Okay, let's imagine for a second the following scenario: A man is in a remote mountain cabin with his empeg, a computer, and internet access. However, a pack of weasels break into the cabin, break the man's arms and legs, rip his flesh, and worst of all, steal the serial cable for his empeg. The man now has no way to leave the cabin to get another serial cable, and since it's so remote, no one can come to deliver him another one.

In that scenario, if the man wants to upgrade to 2.0 is he completely out of luck? Or, can he hack through it somehow?

Hypothetical man has hijack installed. So isn't there some way that the upgrade file could be dissected so that the kernel is discarded and the binaries get installed to the root of the drive using good old linux? If I remember correctly, the upgrade file completely wipes out the root partition and replaces it with a new one. If that can't be done, then I suppose at least the relevant binaries can be copied over (assuming they can get extracted out of the upgrade file).

(The actual situation is that I'm out of town for several days, and would like to at least sample the goodness of 2.0. However, my serial cable is at home, and I don't feel like buying another one when I have a perfectly good one at home. I do dislike weasels, though.)

You could conceivably do it. There's code available to explode the .upgrade files (search here for UpgradeSplitter). There are a number of things that needs to be upgraded in flash. Mark has demonstrated that this is doable inside the OS, though I don't think that there's any currently implemented code to replace an arbitrary address in the flash -- only the kernel point -- though it shouldn't be hard to make that enhancement.

In addition, the majority of the data in the .upgrade file is a filesystem image for the root partition. There ought to be a way to do this, even if I can't think of it right now. Perhaps that's some of what the flash upgrades do in the .upgrade file?

Regardless, there's no way to do this all currently. A significant amount of development would have to happen, but I don't think it's not overcomeable.

(BTW, I like the oblique FZ reference.)

"It was right about then that a little ditty started going through my head. It went a little something like this: AAAAAAAGGGH! GET 'EM OFF ME, GET 'EM OFF ME, GAAAAAAAA!"

It is very possible, but nobody has bothered writing the small program required for it yet, since upgrades are usually pretty rare.

But now that the Linux upgclient tool no longer works for me (doesn't like my newer notebook computer), I suppose I'll write an upgrader for Linux.

This one works over ethernet, doesn't wipe out the Hijack kernel (unless you want it to, I suppose), and should be much faster than the old serial based one.

Linux / Unix only, of course. But others are welcome to port it.
I'll have a go at it this evening.

Cheers

Sounds good, Mark - definitely something I'd use.

The option to wipe Hijack would be nice, but the most likely use for it would be for verifying bugs against a pristine player, and it's probably best to use the Empeg-supplied upgclient if possible for that, for 100% confidence the bug is their fault.

best to use the Empeg-supplied upgclient if possible

upgclient currently only works under Linux/x86. I have multiple Unix machines and none of them fit that requirement.

Okay, I can now do an upgrade of my player in just under two minutes, not including the final reboot and rebuild of the player database.

Cool.

I've got a few things left to clean up before I unleash this:

-- kill the player before doing the upgrade
-- reboot the machine afterwards
-- force a database rebuild (just delete the database files, I guess)

But apart from that, it's working reasonably well.

As a short-cut, it calls "gunzip" (for the root partition data, which comes gzip'd in the upgrade file), and "ncftpput" to do the FTP transfers for me. Anyone who thinks they may want to run this sometime soon should hunt down the "ncftpput" program while they're waiting for me. It is part of the "ncftp" program suite, for which source code is available for most unices. I happen to be using version 3.1.5 on my machine.

Once it's all nicely working, I might build the FTP client stuff into the program, but for now I'm sticking with the lazy approach.

Cheers

And, oh yeah, I'll be releasing Hijack v328 in a few minutes. The only changes are that it now has extra /proc/ entries for the required flash memory partitions that are written to by the upgrader.

Cheers

Mmm.. actually, deleting the database files will force a rebuild on all reboots until the next sync, so I suppose I need to find out how to do this properly.. is it as simple as booting with the partitions mounted R/W, so that the player can write the new database it creates?

I suppose I could trace what the current upgclient does, if it actually worked on my machine..

Cheers

I don't remember it needing to rebuild on the new boot. I'd guess the upgrade client reads it in (optionally updates it, but probably not) and writes it back out after updating.

Okay, this is downright ridiculous. I was hoping that someone would point to a way to break up the file so that I could gunzip the relevant parts and stick them up there. Not only do I have that, but somehow I spurred Mark Lord into basically solving the problem for me.

I'm continually amazed at the way idle musings and impossible wishes constantly turn into reality overnight. I just have a really hard time wrapping my head around the talent, skill, creativity, generosity, and all around coolness of everyone in the empeg community.

A hearty thank you to everyone!

It's great isn't it? I know the upgrade via ethernet has been a wish for many for quite a while. I guess you just reminded them.

Okay, I've attached the current version.

From the README:

This version is pretty simple to use, but not 100% complete.

--> requires Hijack v328 or newer.
--> you should manually "pause" your player first, or put it in stand-by mode.
--> after "upgrader" completes, you must manually reboot your player.
--> after the reboot, you should run emptool or emplode to rebuild the databases.

It works for me.

"It was right about then that a little ditty started going through my head. It went a little something like this: AAAAAAAGGGH! GET 'EM OFF ME, GET 'EM OFF ME, GAAAAAAAA!"

Wow,

I love this song Tony.

o/` All i have is this box of one dozen starving crazed weasles.

And mark, this is sweet. Everyone has been talking about this for a long time and no one ever really did it. Kudos. This community amazes me. It's sad that I have nothing to contribute

It would be nice seeing this work in Windows, since I don't use *nix as my primary OS. But it really doesn't matter. Since I do it so little

is it as simple as booting with the partitions mounted R/W, so that the player can write the new database it creates?

No, it's simpler. Don't delete the database files at all. There's no need.

If you really want to delete them, then mounting the partitions R/W is all it takes for the player to write them back to disk.

I HAte SAurkraut!!!!!

that song rocks

I'm by no means a C programmer, but I (very) quickly added support for a user name and password, for those of us that have that turned on in Hijack. Works for me... Source attached.

Thanks Mark!

Too cool, Mark! Now someone has to figure out how to port it to Win32. Then we can all do upgrades in two minutes.

A few thoughts:

--> you should manually "pause" your player first, or put it in stand-by mode.

Isn't there a way to do that programatically with an HTTP command to hijack or something?

--> after "upgrader" completes, you must manually reboot your player.

Ditto?

--> after the reboot, you should run emptool or emplode to rebuild the databases.

Yeah, as I'm reading through this thread, I'm wondering to myself... Why is Mark deleting the database? The factory upgrade doesn't do it... Who told Mark that was needed?

Okay.

I just thought that all of that code in upgclient was probably doing something to the database ... lots of string matches for "database" and "tags" in that binary.

Let's say, theoretically of course, that I was trying out a v3-alpha release.. might not the database format/content theoretically be different on such releases?

Cheers

Let's say, theoretically of course, that I was trying out a v3-alpha release.. might not the database format/content theoretically be different on such releases?

Theoretically, yes. But in any theoretical future alpha releases of v3, you won't theoretically have to worry about that, as they'll be using a different theoretical filename for their databases, for precisely this theoretical reason.

Peter

A lot of theory being discussed...

A lot of theory being discussed...

Yeah, this computer programming stuff gets complicated at times..

Speaking of which, I've now attached the latest version of the upgrader utility. This one incorporates FTP user/passwd capability (derived from an earlier post in this thread), and automatically reboots the player after the upgrade has been applied. One should still pause the player before doing the upgrade, though.

Cheers

Any chance of getting a "HiJack free" player "HiJacked" via ethernet? (I know HiJack updates can be done via ethernet, but only if HiJack is previously installed.)

I have not figured out a way to do that, and as much as I dislike saying it, I don't think it's easily done. There might be a buffer exploit of some kind that one could use in the player to trick it into uploading and running arbitrary code, but short of that..

Cheers

There might be a buffer exploit of some kind that one could use in the player to trick it into uploading and running arbitrary code

haha... i can see the headlines now.

EMPEG owners being DOSed by a worm that exploits a buffer overflow in the player software, reverting it version to 1.03.

The upgrading over ethernet worked flawlessly for me. My Unix machine is somewhere between Houston and Tucson right now, but thanks to the miracle of Knoppix, I was able to boot my Windows machine into Linux, upgrade the empeg, and shut down, all in less time than it would have taken to drive to the local store for a serial cable.

OOoooo! And yet another creative application of KNOPPIX!

Well done, dude!

Wow that's a pretty nifty thing. I've never heard of it.

*Now downloading*

For best results with KNOPPIX, override the default 800x600 resolution at boot time: knoppix screen=1600x1200 (or whatever your monitor can take).

Cheers