Category: hardware

Well, it's that time again. That time when I've been wanting to upgrade, but was putting it off until I both needed and absolutely had to, and until I had the money to go for an all-out new system. (Something I haven't done in years.)

With the Athlon64s on the market at very reasonable prices, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go that route, this will require a new motherboard and RAM - and probably a power supply as well. Heck, might as well throw in a new video card and case while I'm at it. A new HD wouldn't hurt (I'm only on 80Gb right now - and the campus network has plenty more goods that I want).

Why do I have to upgrade? Well, my power supply is the culprit. I've been having issues playing any game for the past month or so. The system seems to "hiccup" (the fans slow then speed back up) and the system never recovers. I believe this is the system requiring more power than the PS can provide. It could be just a single back component drawing too much current, but I've swapped processors, RAM and video cards.
I haven't swapped motherboard or power supplies, simply because I haven't had a spare...

I recently found this price guide from digg, and it really got me thinking about a new system. Then last night the machine hiccuped again, but I wasn't in game. My birthday is in a few weeks, tax return should be in by that time, and I think it's about time* I got a new system. (*Nothing's changed in this system in almost 2 years - and that was because I worked at AMD!)

Any specific hardware suggestions or packaged deals you know of?

Grendel sez: Besides, now that I know what newegg looks like on the inside, I can envision my parts coming down the conveyor belt and getting the peanut gun treatment.

So the system hardware is configured and ready to go. It's now time to install the m0n0wall image onto the CF card. Because my main machine is Windows, I used PhyDiskWrite 0.5.1 to unpack the image and write it to the card. It's a handy command line utility written specifically for Windows users who need to write the m0n0wall generic PC image to a CF card. Do be aware of what disk interface you select to write to when running this application; it displays all logical drives on your system so you could potentially write the image to one of your hard drives. That would be bad, m'kay?

Once the image is written, simply plug the card into the adapter and boot the machine. Upon booting the G1, I noticed that the BIOS revision was A06 and having looked at the Dell site I knew A10 was available. Having already removed the floppy drive from the machine, I was not apt to update it unless it was necessary. As it turns out, it was not.

Fire it up and pray you did everything correctly. Prior to installing the CF to IDE adapter and card I did boot the machine and make BIOS edits. I turned off all interfaces not required for operation and ensured that nothing else was amiss. During the initial boot, you will need to connect the machine to a monitor and have a keyboard connected. If you're running it on a virtual machine or have a serial port you can use HyperTerminal through a console. For me, that was a lot more trouble that in it was worth considering that the G1 has a video card built in.

After the boot process completes, m0n0wall is up and running. You're greeted with a list of options that looks much like this. The first thing you'll need to do is assign interfaces. It is interesting to note how m0n0wall sensed the two NICs present in the machine; one integrated and one PCI. The PCI NIC was presented first and thus made into the WAN interface; the integrated NIC was then made into the LAN NIC. For units without integrated NICs, the PCI slot closest to the AGP slot will probably come up as the first interface. After assigning interfaces, I set the LAN IP to my normal networking scheme of 10.0.0.254/24; With the 24 subnet, DHCP clients have 10.0.0.1-253 to use.

Once this is accomplished, I connected cables. One Cat5 to my cable modem; the other to my Dell Powerconnect 2016 10/100 switch. I also have a Netgear FS-104 five port switch for my media center. You can set up an optional third interface for a separate subnet as well as VLAN tagging but all of that is overly complicated for my simple home network. After powercycling the router and the cable modem the network was operational. All of my clients received DHCP leases according to the default settings in m0n0wall; two hours by default and a maximum of two days.

Now that all the interfaces are operational, I can access the web-based GUI for m0n0wall. Much like consumer routers, opening a browser and navigating to the router's LAN IP works for this. The options in m0n0wall are quite extensive and do require some basic networking skills to properly configure and implement things like firewall rules and NAT rules, known in some circles as port forwarding. Because I'm not going into great detail here, you can read the documentation on all of the features by clicking here.

The first thing to do is, of course, set a password and the time zone for logging purposes. The only other really special settings I needed were to enable the PPTP VPN server so that I can create an encrypted tunnel for VNC when I'm at work or away from home. To this point I've been using VNC unencrypted over the commodity Internet because I had neither the hardware nor the time to set up an SSH tunnel for windows or a generic VPN server. m0n0wall comes with both PPTP and IPSec VPN server capabilities; the PPTP flavor works best with Windows XP. It is important to note that when setting up the VPN, all of the options it asks for are internal. That is, the server IP should be an internal address; same with the DHCP leases it gives out on a /28 subnet. Because it requires /28, be sure your private assignable space starts with 192 (ex: 10.0.1.192). After this is done, check the box that adds a firewall rule and save the settings. Create a user and you're good to go.

It is important to note that interface or protocol changes are not implicitly applied to the firewall like they are in most consumer networking routers. When you create something like a PPTP VPN or other interface feature, you must also add a firewall rule to allow that traffic to pass. Most setup screens in the GUI prompt you with a checkbox to create a firewall rule for you. If you choose not to do this, it's ok. Just remember why you can't connect later. =)

To say that m0n0wall is fully featured is an understatement; it has everything you could ever want in an enterprise-grade router with none of the fuss and certainly a lot less expense. As a geek, I was overjoyed when the entire unit worked almost completely out of the box. Minimal problems have been experienced in three days of duty.

For action shots, click here and here.

After some rather interesting deals with FedEx, I finally received all the parts required to build my m0n0wall system. It should be noted that this was among the easiest projects I've ever undertaken which is remarkable given that m0n0wall requires some intermediate level of networking skill and my last experience with *NIX operating systems left me with nothing other than feelings of general hostility.

I was in a quandary as to what type of system to base the firewall off of. Tommy has a lovely MiniITX board that runs completely solid state when booting off the CF card. The only problem is that those all-in-one systems can run upwards of $180 before memory. The embedded PCs that m0n0wall was designed to operate on also suffer from the same types of cost. I'm in agreement with Tommy that most of it is due to lack of demand. I decided that it would be more cost effective as an enterprising young lad living in one of the most expensive places on earth to acquire some old PC; something on the order of 400MHz of processing power and 128MB of RAM or so (the m0n0wall minimum is 64 for swap space).

I ordered a Dell Optiplex G1 from RetroBox.Com. They specialize in reselling old gear that is surpluses by corporations when they upgrade their technology. For $48 shipped I received a 400MHz slot Celeron with 192MB of PC133 RAM. It was nearly perfect for what I'm trying to do. When I received the unit, I promptly stripped out the 4GB hard drive, generic CD-ROM, floppy drive, and PCI sound card. See pics here.

After cleaning everything out, it was time to install the CF to IDE Adapter I purchased. It takes a standard 40-pin IDE cable but with one exception; it has a pin for the dead pin spot just above the center notch. Having no IDE cables that fit this job, on the advice of a buddy I warmed a knife and melted the plastic covering the hole. The pin inserted nicely and everything was fine. Under the CF card are the instructions for jumper settings; it came configured for standard voltage and to be the master drive on the IDE channel so no changes were required. It takes a standard floppy power connecter and the LEDs are very bright. See pics here.

The next thing to do was to add an NIC. The motherboard on the G1 came with a 3COM 10/100 NIC built in. I needed an extra interface for WAN/LAN connectivity. Because m0n0wall is built on FreeBSD 4.x, I felt relatively comfortable pulling an old NIC out of a stack I have in my Cabinet O' Geek™ and slapping it in. As you'll see in the next installment, this was not a problem. It was interesting, however, to see how m0n0wall read the interfaces.

The next (and final) installment will cover loading the m0n0wall image on the CF card and initial setup of the unit. Thanks for reading.

Consumer networking equipment quality has taken a nosedive in the last 18 to 24 months. Having been working very closely with one consumer networking equipment manufacturer over the last six months, I can honestly say that I don't think I will ever buy a consumer-grade piece of networking gear ever again.

The problems here are two fold and quite obvious; hardware design/quality and software quality. In the hardware realm, quality problems are not a new idea. Part qualification standards are, as far as I can see, non-existent. For example, the KR1 Mobile Router I've been working on had a CMOS battery in it. The battery was reportedly there to keep the time on the router while it was unplugged as this is a mobile product. In testing, I showed that the battery was completely non-functional. As it turns out, it was never designed to operate on a battery so they took it off. Why was the battery placed on the PCB in the first place?

Moreover, software quality and standards have really degraded. In my observation, it is now standard practice to write code, compile it, ensure that the product actually boots up, and ship it. There is no black box testing by a quality organization and no verification that all features are functional. The product is released to the public and then the support complaints roll in. Based on these customer reported issues, firmware fixes are rolled in and a new upgrade build is spun and put up on support sites for users to upgrade themselves. In effect, the customer is the tester. This is quite cost effective because the company doesn't need to pay testers or spend any extra time before getting the product to market. People almost must have some form of networking equipment in this day and age and they continue to purchase it. So why does this matter? I'm glad you asked.

My D-Link DI-524 is a victim of this downward trend in quality. It is a basic router with 802.11g WiFi support. It suffers from a problem where it likes to reboot randomly when you chunk too much data through it. And by too much, I mean connecting to IRC or and FTP server. It is highly frustrating to be cruising along and suddenly completely drop your Ethernet connection to the router. I found a hacked version of the DI-624 firmware (same hardware in both units, just a different driver for the WiFi chipset that does 108mbps) and loaded it. It exhibited the same type of issues but in different ways. Rolling back to older firmware lessens the frequency of the problems.

These problems are not generic to D-Link. They also affect the latest version of one of Linksys' best selling product lines: the WRT54G. Version five is an utterly horrible piece of junk and a simple Google search will enlighten you to all of the varied issues. Netgear suffers as well but to somewhat of a lesser degree. It seems that they started with a more solid code base which allows them to get the basics right without breaking DHCP or something

"So Mackie, what's your great plan for solving this problem?" A simple answer: m0n0wall. m0n0wall is a barebones edition of FreeBSD that contains a web server with PHP parser that runs most basic network functions. It will do the standard DHCP, DNS, and other routing duties but will also provide traffic shaping and reporting services. All of this is configured via a single XML file and the web-based GUI. It is compatible with all hardware that FreeBSD supports so you can use nearly anything with it. All of this for free, and it runs on an 8MB Compact Flash card.

It is designed to work on embedded PC platforms but can also work on any old PII you have laying around, provided it has at least 64MB of RAM. No hard drive or optical drive is required provided you acquire a CF to IDE adapter. It will run on any x86 architecture, including MiniITX, MicroATX, and ATX systems. I've ordered all the parts for mine and they should be arriving in the next week. I'll be providing update posts to go through system setup and configuration soon. Stay tuned.

It's that time of year, time for exchanges and stuffing ornaments and lights in storage boxes. It's also time to show off your new goods, those treasured gifts you received for Christmas.

This Christmas, I got the following:

a new Sanyo 27" TV

a new HP ze2308 laptop (which we got a great deal on...)

VR3 MP3 Player for the car

a "Hovercopter"

Call of Duty 2 (for PC)

Mark Farina - Mushroom Jazz Vol.5 (CD)

Wireless Hacks by O'Reilly

an Atmel microcontroller project board

and an HO-scale electric train set

...just to name a few. Probably one of the best list of Christmas gifts I've had in a while.

What all did you get?