drive. If you haven’t or aren’t sure if you have, don’t continue but instead refer to comment in pre-amble above.

6. Put newly-etched SD card with NCP image on it, into your Raspberry Pi and plug it in.

About 2 minutes later you should be able to move to next step. If it hangs, you’re too zealous… and chill. If you find the page won’t load, perhaps you already tried an installation and you need to follow the ‘optional steps’ above?

7. Go to IP address of your Pi in your Browser

If you don’t know the IP address of your Pi yet, you can get it from your router (if you know how) or you can use tools like nmap and zenmap to do this on your network. They scan to show what devices are there and their IP addresses. After entering your IP address into the browser URL (something like 192.168.x.xx), you will be prompted with an activation page. But righ before that you will be prompted to accept the not secure connection (which is fine for this part).

Save those passwords somewhere safe (note the convenient clipboard icon which automatically copies the long string to clipboard!) (I use KeepassX and ‘activate’ installation. Should take a minute or two. If it hangs on the activation page for more than 5 minutes, although unlikely, you may need to re-flash the image from Step 1 above as there could be a problem with the way the image flashed onto the card.

8. Enter user and password into the prompt box.

These are the passwords you saved from step 5. Specifically it will be the password for the top one (:4443). The user is ‘ncp’ and the password is that long string of gobbly gook you saved in Step 5 above. You may/will also need to confirm security exception here again (which is normal).

9. Skip the installation wizard when prompted

We are skipping this step since we are adding an encrypted drive. We’ll do part of it later.

10. (Optional) Make Static IP

You can skipt this step, but I think it’s smart for your future to make a static IP for your NCP at this point because some routers tend to change it etc, etc. Just go to the nc-static-IP option and type in what you like and what will work in your unique network config.

Power off and get back to this web admin area so that your router/network will have new static IP if you did this step. You can do this with the power button icon in the top right of NCP admin, too, but when it comes back remember you’ll need to change the URL to the new IP in your browser.

11. Activate SSH in NCP admin

  • On the left hand column you will see the SSH option in the NCP admin page. Go there and click the activate checkbox and enter an easy password. You can enter something as simple as 1234 here since it won’t be your ‘actual password’.
  • Go to your terminal and do ssh pi@xxx.xxx.x.xx where the x’s are your pi’s IP address discovered in step 5 above.
  • At the first prompt you enter the 1234 (easy password) you just made in the NCP admin page. This next part is a bit ‘weird’ if you haven’t dont it because it will kick back a request for the same password again.
  • Enter it again.
  • NOW you enter a real and strong SSH password that you will use for actual access to your box. Make sure it’s strong and you don’t lose it.
  • Once you enter that it will log you out of SSH again and force you to log in again with your new and real password.

Mastering this step is critical because you’ll need SSH access to do encrypted drive stuff (such as decrypting it every time the power goes off) if something ‘goes wrong’ usually you can access your pi via SSH to try to fix it. Note: if you are prompted for the key fingerprint (should be) then answer ‘yes’.

12. Update your Pi-kages

This is to make sure you have the packages required to do useful stuff such as encrypt your drive. The cryptsetup package is in here so if ou want to do steps 11 below you better run these two:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

9. Do an NCP Update

Log in again with ssh pi@xxx.xxx.x.xx and run this command below. This is to make sure that your packages includ the ‘cryptsetup’ package and also makes sure that your box is up to date:

sudo ncp-update

10. Make Apache2 not start on boot.

Making apache2 not start on boot lets you decrypt your encrypted drive before the system starts up. If/when your pi goes down, you will need to later go in and manually mount the drive each time (instructions to follow):

sudo update-rc.d apache2 disable

Remember: when the power goes off your Nextcloud will not work until you go in with SSH, decrypt drive, and restart apache2. More on this later…

11. Pre-Mounting of the Encrypted Drive

From this point we assume your drive is already encrypted in Luks format. If it’s not refer to [this page](link to come) for those instructions

  • a) Install the encryption toolset so you can decrypt your drive on NCP sudo apt install cryptsetup
  • b) Check your pi to make sure the drive is showing up at least sudo lsblk

Mine shows up as ‘sda’ but yours might be different. Look at profile of it and make sure it’s at least there.

  • c) Key step: –> make sure contents of encypted drive are EMPTY…..
  • d) Decrypt the drive so it’s usable by Nextcloud. You’ll need your drive de-cryption password here (and every single time you reboot your NCP…so get used to this step…): sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda gcw2
  • e) Check again to make sure drive is looking right sudo lsblk
    Mine looks like this:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 232.9G 0 disk
└─gcw2 254:0 0 232.9G 0 crypt

12. Start apache

This makes your nextcloud stuff work so you can reach it in a browser

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

13. Run the NCP Installation Wizard to Move Files to Encrypted Drive

  • Go to the address of your pi in your browser with :4443/wizard at the end to access the first run wizard in NCP https://xxx.xxx.x.xx:4443/wizard
  • “Do you want to save Nextcloud data in a USB drive?” Yes.
  • “Plug in the USB drive and hit continue.” –> it’s plugged in so ‘continue’
  • “If you want to prepare the USB drive to be used with NextCloudPi hit Format USB. Skip if already formated as ext4 or BTRFS. Attention! This will format your USB drive as BTRFS and will destroy any current data.” –> Skip formatting of drive because it’s encrypted and you want to keep it that way
  • Move data to USB –> click the button
  • Go through the ‘external access’ wizard however you like. I do mine manually in router
  • For DDNS, I skip and do mine manually in router as well with No-ip but you can try this if you want. This is not the point of this tutorial This should make your nc-datadir point to your drive meaning that your hard files will now save to the encrypted USB drive instead of to the stock SD card which is by default where they would go. You will know if this part was successful because nc-automount and nc-datadir should will change from an orange colour to a green colour in the bottom right side of your browser screen.
  • Go back to web admin panel from there

14. Run the nc-database move feature in the NCP admin panel

Again, make sure the hard drive is completely clear at this point. It’s probably possible to move a previous existing database here, but it’s out of the scope of my ability or this tutorial. You can investigate it yourself but this is assuming you have a clear drive.

Bonus section you hopefully won’t need

If you got a green light above in the last step don’t even read this section and skip to Step 15. If you have a problem where you try to do the above step and it gives you a permission So what happens here with encryption is a ‘symlink’ is created so it’s this symlink that needs to get the right permissions or NCP can’t do it’s thing with the step above. This may be a bug that no one else sees, but I’m leaving a few hints here in case we need it later:

In the next steps you have to in your terminal go to your /media/ folder and correct a permission manually before you are able to use the NCP ncdatabase function. if you have done previous nextcloud installations with their default directories on this drive, you will need to wipe out whatever is there before you move forward.

sudo chmod o+xr /media/gcw-ssd

(gcw-ssd is the name of the symlink created on your drive that points to USBdrive in Nextcloud)

Now go back to your NCP web area and do the nc-database move and it should work.

Command to empty your folders complete are as follow (use with caution, of course because this will ruin your day if you do it to the wrong dir!)

(if it’s not empty run: sudo rm -rf /media/USBdrive/ncdatabase)

You might also like to keep this command handy to check permissions if someone asks:
sudo ls -ld

15. LetsEncrypt – nice and easy.

This is a good chance to relax and do some Lets Encrypt since it’s easy and satisfying. Go to the left panel of web admin find letsencrypt, fill in the blanks, and press go. Now you should be able to find your box from the internets with secure connection too. You’ll need your dynamic dns url at this point to make it all work so go and do that at no-ip.com or whatever you like. S

16. Reboot system to make sure things are working as they ought

  • Shut down your box with command:
    sudo reboot
  • To be sure it’s back up you can ping xxx.xxx.x.xx (your box). When it starts responding you should be ready to ssh in
  • SSH in (see instructions above in Step 8) At this point, because you made apache2 not start on reboot, neither your NCP admin pages nor your nextcloud instance will be accessible. We will proceed with a new section now which will be your process to get it back up each time the power goes down or it’s rebooted.

17. Getting things back up after a reboot:

  • Unlock/decrypt drive. Note: yours will not be ‘gcw2’ – that’s just my example. Can be whatever you like.
  • sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda gcw2
  • Enter your decryption password for drive
  • Restart apache (see above)
  • sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

Celebrate if it’s working! Try again if it’s not!

Special thanks to Tobias, Nachoparker and Kevin for all your hard work with me getting it this far!

Categories
Freedom and Privacy Life Skills Technology Ubuntu

Stop Fighting Apple-Just Force this Disclosure on buyers!

I’m super bored reading these kind of stories.  I’ve been free from such software and hardware for many years so at this point it’s just boring.  However, I do have a solution instead of trying to sue them for monopolizing or overcharging: just force a really simple, plain language disclosure document before the sale of any Apple Inc device. Here is my proposed disclosure:

“

I understand that by purchasing this Apple Inc device I will be forced into a software environment called the “App Store” that is the equivalent of a rigid monopolist jail cell.  I understand that the only apps I will be able to install must come from this Apple ‘App Store’.  There is no other way to get an app without violating your warranties but through this monopolist app store .

Because Apple Inc will take from the software developers who develop for this device a mandatory 30% of the purchase price when you purchase an app through their system, I could either be spending money on an app that could be otherwise free, or spending 30% more than I could while software developers try to make up for their business losses from this significant commission that Apple unilaterally takes for itself. 

Furthermore, I also understand that I will risk the chance of having my device’s performance remotely throttled by Apple Inc whenever they feel it is right to do so and without first consulting me about it.  I also understand that even the hardware itself is made with proprietary connectors (i.e. chargers) that will not work with other standard industry connectors.

I also understand that there are other software systems such as Linux which has operating systems such as Ubuntu, that respect my freedom and choices, and provide free software and free delivery of software and that are capable of running on top of many different types of hardware, including mobile phones.  I understand that many of the large corporations (such as Apple, Google) run these Linux systems for their own computers and servers. 

I declare that no one is forcing me to enter into this relationship with Apple Inc, that I have do have choices, that I have been warned, and I now choose to move forward with this purchase and risk suffering all of the above pains.

________________________

Apple Inc Device Customer

 

__________________________
Date of purchase

 

”