Tomato und VDSL

Update! Ich war mal so frei und hab eine selbststaendig laufende Loesung aufgeschrieben. Schaut’s euch hier an: Klick!

Dieser Artikel handelt von einer technischen Umsetzung, die so wirklich nur in Deutschland bislang Anwendung findet – daher verfasse ich diesen Artikel auf deutsch.

Seit knapp zwei Jahren bietet unsere allseits heissgeliebte Telekom unter dem Namen T-Home ihre Entertain-Tarife an, die wahlweise mit VDSL (25/5 oder 50/10 MBit) geschaltet werden koennen. Da, wie der Name bereits verraet, ein IPTV-Paket dabei ist, verwendet die Telekom das sogenannte VLAN-Tagging, um die gewoehnliche Internetleitung (Surfen, Email, P2P, etc) von der Leitung zu trennen, die die IPTV-Inhalte an die mitgelieferte Settop-Box zuliefert.

Die derzeit standardmaessig von der Telekom ausgelieferte Modem-Router-Loesung Speedport w721v beherrscht dieses VLAN-Tagging sowie die Aufspaltung der beiden Netze auch problemlos. Waere ja dreist wenn anders. Allerdings ist sie gravierenderweise nicht in der Lage, die vollen 50 MBit an Durchsatz zu erreichen. Nichtmal im PPPoE-Passthrough Modus; d.h. wenn man den Speedport als reines Modem verwendet und das Routen eine andere Kiste – beispielsweise einen WRT54G(L/S) uebernehmen laesst. Das einzig praktische an diesem Speedport ist, dass er im Modem-Modus das VLAN-tagging uebernimmt. Somit funktionierte bislang VDSL mit meinem WRT54GL mit Tomato-Firmware ganz prima – mit dem Abstrich der etwas traurigen Downstream-Leistung.

Da es allerdings den Speedport 300HS, der frueher durch die Telekom fuer VDSL als Modem-Loesung vor einem Router-only Speedport w700v eingesetzt wurde, auf eBay fuer 10 Euro inklusive Versand gibt, denkt man sich doch, dass man seine Situation eventuell doch verbessern koennte. Noch dazu gibt es genuegend Meldungen, dass der 300HS die volle 50MBit-Bandbreite schafft.

Da Tomato eine Funktion fuer’s VLAN-Tagging, das wie zuvor erwaehnt fuer den Aufbau der PPPoE-Verbindung noetig ist, ab Werk nicht beherrscht (DD-WRT tut das z.B. in den neuesten Releases, aber wer mag schon DD-WRT ; ), ist der Weg dahin nun Inhalt dieses Beitrags.

Guide to a clean and powerful Codec System

Many will know the turmoil: After installing a codec pack like say, K-Lite or Nimo’s Codec pack (for the oldschoolers), your player sometimes crashes when opening a movie file, your explorer dies off when you highlight a movie file, sometimes there’s flickering when playing back a movie, an entirely green screen when playing back a movie, or annoyances of the such. All of those are clear cases of a fucked up codec system.

Video playback operates by using Codecs, those are used to render video data via Microsoft’s DirectShow system. How these Codecs are loaded is referenced in the so-called “Merit System”. When you install multiple codec packs, or even multiple codecs that can render the same kind of video data, it is no longer clear which codec is going to be used when you play back a video file. Additionally, many codecs that are installed by some of the many codec packs in existence are beta versions; highly unstable and hence often prone to lead to applicational failure.

This guide will tell you how clean your merit system to the point where it is as tidy as the one on a fresh windows install, and afterwards i’ll point out how to set up a powerful and yet (in terms of software) minimalistic multimedia codec system.

WRT54G/Tomato 1.21++ Reconnect-Batchfile

UPDATE! I’ve updated the script to work for Tomato 1.25 (and hopefully upwards) – links below updated.

Some of you pirating people are downloading stuff from Rapidshare. Rapidshare, among other providers of free online storage and downloads, employ a policy that lets the user download a certain amount of data and then forces him to wait for a couple of hours before being able to again download something.

People (who are on dynamic ip connections) usually circumvent this by restarting (also ‘resetting’) their router. Some are clever enough to utilize tools for that task that log into your router and reset the connection.

People using Tomato however have been unable to use some of the Software written for that task, because as of Tomato 1.14 (changelog), in which the author fixed a cross site scripting vulnerability, just calling a URL on the Web-Interface won’t do it anymore.

I have written a php-script started by a batchfile that will let you reconnect your Tomato-running router with one click and no other tools than the ones provided.

Shared MySQL data directories for Linux and Windows

Okay, so you have your own little Apache with MySQL running on your home box and are experimenting with one, or regularly using the both of these operating systems. As the contents of your website probably don’t, or shouldn’t change at all, it is usually quite logical to share those contents between operating systems.
Since I’ve found no such tutorial via google, I’m going to go ahead and write one.

WRT54GL and bandwidth control

Hey guys,
I thought I’d just share a nice and yet powerful tool that I’ve used for quite some time to restrict certain IPs in my network to certain speeds at the WAN interface of my WRT54GL router. It has been written by robsonn from the HyperWRT forums.

WRT54GL, Tomato firmware and bandwidth monitoring via SNMP

SNMP is quite interesting if you like to control the bandwidth usage of your roomies – or family members. I for one have used it in the past to monitor my sister’s bandwidth usage. After all, this is my internet connection, and noone elses.

Azureus and automatic download directory classification

Okay, this is gonna be a quick one.

Since i’m partially downloading .torrent files from IRC – which are afterwards automatically loaded into Azureus – and want the resulting Bittorrent-files to be downloaded into a folder other than the default one set in Azureus’ options, i’ve come across a quite interesting solution that however requires the use of two additional plugins:

WRT54GL, Tomato firmware and Filezilla FTP Server

Alrighty folks, first entry.

I have recently switched firmwares on my Linksys WRT54GL from DD-WRT, which has, despite its bloatedness, always served me well, to the Tomato firmware.

The first thing you’ll notice is the entirely different Web-Interface. Everything is based heavily on AJAX, so the load on the firmware’s HTTP server is reduced. Additionally, configuring becomes a lot more “fluent”, as only the values that the Web-Interface presents you with, are being reloaded, instead of the entire page.