bavatuesdays

Flattening the DNS Curve with Cloudflare

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Reverend

Notice the wwww.reclaimhosting.com

I feel like I could write a book about just last week at Reclaim Hosting, so many awesome things happening and the work we’re doing to build a sense of team internally and community more generally is really starting to gel. I’ll save that post for another day, but right now I just want to capture some of the work we have done over the last couple of weeks to move our main website to Reclaim Cloud using a multiregion setup. What multi-region denotes is that there are two (or more) servers in two (or more) regions that are serving the content. For this to work the files and databases need to be syncing instantly across the two regions, and thanks to Virtuozzo’s WordPress Multiregion setup we can do that. I already have the bava.blog setup with mutliregion, so it was time to do the same with the main Reclaim Hosting website. We started with spinning up a dev instance to export everything from the Digital Ocean droplet hosting our site over to Reclaim Cloud. I setup the multiregion instance and did the migration (mostly) while Chris Blankenship led the way with the Cloudflare setup. This dev space allowed Lauren to troubleshoot a couple of pesky plugins, make sure everything was syncing cleanly between the regions, and ensure there were no major flags with this setup for the main site.

In AWS the CNAME record is pointed to a Cloudflare address in order to flatten that record

All was good, so we created another multiregion for the production instance using two regions and rsynced files and imported the database from the dev site. After that, we had to point our www CNAME record from AWS to Cloudflare, and this is worth talking about for a moment. Given AWS’s DNS service Route 53 does not allow us to flatten the top-level domain of reclaimhosting.com* we had to point just part of our DNS to Cloudflare, a.k.a. a partial DNS setup. We pointed www.reclaimhosting.com, which allowed us to then create two A records for www in Cloudflare’s DNS management panel. And that’s when it occurred to me, this is what we need to do for all of our infrastructure going forward. We need an enterprise license through Cloudflare that allows us to point records for our own infrastructure (and for that of schools that want to point part of their DNS at us, such as subdomains like domains.stateu.edu) so that we can manage the records that point to a server’s IP behind the scenes. This is useful because in the event a server needs to be migrated (which often means an IP address change) there is never an interruption of service. The client never needs to worry about that, and while it took me 8 years to grok it, I now understand how Cloudflare’s introduction of CNAME flattening in 2014 changes the game in so many ways for us. In fact, it was during yesterday’s move of the Reclaim’s main site that it hit me like a diamond through the forehead.

WWW A records for two servers

By flattening the CNAME record for www from the original DNS provider (in our case AWS’s Route 53) we are able to proxy that record in Cloudflare so that it can have multiple A records pointing to the server IP addresses for our multiregion setup. Then, and this is the second piece that fell into place for me conceptually, we can run the load balancer for that server not in the container on Reclaim Cloud, but abstracted out to Cloudflare’s load balancing service. So the management of DNS is fully isolated from a physical machine allowing for immediate failover and traffic re-direction in the event of an emergency.

Load Balancer through Cloudflare

What’s more, there is monitoring built-into the load balancing so should there be an issue with any of the regions you will be immediately notified. In fact, you can control how traffic is steered to these regional pools, whether based on proximity (closest server) by geo-locating IPs, or randomly using speed and latency checks. What’s more, at the point any of the servers is having issues the load balancer knows to re-direct all traffic to the healthy origin. It is pretty awesome, and Reclaim Hosting is leveraging the power of not only multiregion and load balancing, but also all the other benefits of Cloudflare like DDoS protection, a huge CDN, the potential for zero trust networks, and much more.

Details of Cloudflare load balancer using two different pools

In fact, as I was testing out www.reclaimhosting.com yesterday before we redirected all traffic from reclaimhosting.com –> www.reclaimhosting.com we realized that all images were not synced to the region two server. So while Taylor Jadin stepped in and saved my butt by rsyncing all media files to the production server from dev server we were able to steer all traffic to the fully functioning server in region 1 with the click of a button. Literally micro-seconds for the change to propagate. It was eye-opening as to the power of such immediate shifts that ensure your site is enterprise-ready. Cloudflare is no joke, and I am a big fan!

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*We would need to point that main record (reclaimhosting.com) to Cloudflare without interrupting thousands of records for the various servers and services we run off that namespace. So this was not nothing….

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Cloud | Tagged Cloudflare, reclaim, reclaimcloud, WordPress, wpmr | 2 Comments

Ambient Participation, Reclaim Radio, and Breaking on Through #4life

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Reverend

It’s been more than a decade since Grant Potter introduced me to the wonderful world of self-hosted web radio, yet another lasting legacy of that heady ds106 trip. During the pandemic the radio presented an occasion to return to micro-communities. For me, the uncertainty and dread of the early days of the pandemic will always be balanced by the joyful comradery of the ds106radio community. The sharing and laughing were a much needed salvo, and a good reminder how beautiful small can be.

Photo credit: Alan Levine’s 2011/365/135 Accordion Man

While that sense of urgency around connection at the height of the pandemic has retreated a bit, the radio still abides because it is, and always will be, awesome—with or without a virus. In fact, in the long wake of the virus many of our assumptions about how and where we work have shifted. Since the beginning of the pandemic Reclaim Hosting has hired five people that have no idea what a Reclaim Hosting office culture would even look like. Most (all?) of them seem to really enjoy working from home. As Martin Weller reflected on today, there’s been a real sense of excitement around building out the home office setup…in fact, Meredith’s Megadesk is quickly becoming Reclaim lore, and I love it.

I’ve been building my home office setup since about 2018, and it’s getting pretty insane. I’ll leave out the details of 30 golden age arcade cabinets on the other side of the image below and just give you a look into the current iteration of the work space in the bavacrypt.

State of the bavacrypt this morning. I do love the home office space I've been building the last few years, and more to come! pic.twitter.com/RdbNdY6F92

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) October 18, 2022

I think of my home office setup as kind of Winchester House without all the mystery and guilt. A complete blast! And now that Reclaim Hosting has gone fully remote as of March we’ve been working pretty hard on trying to create a joyful work environment where you can laugh and share virtually. It pushes you to think about how our physical space interfaces with the online in potentially interesting ways when so much of our interaction is not just text, but more and more video and audio. In fact, Maren Deepwell and Lauren Hanks are doing a timely Reclaim Edtech flex course, Hacks for Hybrid Working, wherein they explore the impact of the contemporary realities around free-range working—although I flatten all the possible variations of remote working with my inexact language. But thanks to the following useful breakdown Maren Deepwell shared in week 1 of Hacks for Hybrid Working, you can be better than me:

Maren Deepwell’s “Modes of Working” breakdown

The idea of ‘ambient participation’ came up in Monday’s session, and it suggests how people’s backgrounds and working spaces become an integral part of their daily interactions online. In fact, they backgrounds become part of their online persona. That is quite true for me given my office is also a co-working/living space not only for arcade cabinet work, but also my son’s gaming rig or the dog’s waiting room until the next walk. It’s all part of the ambient reality that seeps into the online work we do.

Reclaim Radio 2.0

One of the things that has started to take stronger hold at Reclaim Hosting has been broadcasting to Reclaim Radio. I just finished watching/listening to a vinylcast of Courtney Barnett thanks to our Community Instructional Technologist Taylor Jadin.

Image of a recordplayer in the youtube clone Peertube

Taylor Jadin doing a vinylcast cast video on Peertube!

Both Meredith Fierro and Lauren Hanks were working on setting up Audio Hijack (one of many applications used for radio broadcasting) to go live on the radio earlier this week, and Chris Blankenship has an Azuracast—the open source software that powers ds106radio and Reclaim Radio—instance running on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to his record player. He even blogged his setup as well as some of the crazy music he listens to, which I love. So far he has played Agent Orange‘s Living in Darkness (a personal fav), the Germs, D.R.I., Midnight Oil, as well as his own bands music, such as Toxitolerant and Skumboyz—both of which rule. But apart from the music (which I dig), it’s the act of sharing across the team and feeling there are fun, creative outlets to bridge the virtual space, which I think makes all the difference. And the fact you are doing it rom your home offices means it would be more like inviting someone into your living room rather than meeting in some sterile work environment. We are continuing to push on more regular streams (whether audio, video, or both), and the idea is share if you want and listen/watch if you can.

Like everything, it takes a bit to catch-on, but if you keep the door open and genuinely practice what you preach eventually the band will start playing together to become something greater than the individual musicians. That is why bands are special, and that is why when you go about building a team the idea of working together, riffing off each other, and creating something that transcends any one individual—yet reflects everyone’s collective work—you have begun to break on through. And that is what the team at Reclaim Hosting is doing currently…we are trying to break on through the boring models of work and make our day job not only pleasurable, but deeply gratifying and rewarding on a personal level. That’s the dream, and we can’t stop, won’t stop!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Edtech, Reclaim Radio | Tagged reclaim, reclaim edtech, reclaimradio | 2 Comments

Vinylcast #55: After Dark 3

Posted on October 25, 2022 by bavaradio

This was a two-part #vinylcast on ds106radio x-cast to Reclaim Radio, while streaming to bava.tv. The vertical and the horizontal. The vinyl was a compilation of artists on the Italians Do It Better record label called After Dark 3, and it’s a treat. If you are into the synth/vaporwave movement that returns to the neon sounds of the 80s, this is right up your alley.

*Image of label for side two of the 3 vinyl compilation album* After Dark 3 *from IDIB*

You can can see a full track listing on Discogs, but the songs feature gems from Glüme, Desire, Chromatics, Joon, Johnny Jewel, and many more. The stream gets off to a slow start in part 1, you might want to push to 9 minutes if you actually want to listen to the music rather than my futzing.

After Dark 3, Part 1 plays the first 3 sides of this three-disc vinyl

It took a few weeks, but did get around to finishing the second part of this #vinylcast and playing the last 3 sides of the remaining vinyl. I think one of the things to mention about this vinyl beyond the awesome 80s inspired new wave sounds is the aesthetic of the record sleeves. They are so beautiful!

As always with these vinylcasts, they’re music to work-by for me, and in general a lot of fun to talk to the airwaves of 2 or 3 people in the breaks. In fact, during the second stream there was a fun chat with a strange, anonymous figure who was under the impression colored vinyl cannot be played on a US turntable, and that the album was far too big for a small figure like me to move ? You can’t make this stuff up, the web is still weird on #ds106radio.

After Dark 3, Part 2 plays the last 3 sides of this three-disc vinyl

And if you are not into the whole video thing, here are the two separate audio files for each show:

vinylcast of After Dark 3 Part 1 broadcast 10/4/2022

Vinylcast of After Dark 3, Part 2 broadcast on 10/24/2022

Posted in compilation, ds106radio, on air, vaporwave, vinylcast | Tagged ds106radio, reclaimradio, vinylcast | Leave a comment

bavacade Repair Log 10-24-2022

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Reverend

This was another couple of weeks of fits and starts when it came to arcade repairs given day-job demands. That said, I actually made some significant progress on Moon Patrol. Like, it works now progress! 🙂

What started as a hunch ended up as a fully working Moon Patrol without having to get game boards repaired. That is a win, and I was due one with these freaking cabinets! pic.twitter.com/HtkwQWra9J

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) October 16, 2022

Long-short story on Moon Patrol is that I was trying to knock-out a couple of the smaller to-do items on the “bavacade To-Do List, Part 2,” namely adding the Moon Patrol high score save kit to the new board Tim sent. Ya see, I was getting ready to send the original Moon Patrol boards in for repair given I was convinced the reason that game was not working was board related. Spoiler: I was wrong. So, as I was adding the high score save kit, I realized the extra board only included two of the necessary three boards, namely the video scrolling and CPU board.*

Moon Patrol Board(s)

This was initially a bummer, but it pushed me to consider the issues with Moon Patrol anew and given all the problems I was having with the Williams power supplies it struck me that I was using the Moon Patrol’s power transformer in Joust temporarily and the voltage readings were crazy. So bad that I needed to use the switching power supply with a Williams adapter. Which then made me think the graphic issue Moon Patrol was having could be due to bad voltages rather than anything to do with the board. So, I spent all last Sunday putting Moon Patrol back together and using the switching power supply I had in Venture to test my theory. Lo and behold, that was it. Like web issues are always DNS, arcade issues are always power!

Image of Moon patrol menu options

Moon Patrol menu

After getting it working I was stumped for a bit given I could not get the game out of test mode with or without the high score save kit installed. Turns out there is a dip switch that causes this. Specifically, switch 8 on dip switch #2 was set to “On” forcing the game to load only to the menu. Once I figured that out, the game played beautifully, how crazy is that!

This win encouraged me to do some more clean-up on the Moon Patrol cabinet, which I’d been preparing to send to Alberto for refurbishing. After this, however, I’m gonna de-prioritize that and send Venture out in its place. I can do some surface clean-up on Moon Patrol and save it for the full refurbishing after Venture is done. It also means I can play it sooner than later, which always matters.

I took a wire brush to the coin box door and then re-painted the heads of the new bolts black. I also got rid of as much rust on the metal reinforcements as I could and them repainted them silver. They aren’t perfect, but they look pretty good.

The final piece will be taking some black paint to the front of the game and touching up some of those spots and hiding the peeling plywood at the bottom for the time being, we’ll see what I can figure out. It also means I need to disassemble Venture this week to get that shipped out, which will help me prioritize re-building the power supply for that game, cause again I know it’s the power 🙂

Moon Patrol coin door area of cabinet needs a clean-up

The other project I looked at yesterday afternoon was the issue with getting access to the menu for changing game settings for Robotron. This issue was not a deal-breaker given the game played fine, but I like to have 5 guys in that game rather than the default 3, so I wanted to adjust settings.

Games Switches for menu settings in Defender identical to those in Robotron

This was similar to the issue I had with Defender discussed here, but as with most of the Williams games, it was just different enough to result in my wasting a couple of hours trying to track the issue down. While Robotron has the same game setting switches as Defender, turns out there is another Advance switch for the menu that is accessible via the coin box ceiling.

Sometimes you should really just read the manual to save you time 🙂

The advance switch in the coin door did not work, and at first I could not find this other advance switch that was supposed to be in the cash box area. But after closer inspection of the coin box it looks like that switch was screwed to the top of the box with the switch forced open, which explains why I couldn’t find it, as well as why the switch tester was showing the service switch as open.

Advance switch screwed onto cash box for Robotron, but not aligned properly with hole

Once I unscrewed that advance switch and re-aligned it over the cash box hole for the switch I could then get in and access book keeping totals as well as change settings like number of guys from 3 to 5…YEAH! Too much time spent on a simple problem, but it’s now solved. I also re-visited the original Robotron boards while I was troubleshooting to see if they would work without the FPGA board, but that was a no-go. Something is weird given they’re not showing any errors, just seem to be getting no power, but when I turn the game off the error LED indicator flashes 0 once very quickly.For my sanity, however, I’m not going down this rabbit hole right now, but it’s one to note for later. The other thing is the player 1 and player 2 start buttons are switched, so I need to re-wire those, but after that that’s it. Robotron is done and done.

The other thing I did to get Moon Patrol working is take the transformer from Stargate temporarily, which puts the repairing of the Joust transformer I blew at the top of the repair list now. I’m getting there, only two games down now, and at least one of them, Cheyenne, should be a simple fix….SHOULD is the operative word there 🙂 The other thing worth considering is how much time I have spent the last month managing Williams’ menus, Jesus.

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*The character board was missing, so I’m gonna need to find one.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged 2, bavacade, bavarcade, Cheyenne, defender, moon patrol, Robotron, Venture | 1 Comment

Fall with my Besties

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Reverend

It’s been a quite busy fall at Reclaim Hosting, kinda crazy to think October is almost over. I really haven’t looked up from my desk for the last month, so it was nice to get out yesterday with Anto and Duca for a walk. We went to the Bosca della Città, which is a gorgeous, 500 meter high “Doss,” a geological remnant of the ice age which left large, round rock formations in the middle of the valley. This is one of several within the city limits, and we were able to capture it as it caught fire with the colors of fall.

Before we moved into the “big city” we spent a lot of time with Duca in this park. In fact, probably the greatest thing about Trento is the parks in the city that make you feel like you are within the deepest woods. It was a glorious return, and nice to take a break from all the multiregion networking shenanigans 🙂

Posted in family, fun | Tagged duca, Duke, family, fun | Leave a comment

Multiregion: a Year-Long Odyssey

Posted on October 24, 2022 by Reverend

Since our all-team meeting in November of last year I have been chasing the White Whale of WordPress multiregion hosting on Reclaim Cloud. I’ve been experimenting with it on and off since January. You can find the tale of the tape on the bava using the WordPress Multiregion tagged (wpmr) post. This is yet another multiregion post, but this time with a successful implementation of bavatuesdays running across our US West and UK data centers, and it’s replicating perfectly. The proof is in the database!

The Replication column is the key!

I am managing the DNS of each of the unique servers through Cloudflare, which allows me to setup DNS-based load balancing that steers traffic towards either the closest server, the fastest server, or at random depending on the settings chosen.

Image of Cloudflare load balancing options

Traffic options in Cloudflare’s load balancer

What’s more, the moment one of the two servers goes down all traffic is redirected to the healthy pool, or the server that is not down in this case. That’s the failover, and I tested it for both servers and I immediately was notified via email, which is slick.

Cloudlfare alert to notify me one of two servers hosting bavatuesdays is struggle-bussing

So, that is multiregion failover in a nutshell, and we have it working for WordPress instances in Reclaim Cloud. So, the next step was to get Reclaim Hosting’s main WordPress site running on this setup, and this is where things get interesting. In a recent post on how we work at Reclaim I mentioned how Cloudflare would become a larger part of our workflow and infrastructure, and that’s already the case. And I am starting to fully realize the immense power of this resource, and part of it harkens back to the O.G. web, namely www. The tradition of using the subdomain www. before the top-level domain start has a marker to distinguish these resources from FTP or Gopher sites, a kind of resource branding. With the web being the de facto destination for almost all traffic for well mover 25 years, the subdomain might be seen as redundant. But, when it comes to a web where more and more security, traffic shaping, and resource distribution are controlled via DNS with services like Cloudflare, being able to isolate the traffic for your main site to a www subdomain where all top-level traffic is re-directed becomes an increasingly important practice.

So, in the case of Reclaim Hosting’s mainsite our DNS is managed by a different provider than Cloudflare. Often times when you run your domain through Cloudflare you point your nameservers to their’s and then they effectively manage all your records by “flattening” your top-level domain. But changing DNS for all records running through reclaimhosting.com at this point is a non-starter, so how can we still leverage all the benefits of Cloudflare, such as their CDN, DDoS protection, DNS-based load balancing (to name a few) for our main site if we can’t point our main domain’s nameservers?

Image of a ball rolloing to flatten a fictional character

Flattening CNAME with Cloudflare is something like this….

Well, turns out Cloudflare allows you to setup a Partial (CNAME) setup that allows you to point a specific CNAME, in this case www, to their service so that you can flatten a specific CNAME like www.reclaimhosting.com in order to leverage everything we need. The amazing Chris Blankenship got that all setup yesterday in our development environment, so I think we will be able to pull the trigger on having our main site running WordPress multiregion using Cloudflare for load balancing, DDoS protection, as well as their CDN. Getting multiregion on Reclaim Hosting’s main site has been a bit of an odyssey, but like anything, keeping the faith and continually returning to the issue with a fresh perspective makes all the difference. YEAH!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, WordPress | Tagged Cloudflare, reclaim, reclaimcloud, WordPress, wpmr | 3 Comments

WordPress Multisite Migrations and the Meaning of Web Life

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Reverend

This post is heavily influenced by the goings-on at Reclaim Edtech this October, namely a month-long dive into all things WordPress Multisite for admins with Tom Woodward. It’s similar to the Domain of One’s Own workshop we have run for years, and it feels good to finally offer something for our myriad WordPress Multisite folks. Also worth noting October 24th kicks off Hacks for Hybrid Working with Maren Deepwell and Lauren Hanks—a free, month-long event that is open to anyone, you should really attend!

Tom Woodward during Week 1 of WPMS 101

But back to WordPress Multisite, I believe it’s the first event that Amanda Schmidt has run since joining Reclaim Hosting in late June, and I’m really loving the vibe. She has a wicked GIF game, as you might be able to glean from the screenshot above, and she has made impressive headway on our WordPress Multisite documentation which is a natural adjunct to this workshop. Hell, it’s even inspired me to take on a “Single Sign-on (SSO) for WordPress Multisite” article, which is a much needed push to centralize some resources and track down all the different SSO methods we currently support, including the UMW Blogs outliers. But I should return to the vibe of the edtech sessions already mentioned before I get lost in WordPress Multisite migration land. It’s fun to see Amanda, Taylor Jadin, and Pilot Irwin co-hosting with Tom. It has resulted in some great conversation and a sense of generations of edtech in dialogue with each other in an organic and generative way—and that was all Amanda’s doing. I’m really digging that, not to mention I never tire of the way our pre-recorded videos work in concert with Discord’s live chat—the delivery and episodic calendar along the top are quite elegant.

But all of that is just a way to get to this (you can see how these posts can get unnecessarily long, right?), I have been working on a migration that pulls a single site out of a WordPress Multisite, which can be a tricky process. That said, it was cool to see Tim’s document on “Migrating a WPMS Subsite to a Standalone WordPress Install” holding up brilliantly, so I won’t re-hash the process. Rather, I’ll note some things that were particular for me that might be worth remembering.

To start, the site is a mapped domain on the mighty Rampages.us, namely digitalhistology.org, and the export I got was probably using a plugin like Updraft Plus, which did not have images even though there were 5+ GB worth. So, if you are trying to pull a sub-site out of a multisite be sure to check media is in the uploads directory if you get an export. I also realized that only some of the plugins were included in the zipped export, and I imagine this is due to the ways WPMS deals with network active, must-use and forced plugins. The same can be said for themes when the theme might be a child-theme (this one was based off WP Bootstrap), which means it will depend on another theme being installed and accessible for it to run properly. It can be tricky, but making sure you know what plugins are actually used is important, and doing a visual check of a site through the dashboard helps avoid many of the pitfalls an export plugin like Updraft Plus promises for WPMS, but remains uneven at best in my experience.

So doing the preliminary work around installed themes, plugins, and making sure media is present is essential, after that you have to manage the user scenario given the user data will not come in with an export of the site tables which are managed centrally, rather than site-by-site. This can mean downloading thousands of users to just get to one, not an ideal scenario. For this migration I realized the author info is in many ways secondary given this site is driven by page-based resources not necessarily associated with a specific author. So I just matched the username and email with the the username and email of the new site admin, and updated the wp_user and wp_usermeta tables to make sure they match, I also had to ensure the wp_users_capibility entry was present in wp_usermeta—I have a history with losing admin access with this table when migrating out of WPMS.

At this point user has access, plugins, themes, and uploads are there, now I just drop all tables in the new site database except for wp_users and wp_usermeta and import existing tables from the export SQL file you got from the WPMS. Before importing be sure to do a find and replace of all instances of the multisite ID written into tables, for example wp_1234_options versus wp_options.To do this in your text editor of choice just find and replace all with the find being wp_1234 and replace being wp). The 1234 here would be the site ID, and with a stand-alone WordPress instance that ID is no longer needed and can often break things.

After you import everything successfully, it’s time to look it over, which took some time for me cause I was working through a resource Tom Woodward built for a faculty member over many years and reproducing the process was pretty wild. I actually had a ton of fun trying to figure a few pieces out, but all-in-all it was pretty seamless. I gauge my success—and Tom’s—on not having to reach out to him during the migration. The site has over 1500 pages, each of which uses specific data from Advanced Custom Fields to drive the experience. The site is organized around targeted topics, such as this tiny “module” on Cell Polarity:

Cell Polarity Mini-Module

It was fun seeing all the content written into custom fields, and I started to understand how this site was built using custom fields that created basic page navigation as if a slide deck. Here is a look at some of the innards:

My knowledge of Advanced Custom Fields is limited at best, so I was glad it all just worked. The only snag I ran into was the need for quotes around a url constant in a theme PHP template:

Snag on the Migration path

I went to the template in question, page-test-big.php, and added single quotes around the url constant and it worked, which is next level for this proud citizen of non-programmistan:

Wrap that url constant in single quotes, Cowboy!

There is always something rewarding about a good migration, Tim would often describe them as therapeutic. I agree, and for me it is that much sweeter when we are migrating and preserving work from these truly remarkable WordPress Multisite systems that made publishing at scale trivial, but also enabled edtechs like Tom to grow as developers. There is so much history in these files and directories, so much magic in collaborating with faculty, students, and staff to realize a vision, and it’s why the archivist in me relishes the ability to keep the dream alive. I’m lucky in that we also host Rampages, so I have privileged access to some of these things to make this transition easier. There are some complexities involved that other hosting companies may balk at, but that for me is the gold of Reclaim Hosting. We’re not other hosting companies, we are hosting for educators! This is our bread and butter, this is where we come from and this is what we believe in.

The work happening in WPMS for over 15 years across the higher ed web is an important archive, and all too much of it at the whim of the latest slash and burn campaign of the the newest leadership. This stuff is an important look at the impact of the digital shift on higher ed more broadly, and we can save it one site at a time (or even more if we have access 🙂 ). Thankfully the good folks at UMW have been hosting UMW Blogs with us forever, and I believe that archival project happening over the next 6 months will highlight a way that a school can both preserve what was and move forward at the same time.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Edtech, WordPress, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged reclaim, reclaimedtech, wpms, wpmu | 2 Comments

On being happy

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Reverend

Not sure why, and god only knows how long it will last, but I’ve been feeling pretty happy as of late.

Fall in Parco di Gocciadoro

Maybe it’s the change in season? The crisp fall chill of Trento reminds me a lot of the return-to-school weather of my childhood on Long Island. Maybe it’s finding myself lucky enough to work with a growing team at Reclaim Hosting that is constantly inspiring me? Gotta have something to do with.

The Duke!

Duke! It’s gotta be Duke!!! What would the world be like without a dog like Duke? Worse, for sure.

The long awaited container!

But then I am thinking about the recent container full of stuff from America that arrived on Italy’s shores early last month, filled with memories from a former house in what seems like a former life. Not to mention that small piece of Reclaim Arcade that arrived with various media formats and 14 golden age arcade game cabinets that help me while away the time. I know that’s it.

Whiling away too much time trying to fix Venture

Or maybe it’s the impromptu sets on ds106radio that are responsible. I have to believe listening to friends share what they love on the radio waves, and then responding in kind has to help re-wire your brain for happiness.

Maybe it’s the joy of sharing an office with my youngest son in the bavacrypt. Hearing him narrate his latest boss conquest on Elden Ring, or return to the From Software ouevre to take on some of the most cinematically awesome creatures I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s how much of me I see in him, and how much that fills me with happiness, as well as the concomitant concerns knowing what I know. But, at the same time, knowing that’s not destiny, and being happy again!

Tommy Tile!

Or maybe it’s related to being a certain age, and seeing my oldest leave the nest and head out into the wilds of a European capital all on his own. The fear is overshadowed by the sense of hope and possibility—the only things worth a damn.

Miles the Red Baron

Actually, it occurs to me it has everything to do with a recently turned 16 year old wonder that I still share a roof with, and who regularly blows my mind with her depth and strength. Got be that!

Photos don’t come easy anymore

Then again, it might well be that I am coming up on 20 years of marriage with the love of my life.

Anto in Sicily!

There’s a thin line between happiness and everything else, and I’m mindful of the minefield that is life, and how many near misses I have accumulated in my short time here. That thought can sometimes spiral and cause abysmal dread followed by a soul-deep shiver at what could have been that rocks me at my very core. But today is not that day, today I am happy and there are many potential reasons why, but I tend to think the last few might really be the source of my happiness.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, maybe it’s Daphne!

Regardless, there is one thing I’m absolutely sure of, it’s definitely not Cloudy!

Definitely not!

Posted in bavatuesdays | Tagged happy, life | 12 Comments

bavacade To-Do List, Part 2

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Reverend

bavacade_to-do list part 2

I was pleasantly surprised to realize I’ve worked my way through all of bavacade To-Do List, Part 1, so I guess it’s time to start on Part 2. In fact, I’ve already knocked a few items off this list over the past week, such as #18 with swapping out the switching power supply in Asterock. Although, as detailed here, I didn’t end up removing the switching power supply, I simply made sure the game runs off one AC plug and put back the heat sync. I also can cross-out #10 given that when I swapped the G07 chassis in Dig Dug with that in Bagman there were no more screen issues for either monitor, so no need to replace pots. I just need to try my hand at another G07 capkit for the original Condor chassis I started parting out for pots. I was also able to add the high score save kit to Galaxian so that takes care of #14. Finally, I did try #20, swapping the Hanterex Polo chassis in Cheyenne with a spare I have, but as already noted the horizontal sync issues that resulted means the monitor issues persist.

Galaxian High Score Save Kit

So, that leaves only 8 items to attend to on this list, and 3 of them (#s 15, 16, and 17) are installing high score save kits, which may be simple or a royal pain in the ass depending on how complicated the kit and whether the chips to be replaced are socketed. Moon Patrol and Elevator Action look pretty simply like Galaxian, but I think Pac-man is more involved. So I’ll work through those three tasks this week and see where I land.

Moon Patrol Board with socketed Z80 for high score save kit…YES!

Task #9 is simply getting ready to send boards out for repair. Right now I know I need to send out both Moon Patrol for throwing garbage and Bagman for sprite issues, but I want to find a way to test Venture and see where the original Cheyenne board is at with the audio issues. I also have a bootleg Gyruss and Yie-Ar Kung-fu I could send, but given this might be an international job, I’ll have to limit the board repairs given shipping costs. So holding off on shipping these until I know everything I need and then make some choices.

80s advertisement featuring the Venture cabinet

Task #11 is also a bit of a place holder given work on fixing up the Venture and Dig Dug cabinets won’t happen until Moon Patrol is worked on, and that is still a waiting game. So this is definitely in the pipeline. But I do want Venture to look like new as shown above once everything is woking—hope springs eternal.

Tasks #12 and #13 are related, and after the work on Defender yesterday, I might have an idea why the Joust FPGA board (task #12) is acting up. [You can read more about that Defender repair over on yesterday’s repair log.] Anyway, the Joust FPGA is definitely something I want to return to given that game is currently using the original boards, and there is a line along the top that’s annoying, but by no means a dealbreaker.

That brings me to #13 which is the Williams transformer for Joust when I mistakenly plugged the 120V AC into a European 220V socket. I know, I know!

Anyway, I currently have the transformer from Stargate in Joust and the converted DC Voltage readings coming from that transformer into the power supply board are crazy. They don’t match those on the Stargate or the Joust schematic at all, so I’m only using the isolation transformer to power the monitor and marquee, and added a switching power supply to Joust and will do the same for Stargate here shortly. The transformer outputs for the Williams power supplies are inconsistent at best, and crazy at worst. After Stargate every Williams game in the bavacade (there are 6) will have a switching power supply…hallelujah! I have a hunch the power supply in Moon Patrol was the reason behind the board having issues, but that is not something I can confirm until it is fixed. In fact, getting these original Williams power supplies refurbished is something I am considering given I do want the original pieces working even if I am bypassing them for reasons of preservation.*

I mentioned the high score save kits early on in this post, so the last thing is to return the Asterock boards Antonio Nati of Arcade Story—the godfather of 80s classic arcade games in Italy—lent me in Spring to test an issue I was having. He’s been super mellow with letting me hang on to them, but I’m gonna plan a trip to go to his warehouse this month and return the boards and also see if he has any games I might be interested in for bavacade 🙂 I did see a pretty nice Wizard of Wor and is that an Italian knock-off of Centipede from Sidam called Magic Worm? Another for my collection of Sidam games?! 🙂

Sidam’s Magic Worm

One more thing I need to add to this list is fixing the coin door switches for changing settings in Robotron. I am hoping this will be easy after my work with Defender in this regard, but we will see.

Anyway, the work is coming along, I just need to shore up some of the low-hanging fruit before I lock back into Venture and Cheyenne. In fact, I know I have some local help for the monitor chassis issue with Cheyenne, it’s the power supply for Venture that has me most concerned, I guess I might just have to reach back out across the pond for some help—or ask Antonio if he has any ideas, or maybe Roberto can rebuild that power supply….I guess we’ll see. The game is in the journey!

_____________________________________________

*In fact, the Exidy power supply for Venture is a perfect example of a game I wish I had a switching power supply for, but seems like they don’t make them given that is using both HI and LO -12V and +12V, which I finally researched this, and it means that -12V DC is running at both 1 amp for LO and 3 amps for high, and they are separate lines, same for +12V DC. Crazy, so the Venture power supply will most likely need to be rebuilt again 🙁

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged bavacade, Cheyenne, defender, Dig Dug, Elevator Action, Galaxian, Joust, moon patrol, pac-man, Stargate, Venture | 1 Comment

bavacade Repair Log 10-9-2022

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Reverend

The repairs continue at the bavacade, and this week they came in fits and starts given it was a busy one at Reclaim Hosting. That said, I definitely made a bit of progress and continue to fine-tune the collection, even if there is a bit of one-step forward two-steps back with Venture and Cheyenne.

Cheyenne/Crossbow

As alluded to, Cheyenne continues to elude me. I have the game working cleanly with a Crossbow board while the audio board on the original board with a 440 Multi-kit gets looked at.

Crossbow working in Cheyenne

The Hanterex Polo 20″ monitor chassis that was in there originally was curling at the top after the game was on for 20 or 30 minutes. I know this means a capkit and I have an extra chassis for this game, so I tried swapping it out this week.

I must say I love the way this monitor slides right out so you can work on it out of the cabinet while still fully connected. So the swap was easy, and while the new chassis looks great it would not horizontally sync —which is an issue with many a monitor—so I spent a ton of time troubleshooting, including adjusting the B+ voltage to 138V DC (tested at P112) and every combination of tweaking the vertical and horizontal pots all to no effect. I had to take a break cause it could be something on the chassis board and I was getting nowhere. I’ve had no luck finding a capkit for this monitor chassis, but thinking it might be quicker/faster to just try a capkit on the curling chassis originally in the game. We’ll see.

Venture

Sigh. For a minute or two I thought I was close, but alas nothin’. I swapped out the resistor 302 so I was able to re-install the boards. I also ran +5V from the switching power supply given +5V was not running from main logic board to the coin door, control panel, and the audio/video board. I’m not sure if this is an issue with the logic board, or what, but I decided that with no +5V to the audio/video board the game was not gonna work. After piggybacking on the +5V to the switching power supply I was sure I would get some love, but nada!

Piggybacking for +5V on Venture Board

I also tried everything like making sure everything was grounded with switching power supply, even to field ground, but still nothing.

Field ground is the green and yellow wire and goes into the ground coming in from the wall:

Tapping into Field Ground from Wall

Then at a certain point the -12Vs (Hi and Lo) coming out of the original power supply were no longer registering, and -5V from the switching power supply also stopped working so I was at a total loss. The only voltages registering were +5V from the switching power supply and +12V. Frustrating to no end.

I either need to find a custom switching power supply for Venture or have the original power supply rebuilt yet again, which is annoying. I also have the uncertainty about whether the board blew while I was stumbling around with this game, so right now this one is the bane of my existence and I need some time to rethink my approach because so far nothing has worked. I’ll be back!

Galaxian

As a result of my epic Venture failures, I took out the K4600 chassis I had taken from Galaxian and reinstalled it on that classic 1979 space shooter. While I was doing that work I also installed a high score save kit on Galaxian, so that is working beautifully.

It’s always nice when the Z80 chip you need to replace for a high score save kit is socketed so you can easily remove and replace it without any soldering.

Socketed Z80 Chip I removed and replaced on High Score Save Kit Daughter Board

I removed the original daughter board that was installed and added the new daughter board with the Z80 chip installed and that was that.

Image of the Original Galaxian Daughter Board replaced by High Score Save Kit

High Score Save Kit Daughter board installed on Galaxian

I also have new locks on this game and vacuumed out the cabinet, so this game is pretty cleaned up. It might need a fresh coat of paint at some point, but for the time being it’s golden.

Defender

Defender‘s coin door switches

This was an interesting one. After I installed the FPGA board on Defender I went to adjust the settings to ensure I could go from 3 ships to 5 or 7 given this game is hard enough without only having 3 ships. To do this you need to open the coin door and use the 3 switches inside it to advance through the menu and change things like free play, number of ships, etc. When I tried this I could advance, but the high score reset switch (the red one on the left) was not working. I figured the switch was bad so I took it apart and used another switch I have as a model to see if it was wired wrong. It appears that it was, and someone had wired a resistor across two of the switch legs, so I desoldered those and re-soldered the wire and grounds to what I believe were the correct legs.

Resoldered wires, the green are the ground and the white/gray is the high score reset switch

After re-soldering the wires and testing the switch I saw it was working using the Switch Test built into the menu for the FPGA board. The video below takes you through what that looks like, but turns out the switch works but not for the switch I wanted. What was switching was button 6 for player 1, not the high score reset switch. WTF!

If you watched the above video you might sense a bit of frustration given what I thought was a layup, proved to not work. But the fact is the high score reset switch was working after I re-soldered it. It was just registering as a different button, one that does not exist on Defender. 1P button 6 only exists on Stargate, or so I believe. It is the additional button for invisibility. I then realized that on the FPGA board there is a 4-pin molex that has settings for 1B6, 2B6, Coin3 (also menu), and HSRT (or high score reset). Hmmm, that is weird, given the game is mistaking high score reset for player 1 button 6 (or 1B6), this was starting to seem like a bit of pin inversion.

FPGA Game Board for Multi-Williams

As you can see from the diagram of the FPGA board above, those 4 pins are linked through a 4-pin molex connector to a Jamma connector that actually takes all the various molex connectors for the coin door, control panel, video, and audio from the original game boards and connects them to the FPGA:

FPGA Game Board for Multi-Williams connecting to Jamma Board Drawing

This particular 4-pin molex is a way to add additional switches to the FPGA/Jamma board combo. And I figured out there’s an issue with the Coin3 pin on either the FPGA board or the Jamma Connector—which one I’m not certain. The Coin3 pin controls the menu of the FPGA which allows you to select which game you want and to change board settings.

4-pin Molex Connector from FPGA to Jamma

When the 4-pin molex was connected to the Jamma board in what I believed was the correct way based (given wire colors matched) it was impossible to leave the FPGA menu and return to the game after saving your settings. So, as a result, I thought I had the 4-pin molex connector installed wrong, so inverted it and was then allowed to leave the menu and play the game. So I thought it must be right, but I was wrong. The wiring was not inverted, rather inverting the wire hid the issue with the Coin3 menu switch being stuck open which allowed me to leave the menu and play the game. It hit me when I realized after the above painful video that the high score reset switch was now mapped to the player 1 button 6 (1B6) switch as a result of my inverting the 4-pin molex. Ah ha!

So, as a test, I found a wire connector from a Sparkfun set Tim and I bought at a hobby shop years ago and connected only the high score reset pins and it worked! Not connecting Coin3 (or menu) left that switch closed so you did not get stuck in the menu and the switches for 1B6 and 2B6 are not used for Defender, so no loss keeping them disconnected. Whew, that was some work, but kind of fun. Now I think I can fix the same issue I’m having in Robotron in half the time, but I probably jinxed myself by writing that.

Moon Patrol

And finally Moon Patrol, the cabinet for which is still sitting up in my dining room in shell form waiting to be refinished. That said, I did get all the paint I needed so I’ll be ready to go once the cabinet work is done. In anticipation I was preparing to clean the power supply and transformer after testing it and once again realizing all original power supplies for Williams games are insane and report the craziest voltage readings and need to be replaced with switching power supplies that have the Williams adapter STAT! [/rant]

So using a switching power supply in Moon Patrol is what I will do, but first a good clean-up is important because we’ll still need the transformer to run power to the monitor and marquee lights, even if the DC voltage going into the Williams power supply board from the transformer will all be replaced with a switching power supply—most likely the one in Venture. Anyway, here are some before and after images of the clean up of both the transformer and the power supply board:

Moon Patrol power supply and heatsync with degreaser applied

Moon Patrol transformer with degreaser applied

Moon Patrol power supply board and heatsync after washing

Moon Patrol transformer after washing

Quite a difference, no? I still need to scrub out some of the rust on the transformer with a wire brush and maybe swap out some screws, but gonna let everything dry real good for a while, and then re-install these inside Moon Patrol once the work and painting on that cabinet are all done.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged bavacade, Cheyenne, classic video games, Crossbow, defender, Galaxian, moon patrol, Venture, videogames | 4 Comments

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