A call for cheaper public wifi

We're staying at a nice hotel for xmas. The kids and I can't live without our internet fix for even 24 hours - is that addiction?

The internet is available here (Sydney) but only via an ethernet socket and it's AU$30 per day!

While I'm away, it's the Asus EEE PC for me, while my daughter in the next room has a PowerPC iBook running Tiger.

Obvious solution: plug the iBook into the wall ethernet, system preferences, sharing, internet tab, share internet connection over Airport - works really well. (Don't forget to adjust power management to avoid sleeping while plugged in).

While I'm on this topic, why don't cafes have free wifi? I've seen it in one cafe using an Unwired connection. This is presumably a very easy to deploy solution, an unwired (pre-WiMax I think) modem and a wireless router to share it in the cafe. Surely whatever the cost of this to the business would be outweighed by the extra sales to people staying longer to use the internet.

Finally, if we must use a commercial Wifi connection, provided by the same people that provide our home connections (Optus, Telstra) then why can't we log in with the account we already have at home?

Anyway, enough moaning from me, merry Xmas.

OpenWRT router fun

Recently we've been debugging some network issues with clients that connect through broadband routers to remote servers. The best way to solve this type of thing is to capture the traffic right on the broadband interface with tcpdump -w filename.cap (plus some suitable filters) and then decode the capture with the fabulous WireShark.

The only "hard" router I've used that can do these network captures is the Netgear FVS338, it's a great feature. I wanted this at home, where I normally run an Apple Airport so I decided to fork out $95 and get a Linksys WRT54GL so I could flash the firmware with OpenWRT.

Flashing firmware was very smooth. What you get is a very basic web interface for configuration, enough to get up, and the ability to ssh in and do very powerful stuff with iptables.

The things I needed were:

# forward port 999 to 22 on the home linux box at 172.16.1.100
iptables -t nat -A prerouting_wan -p tcp --dport 999 -j DNAT --to 172.16.1.100:22
iptables        -A forwarding_wan -p tcp --dport 22 -d 172.16.1.100 -j ACCEPT

Also, to allow for PPTP passthrough I had to:

# ipkg install kmod-ipt-nat-extra

and reboot. See here.

The hardware and software seems totally reliable so far. I hope there is more in the web interface in future. For me, what is great is that I can get a command line for pings, traceroutes and tcpdumps (there is 7Mb available in /tmp for saving the captures).

For $95 you get a very powerful router, similar to devices costing an order of magnitude more. Recommended for network geeks.

To infinity... and beyond, internet plans

Our house has four active internet users. Wifi everywhere, desktops, laptops, Wii, DSlite, etc. We're already on the "unlimited" plan but for the second time in recent months, this turned out to not be enough.

Silly me, I thought that "unlimited" was as high as you can go, but no, it turns out we can upgrade to "unlimited pro"!

You've got to agree that this sort of naming is dishonest, or at least short sited.

Secondly, when you look around and see other countries getting 100Mbs (symetrical) fibre connections for $50, while we in Australia pay $95 for 1.5Mbs/.235Mbs, you've got to wonder if we're paying too much.

Bonjour (zeroconf) fun at an airport hotspot

I attended a great session on Bonjour at the WWDC presented by my hero Stuart Cheshire. The dream of zeroconf is that you can simply plug a device in to your laptop, with no other network infrastructure (such as DHCP servers, or DNS), and simply browse for it and start using it.

Stuart demonstrated a shared disk product from LaCie that did just that. Plugged it in and it came up as a file share, a web page for admin, and even a streaming music server in iTunes. Great stuff.

Another great technology is wide area zeroconf where you can grab a Bonjour control panel and add extra, non local, domains to it that will be searched as well. This multicast DNS stuff works on a local subnet, but I was wondering if it would also work within a hotspot at an airport... it does, I'm on a T-Mobile hotspot at Seattle airport and above is the visible shares I can see via the bonjour browser in Interarchy.

Clearly there's a potential security problem here and Mac users should be aware that their name and machine is visible. I had a look at the web pages that showed up and they were just the Apache welcome page in both cases.