MediaWiki… it’s alive! Sort of.

I managed to get MediaWiki running. It really didn’t turn out to be all that difficult. IF you know where to look for the instructions. I did get hung up on the very last step, but a quick IM with my guru Raghu sorted me right out. NaviGoGlobalWiki is now in production!

Unfortunately, it’s not accessible from anywhere besides my home. After working perfectly for hours last evening, connectivity into the machine hosting the Wiki is down. Again. Back to the Comcast vs DynDNS debate in earlier postings. After doing my usual troubleshooting, I decided to call Comcast. The first tech support person in the Residential H-S Internet team didn’t even know what I was talking about when I said “I’m running Ubuntu Linux on a PC in my basement and having trouble SSH’ing into the box.” So they sent me to the Workplace Business Services sales people who sent me to tech support on their side. That guy listened to my problem, then said he didn’t know why Residential sent me over since I wasn’t a Business customer. Back to Residential. The 3rd tech support person seemed to understand what I was trying to do, but went into their usual troubleshooting script. Power cycle everything, then remove my router from the equation by connecting my Linux PC directly to the cable modem. When we compared IP address on Linux PC to what Comcast could see for my cable modem, they didn’t match. Interesting (or maybe not so interesting if you actually know how the cable networks operate… I don’t).

In the end, Comcast told me to bring my cable modem in for testing or replace it. Great. Undeterred, I decided to try a different Dyanamic DNS provider. I signed up with No-IP, configured a DNS host in their database, then downloaded and configured their Linux client which has auto-NAT detection (No-IP receives the public side IP address for my router from the client, then populates it in their DNS records). No joy.

I guess I’ll run to Best Buy and get a new cable modem just to see what happens. Running out of ideas.

*UPDATE! Wed 13.Jun.07*

I am now the proud owner of one (1) Linksys WCG200 Wireless-G Cable Gateway. It’s a combo cable modem / WAP / router with the usual stuff like DHCP and a firewall. This gadget replaced my old Belkin F5D5530-W cable modem and Netgear WGR614 (v7) WAP / router. The install was a snap and after a quick call to Comcast to have them register the MAC address for the new device, I was in business again. After a little configuration work on port forwarding / port triggering, NaviGoGlobalWiki was once again reachable from the outside. And I could SSH into the box. After 12hrs of what I believe is continuous uptime, I think the problem is solved. I’ll declare victory after 48hrs… I’m using Site 24×7 to monitor the domain.

BTW… When I called into activate my MAC, I asked the Comcast tech what the IP address was for my device and he spit out 73.x.x.x. I looked at my WAN side IP and it was 24.x.x.x. Similar to the odd mismatch from the earlier call. However, I soon learned the 73.x.x.x address was on their Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) facing my device and that they had no way of telling what IP address their DHCP engine had assigned my device when it registered. So when Comcast suggested replacing my cable modem because of the IP mismatch it seems to have been the correct fix, but that conclusion was clearly reached by accident. I’ll probably never know why my old Belkin cable modem was acting the way it was.

*UPDATE! Thu 14.Jun.07*

It never ends. I am now the disgusted owner of a Linksys WCG200 Wireless-G Cable Gateway. Or at least I was… read on. Yesterday, the morning after replacing my Belkin modem and Netgear WAP with the brand spankin’ new Linksys, my connection is down. I reboot the Linksys thinking maybe it’s something to do with that fact that it’s a new MAC and perhaps Comcast’s gear reset itself overnight or something. No idea. 4hrs later, it happens again. I look at the Linksys logs and see a bunch of entries that describe loss of signal / loss of sync / loss of connection with Comcast.

I call Comcast. Again. I get a tech that seems to know a little more than most, but things sort of drift during our conversation. He tells me it’s probably a power spike local to my location (e.g. in my house). Power spikes are very common, he says, when computers boot. Micro amps, he proclaims! If the Linksys isn’t getting enough power, it’ll fritz out, he opines. I see it at my house and bought a UPS to work around it, he recommends. I build nitrogen cooled supercomputers, he discloses. Call Linksys if it continues to happen, he commands. I move on. I did switch the power supply for the Linksys to another outlet with nothing else plugged into it, but probably on the same circuit as the other stuff, so pretty much pointless. At least it made me feel a little better.

This morning, the Linksys bit the dust again. I reset it again. Then the WAP part of the Linksys barfs and only my hardwired PCs have connectivity. What the hell!?!?! I wandered off to the Linksys support website to see if I can find any dirt. Buried in their forums I find a thread called “WCG200 dropping internet” and, right there on p.8 of the thread, I find the smoking gun: someone with the same log entries. I continue reading and see another, similar entry on p.9. Then I see another thread called ”WCG200 Cable Router loses internet, comes back when reset…” and skim it to find symptoms similar to what I’m experiencing. That’s enough for me. I tear my whole set-up apart and saunter back over to Best Buy where I acquired one (1) Motorola SURFboard SBG900 Wireless Cable Modem Gateway. I’ll let you know how it goes, but first impressions are that this is a helluva lot more machine than the Linksys. It has a lot of functionality I’ve never seen in a Netgear or Linksys, particularly around customization of the firewall.

*UPDATE! Fri 15.Jun.07*

The Motorola worked.  It took a while to work out all the kinks in the firewall settings, but I got it sorted and all my problems evaporated.  Hurray!

Not-so-Dynamic DNS

As mentioned in Ubuntu in the Basement, I’ve embarked on a fool’s errand of a project. Already, I’m struggling. I signed up with Dynamic Network Services (aka DynDNS) to use their Dyanamic DNS service. I looked around and there are several outfits offering this service, but DynDNS was named in the Ubuntu documentation and, as it happens, the Dynamic DNS feature in my Netgear WGR614 (v7) WAP / router only supports DynDNS. I got it running last week and after configuring port forwarding I was able to http into the router from the public side as well as SSH into my Linux box via the the DynDNS host I established. Easy peasy.

Yesterday, I tried it from another location (outside my home). Didn’t work anymore. So when I got home, I tried again. Still broken. I logged into my router from the private side, told it to respond to pings on the public side, then pinged it. That worked. Then I tried to SSH into my Linux box via the DynDNS host. It worked. Aargh! I turned ping off again on my router, then tried to login once more via the DynDNS host. Hallelujah! It was still working.

But I wasn’t convinced. I got Paul on Skype and asked him to http into the DynDNS host. No good. Then I turned ping back on again and asked him to ping the public address. That worked. When he tried to http in after turning ping back on, it still didn’t work.

I turned ping off and then tracked down a Shiner Bock (a habit I picked up while living in Texas, but that’s another story) from my fridge. Saddened, I sucked down my suds and pondered next steps. I want to believe that it’s something DynDNS is doing wrong, but I really doubt it. It’s probably my router acting flaky or perhaps Comcast is up to something. Who knows, but I gotta figure it out or else things get messier since I’ll have to put my Linux box on the other side of my NAT and then set-up a firewall of some sort (which I KNOW I will not have much fun doing).

Ubuntu in the Basement

I’ve undertaken a new project. I am going to be delivering IP-enabled services out of my basement for fun and hopefully profit. The idea is to build a basic environment in which I can run a couple applications that could be part of some future business ideas Paul and I are working on. Namely, I want to run an instance of Asterisk (an IP-PBX) and MediaWiki (the web / dbase infrastructure supporting Wikipedia). Both of these applications are Open Source and freely available for download and install by those with the will and wherewithal to do so.

However, both of these applications (and some others I am thinking of) operate under the Linux operating system. Since I didn’t have any PCs or servers with this OS, the first thing I needed to do was select a Linux distribution (there are many, many folks out there producing packages) and acquire a PC to go with it. Eventually, I settled on Ubuntu’s distribution because it includes a couple useful items like an easy to use installer, GNOME GUI, integrated LAMP and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support. Since Ubuntu is actually based on the Debian GNU/Linux project, it very stable and secure.

But I still didn’t have a computer, so last Friday I dropped $629 on a new HP Pavilion a6000n desktop PC. It has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4200+ CPU, 1GB PC2-4200 DDR RAM and a 250GB 7200 RPM SATA HDD (cue Tim Allen grunting here). As an aside, I continue to be amazed by Moore’s Law and it’s implicit price compression for perf increases in PCs. Simply astounding what $629 will buy you these days.

So, on Friday night, part of Saturday and part of Sunday, I found myself hiding out in the basement trying to figure out how to install Ubuntu without formatting the entire HDD. The PC came with Windows Vista Home Premium and I didn’t want to just wipe it out in case I ever wanted that OS for something. After a few attempts at partitioning the HDD, I finally got it sorted. I first tried to install the Ubuntu Server version, but it didn’t come with GNOME already installed. After bumbling around trying to get GNOME to come alive, I ended up blowing away the whole partition and starting all over again. Eventually, I got the Ubuntu Desktop version running and have been pretty pleased. Despite Ubuntu’s best efforts, installing this OS on anything other than a naked HDD is still tricky and not for your average PC user.

Nonetheless, I’m now in business. Next up: getting both Asterisk and MediaWiki running on the same machine. Doing MediaWiki will require installing LAMP. I think I will also need to figure out KVM since both of these apps will need their own IP addresses and speaking of IP, since I’m going to use my residential Comcast broadband Internet as the access path for VoIP calls and web pages, I’ll need to figure out how to use a Dyanamic DNS service to work around the DHCP assigned IP address scheme Comcast uses.

I know it sounds like I know what I’m doing, but in fact, I really don’t. This is all an experiment for me. But fun. NOTE: I have tagged this post with Category = Geekery. Go figure.