Can of worms

With the upcoming changes and as a result of a general decluttering I've decided to sell some of the gadgets and devices I've got about the place, most of them have been stashed in the loft for a while. If boxed, the network cables might have gone missing. If you're interested, drop me an email. Read More

...seriously it will save you lots of time.

Ignore all the guides on the internet that talk about setting /etc/ppp/secure.

Don't worry about googling about "Not transmitting... waiting for CCP", just read /usr/local/share/doc/poptop/README.OpenBSD and it'll get you up and running in no time.

And if you can't get encryption running for OS X add this to ppp.conf: set mppe * stateless

Easy when you read the right doc...

Easy...use firmware 2.19:

Go to http://router/syscmd.asp

and enter in /usr/sbin/telnetd -l /bin/ash

Or if you're like me and want to do it the hard way (well, the first time!)

telnet router 80

And then paste in:

POST /goform/formSysCmd HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46MTIzNA==
Content-Length: 83
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

sysCmd=%2Fusr%2Fsbin%2Ftelnetd+-l+%2Fbin%2Fash&apply=Apply&submit-url=%2Fsyscmd.asp


You can then telnet on the standard port - no password needed.

Have fun.

Quick one. We've all done it, written something (fantastic or not) clicked submit, and get a timeout page and we've lost all of the text we've just written.

Then you start poking around with "Form Values" find it's encrypted and cry.

Well, you can get it back - if you've got developer tools installed and you've not shutdown Safari.
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The past few weeks I've been contemplating changing my venerable SWAMR-54125 router for something with more up-to-date. I've tried out a few and been poking around in the firmware of a few others to see what can be done with them.

My general features really are:

- ADSL2 support
- Support for running public IPs
- 3G Modem automatic failover (And failback)
- Wireless N (so gigabit would be useful)
- Decent firewall rule editing/command line to hack it
- Lower power consumption
- VoIP is a nice to have
- IPv6 tunnelling would also be nice
- VPN in would save me a lot of config

So, nothing particularly special really (apart from the last 3 I guess); it's 2010 and various bits of kit have had these features for a few years - surely there's a nice integrated piece of kit that can do it all.
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More embedded linux devices I'm afraid!

Today I received my O2 joggler - not bad since I ordered on Saturday and there was a bank holiday in between, so thumbs up to O2 and DHL there.

First impressions were good, it's a nice box, though it's been resealed and a new PSU stuffed in it. The device itself feels reassuringly well made, it's quite nice to grasp in one hand and type with the other. The touchscreen is fairly nice to use as well, though I need to find a way to crank up the sensitivity since it misses a few of my prods.

The built in apps are nothing special, though the app store allows you to add some extra ones - the YouTube app is quite nice, and Google Maps would be if it remembered your location the last time you opened it. I'm not really appreciative of it always opening on Westminster.

The one app that is quite neat is "Connect and play", I've got it hooked up to uShare and it seems to play most of the videos that I can chuck at it, hopefully I'll be able to get it streaming TV from the Avantgarde.

As for what I'm going to use it for...no idea yet, I'm thinking TV/media player for the spare room to save me buying another another Reel Netclient or alternatively a Squeezebox controller.

Oh yeah, of course I got telnet, I just about managed to get through the updates before I enabled it!

Extracting a meaningful dmesg from the IC3010 isn't an easy case of just typing dmesg. One of the drivers generates a lot of spam and by the time you can telnet in, the interesting information has gone.

So, after a firmware rebuild the following info was obtained: Read More

The Edimax series of webcams are some of the cheapest IP webcams available, providing a variety of ways to get access to either a still picture or video stream (either mjpeg or via rtsp).

The camera is a pl1029 system and runs embedded linux (2.4.19). Since it's a linux system I'd quite like to get into it and have a poke around. Edimax do supply the source and tools to build a new firmware image, from their product site. Unfortunately, the source posted doesn't correspond to the latest firmware and some of the supplied tools are supplied in binary only format for x86_64 linux. But, lets not allow that to be a hindrance, we can extract what we want from a firmware upgrade file.


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The past few months I've been suffering from an unreliable adsl line, with some prolonged outages. I've got a 3g stick to fall back onto, but that needed to be enabled manually, so I decided to automate the process (hopefully I'll also remember to top-up the 3g stick!) using ifstated. It turned out to be really simple, but there's a lack of simple examples, so I thought it might be worth publishing.

The config is such that ifstated pings my router address every 10 seconds to make sure it's alive. When ADSL is live this is just a single hop to the router. Should it not get an answer in 5 seconds it will fail over to the 3g connection, if it starts getting an answer form the router (this time over the internet) it will fail back to adsl.

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