helping you stay protected in the digital age

Apparently I’m “derailment central” for all news related to UPS train derailments. I’ve gotten e-mails and comments about more UPS train “derailments”.

I’ve sent a news submission to CNN to see if they have any information or would want to do a story on these derailments.

Maybe CNN will find something out, maybe not. Who knows. I just wish you guys didn’t have to deal with package delays. In the mean time, read some of the comments on both of the posts. Phil’s comment is pretty funny, sorry we’ll get a laugh at your downfall, once again I wish you didn’t have to experience any BS delay.

“Amazingly enough, my package was on a ‘derailed train’ at 7:00am which was then listed as ‘late’ twice also at 7:00am and then at 2:37pm listed as ‘arrival scan’ package in transit. What the hell kind of derailments are they experiencing? One wheel comes off the track and they stop till some fat guy can lean on the train really hard till it pops back on? I agree with the majority of you, this is all bullshit. It’s UPS’s answer to being able to be tracked everywhere and be inefficient at the same time. Fedex does’t tell you “sorry you plane has crashed, package is late’ and then later that day say “your package is in transit by dolphin that picked it up during the water rescue effort.”

No idea what I’m talking about? The very short blog post that started it all and The follow up that started drawing hundreds of website hits within a few days

So I as at my parent’s house recently and found myself in a hard spot when I wanted to listen to my iPod on my Pioneer DEH-P4500MP. I was leaving that Sunday to go back to New Orleans and buying a cable on Ebay wasn’t an option. I called to every one of their local car audio shops in Alexandria and nobody had an IP-BUS adapter. The only shop in town that could order me one wanted $70.00 for it!

I thought that $70.00 was WAY to much for a simple cable. I figured that I reprogram routers, build computers, and hack IPods then I could make a simple cable. I started searching around on Google and found this website: http://stereophonik.com/gutterslide/IP-BUS_Hack/
The author outlines and makes clear the instructions on how to make your own IP-BUS cable.

Well I didn’t have any motherboard plugs as the author describes because I was on vacation and I don’t carry this stuff around me (my fiance’ would tell you otherwise). I decided to go to Radio Shack and use molex pin

connectors (what you would find on a computer power supply). The hack worked with the molex pins but I had to squish them down with some needle nose pliers otherwise they would make contact with more than just the intended pin.
I’m not going to re-hash stereophonik.com’s instructions but here are the pictures and subsequent steps I took to achieve my $5.00 IP-BUS hack

I had to, like I mentioned, squish the plugs in to make a smaller plug then what came out of the box. You can see the four plugs that the author mentions in his (her) website clearly in my pictures. The plugs around them I’ll never use and you’ll see later why that is so I bend them down but taking care to NOT let them touch each other.

Then I put shrink tubing over the molex plugs I put on the IP-BUS pins. This was partly to prevent movement of the molex plugs but mainly to prevent the plugs themselves from touching each other. I used a blow dryer to shrink the tubing on the plugs.

I borrowed a hot glue gun and just filled the IP-BUS bay with loads of hot glue. Be warned that if you do the same that you MUST have a great contact between the molex plugs and IP-BUS pins otherwise after this step good luck changing anything.

Because I was leaving in a few hours to go out of town I needed to get this project done FAST. Normally I don’t do this with ANY of my hardware but I stuck my Pioneer in the freezer to rapidly cool the hot glue and boy did it cool fast!

The finished product was a hot glue’d IP-BUS bay.

Finally I connected my RCA plug wires (as described in the instructions on the author’s website), soldered those to the ends of the molex plugs, and shrink tubed those wires. To top it off I used the remaining amount of hot glue I had. These wires are going NOWHERE!

Here is a short video clip of the iPod in use on my stereo once I got it back in my SUV. Sorry for the bells or whatever it is in the song, if I had known it I would have used a much “softer” song (something you’d find on the Chillout channel from DI.fm). I demonstrated volume up, volume down, song seek, play and pause. You can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXOowT4r4S4

I’ve added the OpenDNS System RSS feed to the right hand side of my blog underneath “Recent Comments”.
Because what good is “helping you stay protected in the digital age” if you can’t stay connected? If you haven’t switched to OpenDNS yet I’ve also included both of their DNS IP addresses for your convenience.

Wow, I never, ever thought I’d need to hack into some old networking hardware. Sure enough, I find myself sitting here with a 3com Superstack II 1100 in my lap without the administrator password.

Did you know you can find a TON of useful information on the internets? Or “tubes” or “interwebs” or just plain old “Internet”. Whatever term you fancy, I found the “backdoor password” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_%28computing%29) to this 3com SuperStack II 1100. I knew the networking IP scheme cause it was the scheme I set up for a previous employer (10.0.0.xxx) but still didn’t know the IP addy of the switch.

There is a program out there called SuperScan. It is a port scanning tool used by security professional and script kiddies alike. The current version of SuperScan is 4.0. Avoid SuperScan 4.0 like the plague; it is horrible. I use and recommend SuperScan 3.0 (which you can download at http://www.johndball.com-a.googlepages.com/programs-superscan3.rar) If you don’t know how to open a .rar file then you shouldn’t even be messing with a networking switch anyway.

Once I located the IP address (10.0.0.226) I accessed the web-based management utility using Firefox. Well there is where a search engine, like Yahoo or Google, is a HUGE help. I came across http://www.torontotechcenter.com/defaults_1.html and found that this switch could use “manager” and “manager” for the username/password. Sure enough the “backdoor” account worked as the default username and password weren’t change and voila! I was in!

1905 CST Update: Many users that reported they could not log in are now reporting they are able to log into the site. Either the attack has finished or Justin was able to make some changes for those users to log in… or both.

I figured since everybody else on the interwebs was writing about the DDOS attack on BroadBandReports.com (aka: dslreports.com) I would to. Well, the main brunt of the attack occured this morning. I (BBR: exocet_cm) woke up around 5:30 and tried to get to BBR at 6:00 am CST and it was down. Apparently many folks still can’t access the site as the attack is still under way, but Justin, the site owner, has mitigated much of the bombardment.

For those people that CAN access the site, there is a forum thread about the DDOS attack here: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20189090-Todays-DDOS-site-down

For those people that CANNOT access the site here are the excerpts:
Justin @ 0722 CST: “Hey, glad to see you got here, by hook or by crook.
So we have a pesky DDOS and it is still on the curve upwards, over 1000 IPs so far and any which of them will attempt to hammer or occupy request slots.
Sad and annoying but thems the breaks on the internetz
It started at 4am eastern and got worse as time wore on.
I’ve mitigated it enough to serve pages (the site-is-down message) but the front-end is currently too slow dealing with the dregs to handle real pages.. hence the need to bring up the site on another IP address if only for members.”

Name Game @ 15:33 CST: “Some members over in the UK still can not get to the DSLR either with the DNS or URL
NICK ADSL UK asked me to post this for you as his trace route.
hmm..I see he is not alone in the problem reaching us..”

La Luna @ 1840 CST: “I’ve been kicked out for the last hour (Mele can’t get here either by the way, we’ve been conversing over at Wilders). I’m here via a proxy right now.
I get nothing, zip, ziltch, just a white page trying to get here the normal way.”

There is speculation that a pre-curser to the event was occuring about a week before today as mentioned by this thread http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20137749-site-being-DDOS but I think that these are two unrelated issues/topics. This DDOS story reported at The Register and Lavasoft.

One commenter on a post I wrote a few weeks ago had this to say when they received information that a package due to arrive today was delayed due to a train derailment in Vernon, Ca.

“This is all BS, I just got notice that my package due to arrive on 3-19-08 has been rescheduled due to a derailment in Vernon, CA also, how many derailments could there be, this is a ploy to excuse UPS of their wrong doings and screw ups….no doubht.”

Certainly this couldn’t be the same train derailment from March 6th that delayed my package, could it? http://johndball.blaize.net/2008/03/06/worse-case-scenario-the-train-derails-but-thats-unlikely/

Can anybody find any news article about these mysterious train derailments, or is UPS just covering for their ineptness to deliver packages on time?