First things first. If you don't need to do this, don't do this. How do you know if you need to do this? Are you using Linux as a NAT router for your home network? Does the Xbox 360 report your NAT as moderate? If so, you probably need to do this. What is "this"? Keep reading.

Since the last time I posted, the Linux-IGD project has seen some development, but to look at their home page you wouldn't know it. Even the Sourceforge page still shows 0.92 as the latest version, having not been updated since January 12, 2003. All of the recent changes are in their CVS repository, though, so we'll build from that instead. Follow the instructions to checkout linux-igd to your machine.

If you followed my previous post, make sure you've fully uninstalled upnpsdk and linuxigd (a "make uninstall" should be enough for upnpsdk, and for linuxigd you should at least make sure upnpd is not running and remove the /etc/linuxigd directory). Once you've checked out the CVS project, you'll find a file called INSTALL. Read that to guide you through installing libupnp-1.2.1. Make sure you download version 1.2.1 and not version 1.2.1a from the download page. The INSTALL file is not exactly correct, as you can't just run "make" from the libupnp-1.2.1 root directory. Instead, go down into the upnp directory under libupnp-1.2.1 and run make there. This should also build ixml and threadutil at the previous directory level. Follow the rest of the INSTALL steps, making sure to copy the extra ixml and threadutil libs and includes. Finally, you can build and install the CVS linux-igd following the steps in the INSTALL file.

Before you fire up upnpd, first take a look through /etc/upnpd.conf and make sure everything is set to your liking. Some settings I suggest (these should be the defaults):

• Make sure "iptables_location" points to the path to your iptables binary. This should default to /usr/sbin/iptables and should already be correct, but double-check to be sure.
• debug_mode = 1. Without this, you're not going to be able to keep tabs on what upnpd is doing.
• Make sure the chain names for forward and prerouting are correct for your configuration. The defaults should usually be right, but it doesn't hurt to double-check.
• Set your upstream_bitrate and downstream_bitrate if you really care. These are in bits per second, not bytes, so make sure you multiply by 8 if you start from bytes per second. For example, 2 Megabits per second would be 2097152, but 2 MegaBytes per second would be 16777216.

Now that that's taken care of, start up your Xbox 360 and go to the System blade. From here, choose Network Settings and then Test Xbox Live Connection. You'll be prompted that testing the connection will sign out all profiles, so choose Yes and get down to business. You should now see something like this:

By the way, if you have a Windows box behind your NAT, it should now pick up the UPnP gateway device (you may have to install some components through the Add/Remove Programs applet to be able to see UPnP connections, and even if you already have UPnP support installed you'll need to reboot for the OS to pick up the gateway device). For example, on my XP laptop, I now see this in my Network Connections control panel:

Hopefully this will help out other people trying to get Xbox Live working on their original Xbox or new Xbox 360, since Microsoft doesn't officially support Linux as a NAT router. If you've had problems and been told to go buy a router off of the official compatibility list even though you'd rather continue with your Linux setup, this is for you.

Update: One minor note that I forgot. You may need to do a little bit of manual patching of the linux-igd code, if that fix hasn't merged into CVS. Read that thread, and look in your downloaded code to see if you need to manually patch or not before you actually build.

The following links will open a new window to Live.com and add the respective Gadget.

• Analog Clock
• Livetris

As with my Analog Clock Gadget, this one continues to use the awesome JavaScript VectorGraphics library. This is a very robust and powerful tool, and I highly recommend others check it out.

I plan to eventually put my Gadgets up on the Microsoft Gadgets site, but for now you can use these installation instructions:

1. Copy

   http://www.daishar.com/gadgets/Livetris/Livetris.xml

   to your clipboard.
2. On Live.com, select Add Content on the sidebar and then Advanced.
3. Paste the Gadget URL into the Add a Gadget by URL textbox.
4. Select the Add button.

Compatibility notes: For now, this Gadget is IE-only due to the way I'm handling keyboard input. I hope to get this working with Firefox soon, but I figured I may as well release what I've got right now.

The Analog Clock Gadget works with both Live.com and Start.com.

To install (cribbed from Microsoft Gadgets' installation instructions):

1. Copy

   http://www.daishar.com/gadgets/AnalogClock/AnalogClock.xml

   to your clipboard.
2. On Live.com, select Add Content on the sidebar and then Advanced.
3. Paste the Gadget URL into the Add a Gadget by URL textbox.
4. Select the Add button.

Today I finally found the solution. First let me say that this problem is not with a Windows CE machine, nor is it with the web interface to Remote Desktop. This is a Windows XP to Windows XP session. Anyway, on to the answer.

I had already ruled out bad patches, bad software installations, and even went through a series of troubleshooting steps to "reset" terminal server. Out of the blue today, I got the idea that maybe the visual style I was using could cause this problem, as it might be a drawing issue that TS can't handle. I was using the "sgnome" style (don't remember where I got it but I think it was from deviantART originally), so I swapped back to the default Luna style and tried a TS connection.

...

It worked! Okay, verify it. Previously, the act of opening an email in Outlook could cause the error, so I tried that. It still works. Tried replying to an email, still worked. Now my TS sessions are rock solid, I'm not getting kicked with a "protocol error", and all I did was change my style back to Luna. WTF? Well, I can't live with Luna as it's too boring, so I went searching for a different style. I settled on Reluna, after verifying that it didn't break anything else.

Why did I think of visual styles? In the past I've had bad styles that broke other things. Most notably, I've had some styles that caused really bad rendering problems when opening a scheduled meeting request from Outlook. If a style can screw that up, it certainly can screw up Terminal Server. The moral of the story is to be careful when using user-created visual styles. They're not certified by Microsoft in any way (in fact, you will generally have to hack uxtheme.dll or pay for something like StyleXP to use non-Microsoft styles at all), and can do some nasty stuff. If you do run into random problems that you've never experienced with a previous style, switch back to Classic or Luna as part of your troubleshooting steps, and see if that solves it.

While the change is nice, and fixes some weird HTML (why was the first article on a page different than all of the rest), they still haven't made it very nice. For example, they have a div with an id of "articles", which you would think contains a bunch of articles. That it does, but it also contains storylinks (the "Read more" links under each article) and some other crap. Why doesn't an article encompass its own storylinks? Why are there other bits at the end of the div, like the "Yesterday's news" link? Oh well, I'll keep at it so long as they keep posting Roland stories.

As always, the script has been tested with IE/Turnabout and Firefox/Greasemonkey. Since this script is just basic DOM walking and manipulation, it should work in Opera 8 as well, but I've not done any testing there.

Here's the depiq user script. It removes Roland Piquepaille-submitted stories from the Slashdot home page (exactly why you would want to remove these submissions is explained in the comments of pretty much every Roland-submitted story -- ie, if you have to ask, you probably don't care enough to remove them). The inclusion list is only the main Slashdot page, so Roland stories will still show up in other sections (you could change the inclusion list, but I haven't tested that). It's not perfect, thanks to Slashdot's horribly awful HTML code. You might see some parentless "Read More" links, for example. That just tells you that the script is working.

Since I'm an Internet Explorer user (gasp!), this script works with both Firefox/Greasemonkey and IE/Turnabout (Turnabout is now my choice of Greasemonkey-like IE plugins, since I killed GreasemonkIE -- I really liked that name; maybe Turnabout could rename themselves to GreasemonkIE?). It might work in Opera 8, but I haven't tested it there. Feel free to let me know if it does or doesn't work, or update the script to work with Opera.

Any future scripts will be Firefox/Greasemonkey- and IE/Turnabout-compatible. I'll do my best to support Opera 8, but it's secondary to the other two (sorry, Opera users).

• Added a "podium percentage" statistic. This takes the number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishes (or as I like to call them, "win, place, and show"), and divides them by the total number of races.
• Added an onsubmit handler to the gamertag input form. If you hit enter on the input box, it will act as though you clicked "Set".
• Changed the color and opacity of the statistics bar. I changed it to a greyish color that better fit the Forza theme, and added a slight transparency so that you can see the header graphic obscured by the bar. Strictly cosmetic, since the bar wasn't obscuring any clickable bits, but it's still a nice change.
• Added some nasty browser-detection code so that the bar can be "position: fixed" on Mozilla. IE doesn't support "position: fixed", and the hacks to support a fixed-like layout assume you have full control over the web page. Since I really don't want to try to completely re-layout the Forza community pages, I did this hack so that at least Firefox users can have a fixed bar. I was very hesitant about adding this browser check, since it may completely fail if you've changed Firefox's userAgent string to mimic IE, but I decided it was worth doing because Firefox has reached the point where it's an accepted browser and only really stupid pages require it to identify itself as MSIE. Worst case, if you've changed Firefox's userAgent to look like MSIE, the statistic bar will be positioned abosolutely at the top of the page rather than as a "floating" fixed element.
• Added some cleanup code to unhook onclick and onsubmit handlers. This is an attempt to help stem IE's javascript memory leaks. Memory is still leaked, but the forza-stats script should be nicer about not leaking as much memory.

1. The GM_getValue implementation in that script is broken. It's trying to eval the stored value, which doesn't work when storing simple strings.
2. The GM_xmlhttpRequest "implementation" is simply an aliasing of Opera's XMLHttpRequest object. That's not enough for a proper implementation of GM_xmlhttpRequest.

As before, forza-stats is compatible with both Mozilla/Greasemonkey and IE/Turnabout.

Enter Greasemonkey/Turnabout. I wrote a user script to add a bar to the top of the Forza community pages displaying some information about a given gamertag.

Caveat: Like Bungie's Halo 2 statistics, the Forza statistics may occasionally be out of sync with the actual Xbox Live data. This can manifest itself a simply not finding any statistics at all, or finding only partial statistics (ELO, but no race numbers), or it might just not reflect your most recent races (ELO changes, race count increases). You can try Refreshing the stat bar data, or Checking your gamertag's statistic page to see if the data has been synced up yet.

Hopefully a more robust data source will be available for Forza stats (RSS, please!), and hopefully even more statistics will be forthcoming.

I just played around with Trixie a little bit (fixed the google image no-frame script installed with Trixie). It looks like it has the same page refresh bug GMIE had. Maybe that'll be fixed in IE7. The config options are both better (scripts are automatically installed simply by downloading them into the scripts directory) and worse (scripts seem to be stored globally in program files, which won't work well on multi-user systems or with non-admin users; I couldn't find a way to edit includes/excludes without editing the files directly), but at version 0.2.2 it's looking very good.

Congrats to whoever's behind the Trixie project (I'll reiterate, it's not me), and good luck with the project.

Hopefully some other enterprising developer can make user scripts for IE a reality, but unfortunately that developer cannot be me.

Changes:

• Added an interface to load user scripts. No more XML modification. Download your script first, and then open "Tools ->Add User Script..." to load the script into GreasemonkIE. I still haven't hooked up to the context menu.
• Added Tony Juricic's mscoree.dll wrapper, so now explorer.exe doesn't hold onto the GreasemonkIE assembly.

As a bonus, I've written my first brand-new user script: De-Piquepaille Slashdot. This script removes Roland Piquepaille-submitted stories from the Slashdot front page (I wrote it on a whim). Tested with Greasemonkey and GreasemonkIE.

Known issues:

• There's no nice way to install user scripts. For now, you'll have to do that by hand (see below). I'm working on adding an entry to the IE context menu for anchor tags, but that's not as clean as I'd like (only scripts can be added to IE context menus, so rather than adding an entry that calls a method in the BHO directly, I have to add an entry that calls a script that instantiates a COM class in the BHO that adds a script, and that's been causing some problems). Alternatively, I may just provide a GUI that will let you add already-downloaded scripts to GreasemonkIE.
• GreasemonkIE is written as a BHO, so you may get warnings from some anti-spyware software. If it prompts you for confirmation, allow it to install.
• Since GreasemonkIE is written in C#, you'll need to install the .NET framework if you don't already have it.
• Also because GreasemonkIE is written in C#, I haven't yet found a good way to stop explorer.exe from loading the BHO. This means that you may have problems uninstalling GreasemonkIE if you've opened any Explorer windows (iexplore.exe will release the assembly reference when it's closed, but explorer.exe will not because it doesn't close until you log out or reboot). Logging out or rebooting will allow you to uninstall GreasemonkIE.
• User scripts aren't re-applied if you refresh a web page. Internet Explorer doesn't fire the OnDocumentComplete event for page reloads, and I haven't had a chance to investigate other options.

Installing user scripts: GreasemonkIE should write an XML file under your user's application data directory ("C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\GreasemonkIE\greasemonkie.xml", for example). If the folder or XML file doesn't exist, you can create them by hand. To install a new user script, add a new <script> node to greasemonkie.xml under the <scripts> node. For example, to install a user script "inline.player.user.js" that was downloaded to "C:\documents and settings\username\Application Data\GreasemonkIE\scripts\", add the following XML:

<script fileName="c:\documents and settings\username\Application Data\GreasemonkIE\scripts\inline.player.user.js" enabled="true" />

I've included Dimitri Glazkov's html-xpath.js script with GreasemonkIE, which supports a good bit of the DOM Level 3 XPath implementation, but it's by no means perfect. It's also quite slow, so I'd recommend avoiding user scripts that use xpath queries. Also, due to inherent differences in the Javascript implementation between IE and FireFox, many user scripts simply will not work with GreasemonkIE. I've tested some, and here's what I've found:

Scripts that work:

• Inline MP3 Player - works flawlessly
• Linkify - painfully slow on large pages due to html-xpath.js performance issues, but it works
• Add Netflix links to IMDB - works well, but the new link has a target IE doesn't like. Shift-click the links to make them work (overrides the target)
• No Middle Man - works well

• Gmail: Adding Persistent Searches
• Google Suggest - A previous version worked using setTimeout, but this script was recently updated to use addEventListener instead, which IE's scripting model doesn't support. I ran into this on a few other scripts, and I may be able to build a work-around to support addEventListener.
• (I didn't try a whole lot of scripts, so just because this section is small doesn't mean most scripts work)

Enjoy!