Yearly Archives: 2018

Android get GSF ID (Google Services Framework Identifier)

 in Android  tagged android / Google Services Framework / GSF / java / manifest by

The Google Services Framework Identifier (GSF ID) is a unique 16 character hexadecimal number that your device automatically requests from Google as soon as you log to your Google Account for the first time. For a specific device, the GSF ID will change only after a factory reset. To get this information programmatically, you need to do two steps.

A) Add the following to your manifest


<uses-permission android:name="com.google.android.providers.gsf.permission.READ_GSERVICES" />

B) Execute the following code


private static final Uri sUri = Uri.parse("content://com.google.android.gsf.gservices");
public static String getGSFID(Context context) {
 try {
  Cursor query = context.getContentResolver().query(sUri, null, null, new String[] { "android_id" }, null);
  if (query == null) {
   return "Not found";
  }
  if (!query.moveToFirst() || query.getColumnCount() < 2) {
   query.close();
   return "Not found";
  }
  final String toHexString = Long.toHexString(Long.parseLong(query.getString(1)));
  query.close();
  return toHexString.toUpperCase().trim();
 } catch (SecurityException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
  return null;
 } catch (Exception e2) {
  e2.printStackTrace();
  return null;
 }
}

GNU/Linux: How to give access to a subfolder to a user where the user does not have execute permission over the parent folder

 in GNU/Linux  tagged bind / execute / GNU/Linux / mount / symlink by

On GNU/Linux, you can traverse a directory if and only if you have execute permission on the whole path that you are going to use to access it. This rule applies a limitation to scenarios where for some reason you want to give execute access to a certain user on a subfolder but you do not want to enable the execute permission on the all the folders in the path.

In order to access the folder theFolder in the path /folderA/folderB/theFolder, if you are on the same level as folderA (or higher) you need to have execute permission both on folderA and folderA/folderB additionally to the permissions needed on theFolder. On another scenario if you are located in the same level as folderB (and you have execute rights to it) even if you do not have the execute rights to folder folderA you would still be able to access theFolder as your whole path (which is a relative path in this scenario) skips folderA. This feature is due to the fact that in GNU/Linux that the path that you use to access a folder determines your access constraints. In cases where the user does not have execute access to the whole path, creating symbolic links for them will not help you give them access. The kernel will still go through the access rights of the whole path that the symlink describes and it will act accordingly.

A hack-ish solution around this issue is to use mount to remount a part of the file hierarchy somewhere else using the bind parameter. For example: if we needed to give access to a user to the folder theFolder that resides in /folderA/folderB/theFolder without enabling execute rights on folderA nor /folderA/folderB we could execute the following command in a folder where that user already has execute access in (for example in the user’s home folder).


sudo mount --bind /folderA/folderB/theFolder finallyTheFolder;

Notes:

  • This solution circumvents security, be sure to think things through before implementing it
  • This solution ‘escapes’ normal good practices so it could lead to software bugs on your behalf
  • The bind will not persist after a reboot
  • To make this change permanent, you will need to add a configuration line in /etc/fstab
  • If the directory that you wish to bind contains mounted file systems, these file systems will not be transferred to the target. The mount points will appear as empty directories.

How to update all pulled Docker images that are tagged as latest

 in Docker  tagged all images / docker / latest / pull by

Recently, we moved a client to Docker and we needed to give them a way to automagically update all “latest” Docker images.
Since Docker does not have a single command to update all pulled images we used this one-liner to update all images at once:


docker images --format "{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}" | grep ':latest' | xargs -L1 docker pull;

The above command will:

  1. Print all images in the format RepositoryName:Tag
  2. Then it will filter all lines that end with the suffix :latest (which is the tag we are interested in)
  3. Finally, for each result (which is one per line) it will be fed  via the command xargs -L1 to the command docker pull

Please note that you cannot really update an existing container using docker commands, what you need to do is actually:

  1. Stop the container whose image was updated
  2. Delete it
  3. Recreate it using the parameters of the previous container

As you understand, it is a good practice to save all of your data in volumes outside the container to make the update process easy.

For example, below you will find the commands using which we updated the jwilder/nginx-proxy and the jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion images along with the two containers that were using them:


docker container stop nginx-proxy nginx-letsencrypt;
docker container rm nginx-proxy nginx-letsencrypt;
docker run -d -p 443:443 \
     --name nginx-proxy \
     --net reverse-proxy \
     -v $HOME/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:ro \
     -v /etc/nginx/vhost.d \
     -v /usr/share/nginx/html \
     -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro \
     -v $HOME/my_proxy.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/my_proxy.conf:ro \
     --label com.github.jrcs.letsencrypt_nginx_proxy_companion.nginx_proxy=true \
     jwilder/nginx-proxy:latest;

docker run -d \
     --name nginx-letsencrypt \
     --net reverse-proxy \
     --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
     -v $HOME/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:rw \
     -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
     jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion:latest;

Using TeamViewer tar package on Ubuntu

 in GNU/Linux  tagged teamviewer / ubuntu by

Recently, we needed to start TeamViewer on an Ubuntu GNU/Linux machine where we did not want to install it.
To do so, we used the 64bit tar package from the TeamViewer Linux download page.

After downloading the package and extracting its content, we realised that we could not start TeamViewer (./teamviewer) as is.
In order to troubleshoot, we used a terminal and executed the check libraries functionality (./tv-setup checklibs;) from the archive folder that gave us some missing dependencies:

./tv-setup checklibs

    -=-   TeamViewer tar.xz check   -=-     

  In order to use the tar.xz version of TeamViewer,
  you have to make sure that the necessary libraries are installed.

    Writing raw output to /home/xeirwn/Downloads/teamviewer_13.1.3026_amd64/teamviewer/logfiles/DependencyCheck.log

 Analyzing dependencies ...           
    libQt5Core.so.5 => not found
    libQt5DBus.so.5 => not found
    libQt5Gui.so.5 => not found
    libQt5Network.so.5 => not found
    libQt5Qml.so.5 => not found
    libQt5Quick.so.5 => not found
    libQt5WebKit.so.5 => not found
    libQt5WebKitWidgets.so.5 => not found
    libQt5Widgets.so.5 => not found
    libQt5X11Extras.so.5 => not found

    The libraries listed above seem to be missing.
    Please find and install the corresponding packages.
    Then, run this command again.

    QtQuickControls seems to be missing

    The following command may be helpful:
      apt-get install libdbus-1-3 libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5 libqt5qml5 libqt5quick5 libqt5webkit5 libqt5x11extras5 qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-dialogs qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtquick-layouts;

Solution: Following the instructions we executed the following:

sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-3 libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5 libqt5qml5 libqt5quick5 libqt5webkit5 libqt5x11extras5 qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-dialogs qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtquick-layouts;

After the installation of the libraries, we executed once more the check libraries functionality (./tv-setup checklibs;)  where we got the message that everything seem to be OK.

 ./tv-setup checklibs

    -=-   TeamViewer tar.xz check   -=-     

  In order to use the tar.xz version of TeamViewer,
  you have to make sure that the necessary libraries are installed.

    Writing raw output to /home/xeirwn/Downloads/teamviewer_13.1.3026_amd64/teamviewer/logfiles/DependencyCheck.log

 Analyzing dependencies ...           

    All library dependencies (*.so) seem to be satisfied!

    QtQuickControls seems to be installed

Trying to start the (./teamviewer)  application did not gave an error but it would not start again.
It appeared that there was a service running which would not allow the GUI to show up.
To avoid too much fuss, we restarted the machine and tried (./teamviewer)  once more, this time with success.
So after installing the libraries and restarting the machine, we were able to start TeamViewer on our Ubuntu machine without installing it.