Birds Like Wires

It was only a matter of time. I’ve had two Pi boards sat around for a while now; so long, in fact, that they’re both the 256MB Model B types and weren’t made in Wales. This summer, as part of the annual revamp in our studios, the much-neglected information screen finally bobbed high enough up on the to-do list to be in danger of actually getting done. Combine that with a collection of retired portrait-capable plasma screens in the basement and we’ve got ourselves a project!

What started this all off was the buzz there had been around Panic’s latest offering: Status Board. What I found a little uncomfortable was the fact that you needed to dedicate an iPad to the job, which just seemed downright weird. I’m up to my ears in old Macs, but iPads are rather more difficult to find without being attached to a protective owner. Nevertheless, there was an option for having one that shouldn’t have needed to be unplugged and used elsewhere too often, so I hurried off and bought Status Board.

Weighing The Options

I quickly realised that while Status Board may be a great app in the right environment, to do the kind of thing I had in mind would mean writing most of the code myself anyway. There is, of course, no magic button that creates displays for monitoring studios. When you add to that the extra fee for HDMI output (which is galling enough without having to be reminded about it every time you use AirPlay for the output), plus the cost of an iPad HDMI converter and the fact that the display was standard-def and only had VGA and composite inputs; it was a non-starter.

I’d been messing with ddclient, trying to get things to play nicely with DNS-O-Matic, Tunnelbroker and Hurricane Electric’s own dynamic DNS system. Problem was, although everything was configured correctly it still wouldn’t update my DNS! It worked when I told it to, but when the IP genuinely changed, it all went wrong.

It turns out that when my IP changed, ddclient was indeed trying to update things. However, it was trying to do it over the IPv6 tunnel which, due to the altered IP address, was now broken. And I could find no way in the config to specify that the tunnel should be updated first, over IPv4. Hmm.

So, I sacked off ddclient and went for the world’s simplest dynamic DNS client. A bash script and curl.

Easy Peasy

Most of the dynamic DNS services have a simple HTTP method for updating. Some have HTTPS, so you’re not waving your password around in clear text. Switching to an IPv4-only updating mechanism is as simple as this:

Change of plan! While the details provided here are accurate and may well be useful if you’re configuring ddclient, I found issues updating my DNS information this way. So I opted for something much simpler, which I’ve written up here.

My shiny new router, which I’m hoping to write a proper article about soon, supports IPv6 tunnelling. IPv6 is going to become increasingly important over the next decade, as we’re running out of IPv4 (the ones that look like 208.67.220.220) addresses to give to all of the devices out there. Internet service providers are going to need to pick up the pace of handing these out, but in the meantime for those that don’t (such as BT) there are tunnelling services.

An IPv6 tunnelling service does basically what it sounds like; shoves your IPv4 traffic through a tunnel so that it pops out of the other end with a valid IPv6 address. You can then access services that only use IPv6… okay, that’s not many right now, but hey – you’re future proof! There are a few different providers out there, but I use Tunnelbroker. If your router supports it, you can configure the entry point to the tunnel from the details Tunnelbroker provide and pow! You’re accessing IPv6 sites.

This is a quick and dirty method for getting Postfix (as built-in on Mac OS X v10.6) to send mail via Gmail.

My little home server is a tweaked Mac mini, but Snow Leopard is the last version of OS X that will work on it without even more hacking around (besides, it’s the best version of OS X Server, IMHO). I had a search around on the web and after combining a few different methods, came up with this to make it work.

Sort out Certificates

Google changed to using Equifax as their certificate signing authority some time ago, but Postfix doesn’t know about them. So, you need to add their certificate (and we’ll add Thawte at the same time, for good measure).

Start by creating a certificates directory:

sudo mkdir /etc/postfix/certs

Jump into it and create a file called Equifax_Secure_CA.pem, then copy the following into it:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Then you need to create the Thawte one as well. Call it Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem.

Latest Release: 7th November 2014

Version 1.60 (7.7.2-9710) – CHANGELOG
Download USB Installer – (12MB)
The USB Installer is for use with the O2 Native OS only.

This original version of SqueezePlay for Joggler has been superseded by SqueezePlay for OpenFrame.

The new version is based upon SqueezePlay v7.8 and runs on any OpenFrame 1 (O2 Joggler, Telefonica Orby) or OpenFrame 2 (Cisco Home Energy Controller, Telio Touch) device using the new Ubuntu Bionic or Debian Buster images.

SqueezePlay is an open source music player written by Logitech for their line of wireless audio devices. Ordinarily, SqueezePlay is used on desktop systems, but because the interface was designed with touchscreens in mind, it’s particularly well suited to the Joggler’s display.

Updated: 5th November 2012

Download SSH/SCP Enabler v1.03 – (704KB)

Way back in the first days of Joggler hacking, the most important goal was telnet access into the native operating system. Telnet is a simple (and, by default, insecure) method of accessing a UNIX shell. Almost immediately after telnet access was achieved, the next goal was enabling Secure Shell access, or SSH.

This was achieved quite some time ago, and tools like this one have been in use for a while. However, other than getting SSH running, they did little else (and could even cause problems if run more than once). That’s why I put together this little enabler.

The basic difference is that this tool will enable SSH for secure shell and SCP for secure file copying. It can be safely run as many times as you like, and will reset the password of a Joggler should you forget it. It also includes a small script that makes changing the password very easy.