Bend in the Weather

The IEEE's 802.11n standard is supposed to bring high speed wireless to the masses.
It's been in draft longer than most can remember, and from the schedule it appears that it won't be out of draft release and make it to a final specification until Dec 2009. This is from a working party that was setup in January 2004!

Sure there was a rival groups in the early days, but as of July 2005 these rivals (TGn Sync, WWiSE, and MITMOT) all agreed to merge their proposals into the TGn draft.

Last month we saw Draft 4 of the specification approved, and there is already talk of a Draft 5... how many before we get something into our hands?

Sure, there is a bunch of 'Draft 2.0' 802.11n devices on the market. It's risky business deploying one now. Why?

• Being at 'draft' status each manufacturer has a different interpretation of the standard. This can mean that different manufacturers equipment is unlikely to work well (if at all), in addition different releases from the same manufacturer has no guarantee of interoperbility
• There is no guarantee that these devices (wireless cards, embedded chips and Access Points) will be upgradeable to the final specification.
• Not all the details of the specification have been sorted out (thus the draft). You're likely to run into some 'interesting' issues.

Even before the release, 802.11n will be a failure. Harsh words yes... but let me explain.

Many believe it will be the silver bullet for networking, with the promise of delivering 600Mbps. Many read that as 'data throughput' - that's not the case, it's raw bit-rate.

How many people to you currently speak to that use an 802.11g network whinge that they aren't seeing 54Mbps transfers?

Expect anywhere between 30-70Mbps in real world data-transfer rates.

Many have moved their cordless phones from the overburdened 2.4Ghz spectrum up to the 5Ghz area. (Just look at any new cordless phone -- most are shipping in this space). 802.11n will operate in both the the crowded 2.4Ghz space and the 5Ghz range.

Expect to see the same issues we saw when 2.4Ghz wireless networks first came out with a range of devices interfering with the 802.11n network. (on either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz).

MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) does help somewhat, in extending the quality, range and provides multiple streams.

The draft allows for up to 4 antennas on either end, but you'll be lucky to see one of these. Expect dual antennas to be the norm.

In addition, high-throughput will require high performing CPUs (particularly if you have encryption enabled -- which should be unless you want to be wifi-jacked). Home wireless network routers are notorious for having underpowered CPUs... whilst they will get a little jump in grunt, expect them to falter if attempting several large data transfers at the same time.

It appears 802.11n routers will be a mine-field for some time for consumers, there are loads of options and those cheaper ones are likely to miss the bells and whistles... watch out for the cheapies that can't do both bands. Many are working solely in the 2.4Ghz range. Most of those on the market presently are only Draft-2.0 models, so they are quite a fair way from the 'final spec' (We know of 5 drafts at least prior to the final spec).

Ars Technica has a great review on current 802.11n routers. What they have to say doesn't suprise me. These are speeds all running in 802.11n mode and show the average of UDP/TCP throughput results at multiple locations:

Device	2 feet	25 feet	35 feet
Apple AirPort Extreme @ 2.4Ghz	22.75Mbps	25.15Mbps	17.80Mpbs
Apple AirPort Extreme @ 5.0Ghz	44.30Mbps	34.20Mbps	12.65Mpbs
Netgear RANGEMAX Next Wireless Router	28.48Mbps	24.83Mbps	5.39Mpbs
D-Link XtremeN Wireless N Gigabit Router	56.10Mbps	17.42Mbps	FAIL!
Linksys Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link	44.37Mbps	20.10Mbps	10.70Mbps

For those Aussies wonder what the feet is in metres (well it was a US review).
1 metre ~= 3.28 feet. On the flip side, 1 foot ~= 30.48cms

So these results were measured at: 60.96cms, 7.62 metres, and 10.67 metres. Nothing out of the ordinary and actually relatively close for at least the first two. If you were < 1 metre away, just plug in an Ethernet cable!

One thing 802.11n will deliver is supposedly better range. so those struggling with dropouts on a 802.11g network may like the upgrade... though it will come at a cost. Don't expect the devices to come cheap. A 'decent' 802.11n device currently costs upwards of $200USD.... plus adding in all the cards you'll need, you could be up for some serious dollars.
From all reports if you want the range and speed - get the 5.0Ghz models.. though if it doesn't support 2.4Ghz you won't have backwards compatibility with 802.11g devices.

You will also notice most currently advertise 270Mbps or 110Mbps..... it's no where near real-world results. I would love to see one of these manufacturers demonstrate their delivery of these speeds, to date -- we haven't seen anything near them. Advertising raw bit speed is also misleading and these makers know it... they are aware when people look at speeds they normally are looking at 'real world' speed performances. I expect more outrageous claims to be made and the infamous 600Mbps will soon start to be sprouted. Realistically on a '600Mbps device' -- don't expect anything beyond 80Mbps. See that Ethernet cable isn't looking that old at all.

Me, I'll stick with 802.11g for the time being.. . I only use it currently to get to the Wii and the MythTV box. Occassionally I might use it for our laptops or visitors (if I can't be bothered running an Ethernet cable from the switch).

I'm laying Gigabit Ethernet on Cat6 throughout my new house (48 ports baby! ), and expect that all bar the Wii will be on that.

For streaming High Definition Video, don't expect your sparkling new 802.11n device to handle it, or if it does, don't expect multiple streams.

For a specification that been in the thinking tank now for 4 years, the current speeds are pretty disappointing.

I've owned a Maxtor Shared Storage Plus NAS (MSS+) device for quite a while. It was reasonably cheap when we picked it up and it's well and truly paid for itself saving me on several occasions!

It's basically a 500GB disk inside an enclosure that you network (10/100Mbps), and contains 2 additional USB ports so you either plug additional USB storage or a USB printer into (to make it a networked printer).

In our instance we use it mainly for backing up. For this purpose it serves well.

We ran into a problem today when the device filled.
That was unusual, as we traditionally have loads of space left on it (we only backup our content/configurations), not the OS or applications... and we purge old backups.

A closer inspection showed that the backup software we were running on the Windows machine was actually not removing old archive files. That explained the lack of disk space.

It seemed under certain conditions that the Windows machine was unable to delete the files it created. This now appears more an issue with Windows then the actual backup software. (I could delete the mentioned files using Nautilus fine under Linux, just not through Explorer!)

Whilst the device itself has worked flawlessly (it basically creates SMB based shares), it did become a problem when large amounts of files needed to be deleted (it was dreadfully slow over SMB - as it appeared to require a full stat of the files to be deleted, prior to even commencing the delete ). This could take hours before one file was ever deleted.

It always was frustrating that besides the web-interface to manage the device, that SMB appeared to be the only option available for file management.

Many people have used SLUGs (aka NSLU2 - LinkSys's NAS device). This allowed people to use modified firmware to create a nice embedded Linux device, allowing them to install additional software and expand on the base functionality.

How nice would this be with my MSS+

I thought I would take a peep at the support website, as I realized that this device too is likely to use OSS software such as Samba to create it. Low and behold, the source code was available.

This got my creative juices running! Could I use this to create a modded version myself and add items like NFS, FTP and SSH to the device? Surely someone else has already thought the same thing.

Apparently they have! OpenMSS is just that. Not only does it put down a telnet server by default (so you can login, they have got BusyBox working on it as well.

From my reading it appears NFS is there, just was never enabled on the original firmware image. It also allows you to install additional software, as well as a bunch of software from the ports made available through the work by the guys over as nslu2-linux.org.

It looks like with little work I'll be able to have an FTP, NFS and rsync all as options, as well as SSH to login to the box.
The list of packages available is breath-taking, and I can see a lot of work has gone into the porting.

What's even better, the web-interface and existing data stay intact when migrating over to OpenMSS -- just the ability to get into the heart of the box is opened up.

So I think it's now a case of having a play around and actually getting some 'smarts' into this device. I'm doing away with the Windows backup software and we'll look at running a central backup from the device itself to pull in backups from other hosts using rsync. (much nicer). I see ccollect is one of the packages available, so this may indeed do the trick... just through on vixie cron at the same time and I've got a nice simple and effective solution.

I felt a little cheated initially when I heard of the SLUG (after my MSS+ purchase) now I'm feeling quite happy that I can play in the same league!

It's a job for later in the week/weekend (when time permits), but it appears I may have just solved some of the issues that has been burning me for ages (access to the device and trouble free backups from Windows to it). I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Don't ya just love OSS -- putting the power back in the users hands!

Well it's coming up to the end of financial year, and like many businesses we needed to make a few purchases. (That or pay more corporate tax -- hmmm let me think.. more toys or more tax? )
Generally we don't make many purchases throughout the year and then buy up large near the end of the financial year. (well unless something fails!)

As such we decided to get a decent VOIP phone. We currently use a LinkSys SPA3102 with our cordless phone, but wanted to get a phone with a decent headset so we could talk hands free easily.

We spoke to a few people, did the research and settled on a Snom VOIP phone. In particular, we elected the Snom-300 as the phone of choice for us. Whilst it claims it's the 'base phone', unless you're mega-boss or a telemarketing guru I doubt the snom-320 or snom-360 phones are really required. (They basically have a lot of additional buttons and few features added to the base functionality).

You can configure the phone via the LCD menu system, or use the built in web based configuration. The web-based configuration is very well laid out and easy to navigate and locate what you need.

Upgrading the phones firmware is extremely easy and quite painless. You can watch the progress of the phone being flashed, and it's quite novel to see items like chroot, mount appear on your phones LCD.

Chroot, mount you say?! Yup, at the heart of every Snom is a Linux kernel. Whilst this wasn't the sole reason for buying the device, it's handy to know that with a bit of time I could in theory hack the phone.

I unfortunately get stuck is long boring teleconferences far too often, so I wanted to ensure I also had a phone that was able to plugin in a headset. Not all IP VOIP phones we looked at seemed to have that feature.

The Snom phones do, however they use an RJ-11 headset connection instead of a 2.5mm or 3.5mm jack that people are most familar with. (Many cordless phones also use the 2.5/3.5mm jacks).

As such, we decided to purchase them. They don't come cheap but are worth it. It's a much better solution than getting 'neck cramp' attempting to hold the phone under your chin, or even speaker phone (which seems to pickup more background noise), which can annoy anyone else within earshot.

With the headset, I'm able to easily keep working on my computer; punching away on the keyboard, and those on the other end are none the wiser! (Well besides being too distracted to really keep up with the conversation; dang! I think I just let my secret out....and to think -- people just thought I was vague on the phone!)

Our current setup has me registering both the ATA and the Snoms devices registering directly to our VOIP provider. This works fine, and allows multiple out going calls at the same time, but means only our ATA rings for incoming calls (we have two DIDs).

It makes sense, as the ATA picks up the incoming request and responds... well before the Snoms do. How to resolve?

Easily -- Asterisk to the rescue!

I can setup Asterisk as our local PBX (or PABX for those in Australia!), and have all devices register to it. Then the Asterisk server registers with our Voice Provider.

A bit of Asterisk config and I should be able to get all the phones to ring. In addition, it will allow me to use T.38, add MOH, and voice mail. I also like the ability to have local extensions so we can forward calls between various devices. Currently both Pauline and I share an office, but in our new house we'll be up other ends of the house. So call transfers make sense. I think it would be great to also create an IVR application that puts telemarketers into a loop of endless questions. (randomly generated of course -- so they aren't aware!) Though I think Paul Dwerryhouse's idea is probably the solution.

I'm a newbie to Asterisk (though I've been aware of it for a while -- I just haven't had a need for it)... so I imagine it might take me some time to configure it all up as we desire.

Once done, the only thing Telstra will be getting out of us will be the cheapest line rental we can pay. (They overcharge for that as well!) Though, there is not much getting around it whilst stuck on an ADSL1 connection.

Another purchase we made for the upcoming house was a nice 48-port managed Gigabit switch that contains 12 POE (Power over Ethernet) ports. These will be used to power our phones in the future, saving the need for the current power-pack.

The switch we went for is a D-Link DGS-3100-48P. Like most large switches it's full of fans and sounds like a DC-7 taking off. As a result, it's safely packed back in it's box and will be used after the house move!

We also purchased to UPSes (the old ones had dead batteries) -- strangely it's cheaper buying new UPSes than batteries.
So we ended up with 1 x 1500VA UPS and a 1 x 2200VA UPS.
It appears we'll probably need one more 1500VA.
I went with Powerware UPSes as their is reasonably good local support (and hopefully battery replacements!), and nut seems to work well.

All in all it's been a good month for hardware toys to play with.
Shame a fair bit of this new gear is a few months off until we get into the new house!

Now if only those Intel 8-core Xeons were out.... (my desired replacement server that will consolidate everything down!) If you wish to view a demo of what's coming.. take a look at the Intel demonstration.

High speed Internet is not a luxury in the modern life anymore. It is becoming a mandatory requirement for business, education and the delivery of entertainment/information to households.

Only this week the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced a tender bid process to "enable world-class, high-speed broadband for all Australians". This $4.7 billion dollar deal is expected to deliver FFTN access across the country to some 98% of the population.

The week prior Conroy laid the boots into the ill-fated WiMax based OPEL deal that was setup under the Liberal regime. The dumping of the $958 million wireless deal is likely to see that money moved into the FTTN deal.

I don't disagree with the dumping of the WiMax deal, as questions about it's reported effectiveness have been raised globally.

The $4.7b National Broadband Network tender is expected to deliver minimum download speeds of 12Mbps (no talk of upstream data rates) to 98% of Australian homes and businesses and should be rolled out and made operational progressively over five years using FTTN or FTTP technology.

Is this FTTx deal going to cut it?

We all love taking the piss outta Telstra.

Though they do make the job easy on us...

These two YouTube videos sum it up well.


Video 1: http://www.youtube.com/v/Py6kF7761Eg


Video 2: http://www.youtube.com/v/Vfz7yTqF6aE

Anyone who's played with Linux has come across the mixed bag that is wireless Ethernet cards under Linux.

Wireless chipset makers have been slow on the uptake supporting Linux.  This is through decent hardware specs so coders can put together a decent open-source driver to releasing their own proprietary  object blob that doesn't confirm with the kernel wireless framework; thus ensuing a range of flaming hoops need to be jumped through in order to get it to work.

Add to the pain the much discussed often loved/hated Network Manager to the list, and your sure to create pain for the majority of ordinary 'Ma and Pa Kettle' users.    Linux forums and mailing lists are full of frustrated people attempting to get wireless networking going successfully and stable under Linux, particularly after it was pretty much a no-brainer under Windows. 

I was well aware of the grief many had experienced, and treaded carefully when entering into the mix.   I really wanted to have our MythTV box that connects to our Plasma TV running wirelessly to avoid the pain of running Ether into the lounge.  (The house we are building will have the entire house wired for Gigabyte Ether -- so this won't be a problem moving forward!).

After a few weeks of researching I settled on a D-Link DWL-510.   It was supposed to have reasonable good Linux support. 

This is where the story gets interesting...

The D-Link returns the following useful information from lspci:

05:06.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g
        Subsystem: D-Link System Inc DWL-G510 Rev C
        Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 20
        Memory at d5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

Recent Linux 2.6.x series kernels have been shipping a module called rt61pci.ko   This is apparantly this 'new' module is to support 'newer' chipsets.  (The DWL-510 has been around for several years).

The crazy thing is that the module recognizes the card and auto-loads.   This confuses the hell outta people, as they end up seeing the module load cleanly, but unable to do anything with it.

By default most modern distros ship the driver... so people assume because the driver loaded without error it will work.  Unfortunately this is not the case, and normally send people  down the wrong path of trying to debug/resolve an issue that won't be fixed with that driver.  Do a search on "Linux RT61" on Google and you'll see what I mean!




More on this and how it was resolved another day...

Our Billion 7300G has been on it's last legs for a while.

It slowly been dying a slow and painful death for anyone that came in contact with it. 

Slowly but surely most of it's functionality was dying.

• The wireless AP would drop a wireless client that hadn't sent any data for more than 5 minutes.  The only way to avoid that was to login a remote SSH session and use the keep-alive option.
• Transfers across Wireless that went longer than 10 minutes would hang the modem.  (Not really good when ya trying to do a dist-upgrade!)
• Any form of P2P would lock the thing up after about 20 minutes


• Whenever the unit had it's firmware upgraded (often) you would need to manually reenter all the configuration, you couldn't 'restore' anything without fear of it stuffing up!
• Over the past week it's decided that I need to be restart approximately every 7 hours as it would overheat.  You would need to leave the thing down for about 30 minutes before it became usable again!
  

The total lockup every 7 hours was the final straw...

I should have realized something was up by the comments on the Billion Support website, and the amount of firmware upgrades the thing required.  (1.35 and at RC48 and counting!)
Many people complained about the wireless issues, but they were told by support, 'do this, do that', yet nothing really resulting in fixing it.

Lock-ups were also common, and it was known to have problems with many VOIP providers as well as fail miserably at P2P.

Really, in the end there wasn't much good you could say of the modem.

---

I had a whinge to David Gillies, who mentioned he's been extremely happy with his NetGear DG834G.

Recently we purchased a notebook.

Yesterday Pauline and I picked up a Wireless Access Point so we can use the laptop around the house without the need for an ethernet cable.

We've purchased a D-Link DI-524 Wireless Access Point, which is capable of 802.11b and 802.11g.

I'm sitting here typing away on the notebook whilst watching the cricket and being connected to our LAN at a very nice 54MB/sec!

It certainly makes programming and working on the Internet much more pleasant.

It's going to be a rough few months ahead of us all with ADSL. Many will find that they will have disconnections for a period of time over the next few months.

The reason is Telstra is upgrading all their current ADSL1 hardware (DSLAMs) up to ADSL2+.

This is actually a GoodThing^(tm). ADSL1 is capable of speeds of up to 8Mbit down and 1Mbit upload (though Telstra restricted it to 1.5Mbit down and 256Mbit upload). ADSL2+ provides speeds up to 24Mbit down and 1Mbit upload; resulting in faster speeds for us all.

In order to do these upgrades Telstra has to go to every exchange and physically upgrade the software and sometimes the hardware on the DSLAM. This means a disconnection from the network. You can check if you have an upcoming (or current) outage by visiting this web page.

Normally, your ADSL connection will bounce back after the upgrade. However some ports (where you physically connect to the exchange) may not come back cleanly. If this is the case your ADSL connection won't be established and is in a state of 'limbo'. You may even find that whilst your ADSL and PPP lights on your ADSL router are solid, that you cannot get any connectivity to the Internet.

You can do two things:

1. Ring your ISP and request a 'line reset' be undertaken by Telstra... this can take some time to be actioned.
   
2. You can manually reset the line yourself.

How do you reset your line yourself?

It's quite easy. The ADSL exchanges run an automated robot that will check every line each hour. If there is no connection on the line the port is reset. You can force the robot to detect you have a problem and it will do the line reset for you.

To do this... it's quite simple.

1. Turn off your ADSL router.
2. Unplug the modem physically from the phone line. (Take the plug out).
3. Leave it disconnected for at least 1 hour. (You may also wish to leave it disconnected overnight if it's late in the evening... it will be ready to roll the next day!)
   
4. After an hour, plug the phone line back in to the ADSL modem.
   
5. Turn the modem back on.
   
6. Wait 2 minutes for it to establish the connection.
   
7. Now see if you can web-surf.
   
8. If this still fails, do ring your ISP and request your line is checked and possible manually reset. There may actually be other issues.

It's important to note that this obviously won't work whilst they are upgrading the exchange! You'll need to wait until that is finished. Telstra try to do the upgrades from 11pm - 6am weekdays to minimise the impact to most people.

It's likely that this will continue over the next few months until all the exchanges are upgraded.

Hopefully this helps you all get back and running!