Category: moved from livejournal

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December 31, 2003

Well, it seems that I should be able to use the digital out from my motherboard fairly easily. That means I only need one piece of coax for audio run from the computer to the receiver, and it should be relatively noiseless, as it’ll be a digital signal. Video seems like it’ll be a bit more interesting, though. See, iTunes visualizations only run in 640×480 when full screen, so I think that composite *should* do all right. I just need to find a way to extract a composite signal from the board. There’s a five-pin connector that hookes to a $15 Asus TV-out adapter, but I don’t want to pay that. I figure there’s a common ground, one pin for composite, and the other three pins for s-video. If I can only find out which two pins are for the composite, and if the chipset properly detects a TV when this is connected, I’ll be in good shape. :) I think the appropriate thing to do would be to order some Belden 1807A, two s-video connectors, and the Asus adapter, but I’d rather not spend any more on this project.

If this idea had only popped into my head about four days ago. :\

Cables?

December 29, 2003

One update on the last post… If anyone needs some decent-quality RCA interconnects, I’ll make them and charge only parts. Other people going in on cable will let me afford the slightly larger spool. (500′ is only 3x the cost of 100′) Let me know ASAP.

electronics making things moved from livejournal

:)

December 29, 2003

Well, it seems that the audio interconnects that I made need to be replaced. Turns out I was using standard, good-for-RF RG6. This has a copper-plated steel core with a 60% aluminum shield. Not bad, but it explains the extremely hard time I was having with soldering to the braid. Whoops.

Anyway, I think tomorrow I’m going to get a hold of Graybar and see if I can get 100′ of Belden 9259. It’s an all-copper coax, with a stranded core. Should be quite a bit easier to work with… I’ll just have to get some more connectors and resolder things. Shouldn’t be a big deal. :) The subwoofer does function right now, but I’m concerned about using a cold solder to hold the ground together. It just doesn’t seem like the best idea, to me.

So, hopefully this will work out for the best. I’m wondering if I should get more than 50′, in case I want to make more custom interconnects in the future… I’m just not really sure right now. I’m thinking that it might be nice to make a run from my test 2003 machine to my home theater stuff, that way I could listen to streaming audio in the basement…

Hmm…

Would anyone be interested in some coax for making custom, high quality audio interconnects / subwoofer cables / whatever? For about $0.30/ft + connectors and with a soldering iron you can make your own high-quality interconnects!

electronics making things moved from livejournal

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December 27, 2003

For anyone who’s interested, I’ve posted a new recipe: Pumpkin Cheese Coffee Cake.

Also, after receiving some handy advice from , I made up some cables for my subwoofer, ran them, and now my living room has a subwoofer in with the iPod, NAD705, and flat panel speakers. I may snag a spectrum analyzer off of eBay for purposes of adding some motion to the stereo area, but beyond tweaking, I think it’s done. Yay!

food making things moved from livejournal

DHCP Issue

December 12, 2003

Okay, well, I can now reproduce the issue I’m having with my firewall. Here’s how:

1) Reboot Firewall.
2) Log in as root.
3) Kill the dhclient process.
4) Execute ‘dhclient xl0’ to start the DHCP client again.
5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 two more times. (3x total)
6) Network connection goes poof.

I’m not sure if this is an issue with OpenBSD’s dhclient or what yet, although I see no reason why a DHCP server should be able to cause a client to go wacky. If I get a chance, I’ll try it tomorrow on a test machine at work. I’m very curious what will happen if I do this with a non-Comcast DHCP server.

If you’re interested, there are two network captures of the DHCP requests going back and forth at http://www.nuxx.net/files/dhcp_issue.tar.gz. Interestingly, the next packet after the server sending a DHCP ACK is my firewall ARPing for itself. (???)

Hmm, it seems that there is an OpenBSD Patch for arp which patches part of if_ether.c. I wonder if this patch would take care of my troubles…? I think I’ll try to grab the kernel source tonight while sleeping, then give it a try after work tomorrow.

I think I’m at least making headway… I hope?

computers moved from livejournal

:(

December 11, 2003

I lost my fucking IP lease. I should have thought that a transparent proxy is going to cause the cable modem to think a new NIC is connected. Bah.

Stupid, stupid me.

Now I’m sniffing through a hub, but the address has changed.

computers moved from livejournal

Protected: Hmm…

December 11, 2003

computers moved from livejournal

meep.

December 10, 2003

Lots done around here today. First off, I change the firewall. Went from OpenBSD 3.3 to 3.4, to a Celeron 300a (at 450Mhz), new NICs, the works. Hopefully this will cut down on the outages I’ve been having. Big problem with this, though, is my public interface IP changed. It’s now 68.60.146.109. DNS changes have been put into place, and we’ll see how things go. Over the last week I’ve also finished adding entries to the recipes section. As I get more that I commonly use, I’ll add them, but that’s all for now.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

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December 9, 2003

So, I did it. I just ordered the parts to rebuild my old PC.

No, I’m not switching away from Macs, it’s just been sort-of mandated that I get a Windows Server 2003 cert by the end of 1Q2004. So, I need a test machine.

It’s not a bad deal… From Newegg I was able to get a AMD Athlon XP2500+ CPU, Asus A7N8X-VM (nForce 2 IGP) Micro-ATX motherboard, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, and a (free) t-shirt for ~$268.

I figure I’ll assemble the machine into the Doggie Case which housed by old high-end PC. It’ll end up on the rack down in the basement, admin’d via Terminal Service / Remote Desktop. One nice thing, it’ll give me a chance to play with *nix / OS X / Windows integration at home.

Oh, I just realized I haven’t done much of an update lately. So, what’s been going on with me? Well, I had a really good time at ‘s birthday party on Saturday. I was initially hesitant to go, but I’m glad I did. Last night I had an issue where the lamp in my office burned out, and there are no replacement bulbs available. So, two CDs and two trips to Lowe’s later and I had it retrofitted to house an outdoor halogen spotlight. It seems to work well, and will now accept any standard base bulb. And it looks good. I would have just bought a new lamp, but it’s really, really hard to find silver and black torche lamps. They all seem to be nappy black/gold, straight out of 1985, or they have a pricetag upwards of $50. Too much for me.

Tonight I have to give a presentation in class as part of the final project. I’m kinda nervous, but I generally know the material. My biggest concern is running over time, because I have a lot of info. I’m off work tomorrow, so I’m going to try and get the paper for class done. It’s not due until the 18th, but the instructor asked that we get them in earlier so he has more time to read them. I’m going to try to stay in his good graces. I *think* I have the structure of the paper generally done, I just need to write the actual words now. And bibliography. Whee!

Hrm, yeah, that’s it for now. I’m going to go think about eating the indian food I brought for lunch. Mmm….spicy!

around the house computers moved from livejournal

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December 2, 2003

Spent a bit of time today updating dingleberrypie.com. Most of the work was behind the scenes stuff. I’ve still got some more scheduled jobs to work on, including a problem with automated log rotation, where I want to be sure that the logs don’t rotate out before stats run against them, etc. Also, hopefully I’ll get around to adding properly done mail support so that I can transfer nuxx.net over as well. It’d be so much nicer… Although I do get a lot of spam… That could be kinda high traffic. MRTG should allow me to visualize this, though.

· Need to get MRTG running…

· Need to read Life with Qmail get qmail running…

· Need to lock down /admin in some fashion or another…

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net