rPi xBox

After reading Portal 2 Improves Cognitive Skills More Than Lumosity Does I felt like it was necessary to boot up my Gen 1 Xbox360 and play some Portal 2 with some friends. The only problem was my Xbox was in the front room and I had no Ethernet runs to that side of the house and I don't own the WiFi adapter. I do however own a Model A Raspberry Pi, USB hub, and a WiFi dongle. This could work.

So I downloaded the latest Wheezy from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and got started. After flashing the image to my SD card (Instructions Here) I plugged in my mouse, keyboard and wifi dongle into the USB hub and my RCA video into the TV, since I was doing this for the Xbox I might as well use the TV as my temporary monitor.

Upon booting up I was presented with a text based menu where I changed the password and rebooted. Once rebooted I used the default user pi and my new password and I was in.

First thing to do was setting up the WiFi dongle.

 sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Opens the interfaces file in nano. I make the changes below to get the wlan0 interface up:

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

I use Ctrl+o to write the changes out and then Ctrl+x to close it and get back to the console. Next need to setup the wpa-suppplicant config file for my security. As you can see from my interfaces file I had my config located at /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, so...

 sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
        ssid="mySSID"
        key_mgmt=NONE
        wep_key0=myWEPKey
}

Of course I have to enter my actual SSIS and WEP key. Oh and don't use WEP, I only use it on one of my routers sub nets for some legacy hardware. Actually use WPA2. I run a

sudo reboot

and Boom! WiFi is up and running.

I log in and check to make sure I have an IP address from the DHCP on my router by running ifconfig and checking the entry for wlan0. I get 192.168.1.3 (or something similar) and now I can unplug my keyboard mouse and monitor because it is easier for my to ssh in from my laptop.

So I jump on the laptop open a terminal and ssh 192.168.1.3. I accept the computer signature and log in with pi and my password. Now that WiFi is running, its time to get the network bridge so I need to go back to the interfaces file.

 sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Right under my wpa_supplicant.conf line I want to add the commands to bring up the ethernet interface and set its address.

iface default inet dhcp

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.3.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.3.255

After eth0 is up I need to setup my iptables to port forward. So I add to my interfaces file:

## remove chain rules
up /sbin/iptables -F
up/sbin/iptables -x
up/iptables -t nat -F

## mask eth0 activate port forwarding and nat
up /sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE
up /sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABL$
up /sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT
up /sbin/sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Then we need to set DHCP for our internal network. I used dnsmasq. To get dnsmasq installed on our rPi we simply run

 sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

once installed I go back to our interfaces file and add the following:

## use dnsmasq-base##
## on range 3.10 - 3.20
up /usr/bin/killall dnsmasq
up /bin/sleep 2
post-up /usr/sbin/dnsmasq -i eth0 -I wlan0 -F 192.168.3.10,192.168.3.20,infinite

 dnsmasq restart
 post-up /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

Now I restart the rPi, plug in the ethernet into the xbox, and I am done!

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rPi xBox