Storage Wars

In just 22 minutes this amazing cultural touchstone of a show manages to sum up so much of America. I may have watched every episode in existence (2 seasons) over the last week, including a 6 hour marathon on my Thursday off – during which I accomplished absolutely nothing else.

Obviously, as a result of this show, I have decided to quit my job, open a thrift store, and show up at the next storage locker auction with a truck and cash in hand. It actually looks pretty easy if you have a way to distribute the crap and aren't a complete moron.

The basic premise of this show, if you haven't seen it, is that somebody didn't pay their storage locker bills and the contents are going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. They open the door up, give you 5 minutes to look (you can't go inside or touch anything), and then you bid, cash only. Afterwards you plunder this poor person's crap like a tomb robber and try to turn a profit like a good neoliberal capitalist. You're basically robbing poor people of all their stuff behind their back while it is all filmed and celebrated.

The show isn’t really about knowing what stuff is, or being able to spot value in piles of somewhere between boxes and crap; it's about being able to sum up – based on just a few visual clues – if this person has the type of life you'd want to buy at a discount rate, and if anyone else will be dumb enough to buy their dusty junk later.

Although there are commercial exceptions, most of the units are simply someone's entire house in a box. I’m going to guess that a person who packs and entire middle class household into a storage unit may be having sort of a shitty time in their life. I’m going to guess they really would prefer not to see their stuff auctioned off. I am wondering how awkward it would be to see your own storage unit rifled through and judged on TV. I’m wondering how many of these people are dead, which is probably one of the best case scenarios.

There are four main players doing the buying and on the show. I would say profit-turning as well, but one of the guys isn’t really in it for the cash.

The old retired guy – the antique spotter – is the easiest to understand. He doesn't want to resell everything at a profit, he is just looking for cool single items, and he sort of finds them. Over the course of 2 seasons I’d say he has found like 2-3 legitimately cool things – my personal favorite being the pool cue holder. However, I seriously do not believe the amount of money people will pay for antiques. Call me a cheap low-baller but I’d say the cash values on this show are inflated by at least double on average.

The young couple newbie team is my favorite cause the wife is that crafty mix of smart and bitchy and sweet and cute. The guy married way out of his league. They play-fight over everything and at first I hated her, then I hated them for being so cute, and now I like them the most by far. In one episode this woman found the most ridiculous plaster horse head that you hang on the wall and she struts out with it in an otherwise waste-of-money unit and I’m thinking this gaudy plastic crap is valued at $0. Turns out it's some French gold foil thing where in ye olden days you hung it outside of your shop if you dealt with horse meat and the dude gives her 2 grand cash for it on the spot. Who the hell gave these people so much cash?

Then there are two more dudes that are like alpha males who own businesses to distribute the wares and are in it for 100% profit and bring their kids for slave labor and general nepotism. The one who looks like a tough guy is kind of a whiny pussy (but I like his kid), and the one that looks like a pussy is a hardcore asshole and the one I respect the most. The latter is by far the smartest and has made some nice cream on completely obvious units full of commercial grade gear new in boxes that nobody else bid on for some reason.

There is also an auctioneer who is always with this blonde woman and he wears a big, gold pinky ring and asked a psychic (brought in to feel the energy of the unit, of course) what color underwear he was wearing (and she got it right) and he drives a nice car and is a little bit fabulous so obviously he is gay. Then this pretty, cheery blonde woman that I assumed was his minion starts calling him husband and I’m like whaaaaat. They seem like a classy couple and I have no idea how they put up with these yokels.

Anyway, it's my new favorite show on A&E. I have evolved from Intervention to Hoarders to Storage War$. There is a new season starting on Tuesday.

Cisco ASA 5500 and iPhone/iPad VPN

This weekend I decided to setup VPN access to my home network for my iPhone and iPad. SSH just doesn't cut it all the time. I knew VPN was available natively in iOS but I was disappointed that nobody had written an app that supports OpenVPN -- my VPN software of choice. Jailbreaking (on iPhones at least) doesn't have a great hassle:reward ratio these days so I decided it was time to man up and turn my ASA into a VPN server that would be compatible with iOS.

First off, let me tell you about the general setup. The router is a Cisco ASA 5505 running ASA IOS 8.2(5) with a basic license. It is already doing NAT, dhcp, and some basic port mapping for my home network. The phone is an iPhone4 with the current Verizon iOS firmware (4.2.10). It is not jailbroken. And my iPad is running iOS 4.3.5 -- also not jailbroken.

Googling various combinations of "VPN" "iPhone" and "ASA" eventually landed me at this excellent Cisco article:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/asa/asa82/configuration/guide/l2tp_ips.html

Although this looks a little scary at first, it is the best resource I found for understanding and setting up the basics. It also gives you a mostly working configuration example. In fact, there are only a handful of lines I change from its configuration example to "ensure ASA compatibility with a native VPN client on any operating system."

90% pasted straight from that Cisco link, here is what is required on your ASA:

ip local pool VPN_pool 172.16.29.1-172.16.29.10
group-policy VPN_policy internal
group-policy VPN_policy attributes
 dns-server value 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
 vpn-tunnel-protocol l2tp-ipsec
tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup general-attributes
 default-group-policy VPN_policy
 address-pool VPN_pool
tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ipsec-attributes
 pre-shared-key *
tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ppp-attributes
 no authentication pap
 authentication chap
 authentication ms-chap-v1
 authentication ms-chap-v2
crypto ipsec transform-set trans esp-3des esp-sha-hmac
crypto ipsec transform-set trans mode transport
crypto dynamic-map dyno 10 set transform-set trans
crypto map vpn 20 ipsec-isakmp dynamic dyno
crypto map vpn interface outside
crypto isakmp enable outside
crypto isakmp policy 10
 authentication pre-share
 encryption 3des
 hash sha
 group 2
 lifetime 86400
crypto isakmp nat-traversal 20
username happyvpn password changeme mschap
access-list VPN_nonat extended permit ip 172.16.31.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.29.0 255.255.255.240
nat (inside) 0 access-list VPN_nonat

Let's go over the parts of this you shouldn't blindly paste from top to bottom:

• 172.16.29.1-172.16.29.10 are arbitrary IPs that are assigned to VPN clients. Since a basic license can only handle 10 VPN clients, it is pointless for me to make my range larger than that. These IPs must be different from your normal internal IP range(s) -- it should be a totally new local subnet


• The dns-server values should be changed to your preferred nameservers, possibly on your local network


• DefaultRAGroup can not be edited. This is a special Cisco tunnel-group


• pre-shared-key * is one of the two passwords needed to connect, the * represents what you want that password to be


• At the previously mentioned cisco.com link, "crypto dynamic-map dyno 10 set transform-set set trans" has a typo in it and gives a fairly straightforward error. It is fixed in my version above


• username happyvpn password changeme mschap is how you create an account on the ASA for a VPN user. There are other ways of authenticating but this is the easiest


• access-list VPN_nonat extended permit ip 172.16.31.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.29.0 255.255.255.240 In this example, 172.16.31.0/24 is my normal home network, and 172.16.29.0/27 is the range I assign VPN IPs from (as set by the ip local pool VPN_pool ... command)

That is the full ASA VPN configuration needed.

The iPhone setup is very simple. This is under Settings->General->Network->VPN:

• The Server is your public IP or hostname. I have been using a free account at DynDNS.com for years on my home cablemodem with a dynamic IP


• The Account is the username your set on the ASA with username; the Password is its password


• The Secret is the password you set with pre-shared-key


• Send All Traffic does not work with this configuration because of the VPN_nonat rule. I didn't want to send all my traffic through my home VPN anyway

Finally, flip VPN from Off to On and you should get connected with a new VPN icon at the top:

You now have access to the private IPs behind your ASA like any happy VPN connection.

Doesn't work? Let me give you the phone number and IRC haunts of my buddy to helped me when I was stuck on that VPN_nonat thing... one sec... okay just kidding. I am by no means a Cisco guru and probably can't help you! This exact configuration works for me under the versions mentioned above as of today. I did find one document from Cisco on common VPN problems that includes fixes for both traditional IOS devices and PIX/ASA IOS:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6120/products_tech_note09186a00807e0aca.shtml

That covers some solid troubleshooting. My next advice would be to setup logging on your ASA and see what the logs say. I used a simple app to ping for testing from the phone. Finally, some useful stats/troubleshooting commands on your ASA are:

show vpn-sessiondb
show crypto isakmp sa
show crypto ipsec sa

Good luck!