TechnologyInsanity.com

If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted any updates on it, it’s because I wanted to make sure the video cable was in good working order before I moved on to some of the more extreme modifications.

The cable was tested on another Xbox 360 and worked fine, so now I will proceed to some of the X-Clamp mods.

First up is the Penny Mod I will probably try that one today and see how it goes. I will update this post when the testing is complete. There are MANY other things I will be trying with this box, so we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for your patience.

Side Note: I am on my IRC channel from about 4PM EST – 2AM EST so it’s best to go on during those times if you want to chat with me or others, because other people generally join around that time as well. You will always see “s0uThp4rk” as online though, since I run through a bouncer.

Well, I got the Xbox 360 yesterday, it took me all of 15 minutes to take it apart. One thing I like about the 360, it’s easy to take apart. I had all sorts of issues with the Wii. Of course, I happen to have the tools available to take these types of things apart. Remember, I tinker with things constantly, so I’ve had to deal with a lot of  screw protections, so I have an entire set of bits that alleviate the pain of not having the right screw driver

The first things I tried were this:

• The blanket method – FAIL
• Overheating it by disconnecting the fans – FAIL
• Replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU with Arctic Silver, which I happened to have laying around  – Not sure yet. I put the CPU heat sink on the incorrect way as you can see in my picture. This causes the box to go directly to the 2 RROD overheating. I don’t know why, because the heatsink is still making contact with the CPU and it took much longer to overheat before when I disconnected the fans. Perhaps the X-Clamps aren’t connecting correctly. I will update this post once I’ve tested this completely. Seems like it did not work, but the fan has gotten considerably quieter. This means that the thermal paste originally on the 360 is garbage.

So, the next few things to try are going to be X-Clamp mods, I’m still going to play with overheating the box before I purchase other hardware to do those mods. The good thing is, it looks like no one has even touched the inside of this box, it’s 1 year old, and is actually an Xbox 360 Pro console with a Hitachi drive. HDMI is also there, and it came with a Wireless controller instead of a wired one which core consoles come with.

We shall see how this turns out in the coming days when I have more time to do tests on this box, if I end up being able to fix it today I will update this post. Regardless, there will be a part 2, part 2 may focus on either more attempts to fix the box or replacing the firmware with a hacked one. I will go as far as I can go with this, to the heat gun technique.

I’ve also yet to try the simplest method – swapping the Xbox 360 cables. I would *guess* that the person who owned the box tried this, but I don’t know. I’ll find someone around here with cables and try it out.

Stay tooned..

On a side note I will be upgrading my VPS memory..

My Journey

I bought the VPS for one month, thinking that it would be somewhat difficult to setup. I did not even know that you log into servers via SSH. I’m familiar with SSH, but I thought people used VNC’s or similar to do host management. I could have installed VNC, but GUI etc would just take up too much resources. Everything had to be done through the command prompt. By reading my last entries, you can also get a more full idea of what I had to go through.

I got root access to the server, connected via SSH and attempted to install EHCP. It didn’t go well. Someone must have had this box before me and mucked it up. For one, the server is running Ubuntu, and EHCP uses Apt-Get to install everything. Hmm… What happens when the sources.list file is missing? You guessed it, apt-get doesn’t work at all. Neither does apt-get update. After a lot of screwing around I found that I needed to get the sources.list file for Ubuntu 6.06. So, I surfed around the internet and found it. Another issue: how do you transfer files through ssh? Well, putty has a program called psftp. This is not difficult to use. Just cd into the correct directory, type put and drag the file into the command prompt. Easy. Now with that done, I could finally do apt-get update.

I attempted to re-run the ehcp script. Still, errors, all over the place. For some reason it was not asking me for my root MySQL password? I got fed up with ehcp, and attempted to install ISPConfig. That did not go smoothly either. I have a feeling that a lot of my problems were due to the box running 6.06, and someone before me screwing with settings that were not fixed before I got it. I never had such problems installing software on Ubuntu. I went back to ehcp, since that seemed like a little less to configure. I had fixed a quite a few issues manually, so I re-ran the EHCP script, and wallah, things worked.

The next thing I tried to do was play with my technologyinsanity.com domain by moving it over to the new host. That did not go well. It took forever for the DNS Server to update, and I got fed up and just switched it back.

I began searching for a cheap/free domain to use to continue my project. I ended up finding .co.cc domains. They’re free, you have full control over DNS. I was able to setup my own nameservers with it, very easily. How?  I set a Zone Record in the “A” group for one domain. I made the “name” ns1.domain, ns2.domain, and for “value” I put in my 2 IP addresses I have for my host. I was not allowed to then point this domain to the newly created nameservers, so I created another domain, technologyinsanity.co.cc, and pointed it to those 2 name servers. I then went in and edited a file for custom DNS on my ehcp control panel. I waited till the next day and ran “sync dns” and “sync domains” wallah, it worked.

I then installed phpBB on the domain “technologyinsanity.co.cc” and that was it. That’s all I’ve done with it. Quite simple, really. Nothing that was too complex, most of my issues came from the fact someone screwed up the installation of Ubuntu.

I was a little surprised at how easy it was to setup an unmanaged server with no control panel, and setting up name servers was really no big deal. Granted, I do have prior Linux and server knowledge, just never set one up before.

So…

If you sign up, you just point your domain to the name servers I’ve created with your domain, and setup the MySQL and php stuff and you’re good to go. I’ve already tested the mail server, FTP, etc it’s all good. The install scripts for some programs work fine through EHCP as well. Pretty much everything you see through EHCP works fine. If people sign up, I may keep the host active for the next month, just realize that it will be $5/month after the first month. It costs $35/mo for me to have this host.

Sign up details

Visit: technologyinsanity.co.cc for more details I’m only accepting 2 users to start out, because offering free hosting seems like it could be risky.

If no one signs up..

I will discontinue the host after this month, that’s all.

This is my last post about my VPS, I’ve dived into my INSANITY category again.

I’ve told people that I wouldn’t buy an Xbox unless I found one for around $50. Well I went over that mark by about $11.

I bought a complete Core system that was broken off of eBay. I’m going to attempt to fix it, and then mod it. Engadget reported today that the new IXtreme 1.5 firmware works on basically all of the Xbox 360 drives, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

The key here is me being able to fix it, if I’m not able to, I’m not real worried. I love to experiment, it’s what I’m good at. I will keep updated posts here in the near future, this is just a heads up.  The error code as reported by the seller, (A seller that exclusively sells broken items) is E73. I’ve found the details on this here. I’m not afraid of soldering a few things if need be, I’ve already installed modchips etc. If I can’t fix it I’ll just send it right back to eBay

Should be interesting, I’m looking forward to it.