November 2011

There were 51 posts published in November 2011 (this is page 4 of 6).

On my way

I found this picture (slide, actually) in my collection of stuff and scanned it in a few months ago. It was taken on one of my very last days of boot camp, mid-April 1988, by the photo vendors of the now-defunct Boardwalk and Baseball theme park near Orlando, FL. I was on my way in a few days to my very first duty station: my A-school training at Fort Devens, MA. From left to right are James Kading (I think), Christopher Patrick, Richard Royston and me.

I have no idea where these guys wound up. Boot camp isn’t a place you have a lot of time to socialize. There was only one sailor in my company I got to know better, only because we spent 6 months together at the aforementioned A-school. I wonder what these gentlemen here are up to now.

Job offer!

I got a job offer today and it’s a good one! The work is interesting, I like the people I’d be working with, and the company seems to be truly supportive of its employees.

The only reason I didn’t jump right on it today and accept it is that there are three other interesting opportunities that I’m also pursuing, some of which still have interviews pending. Each offers something unique from the others. Each has its advantages. The two I’ve interviewed with so far seem to be very interested in what I can do, and I expect a good talk tomorrow with the third firm.
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NCDOT to award graffiti-removal contract

Graffiti on the Beltline

I found more graffiti on the I-440 Raleigh Beltline last week and that sent me Googling for how to get it removed. Seems a Google search on the terms “NCDOT graffiti” returns MT.Net as the third result. In other words, there aren’t a lot of resources for graffiti removal.

The good news is that NCDOT is getting serious about graffiti removal. It has a contract out for bid right now for graffiti-removal services for Durham and Wake counties.
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Still no luck using my Droid phone as a SIP client

Now that I understand why my Droid phone is using a panic-inducing IP address, I decided to try my hand again at getting the SIPdroid app to work with my home phone system.

My first try was to set my firewall rules to allow traffic from 28.x.x.x. The problem with this is that since the 28.x.x.x addresses aren’t advertised (and thus routable), my home server can get packets from them all day, but can’t send anything back. My ISPs routers don’t know what to do with them.
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DoD IP mystery solved!

A commenter’s tip has solved the mystery of why my phone’s voice traffic is coming from an IP address owned by the Department of Defense. By entering the code *#*#INFO#*#*, I was able to pull up a hidden menu which shows the rogue IP address as assigned to my phone.

The Department of Defense is squatting on a massive number of IPv4 addresses and is not using most of it. Phone networks like Sprint are borrowing these IP addresses because their networks are larger than the 16 million hosts that the 10.x.x.x network can provide.

It looks, as another MT.Net visitor theorized, like Sprint is assigning the (unused) DoD IP addresses internally to its phones and then NATting the traffic from the phones to the public IPs. Since SIP packets have an additional IP address embedded inside, Sprint’s firewalls aren’t NATting that IP and thus the ordinarily “private” IP address is getting through the NAT process.

Whew!

Addressing some theories about DoD snooping

Update Nov. 10: The mystery has been solved. Sprint’s borrowing DoD IP addresses, most likely without DOD’s knowledge. It appears to be entirely harmless.

A few of my friends have weighed in with their theories as to why I was seeing my phone traffic coming from a DoD network. Many of these theories point out how the DoD is the owner of vast stretches of IP address space, many of which aren’t advertised as public routes. Some organizations treat these addresses as non-routable addresses, making it appear traffic originates from the DoD. One blogger discovered the IPs of the UK Ministry of Defence being used similarly by T-Mobile.
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DoD IP address mysteriously unreachable

I decided to see if I could find out more about this mysterious IP address that apparently belongs to the Department of Defense.

One of the best ways to do this is to run a traceroute, which shows the path back to the IP through the Internet’s routers. I also wanted to see if I could find any evidence that my router or my ISP’s router was compromised or broken.

Performing a traceroute from my home computer to the IP provides me this output:

root@maestro:# traceroute 28.191.58.169
traceroute to 28.191.58.169 (28.191.58.169), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 wireless.tonsler (192.168.3.252) 0.971 ms 1.419 ms 1.634 ms
2 user-0c2h181.cable.mindspring.com (24.40.133.1) 14.064 ms 13.993 ms 24.788 ms
3 66.26.46.13 (66.26.46.13) 18.689 ms 18.942 ms 19.029 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *

It’s not unusual that the traceroute dies on the way back: many hosts and/or networks go down and the packet trace stops. However, it is interesting that the traceroute dies on Time Warner’s network. That last router, 66.26.46.13, belongs to Road Runner:
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Why is the Defense Department snooping on my phone?

Update Nov 9 11:00 AM. Mystery solved! Sprint is apparently squatting on the DoD addresses, using them for their internal phone network. Sprint understandably wants to firewall these phones from the wild and wooly Internet, so it NATs the phone traffic from these supposedly-private IPs to the phone’s public IP address. SIP packets have the internal IP embedded in them, however, and aren’t easily NATted. This address slipped through Sprint’s firewall, causing me alarm (fortunately undue alarm!)

Break out your tinfoil hats because this will blow your mind.

I found something quite disturbing today while trying to get my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V phone talking completely through Voice-Over-IP (VoIP). For reasons not entirely clear yet, I discovered that voice packets from my phone are being routed to an IP address belonging to the Department of Defense.

Some background

I had long been a “dumb phone” kind of guy when it comes to mobile phones but finally bit the bullet and got an Android phone from Virgin Mobile when the right plan came along. I am also a VoIP enthusiast and have been sending phone calls over the Internet for almost ten years now. I’m also a cheapskate, so naturally when I got my Android phone one of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out how to make calls with it completely over VoIP – using my unlimited data plan instead of burning my limited voice minutes. That’s what hackers do, you know.
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Daylight complaint-saving time

I managed to make it through the whole day yesterday without my usual twice-yearly rant about daylight saving time. The truth is that Kelly and I completely forgot about DST ending and woke up thinking it was later than it actually was. Other than resetting far too many clocks it was a smooth transition for us.

Since I’ve blogged before about DST’s dubious benefits, I came across an interesting National Geographic look at DST. Some excerpts:

Likewise, Matthew Kotchen, an economist at the University of California, saw in Indiana a situation ripe for study.
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