Last week I competed in the UK Cyber Security Challenge, spending 2 days in London on the HMS Belfast. I was fortunate to be part of a great team, including the event’s overall winner Adam Tonks.

Debian Jessie has migrated libvirt to use polkit which means the normal advice of “add your user to libvirt and kvm groups” doesn’t work for virsh. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation about the change either. After a bit of head scratching and googling the following fixes the problem and allows members of the libvirt group to use virsh.

Because I like to understand how things work before they break, I wanted to be able to mount the encrypted storage of my Galaxy S2 phone from the ADB shell.

Finally we have enough space in /system install the full Google Apps package, download the latest full package from the official thread.

I had a freshly installed phone running pure CyanogenMod 12, but I also wanted the standard Google Apps so now what? Back to the forums to read about how Google Apps work on 3rd party ROMs. The main complication is the default flash layout in the Galaxy S2 only has 537MB for the /system partition, not enough for full Google Apps. There is also a fairly small /data partition which holds other apps but not user data.