Jason Zerbe’s logbook

For those of you who don’t know about DirecTV2PC … check it out! It’s pretty awesome (if you have a Windows PC and a DirecTV DVR).

Here is what I did to get DirecTV2PC working in my Local Area Network with two HR20 set top boxes.

1. Go to http://www.directv.com/directv2pc and click the Download Beta button on the right side of the page
2. When the pop-up comes up, click Continue to Beta download
3. Click Download Now to download the DirecTV PC Playback Advisor application to see if you pc is up to running the DirecTV2PC application.  Once you finish the download run the installation and then run the application. The application sometimes falsely identifies your system specs. As long as your PC is running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, a 2Ghz processor, and 512MB ram you should be good to go.
4. If you PC passes the application or you believe it should be able to handle the application according to the rules of thumb  I laid out in the previous step, then enter your name and email on the page and click the Submit button. The DirecTV2PC application download will then start. It is a 34 MB file, but it may take awhile to download. The average speed I rolled for the download was 20kb/sec. It took about 30 minutes to download … atrocious! Once your download completes, you will be sent an activation code to the email you provided earlier.
5. Run the installer and fill out the various fields.
6. Now run the application, for the application to properly activate you will need to:
   • be connected to the Internet
   • open TCP port 443 (incoming and outgoing) on your router’s firewall
   • open your PC’s firewall for the DirecTV2PC application (you should be automatically prompted by Windows)
7. If the application still does not activate properly, that means that your ISP’s DNS servers have not updated Cyberlink’s new IPv4 address for the A record activation.cyberlink.com. (Or Cyberlink is jerking around with their IPv4 addresses again … bah!)
   Here is what you do:
   add exactly what is in quotes: “203.73.94.101 activation.cyberlink.com”
   to the file “c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts” (if your main hard disk drive is lettered c”)
8. Enjoy your DVR’s movies!

Hardware, Software, Windows Cyberlink, DirecTV

I had first heard about the Warehouse subversion browser a couple of months back. At the time it was still closed source and cost $30 per server license. Recently though, it went open source and is now freely available. For those of you with about 1-2 hours of time and know how to setup and run subversion on a Linux/Unix box (with WebDAV) it really isn’t that hard to get up and running.

I installed this on one of my home Debian Etch (4) servers and it took me about 30 minutes once I understood the entire process.

1. Install some necessary dependencies for building (I prolly left out a few) - make, rake, unzip, zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, libc6, gcc, cpp, g++
2. Install Ruby
   • download the latest tarball (source code in tar.gz) here - http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/ - wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
     
   • run - tar xzvf ruby*.tar.gz - to open up the archive
   • cd into the directory - cd ruby*
   • configure, make and then install –> 1) ./configure 2) make 3) make install (as root)
3. Install Swig
   • download one of the latest tarballs - wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/swig/swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
   • unarchive the archive - tar xzvf swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
   • get into the directory - cd swig-1.3.31
   • configure, make, then install –> 1) ./configure 2) make 3) make install (as root)
4. Install Subversion and the Swig-Ruby bindings
   • download one of the latest subversion archives - wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.5.tar.gz
   • unarchive that sucker - tar xzvf subversion*.tar.gz
   • get into the directory that was just created - cd subversion*
   • configure for installation (and if you are missing anything be sure to install it!) - ./configure –enable-shared –enable-static –enable-debug –with-ssl –with-swig
   • make and install –> 1) make 2) make install
   • now install the swig-ruby bindings –> 1) make swig-rb 2) make install-swig-rb
5. Install various dependencies for later: apache2 with WebDAV support, ruby gems, MySQL server/client, PHPMyAdmin might be handy as well
6. Download the Warehouse source code - http://github.com/entp/warehouse/tree/master
7. Untar into where you want Warehouse to start from: tar xvzf, mv, and whatnot.
8. Setup a 3 MySQL databases (warehouse_test, warehouse_production, warehouse_dev) that can be accessed by 1 user for testing, production and development.
9. Now run the warehouse bootstrapping program and setup procedures. (No registration key needed now that it is open source, so leave that field blank.) - http://www.warehouseapp.com/installing/installing-and-registering-warehouse
10. In the Warehouse settings, be sure to setup warehouse so that it updates your WebDAV permissions and passwords.
    • Shell command to run when permissions are updated. This will auto-generate the necessary permission file for WebDAV: rake warehouse:build_config CONFIG=[warehouse directory]/config/access.conf
    • Shell command to run when someone’s password is updated. This will auto-generate the necessary password file for WebDAV: rake warehouse:build_htpasswd CONFIG=[warehouse directory]/config/htpasswd.conf

Code, Linux, Server, Software mysql, subversion, swig, warehouse, WebDAV

This year I am enrolled in the PSEO program at Century college. To keep up with what is going on at my high school, I subscribed to the Woodbury High School events mailing list. Oddly enough, the host it was coming from was none other than a host in the domain of trend micro. So I did a quick DNS query and found out that the South Washington County schools (District 833) are using an off site hosted email solution from Trend Micro called, InterScan™ Messaging Hosted Service.

blackbox:~# host --anything sowashco.k12.mn.us
sowashco.k12.mn.us A 63.225.128.3
sowashco.k12.mn.us MX 10 in.sjc.mx.trendmicro.com
!!! sowashco.k12.mn.us MX host in.sjc.mx.trendmicro.com is not canonical
sowashco.k12.mn.us NS authns1.mpls.qwest.net
sowashco.k12.mn.us NS authns2.dnvr.qwest.net
sowashco.k12.mn.us NS authns3.sttl.qwest.net
sowashco.k12.mn.us SOA authns1.mpls.qwest.net dns-admin.qwestip.net (
2007092800 ;serial (version)
10800 ;refresh period (3 hours)
3600 ;retry interval (1 hour)
604800 ;expire time (1 week)
86400 ;default ttl (1 day)
)

I had been meaning to check into District 833’s (url filtration) methods for quite some time, so I would be able to figure out similar ways of imaging and control of the six (operational) machines on my Local Area network.

The statistics on their network, according to a testimonial posted on Trend Micro’s website:

• fiber optic switches that connect all 24 school district sites together
• 3,000+ workstations
• 30,000 spyware and virus accomplice hits every day (during the school year)
• 650,000 messages a day about 640,000 of those messages are spam

[Dietsche] continued, “When any end user logs on to a workstation, InterScan Web Security Suite checks the Active Directory to verify that the user is authorized to be on the network. Verification is instantaneous and scanning begins without the end user even knowing it.” Dietsche also can track events by user accounts. “This is a huge advantage for the IT staff,” he said. “In the past, we found it difficult to isolate a security issue. But now, LDAP authentication enables us to get log reports that identify who the affected users are and which of them are constantly running into viruses.”

I thought that was way cool how all of these solutions can come together in one cohesive structure.

Internet, School, Software trend micro