Yellow Cow Blog

Just noticed that one of my geeky people-discussing-important-stuff was photobombed by a guy on a coffee dispenser.

See for yourself:

Warning: This only works for Rev. B1 of the DIR-825. Rev. A1 will not work.

Since support for the D-Link DIR-825 Rev. B1 found it’s way into OpenWRT about 3 weeks ago I started playing around with it.

Here’s a little how-to on installing OpenWRT on the DIR-825. Basically it’s pretty easy. For those of you who just want to get started, I recommend the OpenWRT snapshots.

Here is what I did:

1. Press and hold the reset button until the power LED starts blinking (usually takes around 45 seconds)
2. Set your computer’s IP to anything but 192.168.0.1 in the 192.168.0.0/24 range.
3. Browse to 192.168.0.1, make sure you use Internet Explorer or Chromium here. From my experience Firefox doesn’t work.
4. Upload the openwrt-ar71xx-dir-825-b1-squashfs-backup-loader.bin image
5. Don’t be scared if the flash stops while progress is still under 100% and the box goes offline. That usually means the flash is done anyway.
6. Power cycle your box and telnet to it on IP 192.168.1.1
7. Don’t forget to set a password with passwd

Enjoy!

Restoring the original firmware works similarily: Follow steps 1 to 3 and in step 4 select the original D-Link .bin image instead.

By the way: If you prefer JFFS2 over SquashFS you can view the other images at http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/

Edit:

Because I got some comments on not being able to bring the wifi up here’s a little guide to do that:

1. Install the hostapd package:
2. opkg update
   opkg install hostapd kmod-ath9k
   
3. Then go to Network -> Wifi
4. Press Edit for the Radio controller you want to set up.
   Note: The DIR-825 has two Radios: One 2.4GHz single band and one 2.4/5GHz dual band.
   On my device phy0 (radio0) is the 2.4GHz only and phy1 is the dual-band radio
5. Enter your desired ESSID
6. As network choose lan
7. Mode: Access Point
8. Encryption: WPA2-PSK
9. Key: your WPA2 key
10. Save and apply.

Edit: I forgot to mention that you need to install kmod-ath9k (Thanks Jeroen)

I finally uploaded a selection of the photos I made at FUDCon to Flickr. The set is here.

I’ll be driving to Stuttgart today. Just for fun I’ll test Google Latitude to publish my current location.

Well there’s not much here yet. I also only met Jens Kühnel from our booth team. However my girlfriend (who brought me to St. Augustin) and her father were so kind to set up our booth (they just had fun setting up the booth, I didn’t actually ask them to) while I was organizing changes with the hotel staff.

Here’s the result:

I will try to get a blue table cloth for tomorrow and some other nice accessories to pimp the booth. We will also have some LiveCDs and laptops on display.

I recently added my Samsung 1TB SATA disk to my home server which has an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mainboard. The BIOS is rather 2004ish and I wasn’t actually suprised when my 1TB disk didn’t work on the old SATA150 Controller (namely a Silicon Image SiI3112). However the BIOS on the SATA Controller was also 2004ish and I already knew that Silicon Image publishes BIOS updates on their webpages. So I went ahead and downloaded a new BIOS. As I already killed my eSATA PCMCIA Card while updating it’s BIOS I decided to do it right this time

I found out that the BIOS needs to be embedded in the mainboard’s BIOS. So I downloaded CBROM and slipstreamed the new 2007ish SATA BIOS into it.

Here is what I came up with: C18E1013.BIN

Works like a charm for me, however I will not be responsible if this BIOS update kills your grandmother and eats your babies. USE AT YOUR OWN FUNRISK!

OpenTTD 0.7.1 hast just been pushed to f10/f11-updates. It should now be possible to get it by just yum install openttd

Have fun!

I always wondered why there is no easy way to clone my display to the VGA output of my ThinkPad T61p. I thought I found the solution in the fact that NVIDIA just sucks on Linux (well, they break my suspend/resume every other update). However a few weeks ago I found a script that simplifies the whole process. It is called Disper and can be downloaded here. In conjunction with the Thinkpad Screen script I can finally just Fn-F7 and use my Projector/DFP-Screen.

I also made a RPM of disper for the lazy:

• RPM
• SRPM

Recently I tried to use my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone to access the web via it’s 3G modem that is available over Bluetooth. I wanted it to work together with NetworkManager nicely so that other programs (such as Pidgin) receive the online status and also to ease the connection/disconnection process. However NM and also gnome-bluetooth are not ready for the job yet (Blueman alledgedly is).
I found a blog entry by Harald Hoyer that offers a Python script to simplify the whole process of adding the phone as a modem. However that script isn’t up to date anymore. Unfortunately NM doesn’t trust HAL to determine the capabilities of the phone anymore (thus allowing this nice Python hack-script) but rather additionally asks udev for it’s opinion. This will result in the following error message in the debug log of NM:

NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): found serial port (udev: hal:GSM)
NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): ignoring due to lack of probed mobile broadband capabilties

I worked around this by setting all rfcomm* ports to be “probed” modems via an udev rule. I know that this probably is not the nicest way to do this but hey, it works. Furthermore I updated the script to the new Python 2.6 popen functions.

Here is what I came up with:

dialup-bluetooth.py
90-rfcomm-nm.rules

The udev rule belongs in /etc/udev/rules.d. The python script can be put anywhere you want but keep in mind that it must be run as root.

Have fun browsing the web on the go!