Gerhard Potgieter

The Firefox community is always up to some cool original way to declare their passion for Firefox. This time it’s not exception, and what better way to do it than to set a Guinness World record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

So if you are a Firefox fanatic all you have to do to help contribute to this world record is to download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day sometime in June. In the meantime you can check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. Mozilla will then let you know when Firefox 3 gets out the door, kicking of the 24 hour attempt.

If you would like to help assist in the run up to Download Day, you can do the following

• Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
• Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and Mozilla will provide the party favors.
• Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.

So all you Firefox fanatics out there, lets help contribute toward this world record. If you would like to put a badge on your website or blog, you can get badges here.

With the increased popularity of wireless technology today more and more homes and businesses are starting to use this technology.

What most of these users don’t know is that if you don’t secure your wireless network anybody within range of the network can gain access to it if you don’t have security measures in place.

A while back Telkom started giving away free wireless ADSL routers to all new self install users signing up. This move contributed to a even larger percentage of unsecured wireless networks out there, and these networks are unsecured without the users even knowing it.

If you are into wifi like I am, every now and then you would do a scan just to see how many networks is in your area. With these scans almost every time I picked up at least 2 unsecured wireless home networks. Just to mention I can then easily connect to these networks and then use the ADSL, some cases I could even log in to the wireless router with the default username and password. In a country like South Africa where bandwidth is so expensive there are allot of people out there that exploit these unsecured wireless networks and use up all the bandwidth there is, leaving the owner flabbergasted to hear from his ISP that he used up all his bandwidth.

So I thought it would be a good thing just to list a few things you can do to ensure that your wireless network is protected from unauthorized use.

1. First thing you do when you receive your wireless router is to always change the default username and/or password.
2. Enable some form of security, like WEP, WPA, WPA2, or MAC authentication. This will ask new users to the network for a passkey to be able to connect to the network, or the user’s mac must be enabled on the router.
3. Use static IP addressing rather than a DHCP server. This will make it harder for an intruder to guess your IP range and Gateway IP for internet use.
4. If you are a large business running advanced wireless network use RADIUS to authenticate your users.
5. And last if you can check your router logs as often as possible to see attempts of unauthorized access.

If your are still not sure how to secure your network feel free to leave comments and I’ll try and direct you into the right direction to help you secure your wireless network.

Remember a wireless network is never safe from unauthorized access but you can always make it harder for a person to be able to access it. Always remember a form of security is better than none at all.

During the past few weeks I have received numerous requests about users asking me to help them set up a PPTP VPN tunnel between two Mikrotik devices to share internet, so I thought it couldn’t do any harm in writing a nice little how to.

We are going to start with the Mikrotik router providing the internet, please make sure that the router is already internet enabled and that you can ping internet sites from it.

Log in to the router using Winbox, and click on the PPP link to open up the PPP settings page. First we enable the PPTP server on the router by clicking settings button and ticking enabled and then apply.

After enabling the PPTP Server we need to create a login for the router wanting the internet. Go to the secrets tab, click the +, a screen will open up where you will fill in all the details. Name is the username, Password the password, profile choose default-encryption. Now for the most important part, the IP’s. Local Address is the IP the dialing router will have in the router providing Internet, and Remote Address the IP the dialing router will have in its own side. The remote address is important cause we will use it to masquerade the internet. Click apply and you should now have a login setup.

Now we must set up the Masquerade rule, so that the dialing router will be able to surf the web. On the main menu go to IP -> Firewall. Click the NAT tab and then the +. In chain select srcnat, src address is the remote address we used in the login setup above. You can either just use the ip or you can use a whole range if you have more than 1 router dialing.

Now click on the Action tab and for Action select masquerade. Click apply and then you are done setting up the server side of the PPTP VPN.

Next we log into the Mikrotik router dialing to the router providing the internet. Log in using Winbox, go to PPP menu. Click the + and select PPTP Client. Go to the Dial Out tab and in the Connect To box enter the IP of the router providing the internet, User and Passowrd will be the username and password set up on the server side. Under Profile select default-encryption, tick Add Default Route and then Apply.

That it you should now have a fully working VPN link to the router providing the internet and should now have internet. Just remember that DNS settings could perhaps not be set up and thus your internet could not be working.

Please take not that this tutorial was written for Mikrotik routers on the CTWUG network but should also work for other networks. If you have any questions or queries please leave comments and I’ll respond.

For those of you that read my previous post about rumors that Telkom is trialing a 8Mbps ADSL service, well the good news is that it is true.

Telkom is trialing a 8Mbps ADSL service but told press that it will take so time before it is commercially made available to the public.

The company said that upping their current 4Mbps ADSL service to to 8Mbps is not a simple process as it must be accompanied by backhaul upgrades to the network to support the higher speeds.

Telkom said that they are also trailing ADSL2+, mainly aimed at supporting IPTV plans. ADSL2+ can support speeds up to 24Mbps if users are close enough to the exchange.

Things is looking quite promising for South African telecoms with these kind of speeds in the future, lets just hope Telkom will reduce the price of their SAT3 access once they start trialing, thats if this is gonna happing this year still. Otherwise we must put our hopes on the new cable systems to bring cheap high speed internet to South Africa.

DD-WRT has for long been the custom firmware of choice for many Linksys WRT owners. The initial target was just a modification of the original Linksys Firmware for supporting simple Radius Authentication. But the creator decided to add some more small tools and fancy things, just for fun.

Today it has become one powerful firmware and most Linksys WRT owners run it on their devices. To date DD-WRT V23 SP2 was the release that seemed to have the biggest success and many people still use it to date. At the time of DD-WRT V23 SP2 release the creators also started porting the firmware to other platforms like Avila Gateworks, X86, FON Fonera and whatever was comming to the dev table. (about 90 different router types so far).

Today I’m proud to announce the release of DD-WRT v24 packed with even more features.

DD-WRT v24 offers many new features, on of the most important is support of Atheros wlan chipsets and SOC designs. By supporting special features of the Atheros wireless designs like half- and quarter channels and extended channel support DD-WRT is now perfectly suited for long range wireless links. With this DD-WRT is now also supporting the whole Ubiquity line of wireless products using all available features the hardware offers.

Highlights of DD-WRT v24:
- Virtual SSIDs, Virtual DHCP-Servers, PPTP over WAN enhencements, Bridging + VLAN support, VDSL Support, OLSR-Routing / Freifunk, My Ad Network (powered by AnchorFree), Quaqqa instead of Bird (in X86 + Xscale default),  PPPOE-Server, EOIP-Tunnel, Network configuration enhencements, UP-Downstream (QOS), New Packet Scheduler HFSC, Save & Apply, extended DDNS options, extended status information, New Languages, Sipwerk integrated Milkfish into the new release, turning every DD-WRT router into a SIP-aware firewall.

New hardware platforms:
- X86, Avila Gateworks, Cambria Gateworks, Atheros Soc (for a list, please look into the Download Section), Compex,Senao, Fonera, Ubiquiti

I will certainly be upgrading my DD-WRT v23 SP2 to the new one as there is some nice new features aswell as support for longer distance links now. Or with the support of X86 I’ll even consider turning an old pc into a nice RouterPC with some Atheros cards.

Can you say 30ms pings? CTWUG certainly can now. Yesterday some of the guys braved the cold rain and marble sized hail and went out to install the latest addition the the CTWUG high site family namely Jupiter.

Jupiter is situated on top op Tygerberg Hill and cuts the hops in more that half to go from one side of the network to the other side. It boast backbone links to Saturn and Neptune, also another new site, aswell as a 5.8 sector and 2.4 panel towards Durbanville/Brackenfell area. What is great is the latency, its the lowest the WUG has had so far and this is a great plus point for all the gaming enthusiasts.

Just want to give a great thanks to the guys that made this possible in the weather, we as a WUG greatly appreciates it. As for all the users on the WUG, hope you have your KY ready!

The guys at Adecco sent me the link to their brand new blogspot. Its a blog containing all the available positions they have aswell as what the specifications is to apply for it.

They are also in the process of setting up a blog for Employers where you as a job seeker can post your qualifications and experience and then employers can visit this blog and seek out future employees.

Nice job Adecco for making job positions more freely available to the IT job seeker. The blog displaying all the current jobs available can be found here, and the blog where you can advertise your expertise and experience can be found here. All you have to do to feature on the employers blog is to send your CV requesting to post it on the blog to Hennie Swart at Hennie.Swart@Adecco.co.za, and a short description on your skills will be placed but with no name.

Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. This Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. You can get the latest version of Firefox 3 here.

I installed it and did not have any problem to date, so if you are a Firefox junkie like I am or even a plugin developer I would suggest you install this RC and start testing or making sure your plugins is compatible with Firefox 3 before the final release.

During this weekend some of the guys from CTWUG went out to do some maintenance on our Mars high site. During this time they also thought it would be a good opertunity to sort the backbone link to LoemWug.

LoemWug is a Wireless User Group operating in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, they have about 40 users according to their admins. CTWUG en LoemWug have been negotiating now for a long time to link up and the day has finally arrived.

CTWUG and LoemWug are now officially linked via the Mars high site, so it safe to say the the combined user total of both WUGS are now almost 100 users. All that has to be done now is sort the routing as the 2 WUGS run on different ip ranges, but I’m sure this will be sorted anytime soon.

And some other news, CTWUG will be putting up its Tygerberg Hill high site tomorrow. After the completion of this site we will have our own fully owned backbone reaching from one point of the network to the other end. The site will provide a one hop link to the other side of the hill which should drop latency quite a bit, it will also have 1 5.8 sector covering Durbanville Brackenfell side of the hill aswell as a 2.4 panel cover the same area. The site will be called Jupiter and will link to Saturn and Pluto via Rellik for now.

Good luck to the team going up tomorrow, hope everything goes smooth and as planned. We are really starting to build a kick ass network now.

Nadeo recently launched TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF), the successor of their previous free racing game TrackMania Nations (TMN).

Being part of CTWUG we have a few avid gamers on the network and one of the games we played allot was TrackMania Nations (TMN). So with the new TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF) I thought I would give it a go and set up a server, and as with every game on the network users prefer a stats page aswell. So after searching high and low on the web I couldn’t find a stats solutions for TMNF that produced stats based on real time results, the closest I got was TMOS - TrackMania Offline Server, so the obvious thing to do was write my own solution.

Running a dedicated TMNF server required ASECO, Automatic Server Control, to generate statistics in realtime to a online database or local database. It took me about 2 days of programming to get a stable running bug free site. I called it AsecoStats cause it is based on the Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF.

The index page displays live server stats like how many players are currently online, current track, list all player names and best times that are currently online aswell as the Author records aswell as the best time for the track.

The Players page displays all the current players that ever played on the server aswell as their total wins and total time played on the server.

When you click on the player name you will be transfered to a page detailing all the tracks the player has ever raced aswell as their best time for each track and poll position

On the Tracks page is a list of all the challenges (tracks) ever played on the server with their author, best time and what player achieved this time.

When you click on the track name you will be transfered to a page that details all the players that ever played that track aswell as their poll position and their time.

This is all I did for now as this is the first beta version (v. 0.9b), and what the users wanted to see for now. The pages is written in php and utilizes Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF’s mysql database. I haven’t decided on a license for it yet but if interest is big enough I will possibly release this under GNU.

For the next release I’m looking into a point system so users can get a overall server position and not just per track. Please leave your comments as to what you guys think of this and any suggestions is also welcome.