OpenBSD Journal

Blinkenlights: Exploiting your Net4501 Error LED

Contributed by grey on from the cool shit dept.

Thanks to a wishing-to-remain-anonymous news master for submitting the following:

"Well, there you have your Soekris box, running OpenBSD-current, with GPIO drivers enabled, and the Error LED is still idle? Don't despair!" gpioflicker lets your selectively use the error light to flash when pf logs something to pflog0. The default values are suitable for a Soekris Net4501. For other boxen, you may need to use the -d and -p switches, and possibly do some initialization with gpioctl

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

    Cool!

  2. By Anonymous Coward (24.19.191.108) on

    I've been wanting someway to get that damn light to do something useful...

    I have not tired it yet, but would this compile on an older version of OpenBSD than -current, say 3.4 or so?

    And, no I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth, any chance of a mod to allow turning the light on/off directly? I could see that being useful in a script where the light might come on during execution or something. Unfortunately my C skills are rusty to the point of nearly nothing by now... :-(

    Thanks!!

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.2.39) on

      It looks like you can activate it with pkill -USR1 gpioflicker and de-activate it with pkill -USR2 gpioflicker. I don't have this piece of hardware; that's just based on the webpage, where it says "Signals".

    2. By Anonymous Coward (84.44.246.43) on

      man gpioctl

  3. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

    Cool. Though the word "boxen" is a tragedy.

    Comments
    1. Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (67.71.178.100) on

        Yea I know how many times I've said: "Hey, can you give me a hand with these boxen of car parts?"

        It doesn't matter what ESR says. This is the English language and the plural for box is boxes.

        Comments
        1. By Jason (142.179.203.230) on

          Yes, when refering to a 'container' boxen would be inappropriate. But I think it's pretty consistent within unix culture to refer to computers as boxen. E.g. I've got all the engineering department's HPUX boxen sitting on the foo VLAN...

          This is actually an exceptionally common piece of slang amongst people I know.

          -Jason

          Comments
          1. By Nate (65.94.102.65) on

            Funny, the people I know what to hit any and every person that ever says something that stupid.

            Boxen for computers, Charlie for the daemon, referring to Linux as an operating system, saying wtf, lol or anything else l33t (most especially pwned) are all on the list of fist-to-face sayings.

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (195.224.109.30) on

              Have they considered therapy ?

            2. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

              Only Linux users would mod the above comment down.

        2. By tedu (64.173.147.27) on

          right. and hacking means "to chop with an ax".

          or is it axen? :)

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (213.118.35.56) on

            My boxen have a span of oxen in front of them. Makes things so much easier.

          2. By martin (62.178.75.222) martin@ on

            It's vaxen.

          3. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

            I thought hacking meant "committing computer crime" :(

        3. By Martin Hein (81.19.245.10) on

          Do you know any that hands over car parts in unix driven hardware?

          Comments
          1. By Martin Hein (81.19.245.10) on

            But then again, your english boxes is full of carburettors or?

            Comments
            1. By Gimlet (128.252.11.235) on

              Sidedraft or downdraft? How many barrels are we talking about?

      2. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

        How does that make it less of a tragedy?

        A lot of people say "Where is your house at?" too.

        Comments
        1. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.235.153.99) on

          Culture (5b): the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

          Why is it so difficult to accept that most people like using the specific dialect of the social group they are currently interacting with?

          When you refer to a group of eight binary digits (gee, I almost typed bits), do you use the word byte, or octet? Octet was there in the English language when someone just came up with byte, yet most people use byte anyway, even though it may have meant more than eight binary digits in some minicomputers of the past (OK, french people use octet, but they tend to have a less dynamic use of language).

          Comments
          1. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

            Byte is actually *useful*. Trying substituting "octet of bits" for every time you say "byte". Or to further unroll the techincal language, go for "an octet of binary digits". Boxen gets you nothing. It's obfuscation of language for NO USEFUL PURPOSE. It's a pretentious affectation.

            I'd expect the people of this technical community at least to care about correctness in language. Be it in man pages, code, or written communication, clarity matters. There's nothing more irritating in written communication that to have to stop and take that millisecond to figure out what someone is talking about because they're using an abortion of a word like "boxen" (or just as bad, "cute" spellings like Micro$oft).

            Comments
            1. By Fábio Olivé Leite (200.182.145.118) on

              Boxen gives the reader more meaning than boxes. Boxes could be anything, while boxen are certainly Unix hosts (are you going to complain about hosts as well?). Hacking is messing, fussing, reading, writing, learning and having fun, all at the same time. Guess it makes it a lot easier to simply write hacking, right?
              "Cute" spellings such as Micro$oft also convey more meaning than the plain "correct" word they represent, since the modifications used to make it "cute" express additional ideas the writer has about the subject, in a very compact form.
              If you have to take extra milliseconds to understand these "enhanced" forms of communication (or dialects, if you will), it's clear that you are not part of the subculture that uses them. Now you only have two options: decide you want to be a part of this subculture, learn the dialect and stop whining; or decide you don't want to be a part of this subculture, go away and stop whining. :)

              Comments
              1. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

                Don't give me that bullshit. You're no more the arbitrator of what's acceptable in the "subculture" than I am. I happen to have reasons why I think boxen sucks, you just seem to like it because it's used. Sounds like the kind of reasoning that that other Unix clone relies on. But it's typical of the low-end Unix nerd to want to put up as many barriers as possible between the fanboys and non-fanboys. Maybe it's a reaction to having been picked on in school, who knows.

                What does boxen give you that "machine" or "computer" or even "workstation" doesn't? It's used so indescriminantly that people are hanging adjectives off it now: Windows boxen, Redhat boxen, etc.

                Cutesy spelling is completely indefensible. I've never seen a usage that doesn't look juvenile. That's the main reason why you don't see that kind of spelling where anyone is trying to be taken seriously (that and that tired old warhorse, clarity).

                Comments
                1. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.235.153.99) on

                  Whatever.

  4. By xFred (24.47.180.14) on

    Does NOT work on pcengines.ch WRAP (3 port eth. model)

    Was hoping it would give me the same functionality as on a soekris, but OTOH you can still turn on/off lights via these commands:

    #turn on first light (left > right)
    gpioctl -c 2 pp out
    #turn off first light
    gpioctl -c 2 tri

    Light 2 is -c 3, light 3 is -c 18.

    Gonna take a look at the source for this and see if its something i am capable of hacking to work with the WRAP.

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