Main Page

Hey, another wiki. Great!

Here, you will find things. You may notice that anonymous edits are firmly DISABLED. Yeah, THAT'S RIGHT. I am intentionally destroying the communal benefits that wiki was designed to provide. Why? I friggin hate spam, and my two previous wikis were consumed by friggin spambots. You may also notice that you can't create a user account. COPE! :) If you really want to contribute, please mail me at dreNOSPAMPLSKTHX@mac.com, and I'd be more than happy to let you in.

Here is the page of User:Dre, your esteemed information broker.

You may want to scope my other, less sandbox-like presence: http://www.dreness.com

TigerPage

Network Stuff

AS / Routing Reserach

For instructions on how to find the discrete routes into a network, check out http://cybercon.com/backbone.html.

telnet://route-server.ip.att.net: Use this to find AS numbers.

Subnet Calculator

BGP Regexp (replace 714 in the URL with AS number)

ARIN whois

Networks I have researched:

The Planet

Apple Network Info

Speakeasy

Misc

TCP Timeouts

If your long / idle tcp connections are getting timed out by annoying network hardware, try the following. This should go in /etc/sysctl.conf. If necessary, create it and chown it to root.

net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1
net.inet.tcp.keepidle=18000

Streaming your iTunes music remotely

There are several articles out there on ye ol' intarweb about this, but here's my solution. The executive overwiew:

Use Network Beacon on the client to advertise the music sharing service of your mac at home via Bonjour so that your local iTunes will see it, and use an SSH tunnel to make the client's request appear local to the server's subnet. WAP enabled first to market link farm TQM E2E OMGLOLWTFBBQ

The ingredients:

• Two OS X machines, a client (where you listen to music) and a server (where the tunes are stored)
• On the server, either a public IP or the ability to map inbound ports
• Network Beacon on the client

Configure the server

1. Launch iTunes and turn on music sharing
2. Verify that Remote Login is enabled in the Sharing preference pane
3. If you have a public IP, proceed to the next section. If not, map port 22 on your firewall to the server so that the SSH tunnel has somewhere to attach. It's probably possible to attach the SSH tunnel to another machine on the same lan / same IP subnet; as long as the iTunes server thinks you are local, it should be all good.

Configure the client

1. Create the SSH tunnel as follows:

   ssh -L 4242:idio.dreness.com:3689 -f -N andre@idio.dreness.com

   The breakdown:

   • 4242 is the entry port of the local endpoint of the tunnel, implicitely created on localhost (i.e. where you go in)
   • idio.dreness.com:3689 is where the traffic goes AFTER EXITING the tunnel - 3689 is the daap port
   • andre@idio.dreness.com defines the remote endpoint of the tunnel.
2. Verify that the local endpoint of the tunnel is up:

   netstat -na | grep LISTEN
   tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.4242         *.*                    LISTEN
   ...

   If it's not, please proceed to my document on SSH tunnels

3. Launch Network Beacon and configure as follows:
   • Create a new beacon
   • Beacon Enabled = checked
   • Service Name = whatever (will be displayed in the iTunes sources list)
   • Service type = _daap._tcp. (note the trailing period)
   • Port Number = 4242
   • Enable Host Proxy = checked
   • Host Name = localhost
   • IP Address = 127.0.0.1
4. Launch iTunes and bask in the glory of hearing your tunes from afar. Or don't and curse your inability to press buttons properly.

Extra Credit (tiger only):

Configure an additional SSH listener on the server to which you attach the SSH tunnel, then use ipfw / dummynet to do basic rate limiting on this port (which is only used by iTunes streaming) to keep from saturating your server's upstream.

Useful if:

• you also have regular SSH sessions over the same link that's carrying your tunes
• your server has enough upstream to make this work, but not enough that the stream won't burst to saturate it occasionally

Servers / Hosting

I once maintained a FreeBSD box in colo. Check out the page of meta, where I have notes and instructions for the various services I was running.

Rebuilding floe from OpenBSD to FreeBSD.

Cheat sheets

irssi

screen

q3

color escape sequences

mysql

CPAN notes

wikimedia security notes

shell

useful commands

Compling / Development

php in OS X

bugzilla in OS X

phpbb in OS X

rrdtool builds without error in 10.3.9

He once solved some Panther DNS Issues

Installing and using unix software in userland:

In your shell init file, set the following (for bash / zsh compatible shells):

export LDFLAGS='-L/path/to/your/home/lib'
export CPPFLAGS='-I/path/to/your/home/include'
export PATH='/path/to/your/home:$PATH'
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/your/home/lib
export LD_INCLUDE_PATH=/path/to/your/home/include

Log out / in, so that the above takes effect.

• Configure any dependencies with --prefix=/path/to/your/home, and make / make install as usual. They will be installed into your home directory (~/lib, ~/include, ~/bin)
• Configure your desired software with --prefix=/path/to/your/home and make /make install as usual. It should pick up all your new libs / includes due to the environment variables.

When you execute your new binaries, they will be able to find your userland libraries thanks to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

How to make and apply patches

Once you have the needed changes, apply them (pre autoconf) to a copy of a fresh source directory. You should now have a 'patched' directory sitting alongside an unpatched direcetory. Now generate the patch...

diff -ruN old new > my_patch

To apply this patch to a fresh source directory, place the patch alongside the source dir:

patch -p0 < my_patch

... and then of course, the requisite links to the mediawiki docs, hosted at wikipedia:

Please see documentation on customizing the interface and the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.