Planet FreeBSD Complete

Looks like a little time-off did the trick. Got back into the problem that I was working on last (fighting with the operating system, and the various interfaces). Looks like using 127.0.0.X where X is not '1' works to elicit the correct SYN/ACK response, on the correct interface (lo0), and the host OS doesn't try to fight me about it.

Now all I've gotta do is get the test working :-)

Hopefully, things will be smooth sailing from here on forward!

You should order yourself a copy of the BSD Magazine _FAST_! You can find it here http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/bsdmag.05?id=YtVdjmGH&mv_pc=108 make sure you do that as soon as possible to get the magazine in your possession. Why? Because I wrote in it? Because they need it? Because the community needs these kind of things! The magazine only costs a few bucks, it’s worth spending that few bucks!

Just finished up the last of my exams. About friggin' time. I feel pretty confident about all of them -- and I've been doing better this semester than a usually do.

Schedule for the rest of the evening is GSoC, same for tomorrow. Saturday I've got a BBQ for the 4th. GSoC starts accepting status reports on the 6th, they're due on the 13th (which means I have to submit it to Google/GNN, and they/he has to approve it by then).

Should be an interesting weekend.

I turn 21 next Wednesday (the 8th) so count on nothing getting done on the 8th/9th (Maybe on the 9th, I took the day off from work).

Ha! I beat Leisha!

At the 2008 24 Heures du Mans, car #2 (an Audi R10 TDI run by Champion Racing under the Audi Sport North America brand) passes a screen that displays real-time video from a camera placed in its unoccupied right seat. I'm not positive, but from the helmet colors (silver with red stripes and yellow highlights), I think the driver is living legend Tom Kristensen. This car went on to win the race, while their #1 car ranked sixth and Audi Sport Team Joest's #3 car finished fourth.

The lighting was difficult—despite the flash, you can see patches of light from the window shining onto the calendar, which is printed on very shiny cardboard.

In a recent trip I incorrectly assumed that real-time tracking of Google Earth's pre-cached maps with a GPS receiver would be sufficient help for navigating around the highways in Los Angeles. I therefore experimented with the way Google Earth's sparsely-documented real time tracking works, and wrote a small program to interface Google Earth with a GPS receiver. Fortunately, after seeing a colleague drive with a car-GPS device on the dashboard I came to my senses, and got a real Garmin Nuvi car-GPS device.

Yesterday Firefox 3.5 was released, and few hours later it was in the Portstree. But I see that some pepole can’t right read. So Please READ the pkg-messages carefully: Firefox 3.5 and HTML5 Certain functions used to display HTML5 elements need the sem module. If your Firefox crashes with the following message while viewing a HTML5 page: “Bad system call (core dumped)” you need [...]

For your convenience, this blog entry is bilingual. Pour mieux vous accomoder, cet article est bilingue.

Missed the plane back from Paris (Depeche Mode were awesome; more about that later—as soon as I take delivery of a new batch of round tuits), and had to stay overnight at the Ibis Orly hotel, which for your information does not have a Tex-Mex restaurant. What it does have is a typical French grill restaurant (think Hippopotamus but double the prices).

Ayant raté l'avion au retour de Paris (Depeche Mode étaient épatants ; j'en vous rendrai compte à l'occasion), nous avons du passer la nuit à l'hôtel Ibis Orly, qui, je vous signale, n'a pas de restaurant Tex-Mex restaurant, mais simplement un restaurant grill typiquement français (genre Hippopotamus mais deux fois plus cher).

When we arrived in our room, I glanced at the usual hotel information card and immediately cracked up. I took the following picture for your enjoyment:

Une fois arrivé dans notre chambre, j'ai jeté un coup d'œuil sur l'habituelle carte d'infos pratiques, et je me suis écroulé de rire. J'ai pris cette photo afin que vous puissiez partager mon hilarité :

In case you were wondering, the original French text says «ironing room on the second floor.»

Pour les anglophobes parmi vous, la traduction anglaise signifie, retenez-vous bien, « affûtage de la chambre avec la deuxième étape ».

Finally getting around to migrating my server (which is currently running at a dedicated hosting place) to a virtual server over at RootBSD (http://www.rootbsd.net). The virtual server is very snappy and feels like a bare metal box so far. Reliability has been good too, and it is 1/3 the cost of my dedicated hosting plan. So far, so good.

It's 2009 damn it, I want some convergence between my "smart" devices! Why can't my photo camera beam photos to my mobile phone? Why can't I edit simple documents on my phone without excessively jumping through hoops? Why can't my car use the GPS from my mobile phone? Why can't I shut down my desktop machine from my mobile phone? Why is even simple communication between my desktop and my mobile phone via Bluetooth so complicated and sucky?

Read more...

Enabling "stealth mode" (which should kill all responses to an unsolicited [from the OS's point of view] SYN/ACK packets) does not prevent the OS from responding on lo0. Evidently stealth mode is not active on the loopback interface.

Grrrrrrr.

Power's back on, woooooooooo.

Okay, so I have two problems:
[1] If I attempt to 'send' packets 'from' an IP address that my computer actually has, the host OS's TCP stack sends a RST packet when it sees a SYN/ACK response to my 'sent' SYN packet.
[2] If I attempt to 'send' packets 'from' a different IP address, the packets get bounced back and forth several times between my computer and the router. For whatever reason, the listening server ('nc -l <port>') doesn't respond at all.

Yay.

Small note I just committed nspr and Firefox 3.5 RC3 to the portstree. Please read UPDATING carefully befor you blame us. Happy Testing!

Power is out. Posting this from my iPhone.

After finding out that Wireshark is stupid, and considers 0x2000 to be the same as 0x0002 for Loopback-layer family fields, I am now battling with the host OS. Sending a connection request properly elicits a SYN/ACK response, but the OS is quickly sending out a RST packet to kill the connection.

Changing the source IP to be something other than an IP the operating system should care about results in no SYN/ACK packet. I tried moving back over to a non-loopback interface, with a different source IP address (using the correct destination IP address). It gets sent back from the router (the packet is duplicated with the source MAC being the router MAC), but it does not elicit a SYN/ACK response.

Wierd. And frustrating.

So, evidently even if you have a host that is listening on 0.0.0.0:12345 (e.g. "nc -l 12345") and inject packets onto an active interface, pointed at that interface's IP address (e.g. "en1" has IP 172.16.0.10) -- any normally-generated packets to/from a local IP address go over "lo0".

That would have been good to know, what, a few hours ago?

Lots of troubleshooting the code right now, trying to get the 3-way connect to work. Lots of issues with typos, unfortunately. A lot of it had to do with using (for example) "off" in place of "offset" to access the offset of a TCP packet, because of the way it's declared:

off = pcs.Field( "offset", 4 )

My eyes just saw the first part, and ignored the second half when I started writing code. Thought I went back and fixed all of the fields, evidently not!

I love to work with my window open while it is raining. The sound of rain on the leaves, on the roofs, on the ground, is a natural counterpoint to the electromechanical typing clicks. The cold breeze that enters the window from time to time makes me shiver like a low voltage shock. I sneeze, losing the thread of what I was writing, then find it again and the reprise of the rhythmical clicks goes on.

In continued preparation to the FreeBSD 8.0 Release, the tree had been frozen by re@. This means that development had been slowed down a lot because everything needs to be reviewed by the Release Engineers first. This step will make sure that the system will get as stable as possible before a fork will be done to RELENG_8. Stay tuned!