I wish I had time to work on my projects (Torrentino.net expired a little while ago) since most of them need updating. WorkSimple is in a somewhat stable state. Good news though, I might be getting geekness.eu back. I was too lazy to renew it and lost it.

Nothing new has happened, making this a rather boring blog post (nothing out of the usual). Maybe once I get my domain back I'll get my ass to work and fix up this site (broken links and such) and some of my unfinished projects.

WorkSimple needs a complete overhaul, the main code was used in JAB (Just Another Blog) around two years ago but was using text files instead. The administration side of WorkSimple needs to improve greatly.

School's almost out, 'bout another three weeks then that's it. 

Been bored lately, so I'd thought I'd make an IRC bot in PHP. I wasn't sure how they worked, so I found this to be great: http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/5330/

I added a little more to it, using switch() instead of an if statement. So, instead of:

if ($rawcmd[1] == "!sayit") {

I changed it to

 switch(rtrim($rawcmd[1])) {

and of course everything else in between. 
See the full code here: http://pastebin.com/4F9XPkVx or here http://pastebin.org/205819
Not much has changed, but with switch() I found it easier to add more commands. Again, I didn't write most of it. Feel free to test it out though.

Blog has turned to shit, no post in almost a month now. I guess due to the loss of my domain (geekness.eu), there's less traffic and less of a motivation to do anything. Any links to this site would be using the geekness.eu domain.

Again, my work has come to a standstill. Nothing new has happened. Absolutely nothing. Guess I should start doing something. Happy that I can get Opera on my iPhone though, heh.

Yet another blog post telling my readers that I'm alive...

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.

Celebrated 100 days of uptime on my fileserver the other day. I mainly use it as a SMB/FTP/NFS server and I can say it's pretty solid. 500MHz with 512MB's of RAM, and my first RAID experience as well.

Other than that, it's been quite boring. This is meant as a recap of the things that I've done, though I'm not in a rush.

^{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.

While I'm on the subject of shitty mishaps, my main web server packed it in. Didn't bother reading the logs, plugged in the monitor: kernel panic. Sweet. Screw it, reboot. Ran for couple more days. Again, kernel panic. Reboot, about two more days then it failed. Been down most of today, finally booted up my other spare web server which I should have done in the first place. Apparently Torrentino gets quite a large number of visits. 15000 this month.

'Bout time I head off, shit to do.

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.

 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.

And that's about it. You now have a jailbroken iPhone 3G that's untethered. Also, here's how to install .ipa's:

1. Add the cydia.hackulo.us repo in Cydia.
2. Install AppSync and Installous. AppSync patches the MobileInstallation file while Installous lets you install .ipa's on the fly.
3. Either sync drag and drop the .ipa's to iTunes and sync OR download the Safari download plug-in (which allows you to download files), find .ipa's and install them. I put all the .ipa's I needed on a local server so I head over to the server address and install them right away. You can do that by using something like XAMPP.

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. 

apt-get install pound

Once you've done that, head over to /etc/pound and edit your pound.cfg file accordingly. Here's an example for the web servers:
 
 

   
Service

#first web server
BackEnd
Address 192.168.0.114
Port 80
End

#second web server
BackEnd
Address 192.168.0.116
Port 80
End

 End
End   

 Also be sure to set your ListenHTTP address and port.

Now edit your /etc/default/pound file and change startup=0 to startup=1

Start pound up with /etc/init.d/pound start If everything is configured properly, check out http://1.2.3.4:8080 (or whatever IP and port you put in your pound.cfg)
Half the time, the requests should go to Server A while the other half goes to Server B (you can configure this). For anything else, check out the man page here or type man pound. 
 

Luckily, my file server is running NFS and SAMBA, so I can have the same content on each web server. I couldn't completely get NFS working on Windows Server 2008 (which is on one of the web servers, ugh) so I mapped a SAMBA shared as a network drive and that seemed to work. 

 That's the end of this short tutorial, but keep in mind there's more things you can do with pound. You can set up chroot jails, HTTPS balancing and way more. Any comments or ideas are appreciated.

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) 

Assuming you already configured both your LAN and WAN interfaces, it should be clear which interface to choose for the extra port.

Then go Interfaces-><interface name> in my case, OPT1. Enable the interface, change the Type to Static (static worked for me), change Bridge with to LAN and Gateway to your gateway address (ie, 192.168.0.1)

Apparently, I can't read and didn't read the small print at the bottom. I forgot to add the proper firewall rules to make it work. Go to Firewall->Rules, click on the new interface tab and configure appropriately. To make it exactly the same as your LAN, change the source to <interface name> Subnet.

This is a somewhat short tutorial. If you're using pfSense, you're probably already know what you're doing. Now I can eliminate the switch I was using and go directly to the router.

^{Photo by ToniVC}

Finally got around to installing the 3.1.2 firmware on my iPod.

1. Get the 3.1.2 (or 3.0) firmware. 
2. Grab PwnageTool from TPB (you'll need a Mac for this :) )

Everything else is downhill from there. Open up PwnageTool, pick your model, find your firmware and that's about it (unless you want to change boot logo, etc.)

Then restore your iPod with the new [custom] firmware with iTunes. In iTunes, go to your iPod on the left hand side, hold shift and press restore. Find your firmware and that's it.

For those running Windows, you can always jailbreak using redsn0w. I'd say it was well worth the upgrade, there's huge improvements. Landscape mail, able to search your iPod, Bluetooth and numerous other things. When your iPod is playing music, it'll show the album art at the lockscreen. I also noticed it displayed the lyrics for the particular song I was listening to while in the music app.

I'm glad I built that Hackintosh when I did, or else I'd be using redsn0w to jailbreak. Friday it is, nocturnal night it is.