Desra Blog

I recently drove from Wexford to Dublin. I decided to scan for wireless networks on the way. Some interesting stats I found 192 Access Points; Security types were; [Open] 38 [IBSS] 2 [WEP] 89 [WEP][IBSS] 1 [WPA-PSK-TKIP] 8 [WPA-PSK-TKIP][WPA2-PSK-CCMP] 51 [WPA-PSK-TKIP][WPA2-PSK-CCMP-preauth] 1 [WPA-PSK-TKIP+CCMP][WPA2-PSK-TKIP+CCMP] 2 Of the 192 AP's, 128 were Eircom mac Addresses Of this 128 , 15 had their SSID's non default (13 were netopia mac 00:0f:cc) Of the remaining 113, 62 were wep, 7 open and 44 WPA/WPA2 Of this 113, 67 were netopia macs 00:0f:cc, the ones with extra easy to crack wep. Of this 67, 5 were open and 1 was WPA/WPA2 and 61 were still WEP. What this tells you is that nearly every one with a netopia that had bad wep, have not changed their setup. Eircom need to fix this.

Well putting a 3g modem into my wgt634u , with open wrt, connecting by ethernet a WRTP54G , then linking it to home via openvpn, to my SPA3102, works. Now I can place a call from a remote location, via voip/3g out my home phone line, which has unlimited local/national calls :-) Not to get T.38 working, so that from a remote location my sky multiroom can dial to sky, presenting my home CLID to keep them happy. Right now the WRTP54G doesn't detect the modem calls or T.38, so it does it as a straight g771u call, the modems start to sync, sometimes lock and swap data, but always fail

I have one of these installed Heatmiser PRT but am thinking of changing to one that supports rs485 :-) like this one Heatmiser-PRT/HW-N.html Heatmiser will give the protocol docs out, and it looks similar to resol vbus :-) EDIT: they sent me the docs for V3 protocol which is the current shipping model

the k850i should be with me next week, it should be usb ethernet, lets see does it break like the k800i did ....

This works with kmod-usb-acm and comes up as a serial port ttyACM0. it works fine, but seems to suffer from usb buffering, and doesn't get above 500k or 400k speeds. This is just like the e270 if you don't specify maxsize=4096 when loading usb-serial. I give up with this as the e270 still wins.

I was interested to see if the k800i would fair better with openwrt, because it presents itself as a usb ethernet, so I hoped I could use it to replace the e270 card, even though it only does 768k. openwrt supports it via kmod-usb-net-cdc-ether , and configuring network for wan usb0 and dhcp, it worked. After a short while ( 12 hours now... lets see does it repeat, but I am very wary. I can't reboot the phone remotely, at least with the e270 a reboot of the wgt634u causes a reboot of the e270 (it's usb powered). EDIT: spoke too soon, the phone needed a reboot again with openwrt giving 'NETDEV WATCHDOG: usb0:' errors

so it appears to be more stable in 8.09, and may go several days before 'usb disconnect'. Interestingly, it now redetects it without reboot, but ppp0 is still active, and therefore it gets assigned USB1 instead of USB0, so networking would need to be reconfigured. I added openvpn to the wgt634u, and setup tunnels , and this seams to help, so maybe it's a powersave thing that if there is no traffic the e270 3g modem tries to standby and causes the problems I found that it was intermittent enough for me to live with a watchdog reboot script like this ping -4 -c 3 -I ppp0 www.google.com | grep -v '0 packets received' | grep 'packets received' || (ping -4 -c 3 -I ppp0 www.yahoo.com | grep -v '0 packets received' | grep 'packets received' || reboot)

Well I didn't expect it to be simple, and it wasn't, but I have the bones of vbusdecode put together http://code.google.com/p/vbusdecode/

So, now I need to complete the picture and measure my Natural gas usage (heating and hot water only, no cooking). My system is a potterton HE model, which modulates gas usage , so monitoring the board or burner LED won't work as gas flow is not a constant. Unfortunately my Meter is outside of the house , on the garden wall, with the gas pipes routed under the path into the house. This means running wires is pretty much impossible. So I would have to do something wireless with batteries, maybe an IR sensor counting the meter turns. Either way, it's going to be expensive and not reliable. So, I think I will ask my plumber how much he will charge to install a gas meter in the house, in line with the boiler. This is basically to be used as an expensive sensor. This one isn't too expensive, and has a pulsed output that can be read the same way my electricity pulses are measured http://www.gasproducts.co.uk/acatalog/G4_Gas_Meter_with_Pulse.html Time to ring my plumber, he n...