Easton's blog

Life's been the same, my blogging life has swindled down as well. I have an old 5" TV/radio (it has a handle on top!) of which I connected to a VCR hooked to one of my spare computers. You get a mess of cables and a very very small monitor. I had to sit an inch away from it to read anything.

Sysode has caught my interest again, I've added some new features too. Fixed some bugs and added the ability for public viewing of the project, check it out.

^{Photo by MarkyBon}

About last week my Windows Server [2003] (I had 2008 on there, then went back to 2003) server wouldn't boot. Since it's not accessed externally, I run TVersity to transcode by movies of which I watch on my 360.  

So, it wouldn't boot up which was great. Kept going into an endless loop, after POST it would keep rebooting. Dead RAM? You'd think it would beep if it was. But nope. Swapped the power supply and still nothing. Loose connection to the case fan? Still, nothing. Only other object that was still plugged in was the hard drive. Unplugged it. Booted normally (though it couldn't since it was the only one). Awesome. Ended up re-installing Server 2003 last night, turned out fine. 

Still puzzles me that it wouldn't boot at all. BIOS detected it fine, but once it tried to boot from the hard drive an endless loop occurred. Working well now, which is a surprise.

 One of the servers that are at my disposal has a very low CPU usage percentage (if that makes sense). On my way to set up a PPTP VPN server on the box, I realized my router running pfSense could do it out of the box. In this short tutorial, I'll show you how to get a PPTP VPN working so that you can connect to it anywhere.

Head under VPN -> PPTP

Back in school, so that's just great. Thought I'd write a post, since I haven't for a couple weeks now. Was planning on working on WorkSimple the other day, but didn't. Set up a CS:S server, running pretty good too @ 1.8ghz with 512MB (Debian with XFS of course). 

I found myself having a TI-83+, but no sync cable. So, I tried to use the same type of cable that was used for a PDA but no luck. There's some pretty cool stuff you can do with the TI's. Just and update, I'll write another post in the coming days with some stuff that I've been doing.

So I came upon an app the other day while browsing on my iPhone. iStat. It monitors your uptime, network I/O, RAM usage, etc.. There was another app that just needed SSH access but that was another $2. Anyways, iStat has a Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris port of the agent. Just simply install the agent on your boxen and done!

It's pretty simple to get it working, I'll go over the steps that I used on Lenny.

WorkSimple 1.3.2 has been released, download it or read about it.

 Seeing as blackra1n is only a tethered jailbreak, installing your own [custom] firmware is the way to go. But, (at least what happened to me) is that I constantly got 1604 errors while installing firmware of which I made using PwnageTool. As a short howto, here's what I did:

1. Get blackra1n and run it. It'll put your iPhone in recovery mode. iTunes should be closed.
2. Download or create custom firmware. If you are using PwnageTool, make sure to check off Activate so it is not activated. Just before it's done creating the firmware, click Yes to if your iPhone has been pwned before.
3. Start up iTunes, and restore using the firmware you just made. For Windows users hold shift and click on Restore. For Mac users hold option. Make sure your iPhone is in recovery mode not DFU mode. That's the part that I forgot.
4. iTunes should do it's thing and you'll be good to go.
5. After I put the firmware on, I had no service whatsoever so I ran blackra1n again and I had service. If you have the 5.11.07 baseband, be sure to install sn0w in blackra1n. You might need to fiddle around with things.

^{Photo by gari.baldi}

With Ymas coming up, it makes me realize all the blogging I've done in the last year. I'm glad I got as much traffic as I did, surprised even. Anyway, here are some highlights of the last year or so.

I finally put together a load balancing setup together this weekend, and I'm surprised it was this easy.

What you'll need is three servers, two web servers and one server for the load balancer. It's not recommended that you only use one load balancer since it's a single point of failure (SPOF) but I only had one extra server on hand. For this tutorial, I used Debian Lenny.

First thing's first, download and install pound on your load balancer. 

I recently swapped out my router (a PIII) running Smoothwall with pfSense. I'll say that I'm glad I switched. Anyway, what I found is that Smoothwall wouldn't let me add another LAN interface, making it a real router.

So, once you get pfSense installed, go to Interfaces->(assign)