Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Battlefield 4 Disconnected Session

I have a Playstation 4, thing is awesome. Fuck your XBox. Battlefield (any of them really) is my favorite franchise. I used to play Call of Duty but honestly BF is just so much better. Any the game chat isn’t filled with 12 year olds whining about how your skills are better than theirs. TLDR? Go to the bottom of the post.

Recently there was an update for BF4, they changed some things to get ready for Battlefield 1. BF1 is OK, I played the beta a bit. Didn’t care for it too much. I found the gameplay slower than other BF games and the in game animations where so fucking slow. A rifle reload took forever. While it may have been realistic it’s too fucking slow for my liking. I don’t want a run and gun like CoD but I felt like they were killing what I liked about BF. Anyways this new update broke my fucking game. Now in multiplayer when joined in a group for online play the host of the group can only select a game once. Let’s say you pick a server to play on but the queue is has too many people so you cancel, well your fucked now. You won’t be able to select another server. The game simply wont let you. Either one of your friends has to create a new group and pick a server (only one chance remember) or you have to quit the game and restart it. I know a few people that are affected by this. Well on top of this awesome new feature I started getting “Disconnected from Session” messages. I was not able to play BF4 for a week until I found the solution. Now remember, nothing on my end has changed other than the BF4 update. The fix to the session disconnect error is to forward ports. Wait what the actual fuck. So EA patched a game, now I cant play it unless I forward ports. That is some fucking bullshit right there.

On to the fix. I watched this video and found the answer. You can Google the issue and find a solution (maybe why you are here?) but there are a few different ports floating around out there. I did not (and fucking will not) forward all the ports they specify. It is simply not needed. There is ZERO fucking reason why a PS4 game needs port 80 and 443 forwarded. Fucking ZERO, and if there is such a game that exists take it back and return that piece of shit. All I had to forward was some UDP ports. Port 3659 and 14000-14016. That’s it. Don’t forward anything else.

The fix for “Disconnected from Session” is to port forward UDP ports 3659 and UDP ports 14000-14016. If you don’t know how to do port forwarding go here https://portforward.com/.

PCDuino and Filespace

I hate PCDuinos. But it was on sale, and I didn’t know any better at the time. Fast-forwarding… after using dd or the Apple Pi Baker to transfer the (old ass) image to the SD Card you can boot right up, that much actually works. But soon you will run out of disk space. The image is 1.9gb and I am using a 4gb card. Plenty of space. If this was a Raspberry Pi you could us the config menu and resize the partitions with no problems. That shit works. This shit doesn’t work. Stay away from PCDuinos, please. Their support sucks balls. Using the default PCDuino resizer from their menu causes the unit to not boot once you reboot it, the shit just hangs. I have also tried a few other methods of resizing the card with zero luck. It always just hangs, or has a kernel panic. But, the PCDuino config is still important. It has a few things you may need. Such as changing the boot to desktop option.

The best way to get all of you file space with no headaches is GParted. Just download GParted to a USB drive and use that. I used it on a laptop I have laying around, tossed in the SD Card and resized the partitions in seconds. Why didn’t I try this earlier?

Just do it really, it fucking works. Make the USB it doesn’t take long. You will actually save time. Trust me, I have tried all the other methods and they don’t work. At least not with my image for the PCDuino Nano Lite.

Fucking Comcast

I type this from my phone because for some unknown reason I cannot access the site, or my cpanel for that matter. The cpanel is down for everyone but the site is up as long as I am not on my home network. I haven’t done shit to the network. I have actually been busy, either web coding or working on the security system in the garage.

The Comcast service in this area is fucking atrocious. I am constantly having fucking problems. Fuck you Comcast. Wish AT&T was in the area, at least I know how to fix that shit.

Monitor your security system with a RPi

I had programmed a page of goodness in Node-Red for being the middle-man between the internet and my security system. Here’s the schpeal…

I used to work for an alarm company for a number of years. It’s a job that has kind of stuck with me, specially all the shit and skills that I learned while doing it. So I still have friends in the industry and I still have equipment from when I worked there. Naturally I install my own security system. Not wanting to pay for monitoring but still wanting to be notified with issues gave me a problem. I happen to know Pies so I decided to use a Raspberry Pi with Node-Red to solve that problem.

There are many ways to get notifications from your security system these days but they all require some kind of monitoring or to be activated by an alarm company (someone with a license). Using the Raspberry Pi I could do everything I wanted to. Node-Red just made it that much easier.

I programmed all of this via NR on one of my Raspberry Pies. I believe at the time I was programming in Node-Red v0.12 (around May 2016 I think). Here’s the flow:

https://github.com/jhaury/rpi-nodered-security

I cannot be held responsible for anything bad that may happen. This has been coded to the best of my ability but there may be bugs and some of it may be unfinished. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

An angry mob with pitchforks and torches

They have officially had it with me. They being the wife and daughter. My daughter has a website that I was (was) hosting on our home server along with my sites, well with the server constantly going down due to me fucking with it (mainly ClearOS not fucking working) and Comcast sucking balls they are now officially angry. I don’t blame her (the daughter), when ClearOS had to be reinstalled (how many times?) I lost her database for her site. Whoops. But really in my defense I didn’t lose it. She used some kind of plugin that flooded the database with IP addresses of visitors for page-clicks. Tons and tons and tons of IP addresses. It farked the database when I backed it up before I reinstalled Clear. So it’s there but I cannot import it, it’s all corrupted.

So now that the mob is officially angered we need a happy solution. That turned out to be Siteground. I got an “Official Server”. Moved the majority of my sites to it, specially my daughters, but left one behind on the home Ubuntu server for playing and testing purposes. I’m excited, it’s been a long time since I have had an actual server. Got a nice account with Siteground for a decent price. I have all kinds of goodies to play with! Now the mob is satisfied, pitchforks put away and torches extinguished.