Networking at home

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...

Earlier I had speed problems with my unit and I wanted to make sure if it is only perception or if it is a real speed problem. The concept what I have implemented was, that the unit should make a test every 15 minutes to check the download speed of the cellular connection. Then the result with some other relevant information is added to a file stored on the external USB flash drive. So here is the script: wget -q -O /dev/null http://www.ericssonw25.com/pdf/w25_V1.2_R6A019.zip & wget -q -O /dev/null http://www.ericssonw25.com/pdf/W25_Users_Guide_D.pdf & wget -q -O /dev/null http://www.ericssonw25.com/pdf/W25_Users_Guide_C.pdf & sleep 3; bejovo=`cat /proc/net/dev |grep ppp0 |cut -d":" -f2 |awk '{print$1}'`; sleep 5; bejovo1=`cat /proc/net/dev |grep ppp0|cut -d":" -f2 |awk '{print$1}'`; kill `pidof wget` echo `date '+%Y.%m.%d %H:%M'` `echo $bejovo $bejovo1 |awk '{print (($2-$1))/640}'` kbps `msctl rscp...

By analysing the /bin/swinst script it become clear, that the firmware package is a simple tar file, containing the software components to be upgraded. Usually it contains the following elements: metainfo - detailed information and MD5 summs of the components to be installed preinstall.sh - script to be executed before installing postinstall.sh - script to be executed after installation zImage - linux kernel rootfs.squahfs - root file system wanbl - wan module boatloader wanfw - wan module firmware The swinst script is quite complex, but basicly it download the firmware form the internet to the TMP directory, checks the checksums, checks the SW versions and if the upgrade is needed, the upgrades first the main firmware, then the WAN bootloader and then the WAN firmware. When installing the main firmware it increases the number used by RedBoot boot loader, this way it is garanteed, that on restart the new version will boot. On the other hand, if the installation is interrupted, the old ...

Using the default ip network based time sycronization has two disadvantages: As you can not set time zones your device will run always on GMT In the current SW version the ntp daemon is crasing after some days so you will loose syncronization You can change it to cellular based syncronization with the following commands on the command line interface: # cf set sntp.enabled false # cf set cellular.celltime true # cf commit This will use your local time and will run forever. I have implemeted this 2 days ago, but it turned out that you can use this only if you have good enough coverage, othervise you will not get the time from the cellular network. So I swicthed back to the ip network based syncronization and I will write a script to periodically restart the time syncronization process.