GibStorm's Blog

Setting up your printer using a Synology NAS.

One of the best purchases I’ve ever made is my Synology NAS. One of the many cool features it has, is that you can connect USB printers to it and subsequently use them as network printers.

Getting this to work on multiple computers can be tricky, however. For some reason, the default way of setting up the printer, using the DS Assistant application, only lets you use the printer from a single computer. Why that is, I don’t know. Furthermore, that defies the whole purpose of having a network printer…

After some investigating online, I did find a solution.

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Getting jEdit to work with the Windows 7 taskbar.

The free java based editor jEdit is great, but ever since switching to Windows 7 one thing has bothered me. Because of the editor being java driven, it means that the application starts up as a separate item in the Windows taskbar, instead of just running from the taskbar button you used to start it with.

After doing some searching on Google, I found a fix for this.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get the package here.
2. Copy WinRun4J.exe  from ‘winrun4J-0.4.4.zip’ into the jEdit directory and rename it to jEdit.exe
3. Copy jedit.ini file into the jEdit directory.
4. Copy jedit.ico file into the jEdit directory.
5. Copy RCEDIT.exe file into the jEdit directory.
6. Open an admin command prompt window and go to the jEdit directory,
7. In the command prompt, run the following command: ‘rcedit /i jEdit.exe jEdit.ico’.

Done!

Making your Linksys WVC54G wireless camera work with all browsers.

Several years ago, I wanted to have a wifi camera to set up in my apartment for security reasons. I ended up buying the Linksys WVC54G. It was a pretty decent camera for its time, but there are some problems with it. One of these problems is that the video stream was only visible with Internet Explorer (!), since it uses an ActiveX plugin to show the stream.

Why Linksys chose to cripple it’s product in such a way is beyond me, but after some snooping around on the internet I found out that there’s actually a way of switching the camera over from using the ActiveX capture mode, to a more useful mjpeg capture mode. Only disadvantage by doing this is that you lose audio. For me, that is not a big problem.

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Finding your digital TV channels with Stofa.

With regular intervals, I’m contacted by people who are wondering why their TV channels with Stofa are only available in analogue format and not in digital. Other times people are not even aware that they are watching analogue channels, and thus are watching TV in less than optimal quality.

To alleviate that problem, here is a small guide showing how to find these digital channels.

Please note that in order to do this, you need a newer TV with a built in MPEG4 digital tuner.

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Configuring your router for Xbox Live.

Most of the time, an Xbox 360 is an easy roommate. Things usually just work the way you’d expect. As soon as you start playing popular FPS games online however, things can quickly start falling apart if you haven’t done your ‘homework’. You find out that you get connection problems when trying to host games, you cannot connect to the games they are hosting, and you start wondering what’s up.

What’s up is that you’re probably using a router for your internet connection, and that router (like most routers) is using NAT. I’ll get more into detail about what that is later, but what that basically means is that you need to do some configuring on the router to get things working.

As you may or may not know, each device that’s on the internet has a unique identification address number called an IP. Since these IP’s are in short supply these days, routers started using NAT (Network Address Translation) to enable home users to only need one fully fledged internet IP (also called an external IP), while still being able to use as many devices at home as they’d like.

The way this works is, that the router gets this single external IP to communicate with the internet. At the same time, it hands out local IP’s (internal IP’s) to each device in your home. These internal IP’s are no good on the internet, so everything has to go through the router, which then handles everything (address translation) for you so that it works.

Now, since the servers on the internet only know the main IP on the router and not the IP on your Xbox360, if you don’t instruct the router what kind of traffic to redirect to the Xbox, things stop working. And that is your current problem.

That covers the problem, now for the solution.

Everything communicating over the internet, or your home network for that matter, operates on certain port numbers. In the case of Xbox Live traffic, it uses four different port numbers for four different kinds of communication. What we need to do in order to fix the problem, is tell the router to redirect all traffic on these ports to the Xbox360 in your home. In order to do that, we need to know 2 things:

1. Which ports is the Xbox360 communicating on.
2. Which internal IP is the Xbox360 using on your local network.

Once you know this, we can start configuring the router.

The first one, I’ll give you straight up. The ports are 53, 88, 1863 and 3074. You will probably find listings missing one or more of these ports on the internet, but these are the ones I use, and they work.

There are several ways of finding the IP on the Xbox360, but the easiest is probably to just find it on the Xbox itself after it’s connected to your network. This is somewhere inside the System Settings. Microsoft have a habit of changing the user interface from time to time, so I’ll let you explore for it yourself. Here’s how it looks on my Xbox360.

As you can see, my Xbox360 is using the IP 192.168.0.11. Yours will probably be different, but once you find it write it down.

Now that we have what we need, we can get started configuring that router. Open up your browser of choice, and pull up the router configuration interface. If you don’t know how to do that, I can tell you that it’s usually just a matter of typing in the routers internal IP in the address field, and logging in with your admin user and pass. If you don’t have the routers IP, it’s fairly easy to find in the networking settings on your computer or on the Xbox360, listed as gateway. As you can tell in my picture above, my gateway IP is 192.168.0.1. That is then the IP I need to pull up the configuration interface.

Moving right along to the actual router configuration… Once you’ve opened the router configuration interface in your browser and logged in, look for ‘port forwarding’ or what’s sometimes called ‘virtual server’. In my case it’s called ‘Single Port Forwarding’, and is found under the ‘Applications and gaming’ tab. Once you’ve found this, it’s basically just a matter of entering the info you’ve found into the system and hitting ‘Save’. I know it might not seem simple to most people, so I’ll try to explain furter. Anyway, here is how my config looks:

The Xbox Live port forwarding rules we are discussing now, are the ones outlined by red. Here, I’ve added a rule for each of the four port numbers, and pointed them to the IP of my Xbox360. If your router asks for protocol (tcp/udp), just select both if you can. I did, as it was simplest. If you can’t select both, I suggest you make a rule for both per port number.

With the rules set up, and all of them enabled, hitting save will activate the new config. This sometimes results in the router rebooting, so don’t worry if your internet connection goes down for a couple of minutes. It should come up again in a jiffy.

Your Xbox Live gaming experience should now be effortless. :)

Note: If your Xbox360 changes IP at any time for any reason, things will stop working again. In order to prevent that, I suggest using DHCP reservation (if your router supports it), or setting the IP static. How to do that is a whole different story, however. I may cover that in a different guide, if I find there is a need for one.