décembre 2016 – Erwan's Blog

Xiaomi adventures

Déc 302016

Christmas time…I bought this nice Xiaomi Mi4C phone for my son for quite a cheap price (considering the hardware).

Little I know that this came with a price : my own sweat 🙂

As this is a chinese phone, this is delivered with an operating system which is full of bloatware (if not spyware).
After some mad googling on different forums, I decided to flash (thru fastboot using MiFlash) a MIUI 8 found on miui forum.
I quickly realised my mistake : not only did the OS miss my french native langage, it was still with lots of bloatware and whatsmore was also missing google apps (that was easy to fix).
Much (much) worse : willing to flash another image, I realised that I had locked the recovery AND fastboot : in short, no way back…except maybe get the unlock code from Xiaomi which can take 2 weeks to come (and sometimes is even denied by Xiaomi).

So here I was with a brand new shiny phone in a poor state (to be fair it was still working nicely even with the bootloader locked and the operating system in english).

Here below the steps I used to remediate to this situation :

1-Put the phone in « emergency download mode » : while in fastboot mode, send fastboot oem edl.

2-At this stage, use MiFlash 2015.10.28 (latest version did not work for me) and flash a fastboot miui image on version 6.1.7 since it contains a non locked fastboot (google search libra_images_6.1.7)

3-Exit the EDL mode (long power press) and let the image install

4-Go back to fastboot mode and send : fastboot oem unlock

5-Still while in fastboot mode, install TWRP (google search twrp libra) : fastboot flash recovery twrp.img / fastboot boot twrp.img

6-Flash a recovery image thru TWRP (i recommend a xiaomi.eu image)

extra:
you can check the status of your phone with the fastboot command : fastboot oem device-info.

DNSPING

network No Responses »

Déc 282016

DNSPING uses windows dnsquery function to measure the time it takes for a nameserver to process and reply to your dns query.

This can be useful to monitor and/or troubleshoot DNS performance issues.

Result can easily be piped into a text file and later processed by excel or libreoffice calc (fixed space delimiter).

dnsping 192.168.1.250 www.google.fr 5 timestamp query result ttl duration 00:59:11 www.google.fr [216.58.210.227] TTL:219 time:47 00:59:16 www.google.fr [216.58.210.227] TTL:214 time:0 00:59:21 www.google.fr [216.58.210.227] TTL:209 time:0 00:59:26 www.google.fr [216.58.210.227] TTL:204 time:15

Tool can be downloaded here.

Erwan

VMDK to RAW converter

Uncategorized No Responses »

Déc 282016

Been a while since last article.

A quick one to post a tool I have been using lately to quickly convert VMDK to raw disks.
Indeed it is sometimes easier/quicker to install an operating system in a virtual environement but afterwards you may want to convert the vmware disk (vmdk) to a raw disk so that you can write it to another physical media (usb, hard drive, etc).

Thanks to libvmdk, a library written by Joachim Metz, it is easy to write a quick graphical frontend that will read a vmdk and write it back to a raw image.

VMDK2RAW can be downloaded here.

Erwan