FIOS Router CLI and DHCP
I recently got Verizon FIOS service. The router Verizon provides is an Actiontec MI424WR. Verizon goes to some trouble to hide the Actiontec branding; but, for example, the Model Name field in the System Monitoring tab on mine says "MI424WR-GEN2".
Anyway, I wanted to get the DHCP lease database out of the router in order to populate that information into my own DNS server. I initially looked at scraping the web interface, but the router does some weird Javascript hashing of the password before submitting it to the server. I figured there had to be a better way.
In the advanced options you can turn on telnet access to the router. That gets you into a command line administration utility, which in turn will let you access a shell (via "system shell"). However I was unable to find a DHCP lease database in the filesystem. There was a /var/state/dhcp directory, but it was empty.
Some searching on the web turned up the fact that the Actiontec MI424WR runs a commercial Linux distro called OpenRG. More searching turned up an OpenRG Configuration Entries Guide. A bit more poking and I found that this command will dump out the DHCP lease database:
conf print dev/br0/dhcps/lease
Monday, October 10, 2011
Friday, October 07, 2011
Python Packages
I'm new to the Python and Django world, having primarily worked with Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the last few years. In reading about how to manage dependencies several folks referred to pip and distribute as the new hotness (literally). Ok, fine, they're probably something like ruby gems, but what's the difference?
Looking over their respective pages (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip and http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute) it is confusing to see that there appears to be some sort of circular dependency. The pip page says "In order to use pip, you must first install setuptools or distribute." The distribute page gives instructions for installing distribute via pip. Wha?!
The heading at the top of the pip page says "pip installs packages. Python packages." The heading of the distribute page says "Easily download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages". Argh, still confused.
Pip is more clearly documented, and serves in the roll of package downloader, dependency resolver and installer. This would be analogous to yum or apt. I.e. pip does not create packages. Pip apparently replaces something called easy_install.
So if you're just using existing packages you'll just use pip, possibly in combination with virtualenv for isolation (similar to bundler in the Ruby world).
So what about distribute? The distribute documentation is terribly confusing. It says it replaces setuptools, but then seems to imply that it is setuptools. It looks like distribute is a fork of setuptools because the setuptools maintainer stopped maintenance. And I guess in parallel there's another tool called distutils. These all are used to make packages. As is usual for package making there's a metadata file (setup.py in this case) and setuptools/distribute/distutils take that and a directory full of files and makes a package.
And apparently because setuptools, distribute and distutils all have problems there's work underway on distutils2 to replace them all.
On a side note, you'll also find references to eggs. This is apparently a packaging format introduced by setuptools. It seems to have lost favor. The PyPI repository distributes packages as generic tarballs.
So, in summary if you're making a package use distribute or distutils, and if you're installing a package use pip. I think. :)
Other references:
http://guide.python-distribute.org/
http://packages.python.org/distribute/
Looking over their respective pages (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip and http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute) it is confusing to see that there appears to be some sort of circular dependency. The pip page says "In order to use pip, you must first install setuptools or distribute." The distribute page gives instructions for installing distribute via pip. Wha?!
The heading at the top of the pip page says "pip installs packages. Python packages." The heading of the distribute page says "Easily download, build, install, upgrade, and uninstall Python packages". Argh, still confused.
Pip is more clearly documented, and serves in the roll of package downloader, dependency resolver and installer. This would be analogous to yum or apt. I.e. pip does not create packages. Pip apparently replaces something called easy_install.
So if you're just using existing packages you'll just use pip, possibly in combination with virtualenv for isolation (similar to bundler in the Ruby world).
So what about distribute? The distribute documentation is terribly confusing. It says it replaces setuptools, but then seems to imply that it is setuptools. It looks like distribute is a fork of setuptools because the setuptools maintainer stopped maintenance. And I guess in parallel there's another tool called distutils. These all are used to make packages. As is usual for package making there's a metadata file (setup.py in this case) and setuptools/distribute/distutils take that and a directory full of files and makes a package.
And apparently because setuptools, distribute and distutils all have problems there's work underway on distutils2 to replace them all.
On a side note, you'll also find references to eggs. This is apparently a packaging format introduced by setuptools. It seems to have lost favor. The PyPI repository distributes packages as generic tarballs.
So, in summary if you're making a package use distribute or distutils, and if you're installing a package use pip. I think. :)
Other references:
http://guide.python-distribute.org/
http://packages.python.org/distribute/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)