Perpetually Bored

I can’t help thinking that the real reason we have all these arms limitation treaties governing what weapons could or could not be used during war is because politicians don’t want their war to end fast.

We have the equivalent of that in RTS games, such as the C&C series, where players would set mutual rules such as no superweapons or no attacking for 20 minutes for the same reason. We don’t want to spend time setting up a game to have it end in 5 minutes. Neither do politicians want to spend time mobilizing and preparing for a war, just to have it all end in the 20 minutes it takes for their intercontinental nuclear weapons to find their targets. It’s simply no fun, and it doesn’t give enough time for the military industries which politicians are often tied to, or have a background in to profit from it.

The next time you hear about the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the various forms of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), thinking about familiar terms such as “no rush 20″ and “no superweapons”.

Race change potions have been added to the Station Marketplace in EQ2, and I was more than willingly to indulge myself in one. For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to be an Erudite instead of a High Elf. I love the mysterious and alien look of the Erudite. It is as if in they’ve neglected their corporal form in the search of magic and the amount of power in them have twisted them into what looks like a twisted shriveled body, but one that contains pure power. In a way, it is like a cross between the Emperor from Star Wars and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

The potion can be bought for 2500 station cash, the same as what it takes for a character transfer. Some people however, are visibly upset with the race change potions. As Stargrace kindly pointed out to me, this would let someone be a Dark Elf Paladin easily instead of having to make a Shadowknight and betray it over, making some combinations of race and class easily obtainable without any effort.

Despite not enjoying my own time in military service, I’m a huge military history fan. My initial interest as a kid was first in weaponry, which then grew to tactics and strategy. For the past year or two, my field of interest has shifted to the personal lives and experiences of leaders/commanders, the common soldier and their significant others and that of the civilian during times of war.

While reading autobiography which largely consists of the account of an individual named Erwin Rosen, who enlisted into the French Foreign Legion during the early 1990s [Book title: 'In The Foreign Legion' by Erwin Rosen], I was sidetracked and chanced upon an archive of letters sent during war times, namely the first and second World War, http://www.war-letters.com/. The site is absolutely fantastic, with scanned originals and text transcribed versions of a large number of letters sent to/from the common soldiers who participated in these wars. It was a huge insight to be privileged to the thoughts of these people, who mostly were in a war they’d rather not be in, and want nothing more than to be reunited with their loved ones, and also their thoughts on the day to day routines.

Seems strange that someone who is anti-war like myself would love military history, but is only from understanding the experiences of people who were caught in them can we understand how they have felt, and how truly terrible a thing war is.

The Headless Horseman is an epic x2 mob that spawns during the Nights of the Dead festival from a dead looking tree in Neklutos Forest near the Darklight Woods entrance. He drops a couple of awesome pieces and is an easy kill if done right.

I managed to put together slightly over one and half groups for him. To get him to spawn, at least one member of the raid force needs the necklace obtained from doing the Halloween maze. He’s on an one to three hour spawn timer, and upon spawning, goes for the person with the necklace in their inventory in an attempt to snatch it off. If the person dies, the necklace is consumed. Otherwise, it can be used again for subsequent spawns.

In only place where The Headless Horseman can be killed effectively is on the grounds with the field of bones near the tree. My first attempt lasted almost 45 minutes before wiping because we were clueless on the strategy and tanked him elsewhere, where he had a 99% damage resist debuff. Stupid of us, but we were all once young and naive.

Tanked in the right spot, he was easier than cake and took little effort.

I seldom partake in sports, and the one time I did, which was yesterday, I injured my right wrist while bowling. It’s the worst place that I can possibly suffer an injury. It hurts when I type, and it hurts when I use the mouse. Looks like I’m out of action for first-person shooter gaming.

It was an activity I reluctantly took part in only after much persuasion, and I walked away regretful. As Calvin would say, “Every time I’ve built character, I’ve regretted it.”

Yet another adventure in Linux land. This time, it was largely due to issues with iptables.

First of all, installing vsftpd was rather easy. Issuing aptitude install vsftpd with superuser privileges was all. Configuration didn’t take all that much work either, but it dragged on due to this being my first time and having to look up the manual.

The configuration for vsftpd is located at /etc/vsftpd.conf. Out of the box, vsftp allows anonymous read access. The first order of the day was to disable that by changing the variable.

anonymous_enable=NO

Users in vsftpd can either be local accounts, or vsftpd specific ones. I used local accounts to save myself the hassle since all my local accounts have their permissions set correctly already and what not.

local_enable=YES

By default, all user accounts (including local) are only granted read access. Adding the following line enables write and modify permissions.

write_enable=YES

At this stage. vsftpd is configured and ready to run. However, if you’re behind a firewall, some additional configuration needs to be done to allow vsftp listen and pass through it. To the novice who is inexperienced with iptables like myself, this turned out to be quite an adventure. Before we get to that however, it is imperative to understand how FTP works.

FTP works in two modes, active and passive. A detailed and extremely useful explanation of the difference between the two can be found on http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html. Briefly, in active FTP, the client initiates a connection to the listening server’s control port, and when data transfer is required, the client opens up a port and lets the server know via the control channel which port on the client side to send the data to. Thus, it requires the client open a port in the listening state. This doesn’t quite work if the client is behind a firewall or NAT. In passive FTP, the client initiates the connection to the server’s control port. The server then dynamically opens up another port and lets the client know this port number via the control channel. The client would then initiate a connection to this port for data transfer. In summary, active FTP requires an open port on both the client and server side, and passive ftp requires two open ports on the server side while none on the client’s.

While the server listens on port 21 constantly for incoming connections, and we can specify that as such in the firewall, the dynamically created port creates an issue since it’s open only when required, and is usually a random port in a port range. Having all these ports constantly open is not feasible as it’d be a security issue. To get around this, the firewall has to be stateful react accordingly.

Two things need to be done. First, add the stateful rule in iptables.

-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 21 -j ACCEPT

Next, we’re going have to enable the module that allows connection tracking for FTP so that our stateful rule would work. This can be done simply by running modprobe ip_conntrack_ftp as superuser. In order to make command permanent however, we need to add it to the /etc/modules file so that it runs on startup.

Took a bit of work, but we now have a fully functional FTP server. My adventures in Linux land continues.

From today henceforth, this site will be rebranded as ‘Perpetually Bored’ and the domain name will change accordingly from http://blog.mythokia.net to http://perpetuallybored.com. Old links will still work for as long as possible (looking at at least a year), and will redirect accordingly  thanks to the power of mod_rewrite and HTTP 301 Redirects. The crossover actually happened last week, but I saved the announcement until today to give time for DNS records to propagate and update.

Why? The site never really had a proper name to begin with. It used to be Thermonuclear Exchange, but that was too long. So it became just boring and plain blog.mythokia.net, after a handle I adopted for use. I choose the name ‘Perpetually Bored’ for a number of reasons, one of which is to express the state of life I’m constantly in, and another, was to convey the message that, in relation to the content, being in a state of boredom does give you creative ideas and encouragement to experiment and explore, the results of which can be very positive.

Apologies to those who have to update their bookmarks and such. I’ll try as much as I can to promise that this blog doesn’t go through another name change again.

Carrying on from where I left off yesterday, I assembled a group this morning in a vain attempt to kill Varsoon and finish up yesterday’s instance. After which, I spent the next couple hours spamming the channels looking a Palace of Ferzhul group while grinding out some writs. I even had time to spare, drawing a flowchart of how terrible my weekends are should anyone ask on the following work day.

In the mist of spamming LFGs, I learnt how to use Visio too. No more PowerPoint flowcharts for me.

The day didn’t just end there. I was saved by Latharek late the in afternoon who put together a PoF group for me. That’s the guy who also helped me get my T4 armor too. I owe him lots. Since our group’s Troubadour also had a saved Varsoon only instance of PoF, there was some confusion in determining whose instance, whether mine or his, to use so that one of us wouldn’t get the ‘you may not enter an instance created prior to when your previous instances minimum lockout timer expired’ message. I’ve never had an issue understanding the message, but it can be confusing for some. For heroic zones with a typical 18 hours lockout, what it simply means is that, if you zone into and instance and have a lockout starting at 0100h, you won’t be able to enter another person’s instance unless it his lockout started after 1900h on that day. How did I get the latter number? Time my instance was created + lockout time (18h). It’s only fair because otherwise could constantly do another instance someone else created and never having a lockout yourself. Perhaps I worded it badly, and still do, thus I ended up drawing a small diagram to explain.

Hope I made sense.

Back to the group, we ended up killing Varsoon twice. First time using the saved instance which was cleared up to Varsoon and incurring no lockout penalty, and then resetting it and clearing the whole zone again. Finally, I have my Dagger of the Ethernaut Magus, and wrapped up the TSO signature line. I plan to finish up the signatures and weapon quests from other expansions too eventually, but that’s for another day.

I wasn’t satisfied with just walking away from Varsoon after dying ten over times to him in Palace of Ferzhul. No, I had to get even somehow. As the popular saying goes, pick on someone your one size. Thus, I paid the Chronomagic NPC a visit, lowered myself to level 35, and served another copy of him his just desserts.

My fun with Chronomagic didn’t just end there. Along with the auto-mentoring system, SOE also added daily missions for them, just like the current shard daily doubles. Basically, the quests are a way to encourage and reintroduce old instances to people and get them grouping in those places again. The quest would send you back to an instance that is at least one tier behind your currently level, requiring you to mentor down, either by having a lower level friend, or by using the Chronomagic NPC. The zone for today was the Crypt of Valdoon in Looping Plains. I had a full group of people ranging from 77-80s mentored down to 70 for it, and it was cake.

The reward was pretty spiffy. It gave +1000 faction with the Chronomancers, which could be used to buy fluff armor when you have accumulated enough. However, that’s not all. It also gives you a choice to buy a miniature replica of whichever boss in the zone you had to kill for the daily mission for a bit over a plat. In this case, it was Count Valdoon Kel’Novar.

I’ve hardly explored much of the GU53 content, but I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far.

After an individual has completed their mandatory two years of National Service here, most of their personal documents that have accumulated over their period of service gets destroyed. The earlier half of this month saw people many from my unit completing their period of service and leaving behind two years of internment in what is essentially Auschwitz.

Being one of those that still had a long term left in the service, I had to clean up their mess. Most of the afternoon was spent shredding documents after documents of these people who left service in the past month. I could only imagine how the members of the Stasi felt on 15 January 1990, destroying every single document possible as those pesky counter-revolutionaries and capitalist sympathizers marched on the building.

Boy, it was intense work!