Back on my old IP?

I’ve noticed more cable modem strangeness this afternoon. I reflashed my router today and noticed that my home cable modem is once again on its old 24.40.133.50 address. I have no explanation for what happened to the 24.40.133.16 address I have been using for the last 24 hours.

It’s not been my experience that TWC/Earthlink swaps out IP addresses so quickly. Normally I get an IP address for many months without it changing. It’s very unusual to have one flip in just an afternoon.

Thinking I liked my newer IP address better, I tried to force a new assignment by unplugging my cable modem for ten minutes. Apparently that wasn’t long enough to do the trick, though. I will have to consider other options.

I still have no explanation for the earlier phantom response. Well, no rational explanation, anyway. I could say it was another quick DHCP assignment but that still wouldn’t account for the missing Microsoft ports which otherwise get filtered at the cable modem of every subscriber.

Are these Time Warner Cable shenanigans?

Coca-cola ad causes some heads to explode

I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday because professional football kind of bores me. Last night’s blowout of Denver by Seattle makes my choice seem justified. Plus, what does it say when all anyone wants to talk about is the Super Bowl TV commercials?

Apparently Coca-cola struck a nerve in some when they had the audacity to air a commercial with brown-skinned people singing America the Beautiful. Yes, even this patriotic song by Katherine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward is causing some conservatives to flip out. Why? Who the hell knows?

I’ve been seeing responses on the Desert Storm Veterans Facebook page that just make me want to smack my head.

Here’s one pic from Facebook that’s been making the rounds:

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Mystery host answers for mine

I decided yesterday morning to reflash my home firewall’s version of OpenWRT. This involved rebooting the router, of course, and when the router came up the friendly folks at Earthlink (or Time Warner Cable, depending on who runs the DHCP servers) had assigned my home cable modem a new IP address.

As I worked out a few issues with the new firmware, paring down modules and processes in order to make it all fit inside my modest little router, I decided to test the firewall rules to see whether things were working. From my server hosted outside of my network, I ran a simple nmap test to see which ports were open:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 11:44 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.50)
Host is up (0.035s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.50: user-0c2h19i.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 955 closed ports, 40 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.86 seconds

That’s about what I expected, so I turned my attention to other issues, including running another test twenty minutes later:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 12:04 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.16)
Host is up (0.028s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.16: user-0c2h18g.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 991 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
587/tcp open submission
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 38.88 seconds

For the second test you can see I’ve got a few other ports showing up (TCP 135, 139, 445). These are supposedly filtered by the ISP somewhere down the line (probably the cable modem-level) to block clueless Windows users from exposing their networks to teh Internets.

You can see that these tests produced different results. It what was the same about these results, however, that caught my eye!
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The dark of winter

It’s not been a fun few weeks for me after losing my job before the holidays. I’ve been feeling pretty low, actually, with only my knowing that there will be better days ahead to hang on to. It sucks feeling like I’m not contributing when all I want to do is contribute.

Home life hasn’t been a happy place, which is kind of ironic since when things began going south at work I started to realize how the stress I was feeling could become hazardous to my marriage. Now I’ve the stress of needing to look for work. Things will get better, though. The darkest day of winter begins the return to light.

At least Mother Nature has conspired to give me company in being at home, since the entire City of Raleigh took the week off for last Tuesday’s snow. While sledding with the kids at my neighborhood park on Wednesday, I remarked to my neighbor how awesome the sledding conditions were.

“No kidding,” he answered. “It sure beats a day at the office.”

Well, maybe if you’ve got an office to be away from it does. Sledding is fun but not working is anything but fun.

It’s up to me to make something happen and that’s what I’ll do. And while I know the sun will rise again, I won’t soon forget these dark days of winter.