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Busy, Busy, Busy…

Published January 12, 2009

A very small owl sitting on a branch outside of the window at Rochester Mills Brewery.

I’ve been really, really busy lately. This isn’t a bad thing, I just haven’t had enough time to get everything done that I’d hoped to. Lately I’ve had the MMBA website move, really bad weather on Saturday, shopping (REI, IKEA, Target, Meijer, etc) on Sunday, work then the MMBA Metro North quarterly meeting today, and now I’m making tapioca pudding.

I still have to find time (hopefully tomorrow) to fix a friend’s NAS, finish up the x0xb0x, and whatever else comes up. For now, though, have some moblog photos:

· A very small owl sitting on a branch outside of the window at Rochester Mills Brewery.
· Bags and carts at Ikea on Ford Road.
· Partially eaten veggie burger from J. Alexanders in Somerset.
· The urinal at J. Alexanders is a nice, old style model.
· After buying gas I bought this very large apple fritter.
· I do wonder why this person doesn’t just disable their touchpad.
· Partially eaten rosemary bread with jalapeno havarti melted on the top.
· Waiting for biyrani at Rangoli Express #1.

Also, this evening’s fortune (6):

Last login: Mon Jan 12 19:55:22 2009 from adsl-75-45-241-
Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (BANSTYLE) #4: Tue Dec  9 00:07:44 EST 2008
 
Snow Day -- stay home.
 
c0nsumer@banstyle:~>

Funny that, considering the current forecast. A snow day would be rather nice, actually.

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MMBA Site Moved

Published January 9, 2009

Michigan Mountain Biking Association web site (mmba.org) soft launch after moving to nuxx.net for hosting.

Here’s the result of something I’ve been working on for the last couple months. The new Michigan Mountain Biking Association web site has launched, and it is now hosted here on my server. This is the soft launch of the site, as we should have a new unified theme / design across the main site, forum, and other places soon. However, we wanted to get the new site itself up and running because the old one was causing us a few problems.

I’m really, really glad we got this done. Now, time for bed.

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Xbox Live Open NAT Using pf on OpenBSD

Published January 6, 2009

Detailed photo of the word 'Strict.' from the Xbox 360 Network Test which insists that my network setup is restrictive.

It’s done. My Xbox 360 is now working properly via NAT talking through the Trashwall and using WOW! service.

After getting my previously mentioned pf problem on Trashwall sorted out I tested out the Xbox 360 to see if the network test for Xbox Live would pass. Guess what? It didn’t, continuing to insist that my NAT type is strict.

A bit more research (and information which seems to come from this post at Russ’s Blog) indicates that the Xbox Live uses the following classifications for NAT:

Strict: Symmetric NAT.
Moderate: Cone shaped NAT with port filtering or with UPnP turned off.
Open: Cone shaped NAT with no port filtering or with UPnP turned on.

Cone and symmetric NAT descriptions are formalized in RFC3489, and a bit more digging brought up this general how-to for using OpenBSD’s pf, indicating that the static-port directive on a NAT rule (described here in the POOL OPTIONS section of the pf.conf(5) man page) makes OpenBSD do cone-shaped NAT.

So, overall, what did it take to fix it? Well, it was actually three things:

· I switched to Wide Open West for data service, which gave me three IPs.
· While the whole house was NATted through one of the IPs, the Xbox 360 alone has been bidirectionally NATted through another.
·The magic static-port option on the NAT line for the Xbox 360.

Without a second IP I wouldn’t have been able to forward all ports inbound, which without a UPnP daemon (which didn’t go well before) would have resulted only a NAT setting of Moderate.

All of this has been documented in the updated version of the article on the Trashwall, my home’s a firewall / NAT device / switch / whatever built out of an unwanted PowerMac G4.

(In case you didn’t notice, this photo does a good job illustrating the wire in a aperture grill, such as the one here on an Sony KD-34XBR970 CRT HDTV. If you’d like to see the original without the no sign, here’s the small version and here it is at full res.)

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binat on OpenBSD’s pf Confuses Me

Published January 6, 2009

UPDATED: This is fixed. See the bottom of the post.

With the move to Wide Open West for data service at home I now have up to three IPs available, all assigned via DHCP. In order to best use them and work around the Xbox Live problems I was having I wanted to do the following:

– Assign one IP to one interface, and NAT everything through it, like normal.
– Assign a second IP to a second interface, and use binat to have my Xbox 360 to basically have its own public connection. (Sort of like being in the DMZ on a Linksys box.)
– Leave the third IP alone for times when I want a non-firewalled connection.

While I have this set up, it doesn’t seem to be working. Here’s my current configuration. If anyone can tell me what I’m doing wrong or offer suggestions, please do so:

Continue readingbinat on OpenBSD’s pf Confuses Me
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Eviscerated Bear

Published January 4, 2009

Danielle gave Roxie this stuffed bear before she left for Flordia. Roxie spent much of this week playing with it and removing the squeaker and stuffing. This is how it ended up.

One of Roxie’s favorite past times is removing the innards (squeakers, fluff, etc) from stuffed animals. She only plays with those she is given, but once she has one she quickly sets into it. Throughout the week I’d find her taking the toy and pressing it into my hand trying to get me to play with her or watching her lay behind me pulling out hunks of fluff from a new-found inside passage.

Oh, and the crusty look to the fur? Yep, dried dog slobber.

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Bad BA6110 in x0xb0x #888

Published January 4, 2009

BA6110 (IC15B) in x0xb0x #888, wetted with alcohol for readability. I believe that the buffer in it is causing the x0xb0x not to work properly.

I’d previously posted about how x0xb0x #888 was generating no audio after powerup, and with Roxie now gone I had time to start digging into what was wrong.

I’d already known that the power supply, digital half (sequencer), DAC, and VCO were working fine, so I set to work tracing things back through the schematic from the headphone out. Eventually I found that I was able to see a waveform on the first half of the BA6110, after the op-amp (pins 6 and 7) but before the buffer. I didn’t see anything after the buffer (pin 8).

So, I think I have a bad BA6110, which is one of the rare / hard to find parts in the x0xb0x. This is just what I was afraid of.

Being typically paranoid of my own work I double-checked soldering, checked for shorts, and all the other normal things like that, but I really think the problem is with the buffer.

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Wide Open West Physical Installation

Published January 4, 2009

New junction box installed on the outside of my condo when Wide Open West service was installed. I think the installer did a good job.

Last Monday I had Wide Open West CATV and internet service installed. The installer was a nice guy, did just what I wanted, and did a good job putting the new junction box on the outside of the house. As requested he left the Comcast line going into the house, replaced the old splitter, and let me take care of the data side of things (very basic to set up; no Comcastic walled garden crap), and had an MCard for the TiVo.

The only problem I had is that he wasn’t familiar with setting up TiVos and forgot to check for reception of HD channels. A phone call to WOW! service after he left got those turned on and everything was set.

Thus far I’ve been mostly happy with the data service. Tests at DSLReports.com have shown that I can achieve the claimed 15Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream quite regularly. Everything has been much faster in real use as well, and uploads to my photo gallery are far, far faster now.

I intend to write up a more technical description of how I like the service, including how I intend to use the three IPs (DHCP assigned) that I’m allocated as part of the service, but that will have to come later. For now I’ve got some other projects to wrap up.

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