MacLin : A technologic revolution

The title of this post was though to go in the line of my previous entry of the night. It was related for me changing this website theme so no big deal here. This one is to share my experience with the new router I bought some time ago.

I was having a hard time getting connection stability with my previous DI-524 from D-Link. Last week I opened it to see if the stability issue could come from an hardware problem and I discovered that 3 of the 5 capacitor of 1500uf was cambered. I was planning to change my router anyway to get wireless N capabilities, but though I would wait for the WNR3500L that was announced in October. This router is supposed to be a fully open source router which can be flashed by open firmware like DD-WRT and have a USB port on it to connect an external drive for network storage.

My DI-524 broken, my lack of WIFI inside my own apartment and the no availability of the WNR3500L in store or online made me start searching for an alternative. The website of DD-WRT contain a database of all the routers supported by the project and in the list was an even better router than the WNR3500L, the WRT610N from Linksys/Cisco. This router also have N capabilities and USB support, having previously use DD-WRT on older Linksys routers during my years at SONIA project, I knew that I would be satisfied and the router was in sale at FutureShop, so I bough one.

Its the second revision of this router, so DD-WRT was supported, newer revision are not yet supported at the time of this writing so I have been a bit lucky. I started by using the original firmware that came with it but I was experiencing some connection drop with my IPod Touch and sometimes it would not accept the WPA2 pass-phrase and constantly asking for it. So, last night I followed this pages to put DD-WRT on my WRT610Nv2. The upgrade went well, but I must admit that during the process I got nervous, I would not have like to destroy the router and throw 150$ to the trash.

The first version of the firmware that I put on it was not very stable tough… the router was rebooting by itself at an interval of about 3 minutes. I had to use the “hold button reset for 35 seconds” to make it work and for me to return to the web interface. I passed a couple of hour trying to understand what could go wrong but based on the 3min delay before the reboot and my experience with Linux Kernel development, I assumed that it was having a “kernel panic” that rebooted the router. I though of that because the default delay for a kernel panic to reboot is 180 seconds… (well on a powerpc, don’t know if it’s the same for this router but I simply guessed) and I though it would make sense. But I can be wrong.

After looking at the router database entry concerning the WRT610Nv2, I saw that the firmware linked there was from a previous revision of DD-WRT. This revision is 13401 instead of 13575 proposed in the other page. After trying this one, the router was very stable.

When I bough the router, I also bough an external 1.5TB USB hard drive. I formated the drive as ext3 and hooked it to the router, I activated some options inside the WebUI of DD-WRT and the drive was accessible through the network as an FTP share… I did not like this way of doing so I started to look on the DD-WRT forum and discovered that some user are going with Optware to add functionalities to their router. I followed this page and after installing some packages to the router I had the SWAT interface to configure a samba share for the attached 1.5TB of storage. That’s nice because samba shares are seen in Windows, Mac and Linux !

Now I have a very good router, WIFI is back and now more secure in my home and 1.5TB is available as a storage on my local network ! Sweet!

What would you do on a sunday night ? Well, I don’t know… But my roommate and I generally do some “Geeky” stuff. Last sunday we were both in our living room to do what ? Hacking our game console offcourse !

My black XBOX is a first generation one, I got it by the time it was still selling for 700$ with two games and an insurrance from futureshop. Like all the other XBOX of its generation… it is now a piece of crap. It starts with some random crash, then goes the famous “Disc unreadable” problem, after a while I sometimes got a blinking orange light and now there is no light at all and I’m lucky when I can put  game in it and play.

So, since I have some little electronic skills and that anyway I could not do worse to it, I decided to take it apart and look if I could identify the problem and maybe solving it. While I was opening my black beast, my roommate was doing some soft hacking on his Wii. We were two geeks in the living room having fun with our game console at totaly another level that one could expected ! He was SoftModing his Wii using the Zelda Hack so he could put the Homebrew Channel on it. He was planning on learning how to do some development for the platform, well it seems to have worked, because he was making a red scare bouncing on the tv screen earlier yesterday.

Like you can see on the above pics, I was having an hard time to remove the front panel. Since the XBOX was turning off by itself, that the green light would not turned on anymore and that the little power button had no effects at all. I though that the problem could come from the little PCB in the front panel. When I did finally got it in my hand I tested it with my multimeter and figured out that it could not be the problem since it was in fact doing pretty much nothing. I took a look closely at every pieces on the motherboard, in case I could find a leaking capacitors or something… without success. I finally reconnect every pieces and hooked it to the tv, like you have seen in the previous slideshow, the XBOX was working. I put it back in its case and closed everything, put my DOA3 game in it… and I had an hard time again to make it work. When I was finally able to play the game, I did a Story mode. I was using Bayman, at the hardest level, but the game is so badly designed when you reached the final boss that I was unable to beat it before the XBOX crash again. So I was out of luck to spot the problem but it may be a power supply issue.

I’m thinking about buying an Xbox 360 so I could still play the games I already have and also get Halo 3 ! But this will surely not be soon, I’m buying a car and a lot of stuff recently so gaming will wait. Also, there will probably have a price drop on them during the christmas holiday so maybe then.