John Luif

Maybe I’m late to the party but I just stumbled across Windows Meeting Space which is a collaboration tool to share applications just like GoToMeeting or Live Meeting except it is free, well almost free. Windows Meeting Space comes with Windows Vista which as cool as it is to have a free web meeting tool it will be a while until enough people adopt Vista to have it be a viable option.

Simple but useful.  Say you do not have a conventional config file for your wcf service address, such is the case for compact framework apps.  Another case is with Visual Studio load testing projects in which you can use different properties in the test context to set the service location.  In both case you would want to change the service address programmatically which is quite simple but sometimes not intuitive.  A sample is below:

 service = new ServiceClient();
           
string serviceLocation = "http://testserver/TestService1.svc";
EndpointAddress address = new EndpointAddress(serviceLocation);
service.Endpoint.Address = address;

The service location "http://testserver/TestService1.svc" can come from anywhere (i.e. test context properties), I just chose to hard code it in for this example.

Recently I switched from Comcast (Cable) to Speakeasy.net (DSL) so I could get static ips.  After I got four static ips I found myself saying “Great, now what?”.  Realizing quickly I had no idea how to route traffic from specific ips/ports I went on the hunt.

First I researched different firmware.  I decided to use the DD-WRT firmware for my WRT150N router which gives telnet access has a web interface to update the firewall.

Next I found a good article on WRTrouters that illustrated how to route multiple ips through the firewall.  There are a few things missing from the article, 1) POSTROUTING is not needed if you are just trying to route incoming traffic 2)  Using PREROUTING for ips and ports is not covered, nor will the scripts in the article work for ports.  With those two things said the article gave me a jumpstart on what to do.  I needed to route ips and ports to different servers.  The below is the script I came up with which works great for routing ip traffic for a specific port to another ip on a specific port.  The nice thing is you can route traffic from one port to another port even though I’m not doing that. (The ips have been changed to protect the innocent.)

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 57.63.155.40 --dport 21 -j DNAT --to-destination 68.100.241.60:21
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 57.63.155.40 --dport 1723 -j DNAT --to-destination 68.100.241.60:1723
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 57.63.155.40 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 68.100.241.62:80
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 57.63.155.40 --dport 443 -j DNAT --to-destination 68.100.241.65:443
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 57.63.155.41 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 68.100.241.60:80

No that I have the firmware and I have the firewall routing rules it is time to update the router.  The DD-WRT control panel has a nice Commands tab under Administration.

On the Commands tab you can update the firewall rules by clicking on Save Firewall then click Edit.  The Commands window will be populated with whatever is currently in the rc_firewall variable.  Copy the above firewall updates into the Commands windows then click Save Firewall. 

That is it, you should be routing traffic from multiple public ips using a cheap router.

*UPDATE*

I have found that trying to route using ports does not work as I expected thus the guidance provided by WRTrouters is a better way to proceed.  My updated iptables script is as follows:

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -p tcp -s 57.63.15.40 -j SNAT --to-source 68.100.241.62
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d 68.100.241.62 -j DNAT --to-destination 57.63.15.40

I will continue to research other ways of routing multiple wan ips | port combinations to enable greater configuration through the firewall, but for now this will get the job done.

I found this answer in a forum and it seems to work!

“Microsoft has a service called Transient Multimon Manager (TMM). This (supposedly) makes it easier to run multiple displays. It also causes the annoying flash we all hate so much. It took me hours to pinpoint the exact process (which happened to be the Task Scheduler Engine), and even more time to pinpoint the exact task, so enjoy.

Here's how to fix that annoying black flicker on boot:


Click on the Start button (pearl? ball? orb?).
Type "Task Scheduler" and hit Enter.
On the left-hand side, click "Task Scheduler Local" (you should already be there, but just in case).
Expand "Task Scheduler Library," then "Microsoft," then "Windows," then click "MobilePC."
Up top, you'll see a task called "TMM." Click it, and on the right-hand side, click "Disable."
You're done. :)


There are slight drawbacks to the aforementioned solution:
I just tried this fix for my laptop, and the auto detection of the second monitor no longer worked. But you can still switch around to the external monitors manually though, and it seemed to work.”

For any of you that have to do color matching for websites and whatever else eyedropper is a must.  I have used it for many years on Windows XP and just as I went to use it tonight it did not work.  Luckily there is a new beta version out that works on Vista.

I just noticed that gmail now supports IMAP.  Just log in to gmail and look under settings and you will see the option to turn on IMAP.