- Thursday, 22:00: Accidentally buy an XBox 360
- Decide it needs to talk to the network (before playing any games on it)
- Current Network: Desktop (“Tsunami”) & 360 plugged into Belkin Wireless Router, laptop and Wii talk to it remotely. Cable modem is upstream on Router.
- 360 cannot phone home due to closed ports.
- Open ports
- All ports not documented.
- Fuckit(1): 360 in DMZ
- 360 can talk to home for twenty minutes, then cannot anymore.
- Reboot router
- Reboot modem
- Another 20 minutes
- Fucket(2): Play GTA4 for a while, ignore the network. (Friday, 02:00)
- Saturday, 06:00: Up early, decide to fix network.
- Fiddle around with ports for a while, decide the route is at fault.
- Attempt to reroute everything though just a hub.
- Realise that takes away the single point of entry for the cable modem, which can therefore not connect.
- Also: No DHCP server. Things complain at me.
- Fortunatly, I have a spare firewall box (“Boilingpoint”) which still has IPCop on it from when it was my firewall in Bedford (and, before that, in Reading and Cambridge)
- Boilingpoint has a network card and a PCI ADSL modem. On-board motherboard has no network. Turn out boxes of hardware looking for spare network card to use for upstream connection.
- Fail. Find old desktop machine whose motherboard does have onboard networking, and cobble together bits of it and Boilingpoint until it works. (07:00)
- (07:10) Machine stops booting (Fans spin, nothing happens), fiddle with connections and reseat ram to fix it.
- (07:20) Machine stops turning on at all.
- Transfer everything back to Boilingpoint, which at least boots, for fucks sake.
- (07:45) Get tea, shower, email, clothes.
- Find spare network card in sock drawer.
- Install network card into IPCop
- Attempt to reconfigure IPCop as GREEN/RED instead of GREEN/RED
- Discover I can’t remember the root password for boilingpoint (Installed ~2003 and has Just Worked since then)
- Decide to screw this for a game of sontarians, and install Smoothwall instead (IPCops website is down. Brand loyalty is strong within me. Plus, Neuro’s been recommending Smoothwall instead forever)
- Realise I can’t install Smoothwall for the same reason I can’t bypass root on boilingpoint: because the reason it became a firewall box was that the PS/2 ports don’t work anymore, so cannot access it locally.
- I don’t have a USB keyboard.
- Plug the hard drive and network cards from Boilingpoint into Tsunami (Desktop) and install Smoothwall onto hard drive on that
- Transfer everything back over.
- This doesn’t work due to hard-drive naming.
- Cannot SSH into new box because default smoothwall install doesn’t have SSH.
- Cannot access web interface either. Don’t know why.
- Resolve to borrow a USB keyboard from someone.
- Now have to leave for Gamecamp London. Do so (10:00)
- Gamecamp is awesome. I’ll write more about it soon.
- After Gamecamp, go to party. After party, borrow USB keyboard from friend. Get home (02:00)
- Discover that Boilingpoint predates having USB ports on the motherboard.
- Search for PCI USB card we used to put a USB ADSL modem onto boilingpoint before we got the PCI modem.
- Fail
- Swear. Go to bed.
- Have another thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, and didn’t get up until the following morning.
- This morning: Decide to fix this once and for all.
- Search for ages. Find USB card in box with university diploma in it, on top of a book case.
- Repress momentary flash of optimism.
- Install PCI card, configure Smoothwall
- Access web interface.
- Configure SSH!
- Configure DHCP!
- Connection to cable modem (RED) doesn’t work.
- Swap network card roles a bit to see if it is a driver issue.
- Isn’t.
- More tea.
- Remember that ex-NTL Virgin Media customers will still suffer from the fact that once Virgin have a MAC address for the connecting machine, they won’t accept a connection from anything else.
- Put network back together. Access interwebs.
- Discover that Smoothwall corp count MAC spoofing as a premium fucking feature, not to be fucking included with the free fucking distrifuckingbution.
- Am a little put out by this.
- Find out how Smoothwall works a bit, and hack the config file to run
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55
to set the mac address when the RC script sources the file. - There are more elegant solutions than this, including paying for the software.
- Get a DHCP address!
- Get a connection!
- GET THE INTERWEBS!
- Boot Xbox 360. Remember the Xbox 360? This is a song about Xboxes.
- Cannot connect to XBox Live.
- headdesk
- headdesk
- headdesk
- Find a guide to opening up all the required ports to make an Xbox 360 work though Smoothwall
- Assign the open ports to a static DHCP record
- Xbox refuses to pick up the DHCP record.
- Cut all electricity to the network, TV & surrounds and everything for a while.
- Bring up everything in the right order.
- Xbox still picks up a standard DHCP address. Same one, in fact.
- Give in and move all the port forwarding to the address it wants anyway.
- Connect to XBox Live.
- Play GTA4.
- Get stuck.
- Write up all this.
- Hate technology.