Mice in cars

They made it into a 2000 Ford Focus, a 2005 Subaru Forester & a brand spanking new 2012 Suzuki SX4. They leave mouse shit everywhere, they literally take dumps non-stop. They even brought the poison I spread around the house into the cabin air filter these fucking little pricks.

It’s an all out war and I’m not taking prisoners.

First, I gave them back their poison, have fun not coagulating bitches.

Second, all of these cars have a path that allows a small rodents into the cabin. The Focus & the SX4 was through the cabin air intake. I still don’t know how they make it into the Subaru.

Here’s how to upgrade a 2012 Suzuki SX4 to have an armored air intake.

Pro-tip I didn’t know, most cars’ cabin air intake is somewhere right bellow the windshield on the passenger side. Usually you need to remove the piece of plastic that is between the windshield and the hood as pictured bellow.

A close up of the air intake and how completely unprotected it is.

Now with protection, it looks pretty bad but it has done the job so far.

Back in business

Here’s how to access the intake from the inside, it gives you access to the air filter. You just need to remove the glove box first, no screws need to be removed.

It’s pretty lame to post my dumb hack online but I’ve had an incredibly hard time finding any information about cabin air intakes for cars so I hope it’ll help someone.


2016-10-17 edit: Commenter André shares the picture of his setup. Ingenious use of self drilling roofing screws!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAndré: ”we added a few more screws after this was taken to mold the wire mesh tight against the opening”

Chicken cam – back online!

But with a serious loss of functionality. Given the internet connection that I have (cellular) I can’t reasonably set it up to do live streaming. I’ve also disabled interaction with the cam. What’s left is an image uploaded every hour. Not super duper cool but I’ll take what I can get in this neck of the woods.

Hopefully this will get better when better internet is available.

ZFS send/receive accross different transport mechanisms

Sending ZFS snapshots across the wires can be done via multiple mechanisms. Here are examples of how you can go about it and what the strengths and weaknesses are for each approach.

SSH

strengths: encryption / 1 command on the sender

weaknesses: slowest

command:

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | ssh user@receiver.domain.com zfs receive tank/new_volume

NetCat

strengths: pretty fast

weaknesses: no encryption / 2 commands on each side that need to happen in sync

command:

on the receiver

netcat -w 30 -l -p 1337 | zfs receive tank/new_volume

on the sender

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | nc receiver.domain.com 1337

(make sure that port 1337 is open)

MBuffer

strengths: fastest

weaknesses: no encryption / 2 commands on each side that need to happen in sync

command:

on the receiver

mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G-I 1337 | zfs receive tank/new_volume

on the sender

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G -O receiver.domain.com:1337

(make sure that port 1337 is open)

SSH + Mbuffer

strengths: 1 command / encryption

weaknesses: seems CPU bound by SSH encryption, may be a viable option in the future?

command:

zfs send tank/volume@snapshot | mbuffer -q -v 0 -s 128k -m 1G | ssh root@receiver.domain.com 'mbuffer -s 128k -m 1G | zfs receive tank/new_volume'

Finally, here is a pretty graph of the relative time each approach takes:

SSH + MBuffer would seem like the best of both worlds (speed & encryption), unfortunately it seems as though CPU becomes a bottleneck when doing SSH encryption.