Category Archives: Wireless Connectivity

The power of MRTG …

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The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)
is an elegent piece of Open Source software. It is amazingly
simple, yet powerful … a great combination. I first became
aware of MRTG years ago when working on network management
software. The foundation for a lot of network management and
monitoring is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
protocol. MRTG was designed to provide trend graphs of SNMP
variables that were being polled. Well, it actually started as a
tool to graph some specific variables – the Interface statistics of
data going in and out of a network Interface.

What is great about MRTG is that is was then extended to go beyond it’s
roots … and into a couple of different directions. The first
area that I really like is that I can add scripts to MRTG that return
values to be graphed … anything that I want. You can only graph
two variables per graph … but it can be any type of data.

I have now written a variety of MRTG scripts to scrape web interfaces
for a variety of devices and applications. For example, I wrote a
MRTG script to scrape the status screen of my ActionTec GT701 DSL
modem. With this ActionTec MRTG script I can now see up to date trend graphs of the traffic going through my DSL modem.

Another example is this NoCat MRTG script that I wrote for the NoCat
project – an Open Source network authentication application. It
also scrapes the web page generated by the NoCat Gateway
software. In both of these examples, I am able to extend the
functionlity of MRTG using Perl and wget …

Now I’m also using MRTG as a primitive OLAP tool … to graph the
results of queries to a MySQL database. In the backend systems
that run our wireless network – 80211.net
– I am writing records to a SQL table to track our sales of Internet
Access. I’ve now written a quick Perl script that does a query of
the database, finds all of the records of sales this month, and then
calculates the revenue that has been generated … and outputs it in
the correct format for MRTG. And so now, I have several graphs
that show our month-to-date sales so that I can see our progress each
day … and throughout the day. What is interesting is to be able
to see the trends of when people purchase Internet Access …

MRTG allows me to easily visualize any type of information … in a very simple and elegent way.

Ken Novak, Bloglet, and virtualization …

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I was in the middle of debugging my problems with Radio categories last night, when in walked Ken Novak.  I met Ken Novak a number of
years ago at the Foresight Institute conference. He is always
involved in some interesting and exciting areas … I always like to
hear about his work. Last night as we talked about our use and
experiences with RSS, Radio, and various RSS related companies and
products. I have been looking at an idea that I described to Ken
and he pointed me to Bloglet … my idea already exists! This is a very cool idea … a variation on what News Gator is doing … converting RSS feeds into e-mail messages.

We also spent some time laughing about the current state of Userland’s
Radio … it is becoming clear that most experienced users just plain do not mess with it
once it is working well for them.  I’m going to keep pushing the
limits to get my categories going … and I’ll keep backing things up
on the way.

We also talked about virtualization technologies … his interest and
recognition of the value, and my experiences with Virtual PC
2004.  We talked about how we both expect to see people begin to
trade in Virtual Hard Disks … the large files created by Virtual PC
that contain the hard disk information.  We both see that this
goes another step beyond the current file-trading that people are doing
today.

I had hoped he would be here the rest of the weekend … we’ll have to catch up on-line …

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When cameras are everywhere …
This is an amazing article, with a link to a web site that shows just how advanced criminals are becoming … and how they are leveraging technology.

The concept is simple as described below … what is wild is that they are using some fairly simple technologies to accomplish this. Just the other night I saw an episode of Law & Order where a high school student took pictures of other students in the gym locker room … with her cell phone … and then sent them to other people. I hadn’t even thought about the portability of these “wireless cameras”. This all makes me think about where we are heading when miniature cameras can be carried and left just about anywhere. And people are thinking that we can protect privacy?

ATM Skimmers with Wireless Cameras, Pickups. Automated Teller Machine customers now robbed wirelessly without knowledge: The University of Texas at Austin police have a compelling page that shows how a skimmer (which scans ATM cards before they’re inserted into the ATM) and a wireless camera in an innocuous position nearby can steal a card and the PIN. The skimmer reads the magnetic stripe; the camera can see the PIN being entered. The thieves park nearby and retrieve the information wirelessly. This is reminiscent of last month’s story of a wireless Israeli post office money heist. It may be just me, but after years of being warned about shoulder surfers in the 1980s and 1990s, I often cover my hand when entering a PIN on a phone or ATM. I guess my paranoia pays off. Also, I only go to one bank’s ATM machines, which are uniform. I think I’d notice a weird add-on…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

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More power in your phone
This is another great presentation … and I really like the “miniGPS” link that Phil posted. Over the last week or so I have seen numerous new applications for Cell Phones that are really extending the capabilities of the phone. GPS and Location Based Services are the biggest.

The miniGPS link is really fascinating as they are using a completely different model for location detection and notification. They have an application that monitors the actual cell towers that you are connected to, and the signal strengths. They then allow you to assign events to particular towers, etc. The example that the author uses is that his phone will alarm when it comes into the cell near his house … notifying him that his train station is coming up …

Kill Apps for Your Cell Phone. Rael Dornfest and others are talking mobile hacks. There was lots of fun things, but here’s a few killer cell phone apps I didn’t want to lose track of: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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802.11 is here to stay …
I really like this perspective on 802.11 wireless networks. I have to agree with most all of his points.

There was one other quote in here that blew me away …

“And while many technologists would tell you that the x86 architecture is anything but elegant and certainly far from optimal, Intel recently shipped its billionth x86 processor.”

One billion of anything is a lot!

Why 802.11 is underhyped. Venture capitalist J. William Gurley sees parallels in the history of how the x86 architecture and Ethernet unfolded to dominate their respective markets. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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MP3s in the car? Been there … done that …
When I travel, I always take my laptop, and make sure that I have a good collection of MP3s on it. I rip all of my CDs to MP3 for portability, and often connect my laptop to the stereo in my truck. Because of 802.11 wireless technologies, I also realized a while ago that I can sit in my truck and download MP3s from my server in the house!

Last summer we picked up a small travel trailer and I am slowly outfitting it with current gear. I have a Sony multi-CD changer, and we have some surround-sound speakers that we aren’t using in the house. I’m also going to install a small server with full wireless connections – both client and access point. While the trailer is sitting at home, out by our barn, it will be on my home network … so we’ll be able to copy MP3s and other software to and from the trailer.

Rockford is offering a similar capability with their jukebox … which might be easier to use for the average user. I know that I’m not interested … I have my solution.

Download Music to Your Car. Rockford Corp. is offering a jukebox that sits in the trunk of a car and downloads music from a PC: Users could pull their car into their garage and at a predetermined time each night the jukebox would download new music from a PC in the house. The product retails for $600. This is a good idea but I’m not sure what the benefits are over using any portable digital music player in the car. I have an iRiver and recently bought an adaptor so I can listen to music from the iRiver in my car stereo. My method doesn’t do automatic downloads but that seems to me a small benefit to using the jukebox in the trunk…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

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More mesh network attention
This is an article by an IBM employee about mesh-networks. Some interesting perspectives and research going on …

City-Net: The future of wireless. Imagine a wireless meshing network that connects emergency workers, traffic signals, message signs, public transit vehicles, information kiosks, video cameras and other city resources. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News]

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I’m impressed with Netgear, and their wireless products
I was recently looking at some new 802.11x access points to see what I want to use in some new projects. I came across the Netgear WG302 and was truly impressed with this product. It has some very good radio specs, and a long list of advanced management capabilities. The advanced capabilities all seem to come from the fact that they have based the core functionality on embedded Linux.

This is now the second 802.11g access points that I have found that provide a full embedded system that could be extensible to add additional “edge” computing. This article seems to align with what I am seeing … that some people at Netgear are really thinking, and producing some very strong products.

Wireless gear boosts NetGear’s optimism. The company says it is raising its fourth-quarter outlook, as well as launching a secondary offering on behalf of its shareholders who are selling 9 million shares [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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George … are you listening now?
When I attending one of the George Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conferences a number of years ago, I got up and asked a question at the end of a Qualcomm presentation. My specific question – a leading question – was about 802.11 as a “disruptive technology”. At the time, I had been working with 802.11 and it’s predecessor for several years. It was amusing to me to hear the response that basically boasted about the bandwidth coming via the cell companies. This article was fun to see. George … what do you think now?

Wi-Fi is Bona Fide. Edge Consult says that Wi-Fi increasingly resembles a bona fide disruptive technology: This report actually has a handful of interesting tidbits about the development of the Wi-Fi market. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

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Mesh is getting real IEEE attention
I will continue to say that wireless mesh networks are the future. This article is demonstrating more of the momentum picking up. I have to admit that although this looks promising, I am not convinced that WDS is the solution that is going to dominate. I can be convinced though … and I know that mesh is inevitable … in some form or fashion.

Mesh Group Approved by IEEE. IEEE approves formation of mesh task group for 802.11 protocols: The IEEE has approved the formation of a Task Group for fulfilling the promise of the wireless distribution system (WDS) that’s been part of 802.11 since the beginning, Robert Moskowitz of TruSecure’s ICSA Labs wrote in to tell us. The mesh task group will work inside of the 802.11 Working Group to take the extremely vague specification for the WDS and provide a protocol for auto-configuring paths between APs over self-configuring multi-hop topologies in a WDS to support both broadcast/multicast and unicast traffic in an ESS Mesh, according to the group formation proposal that was approved. [Wi-Fi Networking News]