In my company I’m using two IPCOP router (one as an backup) to decouple a test hardware configuration from the company network. Additionally I had modified the setup to create 4 additional VLANs.

For quite some time I’ve negelected to keep up with the released updates. So these routers were still running 1.4.10, while 1.4.21 is current. Before update 1.4.11 it was easy to get access to the backup files, since IPCOP provided the option to write uncrypted backups. This was changed with 1.4.11 with the additional security option, that a backup password needs to be created.

Apparently no one else had the desire to look at the backup files, since searching the Web didn’t turn up any hints, what needed to be done to get at the backup content. So, in the end I looked at the IPCOP sources.

This steps need to be executed:

Export the backup key from the IPCOP backup Web interface.

The exported backup key needs to be converted by executing

openssl enc -a -d -aes256 -salt \
    -in <exported backup key file> \
    -out backup.key

The backup password is required for this operation.

Then the IPCOP backup can be converted into the original tar-achive.

openssl des3 -d -salt -in <IPCOP backup file>.dat \
    -out backup.tgz  -kfile backup.key`

The tar-archive can now be imported into your local file system for examination.

As the birthday present we (the parents) gave our son Steffen (happy birthday Steffen to your 17th birthday) a Samsung YP-T10 4GB MP3/Video-player (a pretty cute device BTW, read more about it here).

I was aware, that this player can only be connected to the host computer by way of MTP protocol, which basically means Microsoft Windows. Out of curiosity I connected the device to my Gentoo Linux box.

First I tried to access the player with the commands from the libmtp packages. The mtp-detect-command started running and produced some sensible output, but then it hang.

I had much better luck with libgphoto2 and the corresponding gphoto2 command from the gphoto project. If you look at the supported devices, the Samsung T10 is even explicitly listed together with other portable media player devices. By executing gphoto2 --shell I was able to successfully connect to the device, change directories, list directory content and transfer a MP3 file back to my computer.

It appears to me, that the libmtp and gphoto developers should better be working together to provide a first class MTP implementation on Linux. At the moments, it seems, that gphoto2 is way ahead of libmtp.