I converted my OpenWrt installation on my WL-HDD to boot from harddisk, as 4M flash isn’t a lot if you want to make a print/scan/webcam server out of the little thing…

root@nalia:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 3.2M      2.9M    324.0k  90% /jffs
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1     9.2G    134.3M      8.6G   1% /
none                      7.0M     20.0k      7.0M   0% /tmp

Lookin’ good 😉

Update: Oh, eck, wait , a few minutes after this post the harddisk made a loud click and everything started giving bus errors. Now it doesn’t boot anymore. :'(

Been looking around for toys -errm, hardware and possibilities to build the long-discussed wireless link between me and Michiel. I think I got it now, just need a little hardware and help from Fabian… 🙂

Currently, my plan is to put a Linksys WRT54GL in a waterproof box (which I assume I can easily find at Brico), and put this on top of the roof, right next to the Yagi antenna (so we don’t get any loss over the antenna cable, plus save some money). I will pump up the default 30 mW transmit power to 90 mW (which is what the chip is actually rated for, and close enough to the allowed 100 mW). Power will be supplied over the ethernet cable (so I’d need an injector and something to take it back out, the WRT’s don’t support PoE natively). The ethernet cable will then run down the building, go inside via an air hole for the garages; through 2 neighbours’ garages, back out at the back (that’s where our terrace is), then back into the house through the window of our serverroom, et voila.. Connectivity(tm). Or so I hope it will be…

Waterproof box: 5€ (?), WRT54GL: 75€, WAPPOE: 60€, UTP: No idea. Toys for the boys…

Update:  since I actually bought a new wireless router (Asus WL-HDD) to play with, we should be able to use our current WRT54G instead of buying a new WRT54GL. Good, cause LDLC doesn’t have them in stock anymore 🙁

Somewhere this week I changed my firewalling script so that on start it would clear out all the tables and start fresh with my rules. Some time afterwards I noticed I could not reach certain sites, such as Ebay, modules.apache.org, mininova, and others – I didn’t see the connection immediately though.

When clearing out the rules it also automatically cleared out the “clamp mtu to mss” option Debian’s pppd script enabled before… after putting that back into the tables, everything started to work fine again.

Took quite some debugging, as I first thought this was a pmtud issue, and that was supposed to solve it… Another thing learnt, another thing to remember when similar problems arise 🙂