When I started this blog back in 2009, I chose to publish it on Wordpress because it was easy to use and maintain. I hosted it using wordpress.com’s free tier, and it has worked well enough for me since then, but when it came time to move the blog off of wordpress.com and onto something self-hosted, I wasn’t convinced that Wordpress was still the best solution for me.

As a system administrator, my biggest concern regarding Wordpress is its security. When our school’s website switched from some 90’s era framework to Wordpress a couple of years ago, it wasn’t long before our site was compromised. We switched from a web host to a DigitalOcean instance running the latest version of Fedora and a system copy of Wordpress (both kept up-to-date), which has (at least for now) kept our site from being compromised again, but that is one more service that we have to keep our eyes on.

The problem is that, as nice as it is to have a pretty GUI for inputting posts and the like, there’s a potential security hole with any public server that allows changes. Hugo works on a completely different basis. Instead of creating and editing posts online, Hugo allows you to create a site using text files and a git repository, and then publishes static web pages, greatly reducing the attack surface. There are some costs (I think I’m going to go without public comments, at least for the moment), but I think it’s well worth it.

The migration has consisted of a number of steps. First I exported my site from wordpress.com, created a local instance, and imported my site. I did this because wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to use custom plugins unless you’re ready to pay large amounts of money. Second, I used the Wordpress to Hugo exporter plugin to export my site to Hugo. I had already configured a new Hugo site, so I only copied the content/posts directory across from my blog export.

Finally came the time-consuming process of checking each post and changing how pictures are embedded. I’ve followed the steps in Hugo’s image processing page to automatically generate smaller versions of my images to post in the blog, with a hyperlink to the full-size image, and I’ve also checked each url to make sure that it matches the url on the old site. I am currently about half-way through my posts, and it sure has been interesting to see some of the things I wrote about over the last nine years.

Once I’m finished updating my posts, I’m going to pay wordpress.com ($13 a year, I think it is) to redirect everything on my old site to this new one. Then it’s a matter of updating my site information using the major search engines’ webmaster tools, and the conversion should be done.

The source for this site is published on https://github.com/jdieter/jdieter.net

In case you can’t tell by the title of this post, I’m… mildly… annoyed with HP right now. The story starts with my just-over-a-year-old HP Pavilion laptop that has been having problems with its power brick.

While I was at work on Monday, the laptop started running on batter power even when it was plugged in, but when I got home, everything worked perfectly. I assumed it had something to do with the power at work, and wondered whether it might even be firmware related. I looked through the newest BIOS’s changelog, and, sure enough there was something mentioned about power and charging, so I downloaded it and updated my BIOS.

At least, that’s what I would have done if I was running Windows. Unfortunately for me, I’m not. I don’t even have a dual-boot system because I haven’t really needed Windows for years, and, when I do, a VM does the job just fine.

The only BIOS update HP offers is a Windows exe file, so I downloaded it, and ran cabextract to get the files off it. The tool lshw told me that my motherboard was an 0820D, and the zip contained a file called 0820DF45.bin (the BIOS revision is F.45), so I had everything I needed. I put the bin file on a USB, rebooted into HP’s recovery tools, and then went to firmware management, selected the bin file… and fail! It sat there telling me that I need a signature file for the firmware.

So I searched for the signature file, but it wasn’t in the exe. I googled for it, and found a lot of people who seem to be in the same boat. One suggestion was to run the exe on a Windows system and select the “Put BIOS update on USB” option. Sounded easy enough, so I booted my Windows VM, ran the exe, accepted the stupid EULA (I’m pretty sure I saw something in the forty-third paragraph about dancing on one leg while balancing a cupcake on my nose), installed the BIOS updater, and… nothing. After twenty seconds or so, a message popped up, “This program might not have installed correctly. Install using compatibility settings?” Yeah, thanks. After multiple attempts at different compatibility settings… still nothing.

I googled around a bit more, and found a 2GB HP USB image that you can use to recover your BIOS if it gets corrupted. Sweet! I downloaded it, and several hours later, I found out it only has the original BIOS revision (complete with a signature file!), but not my latest update!

At this point, I was desperate. My final hope was to figure out some way to boot my laptop into Windows. I have an 500GB SSD with a grand total of 30GB free, so that wasn’t an option. What about a Live USB? I mean, Linux distributions have had Live CDs and USBs forever, so it must just work in Windows, right?

Nope. Not unless you have Windows 10 Enterprise with it’s Windows-to-go feature. Luckily, the guys over at Hasleo software have created a nifty little tool called WinToUSB that does the same thing. I copied my VM image over to a USB, booted from it, and ran the BIOS update.

It worked perfectly and even offered to put the BIOS update on a USB! It seems that HP, in their infinite wisdom, have designed the updater so it refuses to start unless you’re on an HP machine.

To add insult to injury, all the updater does is copy the BIOS bin file and its signature onto the EFI partition, where it gets updated after a reboot. As far as I can tell, the signature file is generated on the fly by the updater, which begs the question… Why? Why generate the signature on the fly, rather than just stick it in the embedded CAB file with the BIOS images? Why require an HP system to generate a USB image containing the BIOS update? Why require your users to dance on one foot while balancing a cupcake on their nose?

And, as further insult (or maybe we’re back to injury), the BIOS update didn’t fix my charging problem, and it turns out that my just-out-of-warranty power brick is dying. Thanks, HP. You guys rock! After three HPs laptops in a row, I think it may be time for a change.

Picture of burning laptop by secumem, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license