Networking at home

I have not checked it very thorowly, but Ericsson has changed a lot of the programs used in the Ericsson W25 router. I have mentioned before that the wget has dissapeared. The time setting from network is now fixed, it keeds up and running even after connecting and disconnecting to the ionternet. Another change that the DNS and DHCP services were changed to a program called DNS relay, you can find it's decription here. If you want your domain handled with it, simply put the following line in your /etc/dhcpdoptions.conf file: domain=your.domain Other new tool is the xl2tpd (which is not and excel to pdf converter :-) which is the tunneling (e.g. ipsec) handling part. description of a simmilar program can be found here.

I would like to have an always on server for my home network, and altrough I have already two ARM based routers which can be customized, I would like to have an x86 based computer, because it is much easier to install linux programs on it and normally they have faster processors and more memory than the ARM counterparts. I would like to use it for 3 functions: To be the center of the home network with an Apache based WEB interface, whcih can do all network related tasks Install an Asterisk PBX and connect all our phones to it, including mobile phones via Bluetooth Be a storage backup server with two Tbyte or close to Tbyte SATA hard disks Earlier I had a 3G/HSDPA WLAN gateway created from an old laptop, and with the HDD and display switched off, it consumed only 10W, but I was considering to have a modern desktop motherboard with a Intel E2160 or simmilar processor to reach a good power consumption. Before going into this I checked the power consumption of different solutions ...

After long monthes of perfect working, last week my internet connection trough the W25 started to become very unstable, most of the time even not working. Looking at the statistics it turned out that something hapened in the network, which increased the speed of my connection :-), but after approximately one day, the connection became unstable and was more down that working. My first guess was, that my operator has upgraded the serving cell from 3,6 Mbps to 7,2 and the 7D firmware I was using may have a bit buggy radio module. So I started the upgrade. First I have upgraded to 11A, because I have downloaded that already before, and with the bad connection I could not check if there is a better FW available. The upgrade from the WEB UI went pretty smothly, after waiting a lot for checking the radio module FW version, the procedure ended without any problem. I was a bit afraid, that my root password will be changed, but the upgrade behaved correctly and did not change my credien...

In my prevoius blog I wrote about my tests to increase the read/write speed on my Linux home server, now I will collect some links here: A very good comparition of Windows and Linux file system for using as a NAS. Test result for a consumer NAS device. Test results for Linux file systems (ext2, ext3, Reisser, XFS). IOZone test suite. NAS performance measurement comparations. A test measurement of comparing Solaris ZFS, Ext2 and XFS in NAS environment. It is using NFS intead of SAMBA, but the speed results are very convincing with read speeds over 76 Mbyte/sec and write speeds arround 35 Mbyte/sec. I started to do some own test in the server itself, and copying a file from one disk to an other was done with the speed of 23,4 Mbyte/sec, which shows, that it is possible to write to an ext3 filesystem with speeds above 20 Mbyte/sec. I will do some more testing later. I did some testing on my Windows Desktop computer and got a read and write speed of ~90 Mbyte/sec, and thi...

I have recently installed a gigabit card to my home fileserver and was very dissapointed, that the speed of network writes and reads did not increased as I expected. I found some Samba improvement tips, but they increased the speed only by ~10 percent, while I would expect to have network speed on the range of 50 Mbytes/sec. To make an experiment I wanted to use NFS instead of Samba, from one unix test it looked much faster than Samba. There is an official Microsoft client for this, it is named Unix Services for Windows, the actual version is 3.5 and it is quite outdated. Still after installing it and configuring both the server and the Windows XP it worked adn when attempting to read files it was quite stable. But as soon as I tried to copy a 4,3 Gbyte ISO image, my XP crashed completly :-( After a lot of search finally I could identify that you should apply the hotfix: KB904838 and this will solve your problem. Back to the original problem, I have measured the following sp...

Setting up a Windows Mobile device corretly for accessing internet, corporate network, MMS and WAP is not a trivial task and on the top of it it can not be done using only the user interface provided on the device. The easiest way of doing it is to create a special XML file, containg the needed settings, then put it into a cab file, which can be simply installed on the device. In this post there will be a short overview of the handling of the different networks in a WM device, then there will be the explanation of the configuration file created for the Pannon nework in Hungary and then some references will be given to further setting possibilities. As oposed to other mobile phones, where you have to set the gprs connection manually for each application, in windows mobile there is a rather complex system, which tries to figure out automaticaly from the web address used, that which connection to use. Let's see, how this works: First the address is compared to the Mappings an this de...

I have created a list of the available command in the W25. Most commands give you a short help if you invoke them with the -h parameter, but where I have found, I have added a link to the description of the command. Unfortunately this is from an older SW relese R6A019, but still most of the comands are valid: List of Ericsson W25 linux comands Where you see that the size of the file is 515908 these are the BusyBox commands.

After a lot of unsuccessfull experiments, finally I could manage to send out a Wake On LAN magic packet from the W25. The solution is not universal, because I rely on a second router on my home network, to respond to an outgoing TCP packet. The difficulty in WOL for the W25 is that I found only the netcat (nc) program suitable for sending out IP packets from the router and the version of nc implemented in the W25 doesn't support UDP packets. I have manually constructed a magic packet and saved it to a file. The command: nc router2 80 < wakecode.bin sends this packet the the second routers which silenlty ignores it, because this is not a valid HTTP request. But there is still a problem, that in a swicthed LAN this traffic reaches only the second router and not the computer to be waked up. The solution for this is to play with the arp addresses and manually assign the broadcast ethernet addres to the second routers IP address: arp -s 192.168.1.107 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff after waking up...

The firmware of the W25 doesn't support the handling of the SMS, but the bult in 3G modem does. So let's dig a bit into it and use this possibility. (In order to do this you need to have access to the command line of the W25). To control the modem of the W25 there are two commands to use: msctl - this is a high level handling with predefined command mctl - this is a low level command, which you can use to send AT command to the modem Try out: msctl rscp - this will give you the actual strength of your reception msctl issue ATI - this will give you information about the modem included in your device. Now if we would like to know, which AT commands we can use, we have to download the AT command book from the Sierra Wireless site: AT command reference . If this download will not work, just search the Sierre Wireless site for the AT command reference. When looking into this document, you will find a lot of interesting command, but you will soon realize that the command related to S...

After you have implemented the DynDNS for your W25 the next thing would be to have an external WEB server. As the W25 has a built in WEB server, it is only one line to start a web server. The command you should use is httpd . To start an external web server serving pages from the "web" directory of the connected Flash drive, issue the following command: httpd -i ppp0 -h /mnt/C2F8-E4F2/web This will start the web server from on the ppp0 interface, with the home directory being /mnt/C2F8-E4F2/web. The index file should be index.html. For all possible options to httpd issue httpd --help. To see the possibilities in the configuration file, go to the Busybox homepage and look at the examle coinfigutration file provided in the source for httpd.

Half year after the last publicly released SW version from 21st January there is a new SW version available on the official website. According my previous readings the 1.3 SW version solves some security issues, a memory leak in the WLAN driver and some minor issues. When I will get a better internet connection, I will download the new package and update this post with the exact details.

After using the W25 for some time I wanted to add a correct domain handling and certain new names to the DNS services offered by the router. Default behavior of the DNS system: The W25 uses the DNS server called DNRD which is a simple caching, forwarding DNS server, with the additional feature of being able to resolve names from /etc/hosts file. This is used in the original SW to add every local client after requesting an address trough DHCP. The updating of the hosts file is done by the script /bin/updatehostsfile which in is called by the script /etc/udhcpd/udhcpdnotify. The name of the script to be called by the dhcp daemon is specified in /etc/udhcpd.conf. Handling your internal domain with the W25: To handle your internal domain correctly you need to do the following: Add your local domain to the DHCP messages Create an updated "updatehostfile" script to include your domain names and fix addresses to the /etc/hosts file Change the dhcpd configuration to call your update...