miniupnpdlinuxigd: trivial. Click a few buttons to enable it, done. I tried miniupnpd first; but althought it initially looked good, I couldn’t get it to work consistently.

However, that’s when I start getting the MobileMe prefpane telling me that BTMM couldn’t start because “Your DNS server isn’t responding”. A little bit of searching on Google finds me pages like this one, which baldly state that “Back to My Mac isn’t compatible with dnsmasq.”

Well, dear internets, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. BTMM is perfectly compatible with dnsmasq. Sure,openwrt’s default settings don’t work, but that doesn’t make the two incompatible.

It did take me a while to figure out what was going on. The clue also came from Apple’s forums, which told me to do this:

betelgeuse:~ james$ echo "show State:/Network/BackToMyMac" | scutil
<dictionary> {
  zhasper.members.mac.com : <dictionary> {
    ExternalAddress : 143.211.101.234
    StatusMessage : GetZoneData failed: _afpovertcp._tcp.username.members.mac.com.
    AutoTunnelExternalPort : 4500
    StatusCode : -65554
    LLQExternalPort : 5353
    RouterAddress : 192.168.0.1
    LastNATMapResultCode : 0
  }
}

The vital clue was the StatusMessage, which tells you exactly which DNS lookup failed. The important thing is that the hostname starts with an underscore.

Take a look at the dnsmasq man page, specifically the filterwin2k option. Once upon a time, SRV records (and records with underscores) really were a sign that you had win2k machines on your network. Once upon a time, “triggering dial-on-demand links” was actually something to be worried about. Those times are long past.

I turned this option off (vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, add a # at the start of that line to comment the option out, save the file, and run /etc/init.d/S65dnsmasq to restart the service). As expected BTMM now works fine. Well, as fine as you could expect.

[1] I’m ideologically opposed to all things UPnP, and BTMM in particular. What’s the point of having a firewall if you’re going to allow everything inside to poke so many holes in it it may as well not be there? There’s nothing BTMM can give me that a small firewall hole (to allow SSH on a non-standard port) + ssh portforwarding can’t give me in a more controlled way — and without shelling out $$$ to Uncle Steve, too. Nevertheless…

Shtep One: Download the iPhone Configuration Utility from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bottom where you can stipulate self-wipe after as little as 5 incorrect passphrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload config as per instructions in the “Installing Configuration Profiles” section of the Deployment Guide.

Phdone.

Today I saw something new:

That’s right: two complete posts consisting of nothing more than the same ad.

Scrolling down shows me that the very next item is exactly the same add from “The Fail Blog”, another site operated by the same company.

Ads with content I can stand. Ads without content?  *unsubscribe*

All is forgiven.

PS phone is charging off the USB port, a nice touch. Pic related, droid included for scale.

I love you. Really I do. Out of all two international airlines I’ve flown, your by far the best. I’m only flying cattle class, in your planes cattle can only be a reference to those Japanese cows that live a hand-fed, daily massaged life.

It’s the little things you do so well that make the difference: the hot towel immediately on takeoff, recognising that just getting to the airport can be a hard day. The frequent — it feels like every ten minutes, but is probably more like once an hour — offers of a juice or water. I don’t do booze on flights, but the couple beside me do, and your staff have kept them supplied with beer and Baileys until they stopped whining (the couple, not the staff — as far as I can tell, bringing a constant stream of booze for this couple fulfilled the childhood dreams of the staff, judging by the looks on their faces)

I do apologise — turns out they weren’t sated, just resting — but once again the hostess bringing the booze seem thrilled to be of service. It’s little things like that that make me return every weekend to my favorite local cafe, and will keep me returning to your airline.

You get the big things right too — last time I flew SQ, I had the absolute pleasure of riding in an A380 from SIN to SYD. Being first to fly that plane, something you’re rightfully proud of, is just a small demonstration of your comittment to remaining one of the world’s leading airlines.

Right now I’m treating myself to a runthrough of my Living End albums on my iPod. This is a real treat — their early work remains some of my favourite music of all time, and I don’t get to listen to it often enough.

As nice as this is, it’s not what I had in mind when I boarded your aircraft. You see, you’re famous for your entairnment system, and again, rightly so. The games leave a bit to be desired, but your movie and TV selection is second to none. It’s not just the number of programs — it’s the variety! Hollywood, Bollywood, European and Chinese — you have a vast range of programming from all over the world. The first thing I did on boading the plane was to peruse your entertainment guide and plan my next 8 hours of relaxation.

So why am I listening to my own music? Because your entairnment system has failed me. It’s been off for over half the flight. It was off for over 90 minutes at the start of the flight. Eventually it came up, but minus the Video On Demand. Even so, I managed to watch some of Gomorrah on broadcast channel 13 — but before the movie ended, the system rebooted again.

After a considerable time with no entertainment the system came back. This time I decided to go for something shorter, so I started on some of the TV documentaries. I managed a show about gardens in India, and most of another show, before the system crashed entirely. Still about 2 hours from Singapore, and my only entertainment is provided by the music I provided my self, and writing you this rant.

I’m not going to pretend this means I won’t be back: an SQ flight with no entertainment still beats most carriers. I just want to let you know that flight SQ232 today was almost the perfect flight — it was only your entertainment system that let you down.

I loom forward to flying SQ again soon — my next three segments are already booked, the last one once again on your A380, the first mere minutes after I get off this flight — and look forward on particular to being reminded just how good your system can be when it’s working.

However, the initial setup was a struggle.

The device has a very limited openwrt-style firmware. Very, very limited: it contains the bare minimum functionality to be able to bootstrap the device with a more capable OS once you have disks installed.

The documented way of doing this is via a “QuickInstall Wizard”, that comes on a provided CD in Mac and Windows flavors. I only have Macs on my home network, so the windows flavor wasn’t useable for me. The Mac flavor is… interesting. I ran into the problem described here: In short, the full firmware isn’t pushed until after the drives are initiated; but the Wizard gets stuck at the “Initializing drives” stage, so the full firmware is never pushed.

I got around it using these instructions — they’re described as being “For linux”, but as it just uses basic tools like telnet and ftpd, it will work on any *nix.

Some notes:

• Obviously, had to enable file sharing via FTP on my mac first. Did this under “Sharing” prefpane, “File Sharing”, “Share files and folders using FTP”. As the warning states, this involves transmitting your username and password in cleartext: only enable this if you’re confident you’ll only be transmitting them across a safe network. Better, use a username/password you created just for this purpose; which has no special privileges, and which will be turned off as soon as you’re done.
• Out of the box, the device listens for telnet connections on port 13131. Username and password are “admin”.
• Once you’ve successfully updated the firmare and rebooted, you won’t find a telnetd on 13131 any more. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR, DON’T PANIC. Instead, you’ll find an sshd listening on port 22.
• You’ll also find a web interface listening on port 8080. If you visit that, you can start the process of setting up the device.
• It may be helpful to have let the wizard run at least to the “Initializing drives” stage at least once. After I thought I knew what I was doing I switched to a new set of disks and tried again; and this time the hard drives weren’t mounted at all, so I couldn’t go through the documented process.

It’s not clear from the documentation, but the device creates a RAID-1 segment 500Mb in size on each disk you insert (/dev/md9 in my case), and mounts this on /mnt/HDA_ROOT. This is where configs for the device, packages you install, and so on are stored.

The device can handle multiple raidsets — although with only 4 disks to play with, you’re not likely to end up with >2 sets. In my cause I currently have 3 1Tb drives in a RAID-5 set, and a single 500Gb disk sitting on its own.

Same view, 1920.

That’s the Powerhouse Museum, located between Pyrmont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a helicopter, the view would look something like this:

Imagine if you could magically click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from sometime between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older picture, look beyond the chimneystack, and just to the left. Immediately beyond the chimney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle corner. The road then continues up the picture — but it’s not quite straight, it bends a little to the right. If you look at the modern picture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle corner and the same not-quite-straight road — although now the Western Distributor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large building inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That building is Global Switch Sydney — built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s starting to reach full capacity.

The railway line visible in the earlier picture was the Darling Harbour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Metropolitan Goods Railway Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.

This led to the source of (apparently) all pet insurance in Australia; which then led to comparison shopping between the various resellers.

The differences are amusing, but annoying. One provides 15k total cover; but only $500 for tick paralysis. Another only offers 9k total cover; but removes the restrictions on what percentage of that can be used for drugs/medication vs how much is for dental care. None of them cover treatment for leukemia in cats; but some add an additional clause declining to cover any condition for which there is a vaccine.

I’d like to go with the RSPCA - if someone has to make a profit, they seem like a better choice than some of the for-profit companies. But the limits are half that provided by Medibank, while the premiums are double. Sure you can skim profit off the top, but that doesn’t mean I want you to gouge me for every cent I own.

Gah. Choices, that aren’t really choices. Just what I wanted.