If it’s 12AM and your Nintendo WII power supply goes on the fritz and you can’t locate one at your local Wal-Mart and you’re jonsin’  to play a new game have no fear! I too found myself in this situation recently. Like most computer dudes I have a plethora of computer parts lying around in my parts closet. It’s really not all that uncommon to have a power supply or two lurking in the parts bin. In this document I’ll teach you how to juice up your Wii and get back to gaming with simple items almost every geek has. Amazingly the Nintendo Wii’s power brick is rated at 3.0A (Amps) and normal PC power supplies rate at least 5-7A (Amps) on the 12 volt (yellow-wire) side.

 

There are some other articles online outlining the procedures to replace a small soldered-in fuse inside the power brick. We didn’t have a fuse or the time to try to remove the strange shaped screws holding the brick together.

 

Disclaimer: We do not claim that the below will not harm your Nintendo Wii. We have tested it and everything appears to work but we cannot speak to the “cleanliness” of the power delivered by the power supply used nor can we assure that any other issues may be caused. Please use this document at your own risk.

 

What’s Required

* Wire strippers (or equivalent)

* Wire cutters
* A small shiny (non-coated) paper clip

* Electrical tape

* Optional: Soldering Iron w/ Solder

* A small Molex to SATA Adapter (these come in almost every retail hard drive box)

* A small or old PC power supply (ATX is what we’re using here)

 

Steps to Power

1. Since you’re not going to use your old power brick anymore, cut off the end which plugs in to your Wii closest to the brick as possible.

2. Strip the grey sheathing from the wire. This will reveal a white wire surrounded by another wire.

3. Take the wire around the outside and twist it together to form one wire.

4. Strip the white wire. Be careful to leave enough insulator between the white wire and the outside wires we previously twisted.

5. Locate your Molex to SATA converter. Cut the black and yellow wires closest to the SATA connector.

6. Strip the black and yellow wires.

7. Connect Yellow to White (the inside wire)

8. Connect Black to the outside wire we previously twisted.

9. Use electrical tape to make the connections or optionally solder the connections together. Use plenty of electrical tape or heat shrink tubing to secure the connections and insulate them.

10. Plug in your molex connector to the power supply.

 

At this time your Nintendo Wii is connected to the power supply.

 

11. Unbend your silver paper clip and insert one end in to the ATX connector’s green wire. Connect the other end to the black ground wire next to the green wire. This sets the ATX power supply to be on at all times.

12. Plug in your ATX power supply to wall power.

13. Plug in the newly-frankenstiened power adapter to your Nintendo Wii

13. Power on your Nintendo Wii

 

 

Polarity for the Nintendo adapter is printed on the bottom of the brick but does not outline which wire (the outside or inside) is positive or negative. The outside wire is DC negative (-) and the inside white wire is DC positive (+).

 

Conclusion

To power a Nintendo Wii with a PC power supply is very easy and certainly feasible. I’m not sure the long term affects of using this solution but it does make complete sense to use a PC power supply because that is, essentially, what a Nintendo Wii is – a computer. To this day the solution is still working and I haven’t found a need to buy another power brick yet. This solution/fix was a bit overkill but at the time it made sense to get the gaming system back online.

BIND, the Berkley Internet Name Domain service, provides forward (authoritative) and recursive (non-authoritative) DNS lookups for the majority of the internet as we know it. A security vulnerability outlined here shows that a specially crafted packet can cause the DNS daemon to stop functioning. It is imperative that all “master” DNS servers get updated immediately. More general information on BIND can be found on their site here.

CVE Information: http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2009-0696

RHEL Bug Information: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=514292

 

The NVD at NIST reports the following overview of this issue:

The dns_db_findrdataset function in db.c in named in ISC BIND 9.4 before 9.4.3-P3, 9.5 before 9.5.1-P3, and 9.6 before 9.6.1-P1, when configured as a master server, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (assertion failure and daemon exit) via an ANY record in the prerequisite section of a crafted dynamic update message, as exploited in the wild in July 2009.

 

Updating BIND on RHEL/CentOS (4/5)

Updated packages are available to assure you are running the latest release.

Use this command to update bind on yum-based systems:

# yum –y update bind

Updating BIND on Debian / Ubuntu

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

 

 

 

Product Overview

The RioRey solution is a DDoS protection device not widely used or heard of … yet. First of all let me assure you that I am in no way associated with the RioRey company and my focus is to give an honest and unbiased opinion of their product offerings.

 

The RioRey device is a rack-mountable device with one copper management port and two copper or fiber (Multimode SX/LC or Singlemode LX/LC) ports. Their products tier in the volume of packets per second they are able to mitigate under a real DDoS attack. They range from 150K packets per second (PPS) to their newest eight rack unit 16M packets per second model. The model I have had the most experience with is their entry-level 150K PPS model. This will be the model I talk about in the remainder of this article. 

 

Installation

Using the device is a breeze. Installation is as simple as installing it in line to the closest “edge” of your connection. For most companies and hosting providers this would be at their handoff from their bandwidth provider (e.g. Cogent, ATT) The device can be purchased (at no additional cost) with the ability to fail to bypass. This means that if the device has a  hardware failure the device will act as a straight-through cable and continue to pass traffic. In testing this device did not even trip external monitoring when simulating failure.

 

Usage

The device comes with a very primitive web interface which is used for setting up low-level functions like syslog reporting and IP addressing of the management interface. The device comes with a pre-configured IP address to access this web console for first installation. The device also comes with their management software called “rView” This software allows you to view the status of the device, perform reports, get real-time insight into current attacks and customize how the device behaves under attack. The device also has the ability to send SNMP traps, log to syslog and email when an attack is detected.

 

Real World Experience

I’ve personally and (un)fortunately had this device work for me. This device was blocking a 1.3GBit/sec UDP flood and was currently only linked at 100mbit. All sites/devices/services behind the RioRey were still responsive. The sites did notice a small uptick in response time but no dropped packets or requests. The device performed as advertised and their patented Micro Behavioral Analysis (MBA) algorithms performed beautifully. Within 60 seconds the attack was mitigated and “polluted” traffic was removed. The graph on the right illustrates how fast the traffic was blocked. Notice the blue line grow and then almost instantly disappears. This blue line is the “after filtering” traffic (the traffic passed to the LAN interface.) The attack traffic was almost instantly mitigated- all without human intervention.

 

Summary

This device is a very valuable tool. It’s kind of like a fire extinguisher, when you need it you really need it; when you don’t need it you never really even know or care to know that it’s there. Was it worth the investment? It’s hard to gauge these things after an attack is mitigated. If we didn’t have the device under attacks it would be much harder to identify the attacker and the victim and would cause more downtime simply analyzing the traffic to find the source(s).

I believe the device is well worth it. It’s entry-level pricing is second to none (when compared to other solutions) and it allows a level of protection that most never thought possible for the price. To obtain more information and pricing please visit The RioRey Site.

If you have any questions about the device and would like to contact me for more information please post a comment or email Adam [at] Admo.net for more information!

Symbolic links allow an administrator to point a link (file or directory) to another real location.

 

How do I create a symbolic link?

# ln –s [target file/directory] /link/location/to/file/or/directory

 

For example, you wish to link /etc/httpd/conf to point to the real location of /usr/local/apache/conf

The command would look like this:
# ln –s /usr/local/apache/conf /etc/httpd/conf

 

Assure that the destination for your link (in our example this would be /usr/local/apache/conf) does not already exist.

	IOPS (I/O’s per Second, or iostat "tps")	Data Transfer Rate (MB/sec)	Minimum Number of Disk Drives to Support Workload
Random I/O (10k RPM)	125	0.5	n = (%R + f (%W))(tps)/125
Random I/O (15k RPM)	150	0.5+	n = (%R + f (%W))(tps)/150
Sequential I/O	2000	50	n = (MB/sec)/50

Where:
%R = the percentage of disk I/O’s that are reads.
%W= the percentage of disk I/O’s that are writes.
f = 1 for ordinary disks, 2 for mirrored disks, 4 for Raid 5 disks.
Assumes data is distributed evenly across all disk drives.

 

Using the above formula, here’s the minimum number of disks required to support a random I/O workload, at 1000 IOPS,  80% read, 20% write on 10K RPM disk drives.

 

Ordinary disks:  (0.8 + 1*0.2)(1000 IOPS)/(125 IOPS/disk)  = 8
Mirrored disks:  (0.8 + 2*0.2)(1000 IOPS)/(125 IOPS/disk)  = 10
Raid 5 disks:      (0.8 + 4*0.2)(1000 IOPS)/(125 IOPS/disk) =  13

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