The Tlog – a technology blog

New developments here, and not all of them are good.

To begin with, in the first part, I made a mistake (I was at work when writing it, just like now): my OpenBSD box isn’t connected to the “Internet” port in the Linksys, but to one of the “normal” ports. If I connect it to the former, it doesn’t work

Second, it still isn’t working perfectly. I’m still trying out stuff; however, it’s like this: if I haven’t gone online with the DS for a while, and I try to do so, it doesn’t work. I simply have to go to the OpenBSD server and ping the router’s internal address… and it works afterwards. It’s as if the server “forgets” that the DS is behind the router (as they’re in the same network – otherwise, the router would have to do NAT), and has to find it for itself first – if it’s “forgotten” about it, then connections from the DS go out, but the return packets aren’t routed to it.

I’m going to try a static ARP for it later tonight. I really, really don’t want to use a crontab to ping the router every 5 minutes.

I’ve also tried another possibility, which was to connect the switch’s “Internet” port to the server, and connect one of the ports to the switch for my old network, 192.168.0.0/24. I have to enable NAT in the Linksys between the 192.168.0 and 192.168.1. This way allows the router to update its clock using NTP, which it does every time it’s turned on, but then the DS can only connect while I’m pinging it from the server (!).

This is weird. This Linksys model isn’t exactly great – for instance, it basically “reboots” itself for every configuration change, unlike the Linux models (which I’ve seen at my father’s place).

I know, I know – I could have avoided all of this by just connecting the Linksys to the Internet, doing NAT there, and redirecting ports 22, 80 and 443 to the OpenBSD server. But I’m stubborn, and I trust OpenBSD to be “in the front lines” much more than I do the Linksys. Besides, pf (the OpenBSD firewall) is great.

Continuing from the previous post, Nintendo DS: First Impressions, here’s a more technical bit. Still to come is a post more related to actual gaming – more precisely, Mario Kart DS, the only DS game I own.

As I said, since Mario Kart DS is the first DS game playable online (instead of simply using the DS’s normal wi-fi, which requries players to be near each other), using a normal Internet connection, to access NintendoWiFi. It doesn’t use a cable, though, but connects to a wi-fi access point.

So far, so good. However, since I’m not one of those filthy rich people who own laptops , my home network was (and is) based on that highly advanced and incredibly modern technology called “ethernet cables”.

(more…)