My Dockstar

The Dockstar has one LAN port, so the WAN interface is USB. The obviously-homebrew wire is RX, TX, and ground for the serial console.

My configuration files are in a GitHub repo.

I first suspected WP-Super-Cache, because the pages returned HTTP 200 when served from cache. However, nonexistent pages exhibited the same behaviour:

A real page served uncached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/collectionviewer/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:02:22 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://cooltrainer.org/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:02:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

…and then cached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/collectionviewer/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:02:27 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=300, must-revalidate
WP-Cache: Served supercache file from PHP
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

A fake page served uncached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/somepagethatdoesntexist/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:12:59 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://cooltrainer.org/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:13:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

…and then cached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/somepagethatdoesntexist/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:13:01 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=300, must-revalidate
WP-Cache: Served supercache file from PHP
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

The problem persisted with caching disabled, and I discovered why after some digging. WordPress runs / on my domain, but normal pages powered by the old Cooltrainer CMS also include the WordPress core to gain access to new posts (for the front page) and to generate the menus for Archives and Categories. However, since wordpress doesn’t know about them it treats them as nonexistent, sending the 404 header.

The fix is simpler than you may imagine. Instead of using wp-blog-header directly, like so:

require_once("diary/wp-blog-header.php");

…we deconstruct it into its component functions, excluding the bad ones.

WordPress is instantiated by calling the WP class. I use the following:

require_once("diary/wp-config.php");
$wp->init();
$wp->parse_request();
$wp->query_posts();
$wp->register_globals();
$wp->send_headers();

From the documentation:

• init() — set up the current user.
• parse_request() — Parse request to find correct WordPress query.
• query_posts() — Set up the Loop based on the query variables.
• register_globals() — Set up the WordPress Globals.
• send_headers() — Sets the X-Pingback header, 404 status (if 404), Content-type. If showing a feed, it will also send last-modified, etag, and 304 status if needed.

And obviously, we’re leaving out handle_404().

• handle_404() — Issue a 404 if a request doesn’t match any posts and doesn’t match any object (e.g. an existing-but-empty category, tag, author) and a 404 was not already issued, and if the request was not a search or the homepage. Otherwise, issue a 200.

Now, our pages work as expected.

Real, uncached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/collectionviewer/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:41:24 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://cooltrainer.org/xmlrpc.php
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Real, cached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/collectionviewer/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:41:26 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=300, must-revalidate
WP-Cache: Served supercache file from PHP
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Fake, uncached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/somepagethatdoesntexist/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:41:15 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://cooltrainer.org/xmlrpc.php
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Fake, cached:

[nicole@Emi#nicole]curl -I http://cooltrainer.org/somepagethatdoesntexist/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:41:18 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: max-age=300, must-revalidate
WP-Cache: Served supercache file from PHP
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Read on while I walk through the replacement.

Required tools and materials:

• A new hard drive! The 360 uses a 2.5″ SATA 9mm-tall hard drive.
• A Torx T6 screw driver.
• A Torx T10 screw driver.
• A donor Xbox 360 hard drive cage.
• A USB stick.
• USB XTAF GUI
• HDD Compatibility Partition fixer v1
• Some homebrew! XeXLoader, et cetera.
• A copy of the system update matching your version of FreeBOOT or XBReboot, such as $SystemUpdate9199.zip for FreeBOOT 0.032

Our parts. Using the T6 driver, remove the four silver screws of the hard drive cage. One of them is under the Microsoft sticker, voiding your warranty!

Separate the two plastic halves of the hard drive cage. Watch out for the button, lever, and spring of the latch mechanism.

Use the T10 driver to remove the metal drive cage.

Grasp the SATA/Power connector and slide the old drive out the end of the cage.

The old and new drives. Taller hard drives, like 12mm drives, will have trouble fitting. An ideal replacement drive is 9mm tall like the original.

Re-assemble the drive cage by reversing the steps. Make sure the latch mechanism is properly positioned.

The new drive will show up (Should show up, anyway!) as unformatted in the Dashboard.

Annoying

It works!

Now, the drive works! Unfortunately, it’s blank and needs to be loaded with some homebrew. Format a usb stick as a memory card in the Dashboard using FreeBOOT 0.3 or higher (The 2.0.9199.0 dashboard) and insert it in your PC.

Open the drive with XTAF and inject the XeXLoader Game on Demand package to Data Partition/Content/0000000000000000/C0DE9999. Drag and drop HDD Compatibility Partition fixer v1 and your other applications to the root of the drive in your file browser.

Injecting the XeXLoader GoD package.

XeXLoader should show up in the Dashboard under Xbox 360 Games. Move it to your new internal drive and run it.

Run the HDD Compatibility Partition Fixer with XeXLoader, then reboot the console. This will add Partition 2 to the drive and prepare it to receive the Xbox 1 emulator files.

Some Dashboard functions, such as avatars, are unavailable until the Dashboard installs itself on the main storage device. The NXE is too large to fit entirely in older consoles' 16MiB NAND.

Unzip the update package and copy it to the root of your USB drive. It will prompt to update next time it is inserted. Your rebooter shouldn't let the update shouldn't do anything dangerous, but you should still have R6T3 removed or U6T1/U6T2 bridged for your safety!

All done!

Your JTAG console should now be up and running with a big new drive.

Why yes, I did just paint a giant “exploit me, please” target all over my web site.

I used an LPT lead to dump the NAND (16MiB on my board), flashed XeLLous with nandpro to grab my CPUkey, then built freeBOOT with ibuild (Read the readme!) and flashed it over USB as updflash.bin.

The LPT lead. I'd build a USB flasher if I did lots of these.

The JTAG trigger wires.

I didn't even know it could do orange. Each quadrant is a temperature monitor, and I've set the fans to run at a much higher speed.

There is very little interesting homebrew for the 360 at the moment, but I wanted to get a homebrew-capable console before they were all trashed, purchased, or updated to 2.0.8495.0 or higher by running new games or going online. For now, I’ve set up DashLaunch to fun Freestyle and played a few out-of-region games that I normally wouldn’t be able to.

The best thing about this is using the TosLink interface to bypass my noisy motherboard DAC. I was tired of hearing my cursor move.

After reviewing resigns, I settled on Roman Bednarek‘s Microbe and Cerberus designs. The Cerberus I built as-is, but I built the version of the Microbe with a Vifa ring tweeter, the Microbe XT. The full specifications for the XT are available in this thread.

Thanks to my father for much help with the woodworking!

Unfortunately, my 1980s Pioneer faux-stack won’t make the best of these new speakers, but I’ll replace it soon enough. I also won’t be able to position them properly at ear-level until I get a new desk with more room.