Evil Home Stereo

Ich halte ja von diesem ganzen Bonuspunktesammeln schon länger nichts. Meine Eltern haben eine Payback-Karte, dafür haben sie jetzt ganz viele Aral-Bälle und Völkl-Taschen zu Hause. Und die Firma hinter Payback ein bestimmt super interessantes Konsumerprofil oder wie das heißen mag. Komischerweise hat bei ihnen auch die Anzahl der Cold Calls extrem zugenommen, während ich davon verschont bleibe. Mag auch daran liegen, dass ich nicht im Telefonbuch stehe.

Letztens wieder bei Budni an der Kasse: “Haben Sie auch eine Budni-Karte?” — “Ja, aber die liegt zu Hause da ich schon genug Plastikmüll mit mir rumschleppe.” Irgendwo liegt die wohl auch noch, ich habe die schon ewig nicht gesehen. Eine zeitlang habe ich die auch immer brav benutzt. Schließlich hat Budni ein eigenes Bonusprogramm, als Lokalpatriot vertraue ich denen auch, dass die nichts an die großen Datensammelfirmen weitergeben. Nachteil: Budni hat ein eigenes Bonusprogramm. Das heißt, man sammelt zwar irgendwie Punkte, aber irgendwann will man die mal einlösen. Und dann merkt man plötzlich, dass man für seine über Jahre gesammelte Punkte gerade mal eine Handvoll Kekse bekommt. Oder so was.

Gerade bekomme ich eine Mail von O2. “Ihr aktueller Kontostand beträgt: 385 Punkte. Zum 01.10.2007 verfallen Ihnen 111 Punkte.” Oh, da hab ich mich wohl auch mal für deren Bonusprogramm angemeldet. Naja, mal gucken was ich da bekommen kann. Immerhin, das sind fast 400 Punkte

Hmmm… Kategorie “Für mich”. Vielleicht eine original O2-Schuhmatte? Ach nee, die kostet 1300 Punkte. Ein Schlüsselband kostet 1000 Punkte. “Aktionsprämien”? Die Kaffeemaschine hätte ich gerne, die kostet aber 500 Punkte. Oh, ich kann ein 13-wöchiges Hörzu-Probeabo für 99 Punkte bekommen. Äääh… nein. Ich glaube da nehme ich doch die 10 Frei-SMS “Für mein Handy”. Kostenpunkt: 300 Punkte.

Ich habe auch noch diese tolle Amazon Kreditkarte. Ich hole mir ja immer eine kostenlose Kreditkarte irgendwo wenn ich längere Zeit ins Ausland fahre. Jeder, der mal außereuropäische Geldautomaten gesehen hat, wird mich verstehen. Die Amazon-Karte ist gar nicht so schlecht. Ein Jahr kostenlos, einen 20 Euro Gutschein bekommt man direkt beim Anmelden, dann Rabatt auf alle Einkäufe. Und: Punkte. Für jeden Euro einen. Ich habe das halbe Jahr in Südafrika fast alles mit Kreditkarte bezahlt. Laut Kontostand muss ich immernoch 100 Euro oder so ausgeben bevor ich genug Punkte für den nächsten 10 Euro-Gutschein zusammen habe. Vielleicht kaufe ich mir ja doch noch ein Nokia 770 bevor ich die Karte kündige.

Yesterday I killed my old MSI K7T266 Pro2 mainboard. It was a really good board, served me well, ran rock-solid for a long time and with my old Athlon Thunderbird 1200, one Gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9200 Pro I was even able to play WoW when I still did had an account. All I had to do is swap in one of my DTLA doorstoppers with a dummy Windows installation. Ah, the times…

There was just one annoying thing about the motherboard: You could not switch of the sensor for the CPU fan. Which was very annoying because when my old CPU fan died, I replaced it with a big (and thus silent) chassis-mounted fan and a makeshift wind tunnel made of cardboard. Worked well, except for the fact that I had to press N on each boot when the BIOS discovered that there was no fan running and started sounding an alarm while asking if it should switch off itself.

One of my more tech-savvy friends told me that it should be possible to fool the fan sensor by just bridging the sensor pin with a jumper. Well, he was wrong. For one, it doesn’t work. And if you are tired and confuse the pins in the manual (siderant: why does MSI publish their manuals as self-extracting Windows executables countaining a single PDF?), you (obviously) ground the 12V feed. Killing your BIOS.

Maybe I should have read some other information before trying stuff. Or it was just time for that system to die. Who knows.

Got a home directory which is mounted via NFS (or CIFS, or…)? Still want to use Google Earth on Linux? Annoyed by the traffic caused by the cache pushed through the net (not to mention your quota)?

Well, here is a small script which applies KDE’s trick of moving the temp and cache to /tmp and /var/tmp, respectively. Also works with a setup like mine where /tmp is cleansed on each boot (because it is mounted as tmpfs). Just replace the symlink the setup creates in /usr/local/bin. And maybe adapt the BIN path to your setup.

Does anybody know how to contact the developers so they can include something like that in future?

My WLAN AP runs DD-WRT and is located behind a WRAP 1E-2 running m0n0wall. I’ve also got a La Fonera lying around, currently bricked. I plan to solder a serial connector to that beast and debrick it though. Before I connect it back to my network I want to make sure that all the Fon traffic runs over its own VLAN which is then filtered by my m0n0. Today I replaced my old Siemens SE505 with a shiny new Buffalo WHR-G54S (hopefully soon with a SD mod) and decided to set up some simple 802.1q trunking while I’m at it.

I got the router pre-flashed with DD-WRT v23 SP2 and upgraded to v24 RC2, hoping that the VLAN setup via the web interface finally works. Tough luck, its still broken. But based on a more extensive HowTo I managed to move the uplink (ie. the WAN port) into a VLAN. In the end it was quite simple, the overview helps a lot to understand the internal flow.

First I went to the web interface and chose Setup->VLANs. There for Port W I unchecked the VLAN 0 and chose VLAN 3 instead. At the bottom I checked the Tagged mark. I don’t know if this is needed but if not, at least the web interface is in sync with the actual configuration.

Next I logged in to the router via SSH (the SSH user is root, despite whatever you changed it to in the web interface). At that point, the VLAN config looks like this:
~ # nvram show | sort | grep vlan
size: 24638 bytes (8130 left)
lan_ifnames=eth2 eth3 vlan0 eth1
port0vlans=3 16 18 19
port1vlans=0 18 19
port2vlans=0 18 19
port3vlans=0 18 19
port4vlans=0 18 19
port5vlans=0 3 16
pppoe_wan_ifname=vlan1
vlan0hwname=et0
vlan0ports=1 2 3 4 5*
vlan1hwname=et0
vlan1ports=0 5
vlans=1
wan_iface=vlan1
wan_ifname=vlan1
wan_ifnames=vlan1
wl0_vlan_prio_mode=off

All I had to do (and I was surprised that it worked) was to change the string vlan1 to vlan3 everywhere and add the letter t to the Port 0:
~ # nvram set vlan3ports="0t 5"
~ # nvram set vlan3hwname=et0
~ # nvram set wan_ifname=vlan3
~ # nvram set wan_iface=vlan3
~ # nvram set wan_ifnames=vlan3
~ # nvram unset vlan1ports
~ # nvram unset vlan1hwname
~ # nvram commit

After a reboot all traffic on the WAN port was on the VLAN 3, just as I wanted it.

Next experiment will be changing the SE505 (which is really low on RAM and only works with the micro edition anyway) to a mere bridge between the WLAN and another VLAN. Moving all the ports to a single tagged VLAN should be enough…

One of my current playgrounds is IPv6. I’ve got a few dynamic tunnels via SixXS (via AYIYA) already. Using them with AICCU is a quite simple. Sometimes the bandwidth over the tunnel is even higher than the IPv4 link its tunneled through. Weird thing, maybe some admins don’t apply any traffic shaping to IPv6 connections?

Whatever, yesterday I went a step further and set up my first real subnet (with autoconfiguration). It was actually not too complicated, my home net has IPv6 connection now, routed (and firewalled) by my workstation for now. It is quite straight forward and works currently only with one interface. You’ve got to set IFACE and your PREFIX in /etc/default/sixxs and sudo ./sixxs start eth0 (replace eth0 with your internal interface) should start all the stuff needed. [This paragraph is actually about the script I mentioned a fewlines further down, man was I tired yesterday -- mss]

I first tried to do it via a 6to4 setup. Well, that didn’t work too well. It was actually quite easy to create a small ifupdown script to set up a working 6to4 address. But either m0n0wall’s Protocol 41 NATting is broken, the public 6to4 gateways I tried have some real issue, or the Linux driver is broken. Whetever it is, when the carrying IPv4 packet was fragmented, my machine was not able to reassemble it. Took me a while to find out that its only fragmented packets which didn’t work, about half these sites worked. Wireshark didn’t like the packets either even though they looked good to me. I guess its the NAT which makes troubles, got to check that out when I’m in the mood.

I tried 6to4 instead of the easier SixXS approach first because even though those 24h-DSL-reconnects can be quite annoying, a new IP each 24h offers me at least a little bit of anonymity. When I use my SixXS tunnel everybody can see that it was me (or at least somebody on one of my networks).

Well, in the end I went for the latter solution anyway. Currently I use this little ifupdown script on my workstation to assign the addresses and start the services. If you try it, remember that it works for me and might eat your cat (and will wipe your existing firewall rules).

Most important stuff learned while setting up that stuff:

• When assigning an IPv6 address, always specify a prefix length. Else it will be /128 which is most probably not what you want.
• If you don’t want outgoing connections from your gateway to have the tunnel endpoint address, apply this trick.
• You might want to route the rest of your /48 to lo, see here.
• SixXS is cool, but I still want a 6to4 gateway, will probably have to set up my own.