Tag: python

Boxee Box “Can’t connect to internet” fix, cloned Boxee services

The Boxee Box was a short lived but powerful set top box by D-link that was released 2010 and discontinued 2012.

All Boxee Boxes relied on an application server hosted by D-link at boxee.tv for periodic phone-home calls and service endpoints.

In June 2019 these application servers went down, resulting in all Boxee Boxes still in operation throwing “Can’t connect to internet” errors and all user profiles and apps going offline.

In August 2019 I released a small python Flask app, boxee-server-light, to replace the downed boxee.tv servers. This code was created by referencing an existing project by Jimmy Conner (cigamit, boxeed.in forums).

To use it, you’ll need to add DNS entries for all boxee application urls, pointing to the boxee-server-light application.

For example:

18.211.111.89  app.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  api.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  dir.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  s3.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  t.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  res.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  0.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  1.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  2.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  3.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  4.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  5.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  6.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  7.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  8.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  9.ping.boxee.tv
18.211.111.89  dl.boxee.tv

… where the IP is the address of the Flask application.

For those who are unable to run their own DNS or this application, I am hosting a public version of this code. You can add my public DNS server to your router config, or set it as custom DNS on your Boxee Box in network settings. You can also point directly to my public application server using your own DNS.

My public DNS server is by whitelist only, so please email me (I don’t check comments often) if you would like access.

Public DNS server address: 18.211.111.89
Public application server address: 18.213.38.199 18.211.111.89 (also)

For more up to date info and discussion, check out my Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/ci4ugj/boxee_cloned_server_updates_working_server/

 

FAQ:

Do I need a static IP address from my ISP to use the public DNS?
 Yes. I’ll need to whitelist your IP address. If you get a new one every day this won’t work.

I run my own local DNS. Do I need to be whitelisted to use your application server?
 No. Map the boxee domains to my public app server as shown above. No whitelist required.

I’m logged out of my boxee box. How do I log back in while using this app?
 Any username and password combo will work to log you back in.

I reset my boxee box. What firmware do I need to be using to use your public servers?
 1.5.1 (latest) seems to work best. If you can’t find this firmware, email me.

Do apps work with this project?
 I don’t have any apps connected yet. PRs welcome. I’m not 100% sure if app downloading will work without some additional code.



Regression testing releases with Depicted (Dpxdt), Travis, & Saucelabs

Depicted is a release testing tool that compares before and after screenshots of your webpage, highlighting differences between the two.

Depicted supplements your release testing by allowing you to approve any visual changes a new release may cause.

I wrote a script during my time at Sprintly that would take a TravisCI build ID, pull related screenshots from our Saucelabs selenium tests, and upload them to a Depicted API server for comparison.

Before a new release would be deployed, we would manually run our Depicted release script and check and approve any changes.

This script was integrated as a Django management command for ease of use. Check out the full script below with comments.

Firefox & python Selenium: Stopping auto update on browser test runs

Found a minor annoyance when running headless selenium browser tests on Ubuntu server 16. For some reason automated tests would start failing when opening Firefox. Apparently the configuration i’m running allows for Firefox to run auto update when opened.

To stop Firefox auto updates during your python Selenium test run, load a custom profile:

from selenium import webdriver

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference('app.update.auto', False)
profile.set_preference('app.update.enabled', False)

driver = webdriver.Firefox(profile)

If this doesn’t seem to do the trick, verify that apt unattended-upgrades are not causing this behavior. In one case, I saw that the update was happening in the /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log log file.

I disabled auto updates via apt globally with the command:

dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

django-simple-redis-admin: Manage redis within the django admin

It’s been a while since I talked about anything i’ve been coding. A few months ago I released Django Simple Redis Admin, which allows you to manage redis cache keys within the Django admin. Something that annoys me with other django admin packages is the requirement to add database tables for their packages. django-simple-redis-admin gets around this by making a django model on the fly. No need for tables, just plug and play. Hopefully in the future i’ll be adding some filters and speeding things up. Check out django-simple-redis-admin on my GitHub page.

python-cloudcracker: a class to interface with the CloudCracker API

So I released a quick python class to interface with the CloudCracker API. CloudCracker is a new online password cracking service. Upload a pcap file, pay via BitCoin or Stripe, and they will crack the password for you. Pretty cool. Check out CloudCracker at cloudcracker.com and check out python-cloudcracker on GitHub.

Ultramemcache: python-ultramemcached and django-ultramemached-cache

A few months ago I came across a package on GitHub called Ultramemcache, which was described as “Ultra fast memcache client written in highly optimized C++ with Python bindings.”

Using Ulramemcache, I modified the common python-memcached library to use Ultramemcache, making sure it could be used as a drop in replacement. Check out python-ultramemcached on my GitHub page.

I also put together a django cache backend using Ultramemcache. This currently does not require my python-ultramemcached library. Check out django-ultramemcached-cache on my GitHub page.

Django runserver and gevent; NotImplementedError: gevent is only usable from a single thread

Hey. So I ran into a problem when using Django runserver and Requests for Python. Specifically, when running runserver, I came across the error:

NotImplementedError: gevent is only usable from a single thread

To fix this, you need to run the gevent monkey patch in your projects manage.py.

Add the following lines in the __main__ of your manage.py

from gevent import monkey
monkey.patch_all()

Your main will look as follows:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import gevent
    from gevent import monkey
    monkey.patch_all()
    execute_manager(settings)