The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

… and this bug exists because of a work-around for that bug …

Sigh.

The last day at work in 2014 (Debtember 18th), I spent it running yet another IOT, which involves running tcpdump to capture the network traffic on our end to verify that we receive and send the data properly. After running a test, I would load the resulting capture into wireshark, filter for the SIP protocol only to find—

Nothing.

Project: Sippy-Cup” was getting the packets and responding correctly—well, as “correctly” as these things go, but I was not seeing any packets under wireshark, no matter what I did. But the whole test setup is so jury-rigged that it wouldn't surprise me at all if we were, in fact, doing NAT over avian carriers that it seemed rather pointless to spend the next few hours trouble shooting my inability to do network captures when the other participants were able to capture enough of the transaction to let us continue running the test.

Especially as I was one day from retirement a few hours away from a two-week Christmas vacation.

And then today, I learned that we were, in fact, capturing data.

Why was wireshark not showing the packets?

Because I was telling wireshark to filter on SIP, which defaults to port 5060. We were running our SIP component on port 5061, because of some odd-ball router on our network that oh-so-helpfully looks for SIP traffic and attempts to proxy it anywhere else than our SIP component.

And because we were running on a non-standard port, wireshark wasn't showing us the proper packets as it was looking only for packets on port 5060.

I swear, I think IP-over-avaian-carriers would be easier to deal with.


No, a reality TV show about computer hacking can be totally accurate and not boring at all. No, really.

[Well, isolate the node and dump them on the other side of the router.]

So apparently, this is happening:

SyFy just announced a new reality TV show called Hackers. It's about hacking, naturally, and the network promises it will be awesome and exciting. (Spoiler: Hacking is incredibly boring.)

The new, unscripted show does sound interesting. It's unclear if the new SyFy series has anything to do with the 90's classic film Hackers. SyFy will produce Hackers with Relativity Television (of Catfish fame) and promises to “take viewers deep inside the shadowy and dangerous world of high-tech hackers for the very first time.” While verbs like “shadowy” and “dangerous” certainly ring true of cyber security in the age of the Sony hack, that doesn't mean that filming hacker-types staring at dark screens makes for entertaining television for the general population. It almost definitely doesn't.

Via Reddit, The New Hackers Reality Show Would Be Great If Hacking Weren't So Boring

You really want to see what hacking is like? Watch the first episode of “The Scene.” While the story (and music) of “The Scene” is compelling (enough to carry me through the season), it's not compelling to watch (it was tiring having to pay so close attention and read everything on the screen to keep up with the “action”). That's a hacking movie.

This?

I'm curious enough to watch an episode or two—I mean, who doesn't love train wrecks? (Um, besides the ones involved in a train wreck?) But I can't see this being any good.

Or lasting that long.

But hey … you know … HACK THE PLANET!

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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