Author Archives: Oliver

Migrating data from 2 TB SSD to 4 TB SSD with iODD ST400 drive enclosure

Linux is my main system, but I prefer using NTFS for various use cases and in fact some use cases require something like NTFS. The ST400 is the successor of several Zalman-rebranded iODD devices which bring a similar feature set. … Continue reading

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Two more useful flags for cl.exe

/Be appears to spit out a make file1 snippet that contains the recipe to reproduce a given run of cl.exe. It takes into account variables. Check it out: all: @cd D:\17.7.5\x64 @set INCLUDE= @set LIB= @set LIBPATH= @set CL=/nologo /utf-8 … Continue reading

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(New) shittiest software from Microsoft in my book

Previously the so-called Office and especially Teams were ranking quite high among the shittiest software from Microsoft in my book. In fact Teams in all its incarnations is probably going to take up the four rear slots in my top … Continue reading

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NATO’s open door policy

Now, while any small town club is able to reject applications for membership and scholarships are tied to preconditions — and ignoring for a minute that NATO even refused to talk about Russia’s security interests, including its unwillingness to accept … Continue reading

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Undocumented MSVC

Some ongoing research. For obvious reasons I can only share results and tools, but not actual sample data.

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Log build command lines with cl.exe, link.exe and friends

Turns out you can enable detailed logging of the command lines run by MSBuild when building from Visual Studio or the command line. This may not seem like much, until you realize that technically you rarely get to see the … Continue reading

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Jetzt wird Farbe bekannt

Mit der Ankündigung Großbritanniens panzerbrechende Munition mit abgereichertem Uran (Englisch “depleted uranium”) an die Ukraine zu liefern — und den quasi nicht existenten medialen Einsprüchen — haben die “Unterstützer” der Kiewer Regierung unter Selenskij Farbe bekannt. Behauptete man bisher noch … Continue reading

Posted in DE, Meinung, Wertewesten | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Geschichte und Geschichten

Ist schon faszinierend daß die Kubakrise häufig zum Vergleich mit der aktuellen Weltlage — mithin der Beziehung zwischen Rußland und den USA — bemüht wird, jedoch regelmäßig auch hier die “Krise” entsprechend der US-amerikanischen Lesart mit der Stationierung von Raketen … Continue reading

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Aiding reproducibility in builds with MS Visual C++

<AdditionalOptions>%(AdditionalOptions) /d1trimfile:”$(SolutionDir)\”</AdditionalOptions> In your .vcxproj file or a Directory.Build.props when passed to the compiler (cl.exe, ClCompile) this should trim the leading path used for __FILE__. The backslash is actually required here, because SolutionDir ends in a backslash itself, but we … Continue reading

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Initialization of static variables (reminder)

Nice blog article which I ran across again recently: gynvael.coldwind.pl/?id=406 PS: probably also worth a look: Paged Out

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FIDO2 für Kreditkarte (Sparkasse). Aber nicht mit Linux!

Im letzten Jahr hatte ich eine Kreditkarte bei der Sparkasse beantragt — Mastercard war das einzige was im Angebot war, aber gut. Also beantragt und direkt nach Erhalt einmal benutzt. Schon der zweite Versuch ging in die Hose, da aufgrund … Continue reading

Posted in DE, IT Security, Meinung | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Floating point precision … printf-VS2013-vs.-later-VS-version edition

As developers we probably all know that floating point precision can be an issue1. It can haunt us in various ways. Generally when we talk about precision, though, we probably don’t have in mind printf as the first thing. This … Continue reading

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Enabling RSA (with SHA-1) again in OpenSSH server

The sshd version that ships with Ubuntu 22.04 seems to have abandoned RSA authentication. Well, that’s not true. It’s about the hash algorithm used by the “old” protocol by the name ssh-rsa, which is deemed insecure by today’s standards. RSA … Continue reading

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Bash training I gave some years ago

This is a Bash training I gave some years ago, which I had — however — prepared on my own time. Some parts may be outdated. Others may need some touching up, but in general I think it can be … Continue reading

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That trick I learned with the Visual Studio debugger

Alright, I’ll admit it it: I am in team WinDbg. Sure, I’ll happily use WinDbgX — the “Preview” version of the “new” WinDbg which has been in preview for ages now — but I always was a bit unhappy with … Continue reading

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IDA and Hex-Rays decompiler keyboard shortcut cheat sheet

Find it on GitHub: assarbad/some-latex/releases/tag/v1.0-ida-cheat-sheet LaTeX source can be found in the repository itself.

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Reminder to self: IDA load all sections

Just a reminder to myself. Edit cfg/pe.cfg inside the IDA installation folder to configure the PE loader to load all sections: // Always load all sections of a PE file? // If no, sections like .reloc and .rsrc are skipped … Continue reading

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ASR rule “Block Win32 API calls from Office macros”

Microsoft says it’s fixed. It may be, but I think there’s more to it than meets the eye. Colleagues of mine noticed that, aside from shortcuts disappearing, Defender also started acting up on TortoiseProc.exe from TortoiseSVN. Notably, checkouts would fail … Continue reading

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dumbin.exe, editbin.exe, lib.exe …

They’re all just slim wrappers around the actual link.exe, not using a common DLL or so, but actually invoking: dumpbin.exe simply invokes “link /dump” and failing that “link.exe link /dump” editbin.exe simply invokes “link /edit” and failing that “link.exe link … Continue reading

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What does adding masm targets do under the hood

If in Visual Studio when you right-click a C/C++-project in the Solution Explorer, you choose Build Customizations…, the following dialog will be presented: If you check the item for masm, the following changes will be done to your .vcxproj file: … Continue reading

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