The WyzeCam3 is a relatively cheap device that can capture video. It can be set up for motion capture or continuous recording. But even if you install a memory card in the device, it will want to use the company’s app and stream data via their cloud storage. I don’t know much about how much thought went into their codebase with regard to security, but this is the kind of device where the usual answer is “not much.”

Furthermore, the WyzeCam requires an app for installation and configuration, and the WyzeCam3 needs to connect to your 2.4GHz WiFi network. Oops. I have no 2.4GHz WiFi network. It’s all 5Ghz here. Now what?

Enter Thingino, an open-source replacement firmware. One nice feature is that it allows the camera hardware to enable an Wi-Fi access point (“AP mode”) — it creates its own 2.4GHz WiFi network, which my Mac will happily connect to! Once the camera is set up, I can further customize things, and have it write motion capture files to the SD memory card rather than someone’s cloud.

So, there’re a few gotchas that were not obvious to me:

1. When you’ve downloaded the firmware, you need to use something to flash it as an image on your micro-SD (e.g., Balena Etcher, Rufus, or the like). I came across at least one guide that said “simply copy the files onto the SD card” which is incorrect!
2. When the Thingino installation has completed, you connect to the WiFi network it creates. A captive portal form pops up for basic configuration. You’re asked to provide a device name, a root password, and a WiFi SSID and password. There’s also a checkbox to have the camera create its own WiFi hot-spot (the aforementioned AP mode). If you’re going to have it work in AP mode, the SSID and password you provided above are used for the network it creates. If you are not, it will use those to connect to an existing network. Don’t make the mistake of giving the SSID and credentials for your existing network and then checking that checkbox!
3. Once you’ve installed Thingino via the SD card and you’ve connected to the network admin, you might want to set up motion capture to “Storage.” You’re gonna have to reformat that SD card first! The UI won’t complain, or tell you why it’s not working, but it just won’t let you submit the form. Thingino recommends formatting in exFAT.
4. Even if you’ve configured the “Motion” panel, you have to click on the Storage link and tell it that you really mean the storage mounted at /mnt/mmcblk0p1 (or the mountpoint for your SD card ). You can have motion sensing and capture enabled, but it will fail if you haven’t taken that step.
5. You may need to go into storage manager to tell it how to clear off space before you can enable motion capture. The control panel for motion capture does not seem consistent.
6. Even after all that, the motion capture details may not save correctly. At least the firmware version I downloaded, it just wouldn’t save the settings consistently. There is a workaround! You have to ssh in to the camera, and set the values:
   Enable motion detection
   jct /etc/prudynt.json set motion.enabled true
jct /etc/prudynt.json set motion.send2storage true
   Configure the storage destination
   jct /etc/send2.json set storage.mount /mnt/mmcblk0p1
jct /etc/send2.json set storage.send_video true
   Set motion sensitivity, range is 1-8, default is 1. Higher = more sensitive
   jct /etc/prudynt.json set motion.sensitivity 5
   Configure clip length (in seconds)
   jct /etc/prudynt.json set motion.video_length 15
   Restart prudynt
   /etc/init.d/S31prudynt restart
7. If you want to restore the original WyzeCam firmware, the instructions say to copy the original config files that get backed up by the Thingino install into the root directory of the SD card, name the file autoupgrade-full.bin, and then power it up. Oh, did you have that SD card formatted in exFAT? Ha ha, the firmware replacement process requires the SD card to be formatted FAT32 with Master Boot Record (MBR). The failure mode for this is somewhat opaque — it does seem to do something, and then in my case it announced it was ready for setup… in Italian. It was not ready for setup, though, as it hadn’t replaced the firmware.

Other Problems:

1. There’s no way to have the device do its own time management without a network (NTP). You can set the clock (ssh in, use the “date” command in BusyBox) but it doesn’t survive power-cycles.
2. I set up an isolated 2.4GHz guest network for the cameras that only allows DNS and NTP traffic to/from the internet. Then I went to reconfigure the cameras to use that network. From the admin panel, when I changed the network settings and turned off the “create AP,” it never seemed to connect. I had to reflash to the original firmware and then reinstall Thingino.

Other notes:

1. If you set up the Thingino camera with an AP network, it defaults to the IP address 100.64.1.1

I keep all my old scanned records in encrypted APFS disk images, one disk image per year. I do have my Mac filesystem encrypted too, which protects against unauthorized access if the machine gets lost or stolen. However, by keeping these records on encrypted disk images that I only mount when they’re in use, I add a bit of protection against rogue software exfiltrating the data.

It’s probably absurd to use this kind of protection for simple stuff like old utility bills, but a little paranoia can prevent a large headache, as the saying goes^*.

Today, I wanted to look at an old file, and was getting “Permission denied” errors from the Preview app. Looking at the file information from the finder (and then from the terminal) showed permissions were fine. I tried double clicking on the file, and got the permission denied message — including the name of a different file than the one I was trying to open. [o.shit.emoji]

I ran Disk Utility’s “first aid” on the image, and that said everything was fine, but I continued to get the error. I ran fsck_apfs on the image too (specifically, hdiutil attach -nomount /path/to/my/file and then fsck_apfs -y /dev/disk6s1). That’s probably what Disk Utility was doing under the hood, but I figured I’d try it anyway. Same error.

Then I said “[bleep] it!” and rebooted the system. Mounted the disk image, and everything’s fine. Computers suck 🙁

^* It does go like that, doesn’t it?

I clicked on a link to a web page I host on a Rocky Linux 9.7 VPS, and my browser stalled. That seemed strange, so I ssh-ed in to see if the web server was running correctly. ssh timed out.

So I used the VPS provider’s web-based console to log in, and found the networking was all dead. That was unexpected. After trying to remember the service name in this flavor/version, I executed systemctl restart NetworkManager.service and it was back … until I did a dnf update. Then it locked hard, and even the web-based console couldn’t log in for a while.

Tech support helped me track down the problem.

The VPS “only” had 2G of RAM, and that’s not enough on a modern Linux system to run a web server, database, and package manager. The dnf package manager subsystem was consuming all available memory when computing dependencies, and being killed by the oom-killer, leaving the system in weird states.

I ended up resizing the VPS to a mighty 4G RAM. It’s a few bucks more a month.

Makes me think of my first Linux box, which ran Debian Hamm in what I seem to think was 6M of memory.

We were in the middle of watching a streaming TV show / SAG Award nominee, when the spinny wheel started up and the “TV” computer popped up a “network disconnected” message. I figured our new Frontier Fiber had disconnected, but the lights all looked good. Next to it, though, the Netgate firewall appliance had an angry blinking red LED. I plugged in a serial cable. Not good!

Uncorrectable I/O failure? Hm. This turns out to be an actual physical hardware error.

I’d bought this appliance before the start of the pandemic, so it was about six and a half years old. Shortly after I bought it, there was all sorts of drama with the company behind pfSense (not linking, but you can search) which made me wonder how trustworthy the whole thing was. And just a few months ago, when I ditched the cable modem for a fiber connection, the device had corrupted its entire configuration during a routine software update, and stupid-stupid-stupid … I hadn’t kept a recent backup of the config.xml. So I’d just been through the whole reconfigure process, which requires a hidden trick for VLANs on that specific device that’s not required on other hardware configurations, and which kept me befuddled for many hours more than I’m willing to admit.

The storage RAM on the SG-1100 is soldered on, and it’s beyond my ambition to try to replace it. Instead, I ordered a new piece of hardware.

On this new device, I figured I’d try the OpnSense fork of the firewall software on the assumption that I’d be mostly familiar with it. Well, that’s partly true. The web-based configuration is reorganized. Some things require fewer steps, but they weren’t immediately obvious to me. Dammit Jim, I’m a code monkey, not a network engineer.

Anyway, I spent today restoring my network. It’s not all that complicated. I have a LAN, an isolated guest network, an isolated “internet of things” network, and VPN access from outside, all with special sets of rules to allow or prevent access, depending.

It was pretty smooth. A few gotchas that tripped me up whether reasonable or not:

• ddclient. I use this for pushing my dynamic IP address to the primary DNS provider for a domain, so I can have name-based access to the home network. It kept failing. Eventually, I had to log in to the firewall, and manually edit the configuration file to place quotes around my password. There’s probably some vulnerability in there if it’s passing unescaped strings to the command line — although you already need credentials to get to the interface that would allow it.
• Firewall rules in OpnSense have a “direction” which I don’t remember in pfSense. So when I want to firewall off connections from the Guest network to the LAN, for example, I have to put an “inbound” rule on the Guest network blocking the traffic. “inbound” means that the traffic is blocked when coming to the firewall (I had foolishly thought it was “outbound” to the LAN network). Since rules are specified on interface, network, and can specify both source and destination, I’m not sure why direction is required.
• I created and deleted a VPN instance early in the process. There’s still a tab in the firewall rules area, and automatically generated firewall rules for it, even though the instance has been deleted and has no interfaces. I don’t think it’s a big deal, but it’s confusing.
• So. many. DHCP. options. There’s the default “Dnsmasq DNS & DHCP”, there’s also “ISC DHCPv4” and “ISC DHCPv6”, and “Kea DHCP.” For my little network, I could do everything in the default, just creating separate DHCP ranges for each interface.

Setup wasn’t so bad. I’ll doubtless gripe here if things don’t work the way I want them to.

Fifteen years ago, I worked on a blog that was hosted via Blogger.com (aka blogspot.com aka Google). We had a custom domain name for the blog and everything. It was pretty cool.

Now, many years later, the domain name is finally set to expire. We haven’t touched that blog in eleven years, but it still seems a shame for the content to just vanish. So I thought about making a static copy to host somewhere.

Google makes cloning one of these blogs difficult. They do, however, give you a backup/download capability. I went through re-activating the Google account that was tied to the blog, giving all sorts of identifying information and getting verification emails and texts. That done, I initiated the process to backup the blog, and shortly thereafter received an email that my download was ready. However, now Google is absolutely certain I’m not who I say I am (even with verification emails and texts), and their security locked me out of the account. Also, when I read up on the subject, even if I could download it, their site backup is an XML bundle that only works for reimporting to their blog system anyway.

So I thought I’d use the good old standby wget to build a static copy. I tried:

wget --mirror -w 2 -p --html-extension --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows http://www.myurl.com

Yes, this site was so old that we didn’t use SSL… Still, Google stores the assets off in a bunch of other subdomains, and I was unable to come up with the correct syntax to allow wget to follow those. I’d get the pages, but everything still linked to the Google servers for the assets. That wasn’t going to work.

So next I used the old, powerful F/OSS friend, httrack. My first attack was as follows:

httrack "http://www.myurl.com/" \
  -O "myurl-offline" \
  -%v \
  --robots=0 \
  "+www.myurl.com/*" \
  "+*.blogspot.com/*" \
  "+*.bp.blogspot.com/*" \
  "+*.googleusercontent.com/*" \
  "+*.jpg +*.jpeg +*.png +*.gif +*.webp" \
  "+*.css +*.js" \
  "+*.mp4 +*.webm" \
  "-*/search?updated-max=*"

This worked — but a little too well. This blog was part of a community of sites, many of which were hosted elsewhere on blogspot. The cloning was slow. Then I noticed it had used up 2G of disk space, whereupon I discovered that I was happily making static copies of twelve other blogs from that community, and possibly more to come! I interrupted the process, and tried again removing the blank check for blogspot sites:

httrack "http://www.myurlcom/" \
    -O "myurl-offline" \
    -%v \
    --robots=0 \
    "+www.myurl.com/*" \
    "+*.bp.blogspot.com/*" \
    "+*.googleusercontent.com/*" \
    "+*.jpg +*.jpeg +*.png +*.gif +*.webp" \
    "+*.css +*.js" \
    "+*.mp4 +*.webm" \
    "-*/search?updated-max=*"

This was successful!

I now have a static version of the site. It’s not perfect; some references like the user profile links still point at blogspot. But if I want to be able to post the static site somewhere, I can do that, and it will be sufficiently usable that people can still experience the postings and articles.