Bricking a Router

I bricked my router yesterday.

That's the short version. The long version? Well it's a sordid story that starts many weeks ago when I decided to install OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54G v3 router.

Initially, I was happy! The web interface for OpenWRT is a little useless and the documentation (and mbm on the forums) said that setting up port forwarding to work both outside *and* inside the LAN was "impossible" (it's not, iptables works great) so I quickly got used to using SSH for managing the router's setup and firewall rules.

Then came the day that comes up regularly for any good sys admin, that is, update day. I did my little "ipkg update ; ipkg upgrade" but it choked! The device ran out of disk space. Initially, I wasn't worried. I cleared up some space and tried to finished the update. It limped a couple steps and then died. I couldn't even update to download the latest package list much less install/update any software. But the router was running. Since it was still working, I left it as-is. I was worried it would die if it was power cycled, but I was prepared to leave it on indefinitely anyhow.

Then last night, after a few drinks, the missus and I decided to rearrange the living room. So we drunkenly pushed furniture around moved movies, games, TV, stereo, etc. After the dust settled, I sat back down at my computer only to find I couldn't connect to the Internet. I could connect within the LAN so the router was switching, but definitely not routing. I couldn't connect at all to the router and it seemed to be dropping packets when I did a simple ping to it. The router was bricked.

Well, like any heavy user of the Internet, I prayed to Google to show me the way. Google spoke to me and said:

"Go here, my child, to un-brick your router."

Bearing the Word of Google, I went there where I was assured that all I needed to unbrick my router was a working firmware for the router and "any other small pointy metal object". The firmware I downloaded from Linksys (enough fucking around with OpenWRT) and for a small pointy metal object, I nabbed a bobby pin and off I went.

I read through all the instructions twice, then I pulled my router apart, shorted pins 15 and 16 as instructed, TFTP'd the firmware onto the router, and voila! The router booted! I was amazed! Like Christ turning water into wine, I had turned brick into router!

Rather then walk on water, I put the router back together, quickly configured it to a working state and that was that.

The moral of the story is: Don't brick your router. Restoring your router may make you partial to religion temporarily.

Rocking Out

Woohoo! I finally got my computer hooked up to the stereo. Since my computer is nearish to the stereo, all I need was a little Y connector and *bam*, we're cooking! The sound is so much better, it's awesome. And these speakers aren't even anything to write home about, they're just better the computer speakers. The trick being something different about the magnetism, I don't know. The stereo speakers just aren't supposed to be right next to the computer cause they'll mess everything up, but we should be cool as is.

Rambling, enough. Computer to stereo is awesome! Woo!

Good night!

What Doesn't Konqueror Do?

Thanks to a random post on the blogosphere, (here), I've found yet another killer feature in Konqueror. Behold, split-view:


That right, you can split a Konqueror tab, open different pages in each split, split them all horizontally or vertically and good fun is had by all.

In taking the above screenshot, I discovered another handy little utility. The Ksnapshot will pop-up when you hit Print Screen and then you have various handy options, like taking many screenshots, or, more importantly, taking a screenshot of a selected window like when I did one of Konqueror above or when I did one of Ksnapshot itself:



Now aren't those two handy features? Why learn one thing every day when you can use KDE and learn two!

XMPP with iChat Server

One of the nice things that OS X Server can run is an iChat server. The server is jabberd 1.4 which is a nice XMPP server. I finally took a couple minutes at work to enable the service and it was fairly easy.

1. Add appropriate SRV records to DNS,


2. Punch a hole in the firewall,


3. Add the domain to the service configuration,


4. Uncomment the S2S lines in /etc/jabber/jabber.xml,


5. Start the service.

That was it! Since all the users are already in the directory and the iChat server is tied into the directory, everyone has immediate access.

The thing with the s2s stuff was kind of ridiculous. Without going into the jabber.xml file, the iChat server just runs the client port allowing only directly connected clients to chat. The server admin UI did not include an option to enable the server side connections such that inter-domain chats can take place. But it was fairly simple to enable so not a big deal really.

In summary: XMPP is good for you!

Mail Stats

To date, I have been using the reports from logwatch as a rough gauge as to how much spam is being blocked but it wasn't very accurate since each email message was being processed by Postfix many times as it handed the message to various other daemons for processing. A quick check of the logs reveals that since basically all filtering of email is done by Amavisd, that's the process who's messages are of value. The one trick still is that I have to look for SMTP rejections since those are useful stats but are for messages only handled by Postfix and not passed to Amavisd.

I whipped up a little web page here to do basic number stats. I'd like to have charts up but i don't know how to pump this into MTRG so I'll have to do that. At any rate, this little page will give us an idea of how much spam is getting tossed out and how much legit mail is getting through.

Cheers

SSH as a SOCKS proxy revisited

A while ago I had tried to use SSH as a web proxy and didn't have any success in getting it to actually work. I was worried that maybe this was a NAT-to-NAT complication or something of the sort but no, it was just a client configuration problem. It turns out the trick is to just set the SOCKS settings in Firefox rather then the HTTP proxy. Firefox will choose the HTTP proxy first or maybe I just don't understand the difference, but here's how it works for me:

ssh -D port host

e.g.

ssh -D 3125 siona.nibble.bz

Then configure Firefox (Edit - Preferences - Connection Settings) with a SOCKS proxy of localhost, port 3125 like this:



The best test is to go to What Is My IP? and refresh the page with the proxy disabled/enabled and verify the IP address changes.

Now for shits and giggles, you use -f and -N with SSH to background the ssh process (the -f) without running any remote command (the -N) like this:

ssh -fN -D 3125 siona.nibble.bz

This will leave your SOCKS proxy in the background so you can close your terminal and still surf through the proxy.

Hooray for bypassing crappy firewalls and HTTP proxies!

History Meme

14:30:42 % history 1|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|head -10
    394 ssh
    173 ls
    138 cd
     93 gpg
     60 sudo
     58 host
     56 vim
     48 killall
     43 date
     39 man

Apparently I like to shell around killing programs. Exciting? Maybe not...