The entire coast.willstare.com, stream.willstare.com, and willstare.com server infrastructure has been updated to a new dedicated host server. The virtual machines for coast and stream have been rebuilt on top of Debian 9 as well. This will allow them to stay up to date vs the old Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian 7 installs they were previously on.

Over the last week or two services have been off and on, but going forward everything should be stable. If you notice any issues with the coast.willstare.com or stream.willstare.com services, please contact us at coast.willstare@gmail.com

Thank you

After taking a break from the project, I am back with version 2!

The biggest change is that it is now based on a single Debian VM instead of 2 Ubuntu machines. Switching to a single VM will use less system resources and make iy much easier to implement on a single physical box.

There is also a new feature: Recording! Now every stream is archived for later viewing, allowing tournaments and other events to be saved for later distribution. These recordings are incorporated into the WordPress site, and allow users to easily browse saved streams.

I will begin a new series going over the installation and configuration of the Debian VM, and again will provide a download link for the finished product. If you have already implemented the dual-machine solution, I’d recommend you take a look at the single-machine setup.

VIRTUAL MACHINE DOWNLOAD

I made 2 virtual machines (VMware workstation 8.0 compatable) that are ready for deployment in your LAN. You’ll want to run these on a decent ESXi or VMware workstation host with a 1gbps or higher connection. Just download these machines and import them. You’ll probably want to assign a static IP address to these before you send them into production. On the WordPress website you’ll want to change a few of the links to match up with your system’s IP addresses.

Both VMs are running up to date (as of 2014-09-21) Ubuntu 14.04 64bit. The streaming server is set for 4 cores, so if your VM host only has a dual core you should adjust that. They require a combined 3gb of ram.

They are fully configured, and WordPress is installed and customized exactly how the guide shows.

Credentials for both (you should probably change these)

Username: streamer
Password: dh2n7

These will work for logging into the operating system, mysql/phpmyadmin root account, and WordPress admin account (wpress database for the website will use a different password).

WordPress credentials:

Database username: wpress
Database password: m3c6x

Again, you should probably change these!

VIRTUAL MACHINE DOWNLOAD

For the past week or so I was having random redirect issues. It was actually happening when I was checking this website (willstare.com). I finally had enough and did some scans on my PC. One of them scanned my HOSTS file and spit out a little nugget for me. Somehow I had an entry for pagead2.googlesyndication.com pointing toward 194.145.200.27. That was obviously not supposed to be there, so I did some digging to find out who that IP was.

It turns out it was a website based in the Netherlands called http://www.devianceprojects.com/. I still have no idea how that got there, but I will be more vigilant while cruising the web. I emailed the administrators for that site asking if they had any idea why that entry would be in  my hosts file, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. I will update this is I get any more information. I have included my hosts file below to show what it looked like.

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

194.145.200.27 pagead2.googlesyndication.com 

Well, it appears that Storja was just another scam. After my first post, many people commented with their own insight on the company. The following is what we have figured out:

• They posted information about multiple “conferences” where applicants would need to pay $50 for a chance to speak to HR.
• No refunds were ever given to those who were unable to interview (everyone).
• All major job posting sites removed their ads, craigslist ended up being the only source of their advertising.
• Very few people were “hired”, but they never got a paycheck. Checks that were sent out bounced.

So at the end of the day, it looks like Storja was a somewhat sophisticated scam. It got people to hand over personal information (maybe even social security numbers), as well as at least $50. They got a lot of publicity with their wild claims of changing the world, but in the end it was hogwash.

I’m pretty bummed that they didn’t have a revolutionary technology lurking in their labs. I was really looking forward to having TB/s internet speeds for free.

If you have any more information or comments, please leave them below. If you have information about other companies trying to do the same thing, let me know. I like investigating these things, they can be really interesting.

An interesting story came up a few weeks ago about a company claiming to have in their possession technology that would revolutionize the telecommunications world. Their claims included free petabyte speed interent access nationwide, free cell phone service among others. The said that Microsoft purchased the right to work with this company for a little over $3 million. 

I have been searching for information regarding this company off and on since their initial claims surfaced, and not much else has been announced. Their primary channels of communication seem to job posting boards and newswire services.

They are having a members only conference today (March 8, 2014) in New York City, but no information has surfaced about the contents of the meeting. It is hard to say what is happening behind the closed doors.

There are many theories behind what/who they are, but at this point I believe they are a group of people trying to make some money and run. They are charging $50 to attend their conference today, and I am sure they will be holding them elsewhere shortly. There are plenty of gullible investors out there that will get overwhelmed with Storja’s claims, and may drop sizable amounts of money on little more than words.

There is no technical way that the technology that they are describing can exist. I do look forward to seeing how it plays out. It is reminiscent of the Andrea Rossi E-Cat saga from late 2011.

Also known as: SVP XT8PPS, Pocket WiFi PPS Wireless Internet Radio.

I bought my PPS301 on Ebay for around $50 with shipping. I wanted it so I could listen to radio streams at night while laying in bed, or around the house during the day. I found this radio and it looked like it would suit my needs: It has a built in speaker and it looked pretty similar to the Mutant portable radios. I found it hard to find information on the radio online, as the manufacturer doesn’t have a very good website.

This radio uses the iradio168.com service that is OK. I wasn’t really interested in using a service, but its handy to find all sorts of music from around the world. The main thing I was interested in was programming my custom stations in (Mostly Art Bell streams). The instruction manual was missing the portion that gave directions on how to input custom stations, so I took it upon myself to figure it out.

The first thing I did was find the IP address of the radio, which is displayed in the setup menu on the device. Mine had the address of 192.168.1.181. I tried putting that address into my web browser, but was met with a failed load. I ran a portscan of the address, and found port 23 to be open. I telnetted into the device using putty, and guessed the username/password. For my device the username was root, no password.

It runs a version of Linux, so I was able to quickly look around and find what was installed on the device. I noticed that in /home/httpd/ there were files for a website. I kept digging around, and found a little program called boa. I Googled that and found that it is a lightweight web server. YES!  I typed boa in the command line, and refreshed my web browser.

I was greeted by a configuration website that allowed me to input my own custom stations. Now I have my stations saved, and I can find them using the Groups function of the radio. I am very pleased.

Pros:
Easily connected to my WPA2 wifi, has good audio quality, nice selection of stations (iradio168.com), feels solid.
Cons:
Required workaround to input custom stations.

I am happy with the radio.

Hi all, I have a nice little Ajaxplorer implementation running, and 99% of the time it works perfect. However, every once in a while I get careless and run out of disk space on the drive that it runs off from. This causes the script to freak out a bit and doesn’t let anyone log in. Here is what I did to restore access to my server.

I couldn’t log in, as it would hang on “Navigation Loaded”. In the log I found this cryptic message:

message=array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given

I knew it had something to do with the disk space error, and it was most likely a plugin issue with the login plugin.

FTP (or access the files however you normally would) into your server, and go to the /data/cache/i18n folder. Delete the file en_plugins_messages.ser . Reload the page and you should be able to log in! If that doesn’t work, try deleting the two .ser files in the cache folder. When the page is refreshed all of these files will be regenerated.

Another thing to do while you’re deleting stuff is to check out the /tmp directory on your server (if you have access). Ajaxplorer makes a lot of files here while it zips stuff up, and sometimes things are left over. I found a 17gb zip file in there today that should not have been there. I will be purging /tmp more often now that I know that things aren’t always being deleted.

Good luck! If you need any more help check out the ajaxplorer forums at http://ajaxplorer.info/community/forum/ . They have a really great search function, so USE IT! Enjoy!

-loop 1 -y -i “D:\Student Data\Desktop\youtube\deathvalleystars.jpg”   -shortest  -acodec copy -ar 44100 -vcodec  libx264