There is only one more night to go before our biggest event yet. Including staff we have 63 people signed up, we have an awesome lineup of competitions and prizes, and we have even had our first event epic fail – our web host stopped working for the better part of a day!
There are only 5 2 places left. Sign up here now.
SOGC DominationLAN – 4th July 2009
Mosman Returned Serviceman’s Club – 719 Military Rd, Mosman, NSW
10AM to 10PM
I have collected a lot of random computer gear quite a few years. As I’ve been going through this stuff lately I’ve decided to take some photos and post some of my more interesting computer gear on this site.
Update: I have added more photos to this post as of ~12:30pm
Inspired by a forum post on osdev.org about image colour downsampling I decided to have a crack at writing a program which could take a 24-bit image and convert it down to any lesser image format. The picture above shows an image split down the middle. On the right is the original 24-bit colour version and on the left is a 8-bit per pixel version with 2 bits for the red colour channel and 3 bits for the green and blue colour channels (rather than having a specific palette for the image I am downsampling to a 2:3:3 bpp image). As you can see the colour loss is acceptable and despit the limitations it still looks nice. Obviously the image could be improved further by choosing a colour palette suitable for the image but that is for another project.
I’ll post the code once I have cleaned it up a bit and smoothed it out so it doesn’t have so many hard coded values.
Another project I’ve been working on with my interest in Cisco hacking and reverse engineering is my Cisco Discovery Protocol transponder. It is a small program which sits on your computer and emits a configured CDP message every so often allowing your computer to show up on CDP neighbour lists. It doesn’t really have much purpose at the moment but I hope to play around with it and trying to bridge it with LLDP devices so I can get old Cisco gear to show up on my new Windows network topology maps.
This is the output of the show cdp neighbors command on my Cisco 2610XM router. It shows my computer as the device connected to the Fastethernet 0/0 port.
This site and a few others that I host all run on a virtual private server. This server is quite fast by itself but loaded up with services like Apache and MySQL, not to mention hosting heavyweight web frameworks like Drupal, it’s limited resources make it not quite so snappy.
I’ve been working on replacement configuration for the server (on my own computer running on VMWare Workstation) to be able to provide the same services while halving the memory usage (from 512mb to 256mb) and not hitting the swap except in edge cases.
The server currently runs Apache, MySQL and PHP along with Dovecot and Postfix for email as well as a few other scripts for virus checking and spam filtering.
My new server config looks to be running Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Dovecot and Postfix. Pretty much the same except everything has been tweaked and optimised for lower memory usage.
I have also enabled caching for this website so it should be a bit faster now. Not that it was that slow before.
SOGC DominationLAN now has a working Battlefield 2 Dedicated Server. We will be running a Battlefield 2 competition, prizes to be determined, so get practicing.
UnHexDump takes the familiar output of HexDump and converts it back into nice binary format. I wrote this program to assist in extracting files off my Cisco 7970 IP phone which lacks any remote file copying capability.
I am now releasing UnHexDump to the world. It’s a little hackish (given that I wrote it at 3am this morning to solve a problem, that usually happens :[ ). It is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License. The source code is plain C++ and a windows executable are to be found in the zip file below.
It can be found by clicking the UnHexDump link on the sidebar or here.
The Cisco 7970 is a black box piece of hardware and as such there is very little information about it on the internet. Cisco pretend it’s a closed appliance and as such go out of their way to prevent people for using the in a more flexible manner.
As of late I’ve been doing quite a bit of Cisco phone trickery. I’ve gotten a network of Cisco phones working with Asterisk and I’ve been building up sleek looking XML services for the 797x models. What I really want to do, though, is delve a little deeper into the spirit of hardware hacking and see if I can properly customise the phone beyond what is possible with configuration files.
Recently I was inspired by a thread on the Whirlpool forums to write XML services for the Cisco IP phones I have. What I have created is something I have called (most creatively) Dashboard. It is a modular PHP script that allows people to add various blocks of dynamic content on to a page which is displayed on the IP phone’s display. This script can be called directly by the phone or pushed using the cisco XML push service.
My dodgy composition shot below shows the Dashboard running on a Cisco 7975 phone displaying a RSS feed, the count of unread messages in my inbox and a graphical logo.
I am currently working allowing it to display multiple pages of information (using the remaining softkeys along the bottom of the screen between the Update and Exit buttons).
July 4th is the date of SOGC’s next LANning event. DominationLAN is all about unrelenting warfare – with competitions in games such as Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 4, and of course, Defcon!
As per our last few events it is being held at the Mosman RSL club (719 Military Rd, Mosman, NSW). Entry is $30 and includes unlimited soft drinks all day. The day runs from 10am to 10pm.
See http://sogc.com.au/ for more details. You have to register on the site before you can sign up for the event.
The Sydney Overclockers Gaming Community (SOGC) is an online community of gamers and computer hardware enthusiasts who run (approximately) regular monthly bi-monthly events where members can meet up and show off their skills with hardware and software. Think of it as like a track-day for car enthusiasts, except for gamers and PC hardware enthusiasts!