HP MSS (WHS) Upgrade to release in December

Excellent. We, the consumers, told HP we would even be willing to pay if we could only get access to their excellent software upgrades for the older Mediasmart lines, and it looks like they are doing the smart thing and converging the platform at version 3.0. Excellent HP, thanks for listening!

The problem with HDMI handshaking

I had the most difficult time last night trying to upgrade to OSX Snow Leopard. I performed the upgrade and was presented with a blank screen when my mac mini rebooted. I assumed that my resolution had been changed to some mode my television didn’t support so I tried all sorts of things to try and right the situation, but even booting into safe mode resulted in a black screen.

After hours of trying to work out a way to force the mac mini to use a more sane default resolution on boot I finally thought to pull out the hdmi switch I was using and connect the mini directly to the tv. And low and behold, I had video. My tv was obviously broadcasting that it was capable of 1080p, but either a bad switch or cable was reducing the hdmi bandwidth to the point that the resulotion was not actually possible.

So, the HDMI handshaking process seems pretty flawed to me, there should be some way the source can test different modes, and the destination should be able to report success or failure of different modes. A simple capabilities list simply isn’t cutting it. That and its pretty deplorable that apple often makes things WAY TO HARD by making them so simple. Why should SAFE MODE try to probe for capabilities of the destination device instead of picking a SAFE resolution to display in, and why should an OS upgrade try to pick a new resolution than the one I had manually selected? (1080p is a bit hard to read on my TV).

The other unexplained mystery is why my pc (and osx 10.5) could display 1080p content to the tv through this same switching hardware but snow leopard can’t? A bit boggling, to be honest.

Facebook: Guilty until proven innocent?

So my facebook account still hasn’t been reinstated, but finally received an email from them. They apparently think I’m fake, for whatever reason. I’m guessing some automated heuristic? Or maybe some jerk reported me as fake? Either way my account has been diasabled for weeks before they even gave me the chance to defend my existence, not even knowing what I was accused of. Pleasant. I have tried to offer them what proof of identity I can without violating my privacy, so the ball is in their court. Am I real?!?! If not my siblings and wife that are my facebook friends better watch out! They must be fake too!!!

Facebook Account Disabled

My Facebook account has been disabled for over a week now. As I’ve never done anything with it that even comes close to breaking their TOS, this must be in error. I’ve either tripped some automated heuristic that disabled it, or possibly the file node that held my data had an accident and this is their way of covering.
Either way, I’ve sent them numerous emails since the disabling and have not heard back yet. Sometimes I wish things like these were pay services if only so that we could enforce some sort of SLA with them. It would be interesting, actually, to be able to pay a small nominal premium for that kind of assurance.
They are rather lucky I’m only a casual user of the service, or I’d be pretty irate by now.
A quick search of the Twitter zeitgeist reveals I’m not the only one with this problem, but I’m not sure how much of this is normal Facebook disabling practices.

Migrating posts to WordPress manually is not a lot of fun

see title.

TwoFactor WHS addin published

I’ve published the first release of my Windows Home Server addin, which allows for two factor authentication for the WHS remote access website via the Yubikey hardware token. The plan is, in the future, to also support some software based tokens. Maybe I’ll even whip up an implementation of OATH HOTP for a few devices if I can’t find suitable open source solutions.

Let me know what you think of the addin, and please submit any bugs or feature suggestions. I’m interested in the community auditing the code for security flaws, as I’d like this to be as sound as possible.

YubiKeys arrived!

My yubikeys have arrived. I’ve got the authentication working against yubico’s validator, and have done some POC tests. Now I just have to iron out the configuration steps in the add-in and then I should hopefully have a solution ready.

Initial version for WHS add in almost done

Mostly just waiting on those yubikeys to arrive. Also need to snazz up the graphics a bit. My plan is to finally turn on the remote access on my home server for RDP once I get this working. Hopefully the WHS community at large finds this useful too. Will host the code on codeplex, but may also just make the secondary auth pluginnable so that others can extend the authorization schemes it supports.

A road to two-factor auth for WHS

I love Windows Home Server very much, and recommend it constantly. I did a lot of research before settling on a backup solution and I can confidently say that WHS meets and exceeds all my requirements. What I wanted was centralized storage and backup, and what I ended up with was that in spades, plus a whole lot more besides.

One of my favorite features that I didn’t even know I needed is the remote access support in WHS. I can log on to my server remotely, download and upload files, view photo albums, and even make proxied remote desktop connections into my home pcs/mediacenter. BUT, this brings me to my main complaint about WHS. There is no built-in support for strong authentication. If I’m exposing all my data and machines to the internet at large, I want a lot more than a keyloggable password standing in the way.

So, I’m working on an add-in that will enable some two-factor auth models, and I will be recording my efforts here. My solution will revolve around introducing a model to enable requiring a one time password in addition to the remote access acount password, and initially I will be suppporting OTPs furnished by the yubikey token. The yubikey is a cheap hardware OTP token that uses all open source software in the backend.

I already have most of the prep-work done for this project, and am just waiting for my yubikeys to arrive. I’ll be detailing more of my solution as I go along, and I’ll be publishing this project on codeplex once I can do some concrete testing and stabilization, and I hope it will help the community improve authentication on the WHS platform.

Adventures in Universal Remoting or How I Made the PS3 Do My Bidding

So I recently have become an owner of a Logitech Harmony remote, and it is my new favorite thing ever! I happen to have a good memory for how my AV catastrophe is set up, but my wife gets frustrated with its complexity. And, to be honest, although I remember how to arrange things for every activity, its not easy or fun to switch between them. So, as a result I’ve been looking forward to see what the oft praised Harmony line of remotes could do for my system.

I am very impressed. Remote came out of box. Remote led me through wizards my grandmother wouldn’t have balked at (probably). Remote has since saved my life twice (maybe). Very, very, cool. One button press completely sets up an activity or switches between them. I will never need another remote! Well, at least until we learn to ditch IR for some better mechanisms of communication between all of our electronics… which, coincidentally, brings me to the problem.

The Problem

Sony did something that I actually find rather forward thinking when they put together the PS3. They eschewed any and all IR based control mechanisms and instead settled on Bluetooth based control. This is, probably, the future. These devices would cooperate much better if they could all communicate with each other using some standard communication mechanism and protocols.

So what’s the problem??

Well, the PS3s lack of IR would be all well and good if all of my devices could talk Bluetooth, could communicate with each other, and I could direct them through some centralized control to coordinate an activity for me. But as it stands, most of my other AV equipment do not support any kind of Bluetooth control. And furthermore, although I’ve seen evidence online that the Sony PS3 BD Remote uses Bluetooth HID standards to communicate, I’ve seen no-one claim to have been able to pair any other Bluetooth device to control the PS3. There are a few exceptions to that statement (further down the page), but as we shall see, they are not really exceptions.

The Proposed Solutions

USB Dongle

So the first solution that I found people experimenting with on the Internet is that many 3rd party manufacturers sell IR receivers for the ps3 that emulate a controller connecting through USB. In such a way, a universal remote can be trained to control the PS3, and all problems are solved (…ehh).

Cost: $10 – $15

Problem: NO PWR ON!!!

So apparently none of these USB solutions are able to power on the PS3. (Actually, one could, but only via a copper sticker you adhere to the PS3 start button). There seem to be a lot of theories floating around here. Many are claiming that Sony blocks non approved vendors from being able to send power-on commands over USB. For that matter it doesn’t really appear that the USB bus is necessarily powered when the system is in standby (this seems to go back and forth). So although this gets past a major stumbling block, it doesn’t really fix the problem, at least to my satisfaction.

IR to BT Adapters

There seem to be quite a few products floating around that claim to be able to take IR commands and translate them into Bluetooth commands that the PS3 will respect. Many of these seem, from what I can tell, to incorporate the actual BD remote circuit board. This leads me to believe that maybe Sony has done something heinous here too to prevent non Sony Bluetooth remotes from pairing with the PS3.

Cost: Seems to be $70 – $150!!!!!

Problem: Way too expensive!!!!

The IR to Bluetooth solutions are just way to rich for my blood. Especially since Sony may release a firmware update tomorrow (for all we know) that allows for the creation of IR dongles that can power up and down the PS3, and then where would I be??

I also have so many devices sitting around that I should be able to leverage that I can’t bring myself to accept that the only option is to buy a $100 product. Lets make this happen! Which brings me to…

My Solution

Now, before anyone gets too excited. My solution is cheaper for me because of what I have lying around. The bonus is though, that it didn’t cost me much. Also, the kind of person that owns a PS3 and is bothered by not being able to integrate it into their universal remote control system, may well likely have some of the other required pieces here.

Also of note, is I just finished with this solution earlier this evening, and I’m still working things out, and have no idea how robust it will be over time. Anyway, though, lets begin:

1. I bought the Nyko BluWave IR receiver. ($14). As I said these don’t solve the power on issue. But I figured if it worked for all the normal control of the system then my problem is reduced to how to turn the system on and off. The Nyko seems to work fine for what it does, but there many be better products in its class out there.
2. I remembered that if you put the PS3 into ‘remote start from the Internet’ mode it exhibits a Wake-On-LAN like behavior. Now this could be good! First I enabled ‘remote start from the Internet’ on my PS3. This is a feature that the PS3 has specifically so that you can start it from away from your network, using the PSP, and then remote into the PS3 using the PSP’s screen. Its very neat tech, and I had a PSP so I was able to turn this on. I think you may NEED a PSP to enable this feature (borrow one if you have to).
3. I experimented with waking the PS3. If I logged into my router I could send a manual WOL command and the PS3 would wake up. Good News!! It could have turned out that this was some completely proprietary and hard to decode technology. But its actually really straightforward (or so I thought).
4. I tried to write a program to send a broadcast WOL magic packet to wake the PS3 from another client on the network. PS3 ignored me. Double checked implementation. Still ignored.
5. Here is where my memory started to kick around a bit. I remembered that when this feature first came to the PS3 people were complaining (including me) that the PS3 would turn itself on at random times (like a ghost). And that Sony later fixed something to make this go away. If you think about it a client shouldn’t ever think they’ve received a WOL magic packet when they actually haven’t as its a pretty specific looking dude. So my conclusion was that the PS3 wasn’t really doing real WOL, just something that is triggered by WOL (if its sent by the router or the PSP, but, apparently, not by the other clients on my network).
6. So, something about what the router sends to the PS3 works to wake it up, but not what I send from the other clients, even though the packet is the same except for the source MAC address and source IP address. This leads me to believe that the PS3 may be filtering out any communications that don’t come from the the router or the PSP. So why don’t I spoof the packet so as to make it indistinguishable from the one made by the router?
7. I battled with raw sockets with windows trying to send a spoofed WOL packet, until I realized that MS has made this thing harder in recent years to try seal up some network vulnerabilities.
8. I remember that WinPCap has some facilities for sending raw Ethernet packets, so I grab that write a little code, and there you go! I can essentially replay the packet that my router sends to wake up the PS3, and it wakes!
9. OK, so now I have a program that can “Turn On” the PS3. How do I integrate it with my Harmony?
10. So, I have a Media Center PC, also sitting near my TV. I figure I can throw the program on it, and then somehow get a certain IR code sent to the Media Center PCs IR Receiver to trigger the program. There are a bunch of commercial programs out there to help do this, and a few free ones, but I couldn’t really determine whether they would interfere with the normal operation of the media center PC. But then I stumbled across something more elegant.
11. http://www.mediacenterguides.com/advancedremotes. (Warning: Advanced users only! Maybe I can write a guide to help with this bit). Turns out all you need to do is some registry tweaking to map an unused media center remote to something like Windows Key + 1 to start a program shortcut.
12. So I mapped an unused button to run the program that I wrote to start the PS3.
13. In harmony I was then able to say that it had to include the media center PC in the PS3 activity, and that when starting the PS3 Activity it should send that button press to the media center PC.
14. Meanwhile when the activity actually starts up, harmony is talking to the BluWave IR receiver, for all the normal functions.

And so I was able to make my universal remote start the PS3 without buying any additional equipment.

Next on my list:

1. I need to figure out how to turn off the PS3. I think people have made macros for this with the Harmony remote before.
2. When the PS3 starts up from WOL, you need to dismiss a dialog before a certain amount of time, or the PS3 will shut down again, this should be macro-able too.
3. I’m remembering that sometimes the PS3 wouldn’t want to wake from LAN about half a year ago when I used this with my PSP. Don’t know if Sony has made it more resilient since.

I’ll try to elaborate more on how other people can implement this soon. I’m just providing the technical sketch-up up front.