Over the weekend I was playing around with my media server, bigsur. I use HellaNZB as my downloader and I really wanted a way to know when things are finished downloading. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to have my mediaserver ping me somehow when it is done downloading and processing an nzb? I then went on a search for such an application and could not find it. Could I be the first in need of such an application? Surely someone has built it… no? I couldn’t find a thing. So I decided to build my own notifier using twitter. That’s right… a twitter feed for my media server. I call it HellaTweet and you can download it from hellatweet.mikeheijmans.com.
Posted in Tech, Web.
Here is the problem. You are at work or visiting your mom back in your home state and you want to get access to your home network. You could:
- spend hours/days/years making a vpn work using a consumer grade vpn router which, lets face it, is a cheapo unreliable piece of hardware.
- buy a $500+ commercial grade vpn appliance
- spend hours/days/years building your own router using linux and add a vpn server to that
OR
You can use ssh to create a socks proxy.
What is a socks proxy? Socks is an internet protocol that facilitates the routing of network packets between client-server applications via a proxy server.
The first requirement is an open ssh server. You can use ssh on your router (if it has the feature – look at OpenWRT if not) or you can forward the ssh port from a server inside your network using the router. Most routers have port forwarding so this is the easiest solution. Make sure you set up something like dyndns so that you don’t have to remember your ip address. Plus most isp’s use dynamic ip addresses so your ip will change from time to time and dyndns will allow that to happen without you needing to do a thing.
Now that you can ssh to your home network you want to setup the tunnel. In the terminal you want to use the -D command to set the local socks port. Here is an example:
ssh -D 1080 -p 22 username@homenetwork.net
In the example 1080 is the port for your socks proxy to accept connections and 22 is ssh port that you are connecting to. Lastly is your username and host to connect to. Once you have logged in to the machine you can minimize the window.
Next, in firefox’s Preferrences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings Window or your computer’s network proxy settings. You configure the socks proxy as 127.0.0.1 port 1080.
That’s it. Now when you browse the internet the packet is going to the machine you connected to via ssh first. This means that you are browsing as if you were at that machine. You can then browse to local ip addresses in your home network and access those pages. For example, if your router’s status page is at 192.168.1.1/status you can type that in the url and get that page. Try it.
Posted in Tech.
I have never made an official New Year’s Resolution in my life but I really have some stuff I need to do this year and I am hoping that if I write some stuff down, I can do it. So here it goes.
This year I resolve to:
- Exercise 3 times a week.
- Resume morning meditation
- Pay off my credit cards
- Finish at least one personal project that I have started
- Write more things down so I don’t forget as much
- Take better care of myself
That’s it. Lets see how that works…
Posted in General.
If you are one of my regular readers, I am sure that you have noticed that I changed my blog’s look. I felt it was time for a change for 2009. (Plus my old theme had a bug that pissed me off) This new theme is a tweaked version of the carrington theme featured on the wordpress theme site. I tweaked the layout to match my style as you can see from the darker body background with the white content box and the full width footer. The problem is that the theme doesn’t seem to render properly in Internet Exploder. Stoopid microsoft :=/ I don’t support that browser anyway and if you are reading my blog with Internet Explorer… you should switch to Firefox, It is far superior! I have verified that it works great in Firefox and Safari. So enjoy the new look.
Posted in Web.
Much like many people, I got a Nintendo WII for the holidays and much like most of those people I attempted to signup for club nintendo – club.nintendo.com. I say attempted because nintendo doesn’t seem to know how to run a java web application or they didn’t plan for the kind of hit their application would receive after the holiday rush. I have been trying to register my wii serial number with them to extend my warranty and create my family account all day only to be met with 500 error after 500 error. The worst part is that they didn’t even create a custom error page. It is the standard error document. You will also notice that there was a 404 when the server attempted to fetch the error page it is supposed to display. It is bad enough that they can’t keep their app servers running but because of the sorry error document handling, I FAIL YOU NINTENDO!
Posted in Video Games.
By mike
December 30, 2008
