‘Black Ops’ has become an obsession with me.  Often my dreams are filled with the crack of gunfire and the guttural gurgling of fallen comrades and enemies.  When not working, I find myself looking at others’ game play videos on YouTube to find the best weapon load outs or what perks go best with what.  I’m completely in love with this first person shooter.  There are many who would argue that it is not the best in the series but I could care less.  That being said, I have had a great deal of trouble connecting to the servers and, once connected, staying on them.  Being a fairly savvy network type I traced it back to the configuration of my router at home.  A few quick Google searches and I found the ports that ‘Black Ops’ requires to be opened in order to optimize my game play.

What is NAT?  NAT stands for Network Address Translation.  It is the only way that the internet is possible today.  There are millions more devices on the internet than there are internet addressable IP addresses.  What NAT does for us is allow many devices to share one internet IP address.  Most internet providers supply their customers with a router which has wireless and all sorts of other bells and whistles.  Among these whistles and bells NAT is intrinsic.  As devices connect to the router it hands them IP addresses in the ranges: 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255, 198.168.0.0-192.168.255.255.  These addresses will NEVER get anywhere on the internet.  They are not routed by internet devices.  When a router is connected to the ISP it is given an internet route-able IP address.  As devices contact other devices on the internet they flow through the router.  When a connection is made through the router a dynamic port is configured which the router associates with that connection.  In this way, the router is able to keep track of connections from many devices using a single IP address.

When is NAT a problem?  When you have devices connected to the router, devices on the internet cannot contact them unless the connections are configured on the router.  With ‘Black Ops’ those connections are made to the PS3 on TCP ports 80,81,443,3074, and 5223 and on UDP ports 3074,3075, and 3478.  In multiplayer game mode there are three NAT ‘types,’ strict, moderate, and open.  Of these open is the one to have.  Since I’ve been playing the ‘Call of Duty’ series I have always had a NAT type of moderate.  This hasn’t been an issue until recently when I became so obsessed with the game.  Enough with the rant, here is the configuration on my Cisco 881 router that allowed my to go from moderate to open NAT:

ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 80 interface FastEthernet4 80
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 81 interface FastEthernet4 81
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 443 interface FastEthernet4 443
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 3074 interface FastEthernet4 3074
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 5223 interface FastEthernet4 5223
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3074 interface FastEthernet4 3074
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3075 interface FastEthernet4 3075
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3478 interface FastEthernet4 3478

access-list 150 remark COD-BlackOps
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq www
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 81
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 443
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3074
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 5223
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3074
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3075
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3478

This of course requires that you have a static IP address assigned to your PS3.

The line I changed was:

SUPP_CONFIG_FILE=/data/misc/wifi/bcm_supp.conf

to:

SUPP_CONFIG_FILE=/data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf

Enable your wireless.  The SSID that you want revealed is entered into the HiddenSSID Enabler.  Once you go back into the wireless configuration the SSID should show up.  After all of the things I tried, this was the simplest way to get a hidden SSID with enterprise WPA encryption to work on my phone.

Another toy I have enjoyed hacking on is the Samsung Moment.  I’ve had it since December and it has been a really good phone.  It runs Google’s Android and is very stable.  I’ve hacked it (thanks to work of others) to run Android 2.1 (among other things) rather than the stock and somewhat elderly 1.5.  I’m installing WordPress for my phone so I may be able to keep up posting a bit more.

Probably the best thing I have found (thanks to a Co-worker) is the WD HDTV Live.  This thing plays every video/audio format that I have thrown at it and comes back for more.  I’ve hacked it (thanks to b-rad) and can ssh into it and set mount points to be started on initialization, customize backgrounds and icons, run a torrent grabber and many many other functions.  Admittedly I am not really doing much with it other than playing video.  I have sucessfully played 2 full Blu-Ray movies (ripped straight from Blu-ray still in m2ts format) on two WDTV Live from my TS-659 without any problem.  This is when the videos are shared with NFS or through TwonkyMedia server (comes stock with the TS-659.)  Pretty impressive.

None of this would be possible without the loving support of my wife who loves the fact that we have the most tech toys on the block.

What have I been doing you may ask?  I’ve recently upgraded my television, reciever, and gotten a PS3.  Having the NS4300N has been a godsend while endlessly streaming “Meet the Robinsons” for my son, who will watch the movie over and over again.  I’ve conquered the whole blu-ray ripping, sucessfully backing up a blu-ray and copying it to my NAS for replay in all of its full 1080p glory on my PS3 (purchased and built a new server/workstation to achieve this goal).  All of this while trying to keep up with my son who continues to blossom and amaze me.  Since the time of my last post he has begun speaking and his vocabulary is growing exponentially every day.  As you can tell I’ve been very busy.

Anywho, I upgraded WordPress for this site to 2.8.2 and thought I should post something to test it out.  I’m not making any promising anything but I will try to keep this updated.  After looking at the lack of hits here, I’m not quite sure why.

Good news is my unit was less than a year old and the good people at Promise sent me a brandy new one (RMA).  Bad news is, I had to blow everything away on my old RAID to get it running.  I’m in the process of copying all of my music over now.  So, back to the drawing board on the upgrade hacking.  I do have an updated MediaTomb package in the works that I have tested on my new server which  provides for rsyncd, admin telnet access and sudo permissions.  I’m working directly with the guys developing mediatomb and should have an unofficial package out after they release 0.12.0 in December ’08.

In the previous post I mentioned that I was trying to get the videos up to Google Video.  I’ve managed to do that with the videos in the DVD format.  They are a pretty good size and look good after a few seconds of streaming.  It would probably be better to convert them to a smaller size before uploading due to some bandwidth restrictions.

First you have to get the high definition off of the cam.  For this I use dvgrab.  The important thing to remember is that for high definition you must specify the -f hdv command line option.  The exact command line I used is:

dvgrab -f hdv -a -timecode <FILENAME>

This takes the imput from the first channel (firewire) and automatically appends the date and time of the recording to the filename provided.  Each time a new recording is detected it automatically starts a new file.  Pretty handy if you want to take the video off a whole tape at once.  The video that is left is in a very large format and not really worth much.  It is in high definition which is 1280×1080 in my case and doesn’t play well in anything excluding VLC media player.  The files are huge and unless they are very short in duration YouTube won’t let you upload them.  To get them in to a more reasonable size I use a utility called tovid.  My main goal here is to try to get the video files on to a regular DVD, or up to a video site like Google Video or YouTube.  The first thing I do is take all of the raw HD files and back them up to my NAS.  After that I take the files one at a time and convert them.  The command I use for that is:

tovid -ffmpeg -interlaced_bf -ntsc -dvd -wide -noask -in <INFILE> -out <OUTFILE>

I’ve found that using ffmpeg does a better job of syncing the sound with the video.  The options are pretty self explanitory.  The output is a DVD formatted video file which is much more playable by typical video players and of a much more manageable size.  A simple cat command will put any videos together that you want to make in to one.  Once you do that though you’ll have to use the above to fix the SCR before you can put them on a DVD.  I’m in the middle of figuring out exactly what tool to use to actually get the files to a DVD.  Once I figure that out I’ll update.

kcontrol -> KDE Components -> Session Manager -> Change the Window manager to compiz

If you still want to be able to configure compiz through fusion-icon, launch it with the -n parameter (-n, –no-start      Run, but do not start a window manager).

If you’re running c-f with an nvidia card (as I am) and you are having some problems with the inactive desktops not refreshing properly, I found that adding:

Option       “UseCompositeWrapper” “true”
to my device section fixed it for me.  Some day nvidia will fix the problem permanently.  I’m using the Beta drivers now and they don’t address the issue.  Next post will be on uploading video from my HD camera to video sites (google and youtube).