for keeping track of my digital experiments

I needed to post up a couple of useful links/tools so I could find them again easily. Maybe you, the reader, will find them useful as well.

1. Internet Anagram Server: Perfect for getting new ideas so as to avoid copyright and trademark infringement.
2. Wireless Phone Number – Carrier Search: After receiving a random text from +16126367372 which said, “Gurl do u no where i can buy a cute prom dress”, I wanted to see what kind a person was wasting my cell phones minutes. Yes, I’m on a pay as you go plan.
3. The MINIX 3 Operating System: I am looking into creating my own embedded game server and wireless access point that I could jack into my high-gain antenna I’m working on.
4. PC Tools Malware Research Center: For finding out more information on what is going on in the end-user security sector.
5. PHPList: Possible starting point for mailing list script I’m putting together.
6. CushyCMS: Content managing made easy. Perfect for the busy webmaster.

Last weekend I was playing around with running nginx, SSH, vsFTPd, and MediaTomb on this 1GHZ, 512MB RAM machine that I jacked into my network. So let me get the obvious things out of the way first:

• SSH for administering
• vsFTPd for getting files onto the media server
• nginx for serving the media files externally to the WAN

What is this MediaTomb you may ask? It is a DLNA/Media UPnP server daemon, that is administered via a sleek javascript front end, and run by a fast C back end (for nix machines). There were issues though, when I tried accessing it from the new DirecTV set top boxes that have network/internet support built in. According to my dad, who works for DirecTV, the boxes are supposed to be able to access DLNA compliant content. It is not an advertised feature, just an “under development” feature. He says the only reason that ethernet ports are on the set top boxes in the first place is for VOD content, served by Limelight Networks. In the future, the DLNA support will probably be phased out, but for now I guess I’ll get to have some fun.

Well I have a computer cluster in my Zamboni room. It is a pain booting up these semi-hidden machines. After getting a few more computers, as the result of tedious negotiations, it became high time to find a solution to this problem. Essentially, as long as said computer is plugged into a live ethernet hookup, it is possible to boot the computer when BIOS settings allow Wake-On-LAN. [more info on Wikipedia]

I continued poking around my google search results and found a website that runs a PHP implementation of the wake on lan protocol, called remotewakeup.com. If you setup your router properly, I guess you can wake a machine from any remote location. I also found some PHP source code that is probably what remotewakeup.com is running. Check it out at phrackattack.net. There are plenty of implementations available based upon the WOL rfc. A java implementation I found –> http://www.moldaner.de/wakeonlan/wakeonlan.html.

[Added April 5th] I was working with Debian a lot and I found some information on implementing a remote wakeup for Debian/Ubuntu systems.