Saturday, September 01, 2012

That fucking last line.
That line that causes my wireless bridge to fail. Of course, that's probably because of the flaky firmware. The new WDR4300 is really giving my a headache. Even after the latest update if I stress the link too much for a long period of time, it will fuck up somehow.

So far it seems like my uTorrent is the one sending out way too much traffic. After limiting the halfopen TCP connections the link hasn't dropped since 2 hours ago.

I've Google-ed quite a bit and there seems to be a lot of people having the same issue. There doesn't seem to be a solution except for rebooting, and updating to a firmware that works well for them. So I'm just waiting patiently for the magic software that solves all my problems. I wanted to write a script that automatically reboots when it detects that stupid line. Of course, I'm no where smart enough to do that.

Oh, I'm trying to download One Piece. The encoder managed to compress all the files into 40~60mb. Sure, it's just web quality but since the alternative is to watch online, I guess this is alright. Thanks to that awesome compression, the total size is only 27.8GB. (on going)

Alright, and since I'm starting to do so much network-ish  stuff, I decided to monitor my bandwidth usage for my laptop. Not just the internet but the total up and down, including the local network. (mostly from my NAS)


6 days and 65GB has entered or leaved my computer. That's 65 billion 1s and 0s. Oh, and the 1GB is from 12am. It has been 18mins since. Thanks to the torrent of course.

Now, all I have to figure out is,
Why am I unable to access the router when I use a LAN pass-through to make it function like an AP? I have already point the DHCP server to the right place and all the settings are right, I am able to access the internet and such but not the device itself. It is extremely puzzling as I had the same problem with implementing WDS the other time. Hopefully I am able to figure it out sooner rather than later. Argh, here's the frustrated Lord signing off.

Labels: annoyed, geek, life, openwrt, random, rant, router

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

I'm running a really complicated network in my house. 

Surprisingly, the reason is not "Because I can" this time round. It's more of, I screwed up and it just ended up like this. Since everything is working fine, I didn't bother optimizing it due to the lack of time. (thanks exams!)

Since words are really not helpful in this situation, I shall make a simple diagram to illustrate my network. (I feel paranoid and insecure doing this, I pray the hackers stay away from me)


R1 ~ R3 refers to routers. (yes I am using 3)
SSID refers to the name of the wireless network
The grey dotted line is a wireless bridge between 2 routers
My NAS is connected to R3

What I ended up doing is actually quite interesting. It is stupid, but it's amusingly secure somehow. Now, all 3 of my routers are on separate networks. How the fuck? Because I treat each link from the router as a WAN connection. That means that each router thinks that it is directly connected to the internet. Which, is only true for R1.

What do I end up with? R1 is unable to access R2 or R3. R2 is able to access R1 but not R3. R3 is able to access both R2 and R1. Interesting right? Well, I am on R3. I could give my friends access to R2 or R1, using it as guests networks and it will be totally separated from me.

This also means that technically, I am behind 3 physical firewalls. Because I am actually triple NAT-ing my network. It might seem really stupid to the real geeks out there but well, I really don't know if this is ingenius or full retard.

To make this work, your normal home routers with their default software probably couldn't make such an interesting configuration work.

Introducing, OpenWrt.

What is OpenWrt?
OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.
Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.

It's relatively easy to flash a the Linux firmware onto your router. The hard part comes when you have to telnet/ssh into it and do a bunch of command line stuffs to get your web interface working. (I'm too noob to work solely in CLI) Of course, this is relatively advanced stuffs. Even I don't know half the settings that exists on the software. So if you want to mess around with your own hardware, do it at your own risk. As usual read the fucking manual and make sure you have a plan B in case something fucks up.

Many of the supported routers are not exactly stable per say, so please read carefully. I recently bought a TP-LINK WDR4300 and I think I haven't wrote about it yet. But it was relatively buggy with the first few OpenWrt firmwares and I had to power cycle it often. However, after switching to OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment r33276 / LuCI Trunk (trunk+svn9138) today, the connection is more stable and I didn't have to mess around with it anymore. My other TP-LINK 2543ND has been up and running for 5.5days without any hiccups at all.

Alright, how is the performance? I just took a test from www.speedtest.net
(R2 has been running for 13hours)


My connection is 100mbps. Using the direct wireless I could achieve roughly 60+mbps (due to overhead and whatnot). So my connection at R3 is about 60~70% of my maximum wireless throughput. Which is not bad, considering my location and overhead wireless has. Though technically this is only 36% of my total available bandwidth. However, since my wireless bridge link is my limiting speed, I could achieve average 3MB/s downloads, and bursts of up to 4.5MB/s.

I also ran a pinging test from R3 to R1 for about a minute or so, the average latency is about 7ms, with a minimum of 2ms and maximum of 28ms. Which is good enough for gaming.

Well, it's good enough for now. I will still continue to work on this little project and improve my networking skills over the holidays. There's still Dynamic DNS and VPN to set up. This is going to be one hell of a fun thing to experiment on.

Labels: fun, geek, life, openwrt, project, router

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Sunday, January 08, 2012

TP-LINK WR2543ND

 First off, I finally got a better router.


Yeah I know there's nothing to write home about a TP-LINK router. I originally wanted to get a Cisco Linksys E4200, which costs $260. But I wanted the version 2 of it, which doesn't seem to be in stock. Considering that this costs less than half the price, I guess I could live without the extra speed and features.

That said, this is a pretty solid performing router. I shan't bore you with the nitty gritty details. But here's the main parts.

Up to 450Mbps theoretical
Dual band 2.4/5GHz

Blah  blah blah, the rest are too geeky. So now I have this pretty powerful in my room, linked with my older router (also TP-LINK) in the hall as an extender. So now I have excellent coverage in the entire house.

Also thanks to the course I'm studying I guess I managed to set up everything pretty painlessly. If I pick my laptop up from my room and walk to the kitchen, it'll switch seamlessly between the 2 routers and KABOOM! You maintain a >100mbps connection. (provided you're using wireless N)

The next thing I got today was this, 
Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000


Now why did I get a mouse? Because mine died (Microsoft Wireless Mouse 4000)

The main reason I chose it isn't because that it's nice looking or if it has some technology that makes me want it. The reason why I chose it, is because it's huge. It's like a desktop class mouse so it's huge and it fits my hands perfectly.

That said the USB dongle is pretty huge but I guess I can live with that.

Thing is, I'm sick of holding a small mouse in my hands. It's annoying to not be able to rest your entire palm on it. (and yes I have relatively large hands)

In short I boosted my entire home network speed/security and that makes me very very satisfied. 
Till next time my minions!

Labels: geek, happy, life, lordofgeeks, microsoft wireless mouse 5000, residential gateway, router, tp link, wr2043nd, wr841nd

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