zhasper2.0

Simple task: set up my wrt-54g (run­ning open­wrt) with miniupnpdlinuxigd so that “Back To My Mac” works[1].

miniupnpdlinuxigd: trivial. Click a few but­tons to enable it, done. I tried miniupnpd first; but althought it ini­tially looked good, I couldn’t get it to work consistently.

How­ever, that’s when I start get­ting the MobileMe pre­fpane telling me that BTMM couldn’t start because “Your DNS server isn’t respond­ing”. A little bit of search­ing on Google finds me pages like this one, which baldly state that “Back to My Mac isn’t com­pat­ible with dnsmasq.”

Well, dear inter­nets, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. BTMM is per­fectly com­pat­ible with dns­masq. Sure,openwrt’s default set­tings don’t work, but that doesn’t make the two incompatible.

It did take me a while to fig­ure out what was going on. The clue also came from Apple’s for­ums, which told me to do this:

betelgeuse:~ james$ echo "show State:/Network/BackToMyMac" | scutil
<dictionary> {
  zhasper.members.mac.com : <dictionary> {
    ExternalAddress : 143.211.101.234
    StatusMessage : GetZoneData failed: _afpovertcp._tcp.username.members.mac.com.
    AutoTunnelExternalPort : 4500
    StatusCode : -65554
    LLQExternalPort : 5353
    RouterAddress : 192.168.0.1
    LastNATMapResultCode : 0
  }
}

The vital clue was the StatusMes­sage, which tells you exactly which DNS lookup failed. The import­ant thing is that the host­name starts with an underscore.

Take a look at the dns­masq man page, spe­cific­ally the filterwin2k option. Once upon a time, SRV records (and records with under­scores) really were a sign that you had win2k machines on your net­work. Once upon a time, “trig­ger­ing dial-on-demand links” was actu­ally some­thing to be wor­ried about. Those times are long past.

I turned this option off (vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, add a # at the start of that line to com­ment the option out, save the file, and run /etc/init.d/S65dnsmasq to restart the ser­vice). As expec­ted BTMM now works fine. Well, as fine as you could expect.

[1] I’m ideo­lo­gic­ally opposed to all things UPnP, and BTMM in par­tic­u­lar. What’s the point of hav­ing a fire­wall if you’re going to allow everything inside to poke so many holes in it it may as well not be there? There’s noth­ing BTMM can give me that a small fire­wall hole (to allow SSH on a non-standard port) + ssh port­for­ward­ing can’t give me in a more con­trolled way — and without shelling out $$$ to Uncle Steve, too. Nevertheless…

Also — how to make it self-destruct in <10 invalid passcode attempts.

Shtep One: Down­load the iPhone Con­fig­ur­a­tion Util­ity from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bot­tom where you can stip­u­late self-wipe after as little as 5 incor­rect pass­phrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload con­fig as per instruc­tions in the “Installing Con­fig­ur­a­tion Pro­files” sec­tion of the Deploy­ment Guide.

Phdone.

I’ve noticed a trend where a lot of feeds are includ­ing large blocky ads at the bot­tom of each feed item. I can live with that; a little ugly, but I can skip them easily.

Today I saw some­thing new:

That’s right: two com­plete posts con­sist­ing of noth­ing more than the same ad.

Scrolling down shows me that the very next item is exactly the same add from “The Fail Blog”, another site oper­ated by the same company.

Ads with con­tent I can stand. Ads without con­tent?  *unsubscribe*

Not much time to write. Busy watch­ing great Aus­sie movie I’d never heard of till you rec­comen­ded it, on the crys­tal clear big wide screen.

All is forgiven. 

PS phone is char­ging off the USB port, a nice touch. Pic related, droid included for scale.

Dear Singa­pore Airlines,

I love you. Really I do. Out of all two inter­na­tional air­lines I’ve flown, your by far the best. I’m only fly­ing cattle class, in your planes cattle can only be a ref­er­ence to those Japan­ese cows that live a hand-fed, daily mas­saged life.

It’s the little things you do so well that make the dif­fer­ence: the hot towel imme­di­ately on takeoff, recog­nising that just get­ting to the air­port can be a hard day. The fre­quent — it feels like every ten minutes, but is prob­ably more like once an hour — offers of a juice or water. I don’t do booze on flights, but the couple beside me do, and your staff have kept them sup­plied with beer and Baileys until they stopped whin­ing (the couple, not the staff — as far as I can tell, bring­ing a con­stant stream of booze for this couple ful­filled the child­hood dreams of the staff, judging by the looks on their faces)

I do apo­lo­gise — turns out they weren’t sated, just rest­ing — but once again the host­ess bring­ing the booze seem thrilled to be of ser­vice. It’s little things like that that make me return every week­end to my favor­ite local cafe, and will keep me return­ing to your airline.

You get the big things right too — last time I flew SQ, I had the abso­lute pleas­ure of rid­ing in an A380 from SIN to SYD. Being first to fly that plane, some­thing you’re right­fully proud of, is just a small demon­stra­tion of your comittment to remain­ing one of the world’s lead­ing airlines.

Right now I’m treat­ing myself to a runthrough of my Liv­ing End albums on my iPod. This is a real treat — their early work remains some of my favour­ite music of all time, and I don’t get to listen to it often enough.

As nice as this is, it’s not what I had in mind when I boarded your air­craft. You see, you’re fam­ous for your entairn­ment sys­tem, and again, rightly so. The games leave a bit to be desired, but your movie and TV selec­tion is second to none. It’s not just the num­ber of pro­grams — it’s the vari­ety! Hol­ly­wood, Bol­ly­wood, European and Chinese — you have a vast range of pro­gram­ming from all over the world. The first thing I did on boad­ing the plane was to per­use your enter­tain­ment guide and plan my next 8 hours of relaxation.

So why am I listen­ing to my own music? Because your entairn­ment sys­tem has failed me. It’s been off for over half the flight. It was off for over 90 minutes at the start of the flight. Even­tu­ally it came up, but minus the Video On Demand. Even so, I man­aged to watch some of Gomor­rah on broad­cast chan­nel 13 — but before the movie ended, the sys­tem rebooted again.

After a con­sid­er­able time with no enter­tain­ment the sys­tem came back. This time I decided to go for some­thing shorter, so I star­ted on some of the TV doc­u­ment­ar­ies. I man­aged a show about gar­dens in India, and most of another show, before the sys­tem crashed entirely. Still about 2 hours from Singa­pore, and my only enter­tain­ment is provided by the music I provided my self, and writ­ing you this rant.

I’m not going to pre­tend this means I won’t be back: an SQ flight with no enter­tain­ment still beats most car­ri­ers. I just want to let you know that flight SQ232 today was almost the per­fect flight — it was only your enter­tain­ment sys­tem that let you down.

I loom for­ward to fly­ing SQ again soon — my next three seg­ments are already booked, the last one once again on your A380, the first mere minutes after I get off this flight — and look for­ward on par­tic­u­lar to being reminded just how good your sys­tem can be when it’s working.

I just bought myself a QNAP TS-409 Pro from Sky­comp. Very happy with both the device and Sky­comp so far.

How­ever, the ini­tial setup was a struggle.

The device has a very lim­ited openwrt-style firm­ware. Very, very lim­ited: it con­tains the bare min­imum func­tion­al­ity to be able to boot­strap the device with a more cap­able OS once you have disks installed.

The doc­u­mented way of doing this is via a “QuickIn­stall Wiz­ard”, that comes on a provided CD in Mac and Win­dows fla­vors. I only have Macs on my home net­work, so the win­dows fla­vor wasn’t useable for me. The Mac fla­vor is… inter­est­ing. I ran into the prob­lem described here: In short, the full firm­ware isn’t pushed until after the drives are ini­ti­ated; but the Wiz­ard gets stuck at the “Ini­tial­iz­ing drives” stage, so the full firm­ware is never pushed.

I got around it using these instruc­tions — they’re described as being “For linux”, but as it just uses basic tools like tel­net and ftpd, it will work on any *nix.

Some notes:

• Obvi­ously, had to enable file shar­ing via FTP on my mac first. Did this under “Shar­ing” pre­fpane, “File Shar­ing”, “Share files and folders using FTP”. As the warn­ing states, this involves trans­mit­ting your user­name and pass­word in cleartext: only enable this if you’re con­fid­ent you’ll only be trans­mit­ting them across a safe net­work. Bet­ter, use a username/password you cre­ated just for this pur­pose; which has no spe­cial priv­ileges, and which will be turned off as soon as you’re done.
• Out of the box, the device listens for tel­net con­nec­tions on port 13131. User­name and pass­word are “admin”.
• Once you’ve suc­cess­fully updated the firm­are and rebooted, you won’t find a tel­netd on 13131 any more. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR, DON’T PANIC. Instead, you’ll find an sshd listen­ing on port 22.
• You’ll also find a web inter­face listen­ing on port 8080. If you visit that, you can start the pro­cess of set­ting up the device.
• It may be help­ful to have let the wiz­ard run at least to the “Ini­tial­iz­ing drives” stage at least once. After I thought I knew what I was doing I switched to a new set of disks and tried again; and this time the hard drives weren’t moun­ted at all, so I couldn’t go through the doc­u­mented process.

It’s not clear from the doc­u­ment­a­tion, but the device cre­ates a RAID-1 seg­ment 500Mb in size on each disk you insert (/dev/md9 in my case), and mounts this on /mnt/HDA_ROOT. This is where con­figs for the device, pack­ages you install, and so on are stored.

The device can handle mul­tiple raid­sets — although with only 4 disks to play with, you’re not likely to end up with >2 sets. In my cause I cur­rently have 3 1Tb drives in a RAID-5 set, and a single 500Gb disk sit­ting on its own.

Same view, 1920.

View Lar­ger Map

That’s the Power­house Museum, loc­ated between Pyr­mont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a heli­copter, the view would look some­thing like this:

Ima­gine if you could magic­ally click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from some­time between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older pic­ture, look bey­ond the chim­ney­stack, and just to the left. Imme­di­ately bey­ond the chim­ney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle corner. The road then con­tin­ues up the pic­ture — but it’s not quite straight, it bends a little to the right. If you look at the mod­ern pic­ture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle corner and the same not-quite-straight road — although now the West­ern Dis­trib­utor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large build­ing inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That build­ing is Global Switch Sydney — built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s start­ing to reach full capacity.

The rail­way line vis­ible in the earlier pic­ture was the Darling Har­bour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Met­ro­pol­itan Goods Rail­way Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.

Talk­ing to a work­mate who has a sick cat led to look­ing at Med­ibank Private’s pet cover.

This led to the source of (appar­ently) all pet insur­ance in Aus­tralia; which then led to com­par­ison shop­ping between the vari­ous resellers.

The dif­fer­ences are amus­ing, but annoy­ing. One provides 15k total cover; but only $500 for tick para­lysis. Another only offers 9k total cover; but removes the restric­tions on what per­cent­age of that can be used for drugs/medication vs how much is for dental care. None of them cover treat­ment for leuk­emia in cats; but some add an addi­tional clause declin­ing to cover any con­di­tion for which there is a vaccine.

I’d like to go with the RSPCA - if someone has to make a profit, they seem like a bet­ter choice than some of the for-profit com­pan­ies. But the lim­its are half that provided by Med­ibank, while the premi­ums are double. Sure you can skim profit off the top, but that doesn’t mean I want you to gouge me for every cent I own.

Gah. Choices, that aren’t really choices. Just what I wanted.