With every UMTS/3G card comes a tool that tracks your connection information, your traffic and everything… and it looks like this for a Vodafone UMTS card:

That’s not even close to cute and well useable. So someone took the task and created this:

A small tool that is compatible with almost any available UMTS/3G hardware on earth and has these features:

tiny executable: 0.3 MB, very little CPU load

• permanently displaying:
• up- and download speed in kBytes/s, used data volume in kByte (with round option), used online time (with round option), mode of operation UMTS(3G)/GPRS, signal strength in percent and dBm, network name and cell id (if provided by pc card), homezone status
• movable mini window with information display:
• sitting on the task bar, at upper screen border, in front of the start button, as dynamic tray icon with gauges
• warning when exceeding data volume or online time
• optional beep output for signal strength,network change and cell change
• manual or automatic selection of network and mode
• optional warning when using not listet networks
• determination of receivable networks
• retrieve and charge prepaid credit
• automatics:
• start/terminate connections,start extern programs such as Browser or Ping, reconnect after errors/freezes, generate network entry, dynamic com port determination
• adjustable connection error tolerance
• connection test by “smart Ping”
• SMS reception can be activated
• PC remote-control by SMS
• SMS transmission by batch job
• logging of data volume and connection information
• connection statistics as semigraphics
• timer for program end or shutdown
• deactivate graphics compression (some networks)
• scriptable
• service terminal for data card commands
• shows data card netlocks
• service log for data card control communication
• for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/embedded

And the best of all is that this is a freeware tool. Unfortunately it’s not available for OSX.

Source: http://www.mwconn.com

So the Telekom finally managed to bring DSL to my home region. Immediately new stuff was bought to establish a WLAN-network inside the house. When I went home of course I wanted to add my laptop ( a Medion MD 41100, 4 years old) to the net to gain access. But after never having used the WLAN-functions before (yes, there are such people…) no one could know that this would end up in such tremendous trial and error.

The router was a Speedport W 900V and working. It took me about an hour to find the add-new-user-option in the router-menu. After filling in the MAC of my Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 card and creating a new WLAN-connection I was ready to go but nothing happened (yet).

Speedport W 900V

From now I tried several ways to get it done:

1. Get your drivers updated

This was strongly recommended because my card didn’t know the WPA-coding yet, only the older WEP-standard. OK, done. Now I was able to type in some data required by the router. But still no connection.

2. Get your Windows updated

Somewhere I read that there is a support-patch for WPA by Microsoft. Downloaded and installed. Still no access.

3. Use the cards firmware

Intel programmed a software called Intel PROSet for doing some adjustments if needed and adding a new connection which I did. But again without any success.

Here an important thought crossed my mind: Maybe the card is deactivated (The problem had to be clearly somewhere in my laptop because I was using another one for researching in the Internet, so there was a WLAN available and it was working.).

Some clues:

PROSet-configuration (hardware deactivated)

Tray-icon (no network, no connection, transmitter OFF)

Good! So I narrowed down the problem. But how to activate the transmitter?

4. Try the Windows-network-configuration

Many options but nowhere the one I was looking for.

5. Try the firmware

Look above to the PROSet-configuration image: The option to activate the transmitter is simply disabled. Hmm…

6. Try the tray-icon

No, not here.

7. Check your BIOS

Yes, there is a WLAN-entry. But my Phoenix-BIOS has only two modes: card always deactivated on every start or card activated only if activated prior to the system shut-down. So no solution here.

8. Remove the card from your profile

Done and the same as before.

9. Deep-looking in windows

As you know there is a life under the desktop. Typing in %systemroot%\system32\services.msc brought up a nice menu about the systems local services. Here you look for network-connections as follows:

The way to start already has been “automatic”. OK.

10. Look for a hardware-button

Some of you might mention here that this could have happened much earlier: simply looking for an activation-button. And you are right, this button exists. However, pressing it changed nothing.

The solution:

The hardware-button proved to be a good hint. Next I checked the program for controlling the programmable buttons (EzSystem).

Hey, there is an option for WLAN. Activated and one system restart later it was like it was before: the card still deactivated. Then I checked out the directory of this EzSystem-Software.

wbutton.exe –> nothing happened

wirelesscontrol.exe –> peng! WLAN activated and access to the Internet.

Finally it worked. Let’s review it: Obviously you cannot activate WLAN neither through Windows nor the cards firmware; you need a third party’s software. This is (in my opinion) a very weird way.

So I guess that simply some links between components got lost and you have to re-engineer that. A hard task, especially if you have formatted the harddisc right after the purchase, do not knowing anything anymore about the original state and with the support disc hundreds of kilometers away.

Jens Heymann

When I first saw a review of “Microsoft Windows Home Server” I was impressed by several features. One that I never thought about is that little icon on each Home Server client that shows you the overall status of your home network:

This little icon can look like this, depending on the status:

As you can see – it’ll give you a clean and fast status by telling you that everything is okay on your network or that anything needs your, maybe immediate, attention.

I am administrating round about 12 Windows servers and I always looked for a clean and easy to use tool to monitor them. So I came up with a plan: Build my own tool.

Since I am extensivly using Windows Communication Foundation in the last weeks I was intrigued to try it on that matter. So I built a WCF selfhosting service that makes the eventlog of the machine it is running on available. Then I built a small client that fits nicely in your tray. I am not quite done yet but it’s a good start.

As you can see. There is the Host, running on the server and making all Eventlogs of this machine available. Then there is “SmallClient” – being exactly this: a small client for testing purposes only. And thirdly there’s the EventLogClient – giving you the full blown user interface…

This is how it looks when you add a server to the client:

And this is how it looks when you configure a filter:

I thought it would be nice to have this workflow:

1. configure/add the server and select the eventlog that you want to monitor
2. create and configure a filter that is matched upon the particular eventlog source

For the icons (see above) I used one of the icons from the Tango Icon Gallery as a starting point and added some color and stuff.

So why do I even talk about all this? I want YOU to take the code and use it…add more functionality…I am releasing the code(except the icons) under the BSD license. So you can do almost whatever you want with it – but I would love to hear about the things you’re doing with my code and idea.

You can download the sourcecode of my little project here. (200 Kbytes)

Source 1: Home Server Homepage
Source 2: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery
Source 3: Sourcecode.

I just started the formating of a 3 Tbyte truecrypt volume which is located on a Promise Vtrak m500i connected via 1 Gbit/s iSCSI…

This is some serious big truecrypt volume, isn’t it? (at least today it is…)

FeM is in need of a decent conferencing system for years now. And it seems that there’s something really cool showing up in the next days. As of now Microsoft is going to put it’s Roundtable on sale.

“Microsoft RoundTable is a very cool videoconferencing system featuring 360° panoramic views powered by its 5 built-in cameras.”

“The RoundTable actually installs two USB camera devices. The first is the Active Speaker which uses the RoundTable’s 6 microphones to locate where in the room the active speaker is and then focus one of the 5 cameras onto that person. I suspect it may actually use 2 cameras to focus on a person, since it always appears that the speaker is “centered” which probably would require at least 2 camera images and then the images are “spliced” together, processed, and then transmitted over the USB cable. The second USB camera device is the panoramic camera which combines the 5 camera images into a single panoramic image.”

Source: Roundtable Review

… you’ll probably can solve this problem by activating your integrated Firewall.

It seems that Vista just like Windows XP SP2 enforces the same stupid so called “worm restricting measure”. To make it short: If you disabled the integrated Windows Vista Firewall you’ll have a connection limit. And you probably will run into this limit resulting in strange network behaviours, dropping VPN connections and so on.

Beside activating the integrated Windows Firewall you can disable the TCP/IP “Autotuning” feature:

Click on the Start menu and type cmd in the search box. Type CTR+SHIFT+ENTER to tell the command prompt to open with elevated privileges.
In the command prompt window, type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable and hit Enter
After getting the OK returned in the command prompt window, restart to activate the change.

Way to go when it comes to networking :-/

Namenlos wrote about how almost everything is held together at this years ISWI technically. Well he even draw something neat to look at and say “Look, that we did!”

“Die Audiostrecke wird mittels 6 Behringer Ultragain Pro-8 Digital ADA8000 aufgebaut. Diese Geräte nehmen 8 Kanäle Audio via XLR entgegen und setzen die auf eine ADAT-Verbindung über ein TOS-Link-Kabel um. Da die TOS-Links nur 10m weit gehen hängt an jedem Behringer ein ADAT-Extender, der das ganze gleich auf Glasfaser umsetzt. So kommt der Ton vom Studio zur Regie und zurück. Zusätzlich liegen noch 5 Strecken Video (so ein Fernsehsender ganz ohne Bild is ja auch nix.). Zum Abschluss verteilt in der Fischerhütte nochmal ein HP Procurve 2524 ein bischen Netz an die Surfterminals und die Leute vom ebenfalls dort beheimateten L.i.g.h.t. Projekt.”

And then deka came and created another drawing of the Live Streaming infrastructure:

Source: http://blog.slash-me.net/archives/225-ISWISION-2007-hat-begonnen.html

When you’re using Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit Edition with SP2/IE7 you will most likely not be able to access the advanced settings of an Intel Network Interface card (Teaming, VLAN settings). Instead you get the simple dialog:

Damn it. I don’t have a solution for this right now and it does corrupt my plan using one of the servers for VLAN games….

Anyone reading this got a solution how to get the VLAN settings tabs back?

The internet comes up with new ideas of information transformation and management every day. Yahoo now came up with a great idea of how the users could almost freely transform syndicateable data to anything they like.

Yahoo says this about it’s new baby:

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”

If you ever wanted to connect NY Times articles to Flickr, you can do this and many other things now. You even get a decent editor:

(yes, that’s in a webbrowser…)

Go and give it a try.

Source: http://pipes.yahoo.com/

“It monitors port 25 and emulates an Smtp server dropping the files in a directory which you can read using Windows Mail (Outlook Express).”

Source: get it here.

Source: http://www.xkcd.com/c195.html

It’s been some days when I wrote about my wish and need for low latency network audio solutions. And now it seems that there is something to help the situation: JACK.

“Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? If so, JACK may be what you’ve been looking for.

JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple’s OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a “plugin”).”

This alone isn’t what I was searching for…but there is NetJack – the network extension for JACK.

“Netjack is a Realtime Audio Transport over a generic IP Network. It is fully integrated into JACK.”

Source 1: another nerd wish- low latency network audio
Source 2: http://jackaudio.org
Source 3: http://jackosx.com
Source 4: http://netjack.sf.net
Source 5: http://www.grame.fr/~letz/jackdmp.html

“Most broadband routers use Network Address Translation (NAT). Windows Internet Connection Sharing also uses NAT.

For most devices that use NAT, port forwarding is not required to connect to Xbox Live. This is especially true if you use an Xbox Live certified device. Port forwarding should only be needed if you use a proxy server or a true firewall device instead of, or in addition to a NAT. Sometimes, you may have to configure port settings on a non Xbox Live certified router or gateway.
If there is a firewall device between the Xbox console and the network device, you may have to configure the firewall to enable communication on specific network ports. If the NAT status in the Network Status area of the Dashboard is “moderate” or “strict,” you may have to configure port settings.”

The following ports must be available for Xbox Live to operate correctly:

• UDP 88
• UDP 3074
• TCP 3074

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908874/en-us

…build yourself a “just-like-the-original” power consuming flight simulator. I am not sure what would be more expensive. This setup or the ultra-light aircraft which is currently simulated…

Follow the link and see other home-cockpit-setups.

Source: http://www.shorttext.com/z0gv5

Thinstuff released it’s RDP Server version 1.0 recently. Some of the features:

• RDP server for Linux
• RLE compression
• RDP protocol compression
• Data encryption
• Client selected resolutions and bits per pixel
• Fullscreen mode
• RDP Bitmap Cache
• RDP Orders
• Compatible Clients: RDP 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, Windows CE, rdesktop
• Optimized for many kinds of X11 applications for optimal performance
• Change resolution while clients are connected
• Very low bandwidth consumption
• Shadowing support to view a session multiple times
• Terminal Server
• Database or passwd/shadow user management
• Passwd/shadow or PAM authentication
• Management through Java Client
• Authentication by specifying username and password in the RDP client or at a login window within the RDP session

Obviously the RDP server is a X Server on the linux side with a RDP interface to the rest of the world…very cool indeed. As soon as I have some time I’ll give it a try…

Source: http://www.thinstuff.com/company/news/

Yesterday I had an idea how I could fix the last remaining problem in my udp multicast to tcp unicast proxy server (YAPS).

The last time I had to report this:

“There are some glitches I am afraid to say: one known bug is that there are 12 bytes to much in the outgoing data stream which corrupts the picture. If anyone here can fix it: Do it please I tried one day and I could not find a solution for the problem.”

My idea was now, that those glitches are possibly there because some bytes of the header remain in each packet and therefore the movie stream itself is destroyed. MPlayer was able to display something, but as I said…glitches.

So I made a method that actually calculates the size of the header of each RTP packet and then removes this header:

   1:  public byte[] killRTPheader(byte[] b,ref int inlength)

   2:  {

   3:  byte[] outbytes = new byte[1600];

   4:  int headersize = 12+4*((b[0] >> 0) & 0x0f);

   5:    Array.ConstrainedCopy(b, headersize, outbytes, 0, inlength - headersize);

   6:    inlength = inlength - headersize;

   7:  return outbytes;

   8:  }

The results speak for themselves: A perfect sound and picture.

Beside that I added some additional features. Read the source and you’ll find out.

You can grab the source and binaries here: YAPS.zip (24,74 KB)

Hmm…did you ever wonder why your network access is so slow? Have you ever experienced some kind of “network-hickup”? Did your pc ever smell strange? Well you would like to check the cableing:

His Excuse was: “It was dark when I did this!”

And now I can present my new neighbour: Kathrein 742215 UMTS Antenna! With 300 W it

Due to network maintenance work schrankmonster/technology-ninja will most likely not be available from 2030 till 2230 CEST (UTC+2).

Go and make some babies instead! Thank you.

So our test-drive 6509 is setup-and-going in the local junk server room. As you can see the room is obviously used for two different purposes. On the one hand it’s a windowless central network service point…and on the other it’s… oh dear…take a look for yourself:

When you come closer…you see…:

TWO 6509!!!!..
an old one(in the rack) and the new one (on the ground)

And to raise some pulses -a module listing:

c6509-ng#sh module

Mod Ports Card Type                              Model              Serial No.

— —– ————————————– —————— ———–

  3   48  CEF720 48 port 10/100/1000mb Ethernet  WS-X6748-GE-TX     xxxxxxxxxxx

  4   24  CEF720 24 port 1000mb SFP              WS-X6724-SFP       xxxxxxxxxxx

  5    2  Supervisor Engine 720 (Active)         WS-SUP720-3B       xxxxxxxxxxx

  7    6  Firewall Module                        WS-SVC-FWM-1       xxxxxxxxxxx

Mod MAC addresses                       Hw    Fw           Sw           Status

— ———————————- —— ———— ———— ——-

  3  0000.0000.0000 to 0000.0000.0000   1.0   12.2(14r)S5  12.2(18)SXD7 Ok

  4  0000.0000.0000 to 0000.0000.0000   2.3   12.2(14r)S5  12.2(18)SXD7 Ok

  5  0000.0000.0000 to 0000.0000.0000   4.4   8.1(3)       12.2(18)SXD7 Ok

  7  0000.0000.0000 to 0000.0000.0000   3.0   7.2(1)       2.3(4)       Ok
Mod Sub-Module                  Model              Serial        Hw     Status

— ————————— —————— ———— ——- ——-

  3 Centralized Forwarding Card WS-F6700-CFC       xxxxxxxxxxx   2.0    Ok

  4 Centralized Forwarding Card WS-F6700-CFC       xxxxxxxxxxx   2.0    Ok

  5 Policy Feature Card 3       WS-F6K-PFC3B       xxxxxxxxxxx   2.1    Ok

  5 MSFC3 Daughterboard         WS-SUP720          xxxxxxxxxxx   2.3    Ok

Oh…something that raised our pulses… a 6513 in one of the other Network Service Points…yummi:

At the moment the ahzf and cosrahn are playing with the machine…so more stuff is definitly to come soon.

As of today the 6bone IPv6 testbed is phased out…

The 6bone was established in 1996 by the IETF as an IPv6 Testbed network to enable various IPv6 testing as well as to assist in the transitioning of IPv6 into the Internet. It operates under the IPv6 address allocation 3FFE::/16 from RFC 2471. As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone. This document establishes a plan for a multi-year phaseout of the 6bone and its address allocation on the assumption that the IETF is the appropriate place to determine this.”

Source: http://www.6bone.net/

Putty is a free SSH client for Windows. And here’s a link to a How-To that shows you how to set up a tunnel as a system service:

“First of all, before I wanted to browse the web, I’d have to start the putty client and log into my ssh shell. I had to always keep the putty client open, so it would always be minimized to the taskbar, taking up precious space and often getting closed my mistake. Also, if I lost internet connection my ssh session would be aborted and I’d once again have to log in. There must be a better way. By running the ssh tunnel from a Windows Service it is now always running silently in the background. If my network connection is disturbed, it automatically reestablishes my ssh session.”

Read more here.

Source: Putty SSH Tunnel

Of course every single one of you knows how to do this: connect to a 802.1x network with Windows Vista (beta 2 in this case). But I just want to give you a short slideshow of how it’s done:

Today the 6509 + the Firewall Service Module arrived at our office. Quite a heavy machine but we’re really excited to play with it

in all it’s beauty…

more pictures and infos to come…

German CISCO Expo 2006 is finally over and from our point of view it was truly a great success.
There were very interessting sometimes cool presentations and demos, a lot of food & snacks and
very colorful light at the party. Over all it was a much better event than all those cisco
CeBit exhibitions I’ve been to before… the new (cisco) economy seem to be back on stage

Keynotes

CISCO’s new vision for next generation networking got a new name: “Intelligent Information Network”!
Now all the routers and switches should become more intelligent, be aware of the users actual location
and connection type (ethernet, wlan, UMTS, …) and voice, data, video are integrated services of
IIN. Doesn’t sound this familiar? Yes! In the days of web 2.0 I think German Telekom would call
this reinvention of the wheel just ISDN 2.0… let’s hope that it will work better this time

BTW: During the T-Systems keynote they showed us a _real hacker_ *huu-hoo* and demonstrated
the unbelievable security risks of unencrypted VoIP by using ARP Spoofing *hu-hoho*. So don’t
ask T-Systems if you have a _real_ security problem.

eLearning

There were several talks about eLearning, eEducation, about the CISCO networking academy, and
the Scottish Schools Digital Network. If we belive in the given facts and figures people with
deep knowledge in networking will have a great time to earn a lot of money during the next years.
But from our point of view there is still no real funding of university research (URP is not that
great). The NetAcad program might be good for people willing to learn how to configure cisco
switches, but not when you are more interessted in building next generation routers, switches, and
networking concepts. So for us this program is more or less just marketing…

Technology power sessions

WLAN is still a lot of fun… Much more interessing was the talk about the modular IOS, EEM, and
Gold. CISCO is rewritting their os from ground and the new one will have some really nice features…
For example a real filesystem with virtual files like /sys (*hu-hoo* think about this twice ,
embedded event management, processes for more or less every protocol in use and best: an TCL
scripting environment! If you send enough emails to the dev team embedded perl could also
become available. You can win a box of sparkling wine when you implement tetris within TCL *g*

RFID sponsored by German Telekom… great… :/

Burn venture capital, burn!

The party was really a great! Thanks to the orga team… but I still don’t like this “booooming”…

Source: http://www.ahzf.de