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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Why hardware NAT is not in OpenWRT

quorten

2020-02-11

Categories: home-network  
Tags: home-network  

Does OpenWRT support hardware NAT? Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, the answer is no. Yep, so that’s why the Linksys WRT AC3200 router that works well with OpenWRT must consume 12 volts at 2.5 amps. That’s the price you pay so that the NAT can all be done in software at gigabit speeds. So, don’t even bother asking if you can have gigabit routing speeds in LibreCMC.

Nevertheless, there were some pretty good attempts to get this project moved forward into mainline OpenWRT.

20200110/DuckDuckGo openwrt hardware nat
20200110/https://forum.openwrt.org/t/hardware-nat-for-lede/1094
20200110/https://dev.archive.openwrt.org/ticket/11779
20200110/https://openfastpath.org/
20200110/https://openfastpath.org/index.php/service/technicaloverview/

Libre software Windows 7?

quorten

2020-02-11

Categories: windows   license   legal  
Tags: windows   license   legal  

Wow, now this is a really interesting idea. Campaign Microsoft to release Windows 7 as libre software, now that it reached its “end of life.” It doesn’t have to die… they can just shift the stewardship of it elsewhere.

It would be very interesting if this campaign did make it to full fruition, but chances are that it will go pretty much nowhere, unfortunately.

20200210/https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/tell-microsoft-to-upcycle-windows-7-set-it-free

Crows are among the most intelligent animals in a different way

quorten

2020-02-11

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Yes, I know that crows are among the most intelligent animals… but this is interesting. They don’t have a neocortex, but instead evolveed different parts of their brain to achieve their high level of intelligence.

20200210/https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/12/12/2322253/crows-could-be-the-smartest-animal-other-than-primates

Interesting Wells Fargo story about efforts of home loan assistant when a family was in need

quorten

2020-02-10

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Wow, this is an interesting Wells Fargo story about how a home loan processing person was able to help a family in need. They were going through tough times, their son had leukemia and his mom quit her job to be able to help more with taking care of her, and they saw they would not be able to keep paying for their home loan mortgage in their current situation. With help from the Wells Fargo side, they were able to work out a temporary change to the home loan terms for an exception to not make the mortgage payments for a year, in exchange for extending the length of the mortgage term by one year.

20200210/https://stories.wf.com/helping-save-home-carter/

Twitter for blog comments, and strengths of blogging over Twitter and Facebook

quorten

2020-02-10

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

So, I’m looking for different solutions for creating a commenting ability on my blog, and the idea came, how about using Twitter to post comments to my blog? Well, the big disadvantage with that is that the Twitter API can only search within the last week. There you go, not a long-term solution.

20200210/DuckDuckGo blog comments via twitter
20200210/https://medium.com/zesty-tutorials/use-twitter-for-blog-comments-54d6bd7c8b99

Additionally, I’ve found this interesting article about folks lamenting Twitter and Facebook posts compared to good old lively blog comments. The length limit on Twitter tweets is one of its key weaknesses.

20200210/https://www.cre8d-design.com/2012/04/blogs-vs-twitter-and-facebook/

pfsense versus openwrt

quorten

2020-02-10

Categories: home-network  
Tags: home-network  

So, what’s the difference between pfsense and OpenWRT? Well, a cursory web search seems to point to this: pfsense was originally designed for full-blown x86 hardware, so it has many more features because the hardware is much more powerful, but OpenWRT originally targeted mainly small embedded routers. So, there you have it. If you want to go big, go with pfsense. If you want to stay “relatively” small, stick with OpenWRT… though the growing bloat of the Linux kernel used in OpenWRT is pretty much leveling out the differences.

So, if you think the baseline Linux kernel has grown hopelessly bloated. then you might as well just switch to pfsense. On the other hand, maybe you think the meager attempt at simplicity will result in a more secure system nonetheless, so you could stick with OpenWRT on that argument.

20200210/DuckDuckGo pfsense versus openwrt
20200210/https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?topicid=195079
20200210/https://forum.netgate.com/topic/34846/pfsense-vs-openwrt/2
20200210/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075352
20200210/https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/4dklc7/pfsense_vs_openwrt/

Bill Gates does **not** have a GitHub account, other interesting facts about Bill Gates

quorten

2020-02-07

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Now, surely I’ve asked this question before, but it’s worth asking again. Does Bill Gates have a GitHub account?

Well, it’s hard to get an answer to that question, but a related question has quite a worthy answer to cover. Does Bill Gates have a Facebook account? Maybe, it’s hard to say if he really has one or there was just some faker out there. Nevertheless, his E-mail address from a Windows fanboy website lists “B.Gates@Microsoft.com”, so chances are if you see a similar username, it’s likely to be the real one… like that commenter on Ubuntu Bug #1. What about his smartphone? Well, he’s been seen with an iPhone once before, claiming that although he thought Windows phone to be better, he wanted to see exactly how much better Windows Phone is than iPhone.

20200207/DuckDuckGo does bill gates have a github account 20200207/https://www.quora.com/Does-Bill-Gates-have-a-smartphone-or-a-Facebook-account?share=1
20200207/https://www.quora.com/What-phone-and-computer-does-Bill-Gates-use

20200207/https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

B Gates wrote:

As far as I am concerned, this behavior works as expected. It should be marked as a feature, not a bug.

Okay okay… maybe that was just a joke too.

Read on →

Migrate a Windows XP physical machine to a virtual machine

quorten

2020-02-07

Categories: windows  
Tags: windows  

Running Windows XP on modern virtual machines is easier than doing likewise with Windows 98, so surely migrating an existing physical Windows XP machine to a virtual machine should also be easier, right? Wrong, surprisingly it’s actually harder!

So, what’s the problem? At boot, you get a blue screen of death error: stop 0x0000007b (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). This indicates that Windows XP is unable to access the hard drive because of a driver error.

So, here’s the problem. Windows XP hard-codes the IDE disk controller name into the disk driver during boot, and if that changes, like during a migration to a virtual machine, Windows XP will fail the check and refuse to boot. Luckily, there are ways to relax the stringentness of the checking so that it will be flexible enough to boot under a new hardware platform.

The other issue is that you’ve got to be careful about changing aspects of ACPI availability, IO APIC, and so on. There is a specific HAL driver configured for a particular machine, and again if this changes, Windows XP will refuse to boot.

The VirtualBox article provides a good overview of the overall process.

Read on →

Interesting bug in the original Adventure game

quorten

2020-02-07

Categories: twitter   random-software  
Tags: twitter   random-software  

Oh, wow, here is an interesting bug in the original Adventure game, purportedly whose discovery was not published until relatively recently. What is it? It is peculiarities with how the capacity of containers are counted in your inventory. A quirk in the rules required some exceptional condition handling code to be copied and pasted throughout many different other locations in the code, but some locations were missed. The result? You can effectively increase your inventory capacity by one.

20200206/https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/02/06/water-bottle-bug/