But the point is: It is absolutely useless as a Internet-Router for me! It doesn’t allow incoming ICMP (Ping), it got no internal S0 (ISDN) Bus and it doesn’t allow VPN-Passthrough (GRE, Protocol 21). I even suspect it to have a severely broken QoS, but I can’t proof that right now. And this is only after a few days of playing around with this device. Not to think of what I’d find if I gave it some more time.

Die Konfiguration unserer Speedports ist auf Einfachheit getrimmt. Der Reichtum an einstellbaren Funktionen und Konfigurationsoptionen ist nicht das Ziel der Entwicklung, eher schon eine Reduktion auf das Wesentliche.

[Telekom Team @ T-Online Foren]

The quote says that they aim for simplicity and not for features, and they’re good at it. Very good. This device is so simplistic that it is basically useless for all but the most basic users.

I’ll look for a better CPE and try to return this device as soon as possible. Maybe they find somebody who can make better use of it than me.

Update: It looks like the Speedport is killing long running connections after a while (a few hours at most). I’ve heard about that one … that’s very disappointing when working over SSH.

The installation of voyage linux itself is covered in detail in the Getting Started guide.

Very usefull information can be found at networksoul and this chaos wiki.

I recommend picocom to connect to the serial console:

picocom –baud 38400 –flow n –databits 8 /dev/ttyUSB0

If your computer doesn’t have a serial port anymore, like mine, I recommend the LogiLink “USB2.0 to Serial Adapter” (UA0043 v.2.0). It’s cheap and works flawlessly. Another great LogiLink product I can reommend in this context is the LogiLink “USB2.0 Aluminum All-in-one Card Reader” (CR0001B v.2.0). Why I mention these two here? I find it hard to find cheap linux compatible adapters of which I know that they work on linux, so here is the information I would have like had before I bought those. The USB-Serial-Adapter is recognized as “Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port”. The Card-Reader is shown as four separate drives.

Why do they have to do this?

Is the wikipedia database so overloaded that they have to throw out everything that is not 100% fine or are these just selfish, stupid and jealous people trying to show others how great they are?

Really, Wikipedia-Admins, I don’t quite get it …

Fortunately most of these are very well usable even without a Kolab server.

Unfortunately these are not so well documented (or the documentation is not very easy to find).

When trying out these features in noticed that the groupware features will only work properly (at least with Kontact from KDE 4.3) if you access your mailbox via “Disconnected IMAP”. If you fail to do so you’ll probably get an “Write access denied” error.

Please note, that Kontact is very unstable sometimes, but again, this depends heavily on the version of Kontact/KDE you use. My experience is based on KDE 4.3 from Debian unstable.

Right, it is called unstable for a reason …

When you did successfully install VMWare, you probably want to provide your VMs with network connecitivity. There are several ways to achieve this and the approach depends on how you use your servers.

Interface Aliases: http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/focus-linux/2002-01/0094.html

Routing: Use Host-only network

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iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.2.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A INPUT -i vmnet1 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o vmnet1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -o eth0 -i vmnet1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d <external -ip> -i eth0 --dport </external><external -port> -j DNAT --to <internal -ip>:</internal><internal -port></internal></external>

Funny OSM Map (c) OpenStreetMaps

Sometimes OpenStreetMaps can be quite funny.

The installation of the OpenWRT Firmware was quiete easy. At first I did backup my old router configuration in the Webinterface, then I did an Firmware Upgrade, also from the Webinterface. After the firmware was uploaded the router took about one or two minutes to reboot and did then respond to pings on 192.168.1.1. Note: If you already have a device using the address 192.168.1.1 on the network, you’d better connect the WRT54 directly to your pc.

The documentation for OpenWRT is quite scattered around the wiki. Probably the first page to look at is the page about configuring Kamikaze. One thing that confused me at frist was how I could log in to the router after the upgrade. Since OpenWRT, by default, doesn’t offer a webinterface and I couldn’t find a default password for SSH I was curios how to log in. The solution is fairly simple: Just connect via telnet, set a root password and the log in via SSH. If you want to change the ip address, go to /etc/config/network and change the address of the “br-lan” interface. You should also add a default gateway and an DNS server, in case your router isn’t going to be connected over his wan interface.

1. Add “deb http://kde4.debian.net/ lenny main” to the sources.list.
2. aptitude update
Then I did try to “aptitude install kde4“, but as the Backports page states, this didn’t work. So I had to clean up the dependency mess (aptitude -f install) and start with the minimal kde package aptitude install kde4-minimal and then install the modules one by one. At least one of them had unmet dependencies and couldn’t be installed but I hope those will be resolved soon.

When KDE4.1 was finally installed I re-installed kdm by aptitude install kdm and logged in for the first time. The startup took a rather long time – I guess all the initial confguration files were created (or whatever).

I soon realised that the KWin/Nvidia issues were really annoying so I did look for a solution. Fortunately there were already a lot of good hints on this. While trying to fix this I did notice that my Xinerama setup was not supported and I had to switch (back) to TwinView. I don’t remeber why I did use Xinerama instead of TwinView, but I suppose it did just work back then when I set up the two monitor configuration. So as for the performance issues: Depending on the hardware you have, there are a lot of possible bug-fixes. At first you should make sure that you use a recent release of the Nvidia drivers. I did use 177.67 (BETA) from Nvidia and sticked to the tweaks from Nvidia. I put my “nvidia-settings” command in a bash script inside “.kde4/Autostart”.

Below is a list of modifications I made to my xorg.conf. Please note that these are only the modifications I made to the xorg.conf, this is no complete configuration.

After this changes I restarted the X server and made a few small modifications to the KWin settings:

The result? My KDE4.1 desktop, full compositing features enabled, is blazing fast now!

Section "ServerFlags"

Option "Xinerama" "0"

EndSection

Section "Extensions"

Option "Composite" "Enable"

EndSection

Section "Device"

Identifier     "nvidia0"

Driver         "nvidia"

Option      "NoLogo" "True"

BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"

Screen      0

Option "HWcursor"

Option "CursorShadow"

Option "CursorShadowAlpha" "32"

Option "CursorShadowXOffset" "3"

Option "CursorShadowYOffset" "3"

Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"

Option "TwinView" "True"

Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"

Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024;1280x1024;1024x768,1024x768;800x600,800x600"

Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "UseEdidFreqs"

Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "UseEdidFreqs"

Option "RenderAccel" "true"

Option  "UseEvents" "false"

Option "TripleBuffer" "1"

Option "DamageEvents" "1"

Option "BackingStore" "1"

Option "PixmapCacheSize" "70000"

Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "true"

EndSection

Section "Screen"

Identifier     "Screen0"

Device         "nvidia0"

Monitor        "monitor0"

DefaultDepth    24

SubSection     "Display"

Depth       24

Modes      "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubSection

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

Option "PixmapCacheSize" "1000000"

Option "AllowSHMPixmaps" "0"

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

EndSection

Inside the ccd you create one file for each client you want to configure and call the file exactly as the common name from the clients certificate. In this files you can use ordinary OpenVPN configuration statements. For assigning fixed IPs you would use “ipconfig-push 10.8.0.X 10.8.0.0″ if you use the suggested subnet of “10.8.0.0″.