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.]](/2015/01/06/hacking-our-firewall.gif "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!
