Category: Packages

Office 2008 for the ‘executive’

brunerd 11 Comments

Last night, while groggily honing in on the Office 2008 installer package UID problems, I missed another glaringly obvious defect: All the files are set executable, yes those files owned by 502 are also set executable. Take a look again at the lsbom dump you’ll see this everywhere: 100775. For the first two: the 10 means it’s a file, 40 is a directory. The last three (775) are significant: 7 is 4+2+1 (4:read, 2:write, 1:execute) and 5 is… that’s right: 4+1, read and execute privileges.

Now tell me does… /Microsoft Office 2008/Read Me.html need to be executable for you to look at it? Tick, tick, tick, *ding*! No. It does not let’s do another!
Does this god awful GIF bullet? /Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Clipart/Bullets.localized/Red Swirl No. But it is.
Ok. One more: /Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Sounds/Yeehaw? Yeah, you’re getting it. No.

The only things that needs execute privileges are directories (that’s application bundles too) and executables such as: Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word

And can you remove this execute bit in Finder? No. You have 3 choices, Read & Write, Read Only, and No Access, flip through them all and the x will still be there. You’ll need to chmod it from the terminal, but be careful, not all of them… or just give chmod -R ugo-x * a whirl, then slowly go through and chmod go+x the executables one by one and see if it still works, might be faster than the inverse… but I haven’t tested anything yet, that’s for work tommorrow… and the next day… in the mean time…

Try this: ls -lFGR /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008

You’ll be seeing red. :D

BTW: Just in case, the media I am using is Part No: X13-64625-03, I hope MS can fix this and re-press this for Volume License customers — my day job! And speaking of just in case, thanks ‘justincase’ of the Clix forums for pointing out the glaringly obvious.

Office 2008, 502, and you

brunerd 33 Comments

So… I got a free copy of Office 2008 Digital Media Edition for free at MacWorld 2008! W00t! All because IDG double booked a room and the session I wanted got bumped until later. I instead went to see what’s new at the “Office2008:Form Meet Function” session, cute sounding eh? Within the first minute or two, to ensure our rapt attention I’m sure, our lady MC told us that we were all going to receive a free copy of Office 2008. Except, without the same flair as Oprah (she should have tried stretching it out: “You’re all getting Awwwwwww-Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!!!”) Oh well, it still felt nice to win something, especially something as pricey as the Digital Media Edition which runs $467 at CDW! I got back yesterday and after debating whether I’d sell this bad boy or install it, I went with carnal knowledge of the beast.

First things first: They’ve moved to Apple’s Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise rollouts? Well, unfortunately they’ve created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502.

So let’s say, Mr. IT installs this on a user’s machine where the first user is the admin (501) and the standard user is Joes User (502), well, when after all’s installed, it will give Joe User (502) ownership of these folders and their installed contents:

/Library/Automator/ (if it doesn’t exist already)
/Library/Fonts/Microsoft
/Library/Application Support/Microsoft
/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008

Hmmm, that’s not good now is it? Because A) Joe User will find a way to screw it up and B) those are security holes IT does not want to have. Oh, if only they’d taken a peek at p. 1060 of Cocoa Programming, which basically says, if you let root own the file but the person installing isn’t root, it will assign that user’s id to the installed files, that’s how it should be. Instead if UID 502 doesn’t exist on your system when you install it will still assign that UID as the file’s owner anyway. D’oh!

I think I feel a chown’ing script (or an Iceberg repackaging) coming on and an uninstaller script too. “But, there’s an Uninstaller!”, you say? Yes there is and it does a lovely job of moving the Microsoft Office 2008 folder to the Trash, but it kinda misses the Application Support folder, the fonts folder (and moving the disabled fonts back), and all 97 automator actions… tsk tsk. Still, it was free!

Morning Update: It was late, I was tired (and sick), and I totally didn’t think of this one: “Fix Permissions”. If you do get your ownership fixed on all those files, make sure to delete all the Office2008* files from your /Library/Receipts folder, lest you reverse it all with one click of “Fix Permissions” in Disk Utility. And no, you can’t use awk, sed, or some other readily apparent way to modify the bom files… that’s someting for the MOAB crew ;)

What’s in Hard Drive Update 1.0?

brunerd

So there’s a Hard Drive Update 1.0 update out from Apple! Put on your mining hats and let’s go spelunking… first stop the package .dist file has some strings of interest:
if( model.match(/ST3500641AS/) )
if( revision.match(/3.BTD/) )
if( model.match(/ST3750640AS/) )
if( revision.match(/3.BTF/) )

This refers to Seagate’s 750GB & 500GB drives

What else can we find? Once we open the archive.pax.gz there’s the actual Hard Drive Update 1.0 Cocoa app, which has a very scary sounding readme.rtf file inside the Contents/Resources/.lproj:

Warning: It is strongly recommended that you back up the data on your hard drives to an external drive or removable media before running this update. Do not reset, shut down, or turn off power to your computer while performing this update. If an error occurs during the update process, your hard drive(s) may become unusable and all data could be lost. If you have not backed up your data, click Quit and do so now.

As Count Floyd would say: “Oooh Scary”

Next up is the MacOS/Hard Drive Update 1.0 binary and a selection of strings:
installEFIUpdater:
%@/%@/hdfw.efi
This computer is not connected to an AC power source.

It uses an EFI application that will update the firmware on the drives (the AC line makes me chuckle, to think of what the battery life of a Mac Pro would be?! Obviously they used a template for this.)

Inside hdfw.efi are strings that refer to Cygwin, interesting what platform they are using to develop this with: a Windows box emulating *nix
C:\cygwin\home\Loki\Platform\Apple\Common\Application\ATAHDFWUtil\ATAHDFWUtil.c
C:\cygwin\home\Loki\Platform\IntelMpg\AppleTools\Build\X64\ATAHDFWUtil.pdb

Inside the Hard Drive Update 1.0.app/Contents/Resources/System/HDFW directory are hives of model names with single string files (FWAlias & FWCurrent) and the actual firmwares (FW01):
ST3500641AS__P 3_BTD/FWAlias
ST3500641AS__P 3_BTE/FWCurrent
ST3500641AS__P_3_BTE/FW01
ST3500641AS__Q 3_BTD/FWAlias
ST3500641AS__Q 3_BTE/FWCurrent
ST3500641AS__Q_3_BTE/FW01
ST3750640AS_P 3_BTF/FWAlias
ST3750640AS_P 3_BTH/FWCurrent
ST3750640AS_P_3_BTH/FW01
ST3750640AS_Q 3_BTF/FWAlias
ST3750640AS_Q 3_BTH/FWCurrent
ST3750640AS_Q_3_BTH/FW01

Here’s an amusing edited list of strings :D
0000000000000c96 Lube Event
0000000000000d28 Virgin Sector Cleaned
0000000000000e8f Enter DateOfBirth YYWW
0000000000000eaa Enter 64Bit WorldWideName
000000000000534c DRIVE HAS BEEN SET-STUFFED -%1
00000000000058ca Invalid caller to SaveStuffToDisk()! Write not done! %x
0000000000006c1a !! Going Offlimits !!
0000000000006c31 Sleep?

Sounds like a date gone wrong! You really should get the DOB before initiating a lube event on a virgin sector… *ahem* let me try and get back on track with a couple informative strings about the guts of the drive:
0000000000012b4b Orig Code = BTG4H1 TONKA2_GX_4H1.0GC.0B9
0000000000012e87 Built for GALAXY4D,PITKIN,Redback,TI1810 PreAmp,Agere7531 PreAmp,McKinleyDT,4Disk,220 Servos,7200RPM,8Pole,133MHz

Well, enough spelunking I’m headed topside now.

What’s in the Login & Keychain Update 1.0

brunerd

Login & Keychain Update 1.0

The Login & Keychain Update 1.0 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is recommended for all Leopard installations. It addresses issues you may encounter when:

    *Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.
    *Connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks.
    *Changing the password of a FileVault-protected account.

What files does it affect?

/System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPortBrcm4311
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/CodeResources
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/DiskImages
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/OSServices.framework/Versions/A/CodeResources
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/OSServices.framework/Versions/A/OSServices

Brcm4311 meaning the Broadcom 4311 wireless chip
I’m sure this is a stop-gap until 10.5.1

What’s in the ATI Radeon X1900 XT Firmware Update?

brunerd

OK so there’s an update for the Radeon X1900 and we really don’t know what’s been improved…
If you wanna know where the ROM is it’s here
ATI Radeon X1900 XT Graphics Card Update.app/Contents/Resources/
ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources/R580Alopias_1.202_EBC.ROM

And what’s in it? Pure binary. No symbol tables, no strings save for the the device number and copyrights….

ATY,Alopias
ATY,RadeonX1900
113-A52027-202
109-A52027-00
01.00.202
AMD Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2005-2007

If we had the original ROM and this we could see what’s different then reverse engineer the binary! Whatcha think? :roll:

Me thinks Apple and AMD/ATi should pimp themselves better for all their hard work…. unless it’s a bone headed bug they had to fix :lol: