Today, I restored the “Network Settings” on my iPhone to factory defaults only to find that my phone didn’t boot up afterwards. Sigh – cursing Apple’s name under my breath I go to do Restore through iTunes. Since I was jailbroken at 3.1.2, and didn’t want to upgrade to 3.1.3 since I needed my unlock to work.

Here we go, I fire up iTunes, Option+Click Restore, and select the 3.1.2 firmware ipsw for my 3GS. Extracting firmware… waiting…waiting…

“This device isn’t eligible for the requested build”

Hmm?! I figured that this would be an issue with the SHSH hashes which I stored on Saurik’s site when I clicked “Make my life easier” in Cydia.

I had my hosts file entry pointing at the proper place as well:

74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com

All the Googling looked like I was screwed and would have to upgrade to 3.1.3 because Saurik’s site didn’t store my SHSH hashes. Well f*** me I wasn’t going to go out and shell out another grand on a new iPhone.

After hours of fiddling, getting bitched at by my girlfriend, 3 missed calls from work, I finally came up with a solution to this problem.

It looks like Saurik’s site @ gs.apple.com DID in fact store the hashes, but wasn’t sending them to iTunes properly.

Anyhow, go to http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/2009/09/tinytss-all-your-iphone-restores-are.html and download the fw-umbrella package there.

Grab your ECID using one of the bazillion tutorials on the internet (http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/09/grab-and-get-signed-your-ecid-for-iphone-3gs-os-3-1/ <– one for the lazy people out there)

Open up Umbrella on whatever OS you may be using.

Paste your ECID that you got earlier on into the box. Select 3.1.2 3GS, make sure that Saurik is selected for the source, and hit Submit.

Now, go open up your Command Line or Terminal, go to the directory where you downloaded Umbrella (fw-umbrella), and type out the following command:

Mac OS:

sudo java -jar tinytss.jar -f 000000000-iphone-3.1.2.shsh

Windows:

tinytss.exe -f 000000000-iphone-3.1.2.shsh

Now, change your /etc/hosts entry to:

127.0.0.1 gs.apple.com

Fire up iTunes, go through the usual Restore routine while in DFU mode, and voila! It should work.

Peace out,
Brennan

Just as a quick reference, for people with “Packet Teigaku Full” plans using their iPhone, the current APN info is the following:

APN: smile.world
Username: dna1trop
Password: so2t3k3m2a

Cheers!

Ok, so you installed OpenVPN, generated your certificates, configured your server.conf, and you are connected via your client. Easy enough eh? But you now realize that you can’t ping anything on the internal network that you are connecting to. You checked, and IP Forwarding is enabled, and your push “route” rules are set properly. You start pulling your hair out, then you put your fist through the KVM. No need anymore.

To get this working, all you have to do is enable IP Masqurading for the tun0 interface via iptables. The following two lines should do the trick for POSTROUTING.

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s <vpn-network> -o <internal-interface> -j MASQUERADE

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s <internal-network> -o <vpn-interface> -j MASQUERADE

Hope this helps!

Brennan

I’ve been real busy for the past few weeks and haven’t had time to blog about anything, so I decided to upload a screenshot of my current desktop layout. It changes most every month, so I will be doing this monthly. The wallpapers I use are avaliable on my Gallery site.

The SSH Client I am using is called PieTTY. It is one of the best PuTTY mods I have seen, and by far the most astetically pleasing with features like Alpha-blending and Glass Pane mode. It also supports East Asian Characters, so it is a must for Chinese/Japanese users.

Brennan

I got the iPhone 3G on Rogers on the first of this month, and I’ve been happily using it for the past few weeks. I had the silent/ring switch break off, but Rogers was great about sending a replacement unit right away, and I had a new one (albiet with one little nick in it) within 3 days.

Anyways, I hear all this crap about the iPhone 3G having reception issues, but on the EDGE network in Canmore RIGHT in the middle of the Rocky Mountains seems to be perfectly fine. I even have reception where my buddies with HTC Smartphones don’t. And with 3G reception anywhere in Calgary, it’s been flawless, with me having steady 4-5 bars all over the place. I haven’t have a single dropped call on both the 3G and EDGE networks, and no random switching from 3G to EDGE – although the phone switches from EDGE to that really really slow data connection when I only have 1 bar or less sometimes.

This goes for THREE iPhones we have in our house. Two 8GBs (including replacement), and one 16GB. I’m begining to wonder whether or not it is Apple’s issue, and just the networks being overloaded by the extensive data-usage that iPhone users rack up?

What’s your take on this?

I found this to be quire hillarious actually

Isn’t there a way to filter advertisments?!

Brennan

My new system specs are:

• Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz @ 4.0GHz
  • 444 x 9.0, 1.32 VCore
• EVGA nForce 780i SLi
• 4GB Crucial Ballistix PC6400 @ 889MHz
• EVGA nVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX *2 SLi
• Zalman 9700 Quiet CPU Fan
• WD Raptor 74GB 10k *2 in RAID0

This system scores around 17k in 3DMark 06, and 9k in 3DMark Vantage. Not the absolute best, but good enough to play Crysis @ Very High @ 1680×1050. Here is a screenie:

Here is a picture of the system itself:

And a naked GeForce 9800GTX core

Brennan

All the critical articles on the site are back up. There may be a few quirks here and there, but please feel free to let me know via e-mail or a comment.

Thanks!

Brennan

After around three months of installing various software that uses SQL Server 2005 on my ESX server, my SQL VM finally reached it’s disk limit. I was poking around in the command line for the actual ESX server, and found a tool called vmkfstools that could do the job for me. You can resize the disk by running the command:

vmkfstools -X <size-in-mb>M <image-file>

So for example if i wanted to resize the file server.vmdk to 60GB, I would run:

vmkfstools -X 60000M server.vmdk

That was the easy part. Now I booted into Hiren’s BootCD (you can find this on the net), and ran Acronis Boot Manager to resize my partition. You can alternatively boot into the Recovery Console for Windows 2003/XP or run the Command Line on Windows Vista/2008 and run diskpart to accomplish the same thing.
That went all well and my disks were properly resized…. or so I thought, till I was greeted with the following message on boot:

Winload.exe?! Well scared that my OS was corrupt, I booted into the Windows 2008 Server CD and ran the command prompt. dir C:\ still showed all my files there, and C:\Windows\System32\ still had winload.exe in it. Just for shits and giggles, I replaced the file with the one in X:\Windows\System32 and tried rebooting.

Still didn’t work.

I booted back into the install DVD, clicked “Repair Computer”, but this time I noticed that my disk size was 0, and it said “Unknown” next to the disk. My gears were turning, and I realized that this might mean that my MBR was corrupt. Running bcdedit.exe /v confirmed that. Instead of saying:

device partition=C:

it said

device unknown

Recalling what I did a year a so back when my MBR was corrupt, I ran the following commands:

bootrec.exe /FixMbr
bootrec.exe /FixBoot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

As soon as I rebooted, my system booted up without any issues!

Hope this helps anyone else this has happened to,

Brennan

When using SharePoint with a proxy server such as ISA, you will need to configure SharePoint Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) if the external address and the internal address are different. For example, if your internal address is http://wssserver/ and your external address is http://wssserver.domainname.com/. Here is a simple guide to configuring AAM on MOSS or WSS Server.

1. Open up your SharePoint Central Administration on the server running SharePoint.
2. Navigate to Operations under Central Administration.
3. Open up Alternate access mappings under Global Configuration
4. Click Edit Public URLs
5. Select your Alternate Access Mapping Collection (your web application)
6. Then enter the respective URLs that the application will be accessed via.
7. I usually do an iisreset /noforce after this.

I found that the other tutorials on the internet wern’t straight to the point, and it was hard to understand them. Hopefully this clears things up for Sharepoint novices out there!
Brennan