ReplayTV Internet Video Sharing (IVS)

ReplayTV, as a predecessor to the commonly known Tivo had two features that ultimately lead to the companies undoing:

  1. Commercial Advance (automatic)
  2. Internet Video Sharing

Obviously, advertisers did not like the first feature, and movie studios did not like the second. As these boxes could easily share ‘anything’ that they could receive it was/is relatively easy to send video that was captured from cable networks or DVDs over an internet connection.

Mind you that sharing is not as easy as it is over the file sharing networks, user interaction is required to both send and recieve files, and that process is far slower than most people would be willing to wait if they just wanted to ‘pirate’ something.

Several years ago, when I first purchased my unit, it was easy to go to http://www.myreplaytv.com/ to remotely manage my hardware, that service is now gone but in it’s absence there have been some creative solutions.

My ReplayTV (5xxx) ISN: 00004-54831-42373

Test your connection (or mine):
http://www.lhaven.net/ivstest/

Merry Christmas!

Windows NTFS Performance

For a very long time I was perplexed as to why my old 900Mhz Pentium-3 server outperformed many of my newer and faster machines, even when they all were running with essentially the same amount of memory and had the same 7200rpm hard-drives.

I recently realized that over the years, I had optimized the WindowsXP NTFS registry settings with a variety of software and manual edits, and thus had essentially changed the way that windows works with the drive itself.

Here are the current settings that these machines utilize, perhaps you can try them for yourselves:

WARNING: You need to be confortable making edits to your registry to do these changes, as such I will not document ‘how’ to open the registry itself, you can easily find that info anyways.  These are all DWORD settings.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

  • DisableNTFSLastAccessUpdate  = 1
  • NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation = 1
  • NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1
  • NtfsMftZoneReservation = 2

Cheers

Linux kernel updates without reboot

Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows.    Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine.  This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements).   Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.

Dotless IP Address

This is a concept I had forgotten about until recently, it can often serve as a simple means of code obfuscation and is also sometimes referred to as “Decimal Address”.

Some background:

  • DNS is used to convert a URL/domain name into an IP address that is used to contact the remote machine.
    EXAMPLES:
    localhost = 127.0.0.7
    giantgeek.com = 99.138.127.198
  • IP addresses (as IPv4) are represented as groups of 4 hexadecimal or decimal octets.
  • Those numbers can be plugged into a simple formula to be represented as a single large integer.

As such, you can use the following as equivalents:

  • http://localhost
  • http://127.0.0.1
  • http://2130706433

REFERENCES: