cl0secall.net

Battlefield 3: Black Screen of Death fixed

cl0secall — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:00:36 +0000

In a previous post, I explained that while I was able to correct one major problem with BF3 after the 11-22 patch, I was now seeing a separate, more insidious issue where the game would lock up in between maps. I believe I’ve now fixed this as well by running PBSETUP and updating the game’s PunkBuster files manually.

Battlefield 3: Post Patch Woes, Part 2

cl0secall — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:10:57 +0000

I was able to partially resolve my Battlefield 3 issues (as posted here) by running a “repair” operation on the game from the Origin client. Numerous rounds of Windows Updates and driver updates didn’t help at all. Now the game seems to crash on map changes under certain circumstances, but I haven’t been able to isolate the problem yet.

A Different Kind of Linkrot

cl0secall — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:37:28 +0000

I’ve increasingly noticed that searching the web for answers to various technical questions gets me a lot of dead-ends or infinite loops. For example, when searching recently for information on libnss-ldap and libnss-compat, I found this forum thread: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/miscellaneous/172807-name-service-switch-file-nsswitch-conf-what-compat.html. It conveniently doesn’t answer the question — instead referring the reader to search Google. I ended up using different query terms and finding what I was looking for but as I said, this is happening more and more.

I find it interesting and somewhat bothersome that these types of responses — typically snarky to boot — are becoming more prevalent in search results and I hope it doesn’t get too out of hand.

Battlefield 3: Post Patch Woes

cl0secall — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:12:34 +0000

In short, the game won’t launch post-patch (the Nov 22 patch). I’ve tried installing the latest AMD video drivers, and all of the current windows updates, to no avail. Now I’m going to try leaving it in this state (trying to launch) overnight to see what happens.

FusionPBX Provisioning

cl0secall — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:08:51 +0000

I got FusionPBX Provisioning to work on my beta HomePBX system. Turns out that you must specify only one of TFTP or FTP provisioning directory, or else the system will not be able to write out all of the files. This is because it unsets one of the variables ($file_name) after writing out the file once, but will still try to write out the file a second time in the FTP directory anyways (with an empty filename). Fun times. Because the system writes out all of the files to this directory, I was able to cobble together an nginx config that allows my Polycom phone to provision and push logs to the provisioning directory. Still no luck getting it to register though.

FreeSwitch

cl0secall — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:04:43 +0000

One thing I feel I’ve learned in the world of systems administration is that although there is such a thing as good documentation, it’s much like good food. It’s only good right after you make it, or if you take very good care of it. Depending on how you made it, it might not keep very well. All this to say, FreeSWITCH’s documentation left me lost and confused. The documentation seemed to me to be very fragmented, in that the valuable parts were scattered amongst various wiki articles and blog posts about how someone got FreeSWITCH working with specific hardware for specific purposes. It would have been nice to have seen an overview about some general conventions and a thorough description of what happens when you turn up FreeSWITCH out-of-the-box.

Compare this to Elastix (which is really just FreePBX + addons) where you can dig around in the GUI and get most of the configuration figured out fairly quickly. It’s not an apt comparison or a very fair one, but it describes my predicament. I am attempting to use FusionPBX with FreeSWITCH but it seems like FusionPBX doesn’t really take the bumps out of FreeSWITCH, rather just simplifies access to the configs.

In any case, here’s what I have on FreeSWITCH so far:

It’s very important to understand that the XML configuration files are all interpolated into a single file at runtime. This file is located at /var/log/freeswitch/freeswitch.xml.fsxml on FreeBSD. I had problems with redundant tags and nesting that were happening because documentation and HOWTO snippets weren’t explicit in how to specifically apply each example. (in other words Copy & Paste fail.)
When configuring POTS hardware, it’s important to note that DAHDI drivers instruct you to configure your analog ports with the signalling you expect to see from the far endpoint (on an FXO port, you would configure FXS signalling, as the CO side will use that signalling.) FreeTDM does the opposite — you configure the port with the signalling that the port will use. (On and FXO port, you would configure FXO signalling.) I didn’t see this in any of the documentation until after I found it mentioned in an e-mail to the freeswitch-users mailing list. I then found it on an FAQ/troubleshooting page. I lost two days to figuring this out. Mostly because I was doing this at 3am those days.
Internally, FreeSWITCH seems to refer to endpoints using a nomenclature like this: module/instance/counter. For example, (FreeTDM/trunk/1) or (sofia/internal/1000@example.com). There also seems to be an alternative nomenclature which causes some sort of internal resolver process to be used to identify the specific endpoint: “extension dialplan_type dialplan_context“. For example “1000 XML default”. Examples in the documentation didn’t appear to explain this at all. I had lots of trouble getting my FreeTDM extensions to work properly, to an extent that I began to believe that I wouldn’t be able to use my hardware under FreeBSD. It turned out that I was putting them in the configuration wrong. I had “FreeTDM/1/2″ or “FreeTDM/exten/1/2″ (meaning module/span_number/channel_number” or “module/span_name/span_number/channel_number” instead of the correct nomenclature above.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m more interested in getting this posted for now, and getting something more formalized up later. I’ve been working with FreeSwitch more over the past few days since I started writing this post on the 30th and things are coming along, slowly. I at least have the PSTN stuff fairly well down, and got voicemail and SIP registrations partially working as well. The next steps are to smooth eveything out and get some better logging and UI in place (e.g. error reports when lines are busy, etc.)

Update Nagging: Getting out of Hand

cl0secall — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:50:56 +0000

These days it seems I have less and less time to use my machine, let alone maintain things. At the same time I’ve noticed that software has become increasingly whiny and nagging when “new versions” become available. WordPress, FireFox, SumatraPDF, FileZilla, Notepad++ are just a few that come to mind that more often than not demand that an update get installed close to every time I use them. (Maybe not so much with FireFox.)

What’s the point? I’m not really sure. A quick search on the WordPress nag indicates that it’s some kind of nudge towards “don’t come crying in the forums if some nifty ajax thingy doesn’t work in your ancient browser”. Like that’s going to work. Congratulations, now folks will barge into your forums and complain about the nagging pop-ups.

I do know one thing: Each and every one of those programs is up for review to be replaced with something less needy. I need a bit more longevity out of my software. WordPress and FireFox are at the top of that list. I’ve been planning a Django migration for some time now, and I’ve been exploring alternate browsers as well.

Brave New Worlds

cl0secall — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:25:47 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of exciting things lately — too many to go into great detail right now.

FreeSwitch / FusionPBX as a replacement for Elastix. This is allowing me to roll all of the services provided by the Elastix box into another already built system.
URL Shortener. Still in progress, but hopefully coming soon.
Anti-Spam stuff — site-wide SpamAssassin with Spam-folder support.
XMPP Server with Conferencing

Additionally, I have been pipe-dreaming up more projects to keep me busy.

ClamAV for the anti-spam stuff, plus a web-based quarantine manager
Debating breaking down and installing a IMAP-backed webmail package
Diaspora seeds
lighttpd or nginx as reverse proxy / static host to replace Apache
Django as a replacement for WordPress and gateway to many more things for the site.

I have been forced to budget my time somethin’ fierce, but here and there I’ve made some great progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to document it all here at some point.

MicroStorage

cl0secall — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:29:38 +0000

I’ve made some progress on my MicroStorage project. Some day I’ll have to document it in a page here. I managed to get the storage server and my XP workstation log in using Kerberos credentials and be able to talk to each other. The downside is that Windows 7 is not cooperating. I’ve taken a quick peek at having my Mac talk to the storage server but that may prove to be troublesome as well.

The Windows 7 issue seems to be related to intricacies of the newer MS kerberos implementation.

Brink

cl0secall — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:26:25 +0000

Been playing Brink a good amount since the release date. Don’t really have too much to say about it other than I like it. I wish they had linux server files for it so I could run it on my box here. In the meantime I’m examining the option of running it under wine.