Comments for We're Hosed

Comment on We’re on a journey by greg

greg — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:21:40 +0000

Cece, praying and hoping for a quick victory. Please let us know if we can help in any way. — greg

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by Cecil

Cecil — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:22:18 +0000

It is quite complicated by design, in order to hide the details from people who would circumvent the DRM and return by dates. I’d use wireshark rather than a proxy server to capture the traffic (better filtering and more details that might matter). But your network needs to be quiet like a small home network and it’s a pain to learn. I believe there a public specs for what an Audiobook bundle should look like just as there are specs for EPUB. Whether ODMC follows the specs is unknown or disputed.

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by Anne

Anne — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:39:50 +0000

Turns out OMC works under wine too, yielding simple .mp3 files in a directory you get to choose. I’m guessing it’ll delete them when my time is up. I was able to dig through the xml and find both a baseurl and a filename, but I couldn’t assemble them into a fetchable URL. I guess the thing to do is make OMC fetch a book through a proxy and record the traffic so I can see if they’re doing anything complicated.

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by Cecil

Cecil — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:42:59 +0000

@Anne
I have tried something similar. I once checked out Hayeks “Road to Serfdom”. It had 5 mp3 files and downloadable urls inside the XML. You have to look deep in the XML to find them and, for me, the first minutes or so of speech had odd dropouts. Not saying is DRM, but you know? The real problem was I lost all the chapter info metadata so I couldn’t go to chapter 12 or to the last chapter I heard because MP3 players/clients (generally) don’t have that ability in the middle of a file — they could but that’s another can of worms to open.

Back when my device was a bog standard Color Nook using the Overdrive Media Player (not the Android its flashed to now), it would pause at odd moments while it downloaded the next MP3 file. There are more than enough hints in the XML that what I saw was indeed what was happening. Overdrive AudioBooks have expiration dates but that is enforced by the client checking the home base or it’s Android DB. If someone was so inclined, that would be easy enough to get around. Building a bundle that players could accept as expiration date free “AudioBook” ? That might take some work.

Thanks for mentioning the Wine option. I vaguely remember testing it and it did work with ADE. I also had to re-install Wine & ADE every time I updated Ubuntu versions. Easier for me fire up a cranky old XP SP2 vm. Wine is is viable option and it would remove the ftp step in my process.

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by Anne

Anne — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:19:42 +0000

I realize this is not exactly what you’re working on, but I notice that OverDrive distributes DRM-free MP3s — but to get them you have to use ODMC on a .odm file. I haven’t installed ODMC (though ADE works fine under wine to get me .epubs, by the way) and I (foolishly?) hoped that it would be as easy as pulling the filenames out of the (XML) .odm file and firing off a wget. Apparently not. The three-part overdrive extractor for iphones claims that their (somewhat different) URLs can simply be wgetted from, but all I get are 403 Access Denieds.

Have you tried wiresharking MP3 audiobook downloads?

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by Cecil

Cecil — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:57:02 +0000

I didn’t pursue the ruby script because it would take a lot of time to decode and replicated the ODMC protocol with no guarantee that it can be done (SSL/Cert issues). I download the book in Windows (in a virtual machine), ftp it to the Linux system, Load it into Calibre (it has a user installable plug in to remove the DRM). Calibre also has an book sharing server which I wanted. On the android device, I use Aldiko as a book reader because it knows how to talk to the Calibre server.

Comment on The other OverDrive deep hole by edjolanski

edjolanski — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:37:47 +0000

I am very interested to see your “Ruby script to extract that Abode Digital Editions (ADE) key from activation.xml” As someone with access to Linux and Android only, it makes this whole process very difficult. As far as I am aware, there is nothing illegal about extracting my Adobe key. This is some great work. Please let me know if you’re willing to share this code! I certainly share your frustration at Adobe and OMC not having any Linux solution available. Thanks!

Comment on Updating Buffalo NAS firmware from Linux by Cecil

Cecil — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:51:07 +0000

The instructions I wrote are more like hints to a skilled Linux admin. You need the acp_commander so you can get a telnet console to your stuck NAS. Then you can mount the partitions and see what’s on the disk. I eventually pulled the HD out and put it in a usb enclosure and mounted the disk on my main Linux box and setup the boot partition to boot the debian installer. Then I put the drive back in the NAS, booted and it. Any acp_commander to get a console and then I could install debian. acp_commander is 100% required, you use it several times. This is the most difficult kind of Linux installation so you really need to understand how linux boots and lives. Have you tried the buffalo tech forums. There is a lot info in there.

Comment on Updating Buffalo NAS firmware from Linux by Johnathen

Johnathen — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:11:35 +0000

Yes my host was 192.168.11.1, been trying for ages now. Tried reseting (where 2 blue leds flash). No luck. Tried on different PC’s, no difference.

With a port scanner I can pick up 192.168.11.150, directly after the red led flashes 6x, and I press hold function button (Blue light flashes quickly, this is as far as it goes).

It disappears in the port scanner almost immediately, and NasNav never found anything yet. Seems like it tried to boot to EM, but failed ?

I read about acp_commander (Java?) Do you think this is my last resort?
I was thinking of extracting the IMG’s to the hdd, but I can’t find out what directory, and what partition & partition table has to be for the Buffalo to be happy.

Struggling a bit with Linux, but interested to learn.

Thanks for your time :) I will search your site for more info.

Comment on Updating Buffalo NAS firmware from Linux by Cecil

Cecil — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:13:57 +0000

Did you change your boot host to be 192.168.11.1 before starting atftpd and then getting your LS into EM mode. That may require secret button pushes and waiting for secret seconds on the LS — there are several tones that the LS can produce depending on how much trouble it thinks it is in.

If you are Linux savvy the important hint is ‘acp_commander’ works on the Buffalos. I later wrote about getting debian squeeze installed on my Buffalo NAS so it’s somewhere on this site.