Bus error: Jake Billo's weblog

This should be a common scenario in shared housing worldwide: you’ve got one Internet connection coming into the house, into a router shared among two or more chumps. Chumps A and B each have an Xbox 360. Specifically, Chump A has one that sounds like an aircraft engine turbine – courtesy of Microsoft’s repair centre. Both chumps want to connect to Xbox Live at the same time and play some Rainbow Six Vegas. Unlike most other games, R6V should not be played under the influence of alcohol: it’s enraging enough playing it sober.

With most consumer routers sold today, this scenario should “automagically” work through the wonders of UPnP (Universal Plug n’ Play). This technology provides a method to forward ports through a NAT firewall based on a device request. In a standard PC setting, you might see this used for uTorrent or other P2P applications. Unfortunately, the wizard has failed to enchant my personal setup, and both chumps A and B experience a disconnection after about 20 minutes of gameplay. The disconnect is really more of a fraudulent excuse, as both chumps can reconnect immediately after receiving the message.

For some background as to why this issue occurs, it’s important to note that Xbox Live needs certain ports forwarded properly for an “Open” connection (best chance of matching). TCP 3074, UDP 3074 and UDP 88. Only one Xbox can open this set of ports at a time:

Xbox A (192.168.1.100) > Internal Port 3074 > Router > External Port 3074 > Xbox Live

Once this mapping is set in the UPnP table, no other system can occupy external port 3074. So the Xbox Live software picks another port in a similar range to communicate with Xbox Live:

Xbox B (192.168.1.101) > Internal Port 3074 > Router > External Port 3641 > Xbox Live

UPnP mapping unfortunately can run into conflicts if an Xbox loses its DHCP lease, or the mapping fails to be renewed on a regular basis. During this time, the external port mapping can “flip”, leaving Xbox B getting data from port 3074 instead of the alternately chosen 3641. In short, Xbox B gets the packets meant for Xbox A, causing the ‘heartbeat’ packets to Live to fail out. The result is an abrupt disconnection.

It’s not possible to merely set a static IP address for each Xbox: UPnP relies on the DHCP server in the router handing out addresses. If you set static addresses, your connection will be listed as “Moderate” NAT for at least one of your consoles.

We’ve replicated this problem on both the latest versions of Tomato and DD-WRT, running on a Linksys WRT54GL.

The Solution

Using either one of these alternate firmwares, a function called “Static DHCP” becomes available. In essence, it lets you provide a MAC address for a computer or other Ethernet-enabled device. When the network card in question attempts to get a DHCP lease for an IP address, the Static DHCP table takes over and will always assign the same IP address to the same device. This process has all the benefits of setting a static address, without having to change Windows or console settings.

What you’ll want to do is find your console’s MAC address. In Tomato and DD-WRT, you can likely find the device with an OUI code that matches Microsoft. DD-WRT provides this information in the Status > LAN tab.

Tomato provides the active connections in Status > Device List. (You can click directly on the IP address to copy the associated MAC into the static DHCP table.)

Alternatively, you can look up the MAC address on the Xbox following these instructions (the process is still similar for systems running the NXE.)

Once you have the console MAC address, click over to the Services tab in DD-WRT, or the Basic > Static DHCP section in Tomato. In DD-WRT, click the Add button if there are no more fields available. You’ll want to provide the Xbox MAC address and a new IP address – something below your normal DHCP range (usually 192.168.1.100 onward.) For example, we’ve picked 192.168.1.40 and 192.168.1.41 for two Xbox consoles.

Once you’re done making these changes in Tomato, remember to click the Save button at the bottom of the page. DD-WRT users should first click Save, and then Apply Settings when the page reloads.

Finally, return to Status > LAN (DD-WRT) or Status > Device List (Tomato) and remove any dynamic DHCP entries in the 192.168.1.100+ range for the consoles. Save and apply your settings, then go reboot the Xbox consoles and run a network test. It should pick up the new IP address and work properly for any Xbox Live activity.

Congratulations! No more random disconnections, unless Xbox Live falls down like it did last Christmas. 🙂

If you’ve sent in a mail-in rebate recently that advised you to check its status on rebatestatus.com, think again. Continental Promotions Group (CPG) has recently filed for bankruptcy, which means any cheque you may get will come back with non-sufficient funds. If you haven’t already received a cheque, you probably won’t be getting one.

Your best bet at this time is to contact the company that sponsored the promotion and determine what their plans are. I personally had a rebate out with Epson; their Canadian home page has an announcement under “Important Rebate Information” advising people to call a customer service number. I had a pleasant conversation with Elizabeth this evening regarding my cheque, and I’ve got an outstanding email to resolve things. I’ll update when this comes through, but figured it was important to get this information out.

Any outstanding rebates that you may not have mailed in yet – the best bet to avoid trouble is check the bottom of the form. If they suggest visiting rebatestatus.com for updates and tracking information, talk to the company and see if there’s an updated form or revised rebate offer.

There’s also a reasonably complete list of companies affected at FatWallet.

This is an accurate representation of our kitchen area circa Saturday morning at about 10am. Anyone walking in and viewing this scene would probably wonder just what exactly transpired.

For the past week or so, my roommates and friends have been in exam mode. I’ve been spared the same indignity this fall, since I’m presently on co-op and resuming school in January next year. In any event, a decision was made to blow off some steam on Friday and purchase some Bacardi 151. This liquor’s claim to fame is its flammability, owing to its higher than average alcohol content.

The back label, as threatened:

“Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”

In the interest of not offering evidence to a future jury or prejudicing potential employers, we won’t go into any specific details here. 151 certainly puts everyone in an interesting mood though. I can’t say I personally had the nerve to try any – that will have to be next weekend.

Another common domestic picture results when people are in the vise grip of midterms – they often choose cheap fast food and leave it all around. This is the set of cardboard I took out to the recycle bin on Saturday morning:

I must admit if that pizza place was open right now I’d be over there to grab one. 🙂

And so it begins. Should be an interesting next few months.

This Friday I received a box with several new computer components from our supplier NXSource, the business end of NCIX. I’m currently in the process of performing several new system builds and overwhelmingly chose the Asus P5Q series, in both -VM and -E based configurations.

As per its extension, the P5Q-VM will be going in an office/lower end configuration with no need for a discrete graphics card. It’s replacing a Sempron 2400+ configuration; the MSI Socket 462 board blew two or three capacitors last week and there’s not really a point in finding a replacement motherboard now. The onboard video from the Intel chipset should be sufficient for its purpose in life, and the board has a DVI-D port unlike similar systems with integrated graphics.

Eventually the machine may be repurposed with media center-type functionality, so all it should need is a DVI to HDMI conversion cable to connect to a HDTV. I did slightly overspec the processor (a Core 2 Duo E7200 at 2.53GHz) so that it could run 720p video without issues; in general, at least a 2.4GHz dual core is the baseline for decent playback of most popular MKV’s.

One nice thing about the new Asus microATX configurations is that they include an x16 PCI-Express slot for potential future expansion, as well as four DDR2 SDRAM slots instead of just two. This makes the configuration incredibly useful in the future when it comes time for a RAM upgrade.

I’ve replaced the P5B Deluxe pictured above and taken the new P5Q-E for my main workstation. The new board is now essentially the same platform as the file/media server upstairs. I’d originally chosen the board for its three PCI-E x16 slots, which makes powering a video card and two PCI-E RAID addon boards a possibility. One feature that I’d neglected to investigate is the instant-on “Splashtop/Express Gate”, which is basically a stripped down version of Linux partially embedded on a flash chip on the board. I can see this feature being really useful, but it has a few drawbacks:

• Installation is performed through Windows. You have to have a hard drive for the initial installation, which doesn’t really make sense when it comes to grabbing drivers or BIOS updates. Ideally, the motherboard utilities DVD would allow you to boot a read-only version or install the environment to a USB thumb drive. From there you could pull the latest BIOS, upgrade, and grab new drivers even before Windows enters the picture.
• I’d like to see more motherboard utilities included in the package. A temperature gauge, overclock tweaking utility and network cable tester would all be excellent additions.
• While on that subject, tools similar to SpeedFan, Orthos and Prime95 are sorely lacking.
• Where’s the music support? You’ve initialized the sound card, now get to business with it. Embedded Linux with a jukebox – even XMMS – would be really neat.
• Hard drives with NTFS show up in the Picture Browser, but there’s no way to even view their contents through the conventional USB drive explorer.
• Also, give us a command line and non-gimped web browser! The lack of console support in an OS that’s so obviously Linux hurts me.

All in all, the features of the stripped-down distribution make me want to try out Ubuntu again outside of a VM.

I had some time last week to get to the root of a recent installation problem. On my work system running Server 2003, the installation package for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 would fail repeatedly. This was the case using either the Microsoft Update or standalone MSI download. Since service packs for Visual Studio are generally a Good Idea, this was a seriously annoying inconvenience – not the least of which was seeing the “one remaining update” icon in the system tray.

In any event, I managed to pick the correct answer out of the Web from Egghead Cafe, which pointed to KB925336 from Microsoft’s site. There are packages for Server 2003 in 32-bit, x64 and Itanium versions. Since I know a number of developers run the server OS (through MSDN usually), this seems to be a worthwhile fix.

Note that the package does require a reboot before Service Pack 1 will install properly.

This is an angry post written in uncov style. I may submit it over there if it’s sufficiently full of bile and vitriol.

Digg: the little news aggregator and home for moronic comments that could. I’m finally giving up on it, yet not for some presumed lack of Kevin Rose fanboy love. This particular train has fallen off the mountain and into a septic tank for people’s pet issues of the day. Issues generally include the legalization of pot, minor political scandals or community butthurt over restricted Ubuntu drivers.

All of these elements essentially distill YouTube with a focus on poor-ass headlines, misleading summaries, and a PageRank whoring link pointed to some Blogspot drivel that some high school kid thinks is hot crackers. Recently popular stories just parrot content produced by Gawker Media or Weblogs Inc. (an AOL production!) properties. As much as you may disagree with Denton’s practices, there’s a key difference: both of these companies pay people to write, and it’s certainly a different quality standard.

One of the best investments I’ve ever made with a half hour has been the Digg Stupidity Filter, which is basically an inbred regular expression that’s hosted on somebody else’s ~$13 per share server. Unfortunately, even this bastardized contraption is unable to cope with people that insist on pushing out “Top Three Hundred and Twelve+ Ways to Enable Beryl and Cry Yourself to Sleep” to the front page. Lists of absolutely stupid Firefox tweaks are the prime offenders here, but you might see similar content from Mashable!!!!omglolone authors. What ever happened to people reading informed reviews and opinions, instead of regurgitating bullet points? If I wanted that, I’d go sit through an executive slide deck – one created in PowerPoint and not Zoho Office.

The main problem I have with Digg is not the blind subservience to the brilliant economic policies of Ron Paul. It’s the encouragement of a brain-dead social networking community of conspiracy theorists, and the resulting mass media coverage only gives these halfwits some semblance of legitimacy. Deep down, every “power user” is really a 4chan bandwagoner whose love for cannabis knows no bounds. If you can’t be a real hacker, come to Digg where the next best thing is to be a script kiddie. You, too, can crack WEP with the assistance of Google Video.

Where were these idiots on the Internet before the advent of easily-accessible comment boxes? I mean, Geocities had its fair share of numptees back in the day, but I continue to be astonished at new lows of mouth-breathing twits. As the ease of vomiting into a <textarea> increases, it’s probably inevitable that we’ll see more and more loser-generated content. I just wish there was a production version of StupidFilter available that didn’t require tweaking makefiles. While I’m perfectly competent at compiling and running a C++ app, you won’t get major traction from the Rails evangelist crowd until you make a plugin.

Digg’s biggest problem, bar none, isn’t the roving masses of morons continuing to patronize its impeccably validated HTML. The Digg audience are dangerous because they’re just smart enough to use something like Firefox with AdBlock. They’re just trendy enough to try and run Linux, even if they don’t understand what the command GreyWizard54 posted actually does. So when you’re a Web2 company whose primary income is based on people clicking on ads, you can’t go with a conventional Microsoft package. The lucrative “text JOKE to 99999” ads festooning the borders of MySpace won’t work either. Digg is the perfect target market for mail-order Russian brides; it’s just too bad nobody there will ever see your wares.

UW’s CampusTechShop outlet has become an authorized Rogers Wireless dealer, and lately they’ve been trumpeting the $25 and $45 student packages. Every carrier in Canada has similar student deals to try and bump new subscribers and ARPU in the fourth quarter.

What I don’t understand is how such an outlet expects to attract new signups through this ridiculous device pricing. (Yes, these prices are on three year contracts.) I’m assuming this is what they’re charging without a data plan… that’s really the only way I think Rogers could justify selling a Pearl for $300.

• Blackberry Pearl 8120 – $299.99
• Blackberry Curve Red – $399.99
• Blackberry Bold – $599.99

Yeah… no thanks. If this is their idea of a special promotional price worthy of an email blast, forget it.

There is no good reason this shouldn’t work out of the box, but I run 2K3 Server as my primary machine at work and can’t try out Microsoft’s fruity new Messenger app. The MSI is hardcoded to block server OSes, which is complete and utter shenanigans.

The instructions in this post from Techspot work well for Windows Live Messenger 8.5, but you’ll have to dredge through the comments to find a working version of WLM 9. Since it’s hosted on one of those free file sharing services, I figured I’d mirror the .msi and try and dredge up some search engine hits. I’ve scanned it with Symantec Endpoint Protection and it came up clean. Thanks to Quasim for the original file.

The installer should work on any ‘unsupported’ OS, such as XP x64, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

Download Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – MSI

I’m writing these instructions up for posterity, since this is now the second time this incident has happened and I wanted to preserve the instructions for the MDBVU32 tool. The first time, it was a bad read receipt causing an annoying popup for every sent message; an outstanding client can’t send or receive any messages. (Original instructions are at howto-outlook.com.)

This situation can occur on most versions of Outlook and requires a repair utility from Microsoft to fix. To avoid completely trashing the mailstore, grab a copy of MDBVU32 (the Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store Viewer) from Microsoft or from here.

Start the utility, then click OK to the first dialog. Then,

• Click MDB > OpenMessageStore, select the item with the “D” next to it for the default PST file.

• The message will be in either MDB > Open Root Folder or MDB > Open IPM Outbox.

• Select the stuck message in the middle column and select lpMDB->AbortSubmit(), then Call Function.

• Select OK, then log out by MDB > Store Logoff > OK > OK

• Close the application by Session > Session Logoff, then close any remaining windows.

 Updated April 2014 to replace self-hosted link to tool.