Jeff’s Place

I just had to upgrade the Mac server which I had previously set up as a NIS/Automount client, and found that suddenly automount no longer works right. It looks like this is genuinely broken in the new automountd, but of course I can’t tell for sure without source code access.

In an earlier post I detailed how to set up a Leopard server as a NIS client with automount. That procedure required editing a couple files in the /etc/ directory. The upgrade to Snow Leopard replaced those files (auto_master and autofs.conf) with new files, wiping out my changes. It should be easy enough to just put the changes back, right? Wrong.

Continue reading ‘Mac OS-X Snow Leopard breaks NIS Automount’ »

Many companies use NIS to distribute authentication data (username/password, group, etc) along with automount maps to make networks of servers all authenticate and mount shared NFS drives uniformly. I’ve built hundreds of these networks, often mixing linux, solaris, bsd, and usually a few windows systems. I recently was asked to set up a Mac XServe box on a network of Linux and Solaris machines, and integrate it to work alongside them. At first this was a bit baffling, and there was really very little useful info on the net for how to do this, but I eventually figured it out and it wasn’t that hard in the end. I have very little recent Mac experience so maybe someone more familiar with the Mac would have found this to be simple but I suspect there are really very few people around with recent Mac server experience outside of Apple itself.
Continue reading ‘Mac OS-X Server as a NIS Client with Automount’ »

This year for a combined present for my father’s birthday and christmas I put together a trip for the two of us to go to the NHL Winter Classic game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, January 1, 2009, between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Redwings. This turned out to be quite a great trip, and perhaps a bit unlikely since there were apparently 240,000 people signed up in the lottery to get a hair over 40,000 tickets (less the 14,000 or so allocated to Blackhawks season ticket holders, and certainly many held back for the teams). This was going to be a truly once-in-a-lifetime event since certainly we won’t see another outdoor hockey game at one of the two remaining real old-time baseball stadiums. Wrigley is long on history and is the home of the Cubs, which along with the Blackhawks were my father’s two boyhood teams.

I booked a hotel room back in June, well before the game was even announced but there had been some speculation that it was going to happen so I figured I’d get ahead of sellouts and price bumps once the announcement was release. Then I began working my connections to get some tickets since I figured being able to just buy them was probably going to be unlikely. I have several connections that I figured all probably had a good chance of coming up with tickets. It got right down to the wire but finally just a couple weeks before the game a friend (who I now owe beers for life, thanks Amy!) came through with tickets that turned out to be about the best seats in the house (face value was $325 but there were going on StubHub for over $750 a few days before the game, probably even more closer to game time but I forgot to check). I had booked flights in October so was really hoping this would all fall together else I’d be stuck with two tickets to Chicago and no reason to go there.

Also in October I ordered a Blackhawks sweatshirt from NHL Shop online, the plan being to wrap it up with the tickets for my dad’s birthday at the end of November. Well, come the end of November I still didn’t have the tickets and stupid NHL Shop hadn’t shipped the sweatshirt. So, I ordered a Blackhawks t-shirt from the Blackhawks store and had them overnight it to me. That and a printed copy of the Winter Classic logo from the NHL web site would have to do for his birthday. The sweatshirt showed up two days after his birthday so it became a chrismas present (stupid NHL Shop…) along with the actual tickets.

Game Day at Wrigley

We got to Wrigly a couple hours before the game and the whole area was already jammed with people, people everywhere in Blackhawks and Red Wings jerseys and hats and every other team prop you could think of. It seemed like there were as many Wings fans as Hawks fans, but that’s not too unusual, even at Sharks home games against the Wings there are an amazing number of Wings jerseys in the crowd. Anyway, the streets were packed, the concourse inside Wrigley was packed, lines for beer and dogs and t-shirts and nachos were all long, and the place was just fully abuzz with excitement.

For the hour or so before the game we walked around the stands and took pictures from a bunch of different locations. The lower deck seats at a hockey game are usually the best, but this one being so far from the stands (centered on second base) made them seem not so great, far from the ice and low enough that it would be tough to watch the puck. Our seats were in the second deck (section 413 row 8, above the third-base dougout and about even with the goal line). With the way the rink was set up this and the couple sections on either side of us were I think the best seats in the house, along with the same sections above the first-base dogout.

The Hawks started out strong, with a couple quick goals and a huge hit by Ben Eager putting Dan Cleary into the Hawks bench, and followed by a too-many-men penalty when he got back onto the ice because the Wings had already substituted someone in for him. Unfortunately after the start of the second period the Wings took over, and in typical Wing style controlled the rest of the game, scoring 5 un-answered goals before the Hawks could put in their fourth just before the final whistle. In the end the Red Wings beat the Blackhawks 6-4, but it was an overall excellent day nonetheless. After all, neither of us is really a current Blackhawks fan (go Sharks!) and Detroit is definitely the top team again this year (in spite of excellent starts by both the Sharks and Bruins).

I snapped a bunch of photos before and during the game, they follow below with short captions. Most are cellphone shots, sorry for some being a little fuzzy. Click on the photos for a the full-size 3MP version.

Wrigley Field, from across the street.

Continue reading ‘NHL Winter Classic 2009’ »

NHL Winter Classic 2009 live from Wrigley field in Chicago, 20 minutes before the game. It’s about 25 degrees and the seats are almost full.

I’m in Chicago for a few days this week, ultimately to go to the NHL Winter Classic game tomorrow. This year my christmas present to my father was this trip and tickets to the game, more on that tomorrow.
Today we met up with Dads brother and wandered around downtown Chicago all day. We were on the Navy Pier as the sun set over the city.

It was a pretty pleasant day today by Chicago standards, mid 20’s and not much wind.
More tomorrow from the game.

From time to time I have to make serial connector adapters to get from DB9 to RJ45. Many devices (cisco, lantronix, etc.) use RJ45 connections for serial ports, many others use DB9 connections. This simple pinout works with an RJ45/DB9 connector to make the connection, these connectors are available at any decent electronics shop for about $3, you just have to push the pins into the right holes. The sweet thing about this is you can pick straight or null-modem by using either a straight cable or a telco-roll cable (not ethernet roll, telco-roll reverses all the conductors and usually is used with flat satin cable, just flip the cable over before putting on the rj45 head so on one end blue is on the left, on the other end white is on the left).

DB9 Pin -> Color -> Signal

1 -> Orange -> DCD

2 -> Black -> RX

3 -> Yellow -> TX

4 -> Brown -> DTR

5 -> Red -> SGND

6 -> no connection

7 -> White -> RTS

8 -> Blue -> CTS

9 -> no connection

- -> Green -> no connection

The latest from the state a California, in a budget mess and chronically budget-challenged, now wants to raise money by selling advertising space on highway message signs.
These signs, most of them just arrays of light bulbs, are currently used to display traffic alerts, and in some cases estimated travel times. Once every couple months these signs display an “Amber Alert” about some missing kid or whatever. Well, the problem is, way too many of the drivers on the road seem to think they have to slow down to read the sign, so traffic gets all screwed up as a result. Miraculously, traffic speeds up just past the sign.
Let’s face it, way too many of the people driving down our freeways are barely bright enough to manage to breathe and drive at the same time. Add in something they have to read and it’s all over, welcome to the roadway parking lot.
Come on California, don’t be stupid. Fix the budget, get rid of stupid spending, and if that’s not enough make the freeways into toll roads and let them pay for themselves or raise the gas tax, just ensure the revenue goes back into the roads not some stupid feed-the-homeless bullshit.

Last night the San Jose Sharks pretty thoroughly shut down the Detroit Red Wings. For most of the game the shot count was double or more in the sharks favor, and Detroit had only a few solid scoring chances. The game was 4-1 with 30 seconds left, Detroit managed one goal to finish 4-2 but now trail the sharks in the standings by one game.
Live from the game, the Sharks on the attack:

Just a quick update on the DirectTV2PC application I started fiddling with a few days ago, since I’ve now managed to get things working.

The application seems to work pretty well, even on my laptop that is supposed too under-powered according to their system requirements list. Video is a little glitchy, especially HD content, but I can see that my laptop’s cpu (dual-core 1.2ghz ULV Intel U7600 processor) is pretty much pegged so that’s probably the cause. I’m also using the wireless adapter on my laptop instead of a wired connection but that doesn’t appear to be the problem. It took some poking around but there is a way to point the dtv2pc app at a different DVR – it’s in the “Menu->Settings” menu, you can pick which “server” to connect to. It shows them by receiver ID, which isn’t terribly friendly, so you have to make a mental note of which is which, and you have to use the up/down arrow keys to pick the dvr, the mouse doesn’t make the selection. Switching DVR’s causes the dtv2pc app to load the program list from the new dvr and off you go.

I tried using the app from a remote network, with a vpn connection back to my home network, but the dtv2pc app fails to find the dvr’s. I fired up wireshark to see if I could tell why, and discovered that at startup the app multicasts for the dvr’s, so since that multicast traffic doesn’t get forwarded over the vpn link it’ll never be able to see the dvrs. That is probably a solvable problem with some network hacking but it’s not something the casual user could manage, and I probably won’t bother but it may be possible to get this thing to work remotely ala slingbox if you’re willing to invest some time to get multicast forwarding over vpn to work. I did find that when switching back and forth that at some point one of my dvr’s started reporting that it had no recordings, although it correctly showed only 6% of space available. Again with wireshark, I found the dvr was returning an error when the dtv2pc app requested the program list. I figured I’d probably have to reboot the DVR but it eventually fixed itself, although I don’t know how long that took, it was just working the next morning when I looked at it again. Everything on the DVR itself was working fine, it was just the remote dtv2pc app that didn’t get a program list.

By the way, it looks like the app uses http conversations with the dvr to get it’s program lists and other data. It might be interesting to spend some time sniffing to see what info might be available, I could see maybe writing a script to track which shows get recorded and put the data on a server somewhere. Anyway, that’s all for now, more later when I have time to dig into this more.

This evening while searching for details on why both of my directv HD DVR’s locked up, yet again, I stumbled across some posts on directv’s tech forum about a new application called DirecTV2PC which is supposed to allow playing programs recorded on a DVR over the net onto a Windows PC. I was all set to start a rant about how DirecTV is completely inept in their constant distribution of flawed software and supposed “transmission glitches” which cause the damn DVR’s to lock up randomly. Well I think, now maybe that’s enough rant and here is a new toy to play with instead.

Guess what… IT DOESN’T WORK. Big surprise

I downloaded the application, gave them my email address and they sent me an activation code. When installing the app it asks for a serial number, which I assume is the activation code, copy and paste that code into the installer and off it goes.

When I first started the app after install completed it found my DVR (wow, I thought this might actually work). Then it asked me to activate the program, I click the “Activate” button and what happens? Error: Invalid activation code. And guess what, there’s no way to re-enter the code, just a “try again” button. How fucking stupid is that? Turns out the only way to enter the code is in the installer. So I tried a couple more times, even downloading the software again so I could get a new code, same problem each time. I tried hacking their config files, sniffing the traffic to see what it’s doing (it turns out it uses https to talk to the registration server so that didn’t help much), and poking around the registry, no luck.

Gee, it must be true, DirecTV is completely inept, they can’t even issue a valid activation code for their software. To be fair this application is from Cyberlink so I guess they must be equally inept. Thankfully they finally gave in to all the complainers and signed a new deal with Tivo so maybe this time next year things will get better.

Somebody wake me up when the morons are no longer running the world….

Fast forward to the next morning…. Now the Directv2PC app manages to get through it’s activation step, the activation servers must have just been down last night or something. It now will connect to one DVR and play content saved on that box using roughly the same menu as shown on the DVR itself. I don’t see a way to tell it to switch to my second DVR, and don’t have time to play with this much more at the moment so I’ll have to fiddle with this and post more later.

You can download the Directv2pc application here.