[Arm-netbook] Mysteries of Lemote Yeeloong MIPS netbook

[Gordan Bobic]

On 10/17/2012 11:30 PM, freebirds at fastmail.fm wrote:
> (1) Mystery of unscrewable screws. Yesterday, a geek from China examined
> the four unscrewable screws underneath the touchpad of my Lemote
> Yeeloong MIPS
> netbook. He said they were allen screws and instructed me to purchase a
> small allen wrench. Why didn't Lemote's manual posted on their website
> and in their replies to my complaint, disclose the use of phillips
> screws and allen screws? Is Lemote intentionally preventing their
> customers from opening their netbooks? Or did my abuser's crackers
> replace some phillips screws with allen screws?

Let me get this straight - you were trying to unscrew allen screws with 
a philips screwdriver and were wondering why you couldn't undo them?

> (3) Mystery of Chinese backdoor or abuser's crackers' tampering. Redflag
> linux, a Chinese variant of Debian is preinstalled on the Yeeloong.While
> shutting down, there are two POST messages are very quickly flash on the
> screen. Yesterday, I turned my Yeeloong on and off 30 times to write
> down the messages. I could not get all the messages on the second
> screen.

Photo, maybe?

> The messages include an OpenBSD server, starting CRON command scheduler,
> file alternation monitor, STARTING network manager, timidity, rsync for
> backing up data remotely offsite BSD, etc. I do not have a server, no
> cron schedule, no file alternation monitor, do not back up my data
> offline, do not have any printers connected. I am not hardwired to the
> internet and I disabled the wifi. Why is network manager starting up at
> shut down?
>
> Thanks Roman for writing a HOWTO install Debian on the Yeeloong at
> http://romanrm.ru/en/loongson/debian
> Prior to replacing Redflag linux, Roman or anyone else who owns a
> Yeeloong, did you have the same POST messages while shutting down? Did
> replacing the OS replace the POST messages at shut down or are you still
> having the identical POST messages? If there was an English speaking
> Lemote forum, I would ask there.
>
> The first POST message screen:
>
> Init: Enter runlevel 2
> Starting OpenBSD secure shell server: sshd

So it's running sshd by default. Just about all UNIXes do. Expected, 
normal, and nothing to worry about if you use reasonably secure 
passwords. But there's nothing stopping you from disabling it (check the 
documentation for your links distro on how).

> Starting periodic command scheduler: crond

Cron daemon. Again, all UNIXes have this. At a minimum this will do 
things like rotate logs once per week so they don't eventually eat all 
of your disk space.

> as root run etc/rc2.d/Sl9hpo2setup
> No hpoj devices have been configured.

No idea what this is. HP OfficeJet something or other, maybe?

> starting xprint servers: xprt

Print server daemon?

> Starting file alteration monitor: FAM

I'm guessing this is a security feature not dissimilar from tripwire.

> Starting system message bus: dbus
> Starting K display manager: kdm
> Starting Avahi MDNS/DNS-SD daemon: avahi-daemon
> Starting hardware abstraction layer: hald
> Configured enable ALSA sequencer
> saned disabled edit/default/saned
> Starting network connection manager: network manager
> Starting timidity not yet configured. Enable ALSA sequencer by editing
> etc/default/timidity
> starting DHCP D-bus daemon: dhcdbd
> (Then more entries pop up):
> Switching to runlevel 0
> Sending processes the TERM signal
> Stopping K display manager
> _____________ not yet configured

All of this seems perfectly normal. Avahi and network manager start by 
default on just about all distributions to manage your network 
interfaces, wired or otherwise. If you don't have any they'll still 
start, just not do anything.

> Second POST message screen:
>
> using debug method to see details of our search for an access method
> SCPlugin -
> stopping rsync daemon

This is the only thing that might be deemed a bit unusual for a default 
setup. But if you had perps trying to spy on you I'm sure they wouldn't 
set up rsync on your machine running as a normal startup scripted 
daemon. They'd probably bury it into one of the other startup scripts 
silently, which wouldn't produce any mentions of it during 
startup/shutdown sequence.

> stopping file alteration monitor
> stopping fan speed regulation
> saving system clock.
> DHCP D-bus daemon
> stopping nework connection manager
> stopping resolv
> conf . . . done
> ALSA done.
> stopping Avahi MDNS
> stopping xprint
> stopping HP OfficeJet linux driver
> starting HP OfficeJet linux driver
> asking all remaining processes to terminate
> hardware clock via any known method
> stopping portmap daemon
> stopping enhanced signal syslogd
> deconfiguring network devices.  cleaning up.
> unmounting temporary file system
> unmounting local file systems . . .done
> deactivating swap.
> ifupdown

Nothing unusual here.

Gordan