Q's Blog

ICCID activation was once a common workaround for carrier-locked iPhones. Apple patched it, so it cannot issue new unlocked tickets, but tickets created before the patch still work. To preserve an existing unlock through a reset, downgrade, or DFU restore, back up the activation ticket first and restore it afterward. The ticket is tied to one device and cannot be transferred. I use my iPhone 5s (A1453, au/KDDI Japan) as the example.

A memory-modded 360T7 had run for years until I flashed OpenWrt's bl2 and fip. It then stopped at dram size: 0MB. Every rescue package I found failed for the same reason: OpenWrt's official bl2 drives DDR3 at 2133MT/s, while this router has a DDR3-1600 chip. DRAM initialization failed before the rest of the boot chain could load. I traced the settings in the ATF source, built a bl2 at 1866MT/s, and recovered the router over UART.

The 360V6 has A/B dual-partition flash: two complete rootfs copies and a bootloader slot flag that selects one at boot. Updates write the inactive partition and leave the running one alone. If a write fails or is interrupted, the router can still boot the old system.

OpenWrt's sysupgrade ignored the layout and wrote the running partition in place. A power loss or bad image mid-write left the device unbootable, recoverable only over TTL. I added proper A/B support upstream, and it has merged.

BitTorrent and private-tracker clients benefit from accepting inbound connections, but CGNAT prevents that. Your ISP places multiple subscribers behind one public IPv4 address, so there is no inbound mapping for the home server. Port forwarding on the home router does not help because the relevant NAT is upstream at the ISP.

A VPS with a public address and a WireGuard tunnel can relay the traffic. It receives torrent connections on a port range and forwards them through the tunnel to the home server. To peers, the home server is then reachable at the VPS's public address.

The Late 2012 Mac Mini Server makes a cheap Proxmox VE node and is the last fully upgradeable Mac Mini. Its two SO-DIMM slots support 16GB of RAM, and its two 2.5-inch SATA bays can hold a boot disk and a datastore. Apple soldered the RAM in 2014 and moved the line to ARM in 2020, so newer Minis either cannot take more memory or cannot run x86 virtualization.

Its quad-core mobile Ivy Bridge i7 keeps power use modest for four cores. The whole machine is a 19cm-square box that fits on a shelf.