Welcome to Gulag
they’re both broken. one’s showing my personal favourite wii u error (160-0103), the other they have absolutely no clue what’s going on with it. i will be making a full blog post about them. also you ever seen how many of those boxed white 32gb japanese splatoon wii u systems there are online? i want one.
you’re the one with the wii u problem. not me.
not about anything bad, quite the opposite actually. so why dont i talk about what i’ve been thinking about here. as i predicted back in june the stress i had been experiencing back then has got significantly better, to the point that i’ve finally been able to enjoy going back out, walking, shopping, all those things i used to do before school fucked me up. over christmas and the new year i had a great time, spent loads of time with friends and family, ate a good bit, done all those things you do with people over that time. i hope you had an enjoyable time over the holidays too. i’ve been sleeping quite well as well, finally got back into a sleeping routine and now it feels like a day lasts both 8 years and 8 seconds at the same time. a lot more time to spend in the day since i’m getting up earlier but as i’ve learned the hard way time really does go by quickly as you age.
now let’s talk about the future. the very near future i mean. like next month. now that the holidays are basically over, it would make sense to start exercising properly again. i should get back into a routine really, before i decide to retreat to my chair yet again. i’ve got high hopes i won’t though, turns out listening to music while you exercise sure makes it go by quickly. and now that the cooker’s fixed i can eat a bit more properly again so that’ll be nice, believe it or not i enjoy eating healthily and microwave meals aren’t exactly appetising after the third week of them. regarding vrchat avatars absolutely no progress has been made, regarding actually playing vrchat, well turns out my index controllers had faulty finger tracking from the factory. first couple weeks in i just didnt care cause i wanted to actually use the things but now i’ve sent the broken controller back and am waiting on a replacement. its been two weeks please help.
well, that’s what my january thoughts have been like. why dont you share yours with me? my discord, steam and bluesky are linked on the website’s footer, or if you’d like to use a service that gives you a bit more freedom of choice my email is lana at woomy dot sh. i’d love to hear what you have to say! :D
hello again. in all honesty i haven’t been all too motivated over the past couple months to write anything, if you couldn’t tell. therefore i’ve decided to make another monthly update post as opposed to a more ‘proper’ writeup of something i’ve got over that time. said writeups will return soon however, as i’m beginning to get more motivated.
so regarding the vr hardware i promised to talk about last month: i bought index controllers like 5 years late!!! believe it or not, they’re considerably better than wands. before i got them i loved the wands and their massive trackpad, thought it would have been easier to use than sticks, didn’t really understand the point of the extra buttons either. i now understand. only issues i’ve really had with them is that the right ring finger will not track at all, no matter how much i drum on the controllers and the right controller’s tracking is a bit dodgy too.
and regarding vrchat yet again: more avatar work. bought rusk and some extra outfits for it, i’ve been setting that up. blade nia is now being worked on. the xenoblade avatars i briefly talked about last month are closer to being done.
thanks for reading, happy new year! :D
this month i haven’t had any new things turning up for me to talk about so i just thought i’d talk about this month as a whole for me instead and a few things i’ve been doing.
so i got back into vr. quite a bit. on the vrchat side i’ve been doing more avatar work, figured out how to make metallic parts of a model actually metallic, started work on a Pyra avatar as well, i’ll probably have all my public avatars actually public soon which will be nice cause as far as i can see xenoblade 2 avatars aren’t really a thing on quest, much less ones that are rated a higher performance rank. the models on my quest versions did unfortunately have to be decimated a bit but doing that means that they’re currently rated Good. regarding actually gaming in vr i got back into beat saber a bit, streamed it for around 10 days and i’ll probably start streaming it again soon cause i found that it is a really fun way to play through the game, not giving a damn about rank and instead just focusing on random shit nobody’s ever heard of. and i’ve got some new vr hardware on the way that i’ll save for december’s post.
so to start this one off, i’ll provide some context (as per usual). one of my mates was spending a load of money per month on server hardware so that he could host websites and discord bots and game servers and such. he realised a while into it that it was costing him a lot so he wanted to cut back. his way of doing that was outright buying server hardware for us all to use. he found on ebay for himself a HP ProLiant ML350e Gen8 for ~£100 that he’s currently using for i believe backups and media serving, and generally just as a main while waiting for some more hardware. after that purchase, he let me know that he was willing to buy some hardware for me too.
after much searching, i found a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a 2 TB hard drive pre-installed for ~£130. seemed good to me, the CPU needed upgrading because it was a small 2 core Celeron G1610T and I was planning to use the machine for virtualization, which also made it unfortunate that the RAM limit was 16GB but honestly definitely a limit i can work with. the machine made up for it with it’s built in iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) chip which if you’re not familiar with, would allow me to have complete remote control over the machine, even when it’s not powered on. helpful considering my unfortunate lack of working USB keyboards.
now with the server chosen, i moved on to finding a network switch. my criteria was very simple, gigabit with more than 4 ports. i have one ethernet cable carrying internet and i needed it to reach 4 devices. some expansion for the future would be nice too. i found a brand new sealed Netgear gigabit 8-port switch on sale for ~£20. nice, i’ll be taking that. for the RAM i found 16GB of the stuff it wanted (DDR3-1600 unbuffered ECC) for another ~£20 and i needed some thermal paste so that was another ~£5, as well as a couple cables to route power to an SSD i’ll be using as a boot drive, ~£4.
for the CPU, i had a good bit of choice. due to the Gen8 having a motherboard with a socket unlike the Gen7 systems which have soldered CPUs, there are a good few different chips that the system can take. people seem to recommend the Xeon E3-1265L V2 as the best all-around chip for this system. only 10W above the TDP limit of the cooler (35W), 4 cores with hyperthreading and a good base/boost clock combo for what it is. it can be hard to find sometimes and a little more expensive than its alternative though so failing that there’s the Xeon E3-1260L for a lower price with a couple hundred MHz lower clock. you wanna know what they don’t recommend? the Xeon E3-1240 V2. over double the TDP limit of the cooler at 69W and a boost clock speed that really does not make that increase worth it whatsoever. but i found one on ebay that i would soon learn had a dent in the IHS for only £9!
a few days later, i was exercising while i notice a van park up on our driveway. i greet the man in the van and he hands me a parcel. i thank him and open it in my room. inside it i found the server. it seemed a bit dusty but i thought nothing of it because it didn’t seem too bad. i continue exercising then once i’m done i get some stuff to clean the server out and hop into a voice channel with a friend. i then open the server up…
…oh my god its fucking disgusting. touching any part of the inside was absolutely horrible. it was clearly used in some sort of industrial hellhole or really really not taken care of or both. while disconnecting everything i thought the fan cable plug was meant to just pull out. turns out i was wrong. in my stupidity i believe i pulled the socket out of the board just a little bit. later on i realised that it hadn’t been pulled out enough to stop the fan from working thankfully. everything else went fine though, i slid the motherboard out (it’s screwed onto this really cool metal plate that you can just slide out of the case) and cleaned that up along with everything else in the case. after i felt like i wouldn’t cause dust to be sprayed all over my room upon booting the system up, i put it back together and booted it up into ShredOS to shred the drive (and some others i decided i wanted to fit into the system).
fast-forward to the arrival of everything but the CPU, i install the RAM and the SSD thanks to the molex splitter and molex to SATA cable i bought to tap into the PSU’s molex power, i connect everything up to the network switch and connect to the iLO. once i’m in i update it and the system’s BIOS (please don’t buy those ~£30 BIOS/iLO update packages on eBay, you can achieve the exact same thing for free by downloading the web installers for the BIOS/iLO on HP’s site then extracting the updates from those exe files using 7-zip) and then mess about with installing Debian onto the machine. the reason why i have to “mess about” instead of just installing Debian is because of a funny little thing with this machine’s BIOS. it allows you to boot from a drive connected to the motherboard’s SATA port (usually reserved for an optical drive) but as soon as you also plug a drive into one of the non-hotplug slots on the front it disables booting from that SATA port on the motherboard if you’re using the built in RAID controller for the backplane. now why it does this i have no fucking clue, but it means i have to store a bootloader on a different device that the bios can boot from when the backplane is in use. thankfully the motherboard has both a USB port and a microSD card slot that can be booted from, and i have a 1GB microSD card i can use for that. ultimately i decide on storing /boot on the SSD connected to said problem port so that i get fast speeds updating the kernel and other Linux boot files but also install a copy of GRUB onto a microSD card which i can use to chainload the GRUB install on the SSD.
now that Debian is installed, i secure the install and enable SSH so that i don’t have to continue using the really slow console on the iLO. after that i install Proxmox over the Debian install. i do it this way simply because there are no LUKS encryption options in the Proxmox installer. now that Proxmox is installed i whitelist the port and set that up. i download the ISOs i’d be needing (Debian 12, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC and the virtio drivers for Windows) and start to set up my VMs. soon i’ll make a page detailing all my VMs and what they do, but for this blog post i’ll talk about one in particular, which is the most important of the two “public facing” VMs on my system.
on this VM i installed a copy of Debian 12. it got secured the same way that the host machine did and after that i moved everything from my old VPS to it. now comes the fun part, how i got those public-facing services on the internet without needing a static IP address. some time between my childhood years having to use Hamachi to allow others to access services i set up and last month Cloudflare made this awesome piece of software called “cloudflared” that allows services on a machine to tunnel through their network to your domain, therefore not requiring a static IP of your own. i set that up using their dashboard and all i had to do (minus setting up certificates to give to the Apache web server) was run a one-line bash command to install the service, point the root of my website to the port commonly used by web servers for HTTPS traffic (443), then tell it to be happy with certificates made for my domain.
the CPU finally arrives. i take out the poor old Celeron, put this new chip in, repaste, clean the heatsink, and boot. it fails to boot. it’s stuck POSTing. i reboot. it’s stuck POSTing. this happens maybe once or twice more and then finally decides to complete its POST and boot. despite those POST issues, it’s completely stable once booted. i haven’t tried to benchmark or anything but i’ve not noticed any issues apart from the heat issues from running a 69W CPU at load on a 35W heatsink (which isn’t an issue anyway cause the server rarely sees load). after that first boot it seems a lot happier though, it might maybe fail once on a cold boot but apart from that it’s fine.
it’s now been a month and a half since i first got the server and the experiences i’ve had in that time have certainly made me more interested in self hosting, it’s only fueled my addiction to actually owning the stuff i use on a daily basis even more. you’ll likely see more posts here in the future regarding this sort of stuff if you decide to stick around with me. i’ve gotten back into VR as of recently too so talking about that could be fun. vive pro wireless post 6 years after its release, anyone??????
thanks for reading all this haha
happy halloween :D
just migrated the site to a new server, hence the fuckery. its in my room now! i’ll make a proper post about it soon :)
since the 3rd of October 2019, i’ve been working on a Discord bot called Octoling. it’s been really fun, hence why i’m still working on it every now and then almost five years later. so far the bot has a nice set of features but lacks many modern features such as / commands and the ability to add commands to your user profile to use wherever. to solve this, i have begun building a new version of the bot with the idea of keeping the code as futureproof as possible as the main focus. i’ll likely make posts here about the progress of this new code as i work on it.
a couple days ago, i was on ebay looking at Wii U systems. i find this one for just under £17 that claims to be broken. specifically, it’s showing the error code 160-0103. as of today, this can be a really easy error code to fix thanks to the fact that udpih exists, so i decide to buy it. fast-forward to today, and it’s here. i connect it to power and my capture card, boot up OBS so i have a display, and…
…it boots normally to the Wii U menu. there are 2 users on it, neither are linked to an NNID and there’s no parental control lock. i check the system version. it’s on 5.5.4 (E). i then put in my mario kart 8 disc to see if it will play a game, it plays fine. next, i connect it to the internet to prepare for exploiting it. i go back to the wii u menu. turns out the past owner had automatic updates enabled. the update completes and the system reboots. i go to the web browser after preparing my SD card, send it to wiiuexploit.xyz and run the exploit. it’s failed to mount the sd card. i reboot and open mii maker to try exporting a mii, just to double check. yeah it’s not mounted.
so i end up thinking the SD card slot is gone, because all the buttons and slots on the front panel feel looser than my main system and other SD card adapters don’t work. i try reformatting the SD card anyway just in case, thankfully it worked this time. i exploit it again, now the NAND (minus the MLC) is dumped and I have isfshax on the thing. i dump the logs. there seems to be nothing there until i get to log number 11 of 13. that one shows a media error. there’s the issue, the MLC is probably on its way out. it’s a Hynix so i’m not surprised.
i now prepare the SD card for a redNAND setup. resizing goes fine, now i need to download the MLC titles. i decide to try something different this time and download the Japanese MLC titles and attempt a region switch. i install them on the redNAND and it boots to the first-time setup after a ~5 minute install.
so i finally bought the ps3 i said i’d buy in the gamecube post. but not really. as much as i wanted a slim i still couldn’t find one. but u wanna know what i did find? a used CECHK03 fat ps3 for £45 with a controller that i would soon realise was fake and no power cable. some would call that dodgy as fuck, i would call that fun as fuck. so i buy it without first realising that it would be shipped by a courier that i “jokingly” call the worst in the UK with my mates. once it turns up (took forever but surprisingly turned up on the day they said it would turn up!), i get it out of its packaging that consisted of a bunch of paper and what i vaguely remember to be an Aldi shopping bag, plug it in and power it on. to my surprise it actually booted and it was absolutely filled with shit. what i believe was pirated tv shows, music, a couple games, decent lot of save data (the most notable being GTA V and IV) and they still had ps home installed with some cache data! one issue though: the disc drive didn’t seem to enjoy ejecting any disk very well. later on that issue fixed itself though once i gave the drive some more use.
once i knew that it actually worked, i took it upstairs and began my fuckery. i first installed HFW and HEN to grab their game licenses just in case i ever wanted them and then webMAN MOD to check the temps and usage stats. the temps are surprisingly good for it being a fat ps3 with a still intact warranty seal, not overheating at all. they had used the system for around 3400 hours and it had a startup and shutdown count of around 1800. fairly decent for a probably 15 year old console. once i had checked all that, i installed multiMAN to extract the ps home cache data. that went well and it’s sitting on my desktop. i’ll be donating it soon.
now that i’ve got all the data i needed i put in a 500GB hard drive i had lying around and loaded into safe mode to reinstall 4.91 OFW in preparation for an Evilnat 4.91 CFW installation. now that i can see the XMB again i log into PSN and activate my account on the system, and of course disable auto log in. next i made a new local user, opened the browser, wiped all the cookies, search history, etc. and loaded the ps3 toolset. the flash got backed up, i checked it with PyPS3checker, it says my flash backup is good so i patch it and that succeeds. i reboot and install Evilnat 4.91 Beta 8, then webMAN MOD, multiMAN, the PS2 Classics Launcher and the PS2 CONFIG Database. multiMAN gets started, i put in a PS2 disc, try dumping it, multiMAN starts acting up and crashing my system. i spend about 20 minutes trying to fix the issue and turns out i had to take it out of mmCM mode or else for some reason it would just cause my system to crash. now though, i have a really nice way to play PS2 games since setting my actual PS2 up is a pain in the arse and the video quality is similarly arse since i have to use AV.
fast forward to today (2024-08-20) and i have a small collection of PS3 games that i’ve dumped and put on the hard drive for easy access. i’ve also got both the Sonic Adventure games for the third time, making me closer to completing my goal of owning every single different version of both the Sonic Adventure games (thank you very much Sony for keeping the PS3/Vita store alive, even if it is a bit of a pain to add funds). i’ve been playing through them both, cleared SA2 again and for the first time in literally years i now have the hero and dark gardens unlocked. and for the first time ever, i have all A ranks in a couple stages too.
so i got paid a bit early may. after putting some of that money into savings i went onto ebay and had a look for ps3 systems as i had been wanting to buy one for months prior. after a while of searching, i started to realise that the exact model of ps3 slim i wanted to buy was kinda hard to find, at least on that day. because of that, i started thinking about other systems i had been wanting to put in my collection. soon after, the gamecube popped up in my mind and off i went looking for a DOL-001. not long after, i found a black one in fairly good condition with all the cables (the AV cable was fake but that wasn’t gonna matter cause GCVideo), one controller, one third-party memory card and a game for ~£60. i started thinking about whether or not i *really* wanted it, as i always do for some reason before buying something, and not long after i had a confirmation email from ebay for the purchase of a gamecube.
a couple days later, i had just finished one of my exams and i get my phone out of my bag and turn it back on. i look at the shipping status and see that it had arrived. the driver attached a proof of delivery image too. it was incredibly low-resolution and it seemed to be a random picture of the ground. thankfully when i got home, the parcel was actually there and when i opened it i did indeed see the gamecube i paid for. i powered it on and made sure that it worked. it worked fine, controller inputs are recognised, the memory card is too and the optical drive seems to be working fine (thank god). the video however, was really really bright. the black background of the gamecube startup screen was light grey haha. i obviously blamed that one on the AV cable they provided, which i ended up being correct about. i am absolutely keeping that cable though because paired with my cheap AV to HDMI adapter, the output i get from it looks like it was recorded in the early 2000s with the cheapest capture card anybody could get at the time. and i like that.
along with the gamecube, i bought an sd2sp2 and a 32GB SD card. upon loading a memory card with a save exploit and a copy of NiHuSu’s dolauncher, i tried using the sd2sp2 to boot Swiss. it failed. i tried everything i could and it still failed to load. so off i went looking for an sdgecko. one amazon search and around a day later, i now had an sdgecko. this time, booting Swiss actually worked and i could get to setting it up. after that, i beat Sonic Adventure 2 for what feels like the 30th time in my life, and completed a couple of the stories in SADX too. safe to say i’m happy with my purchase. soon i’ll probably have to open it up cause i see some rust on the shielding, but that’s no issue really.