Internet

I have been using an EdgeRouer POE as my main router for most of the network (some of the network still uses PFSense as a router, but thats being removed soon) for the last few weeks, and i am quite happy with it. I also have a second router, a Sophos UTM VM between my first LAN (essentially a DMZ) and my client LAN (there will be more “LANs” over there soon). The Client LAN is NATed between the DMZ and the LAN, which means anything on the LAN i want to access from the DMZ has to be port forwarded… Ideally, not much from the LAN should be accessible though the DMZ, but in my initial setup, stuff like Plex, etc, is…

Today, my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter POE arrived in the house. I got it hooked up to both UPC connections (as secondary connections) and all seems to be working grand. Some notes i wanted to put up here:

• out of the box, the install was quite simple. set my Ethernet connection to a static ip in the 192.168.1.x/24 range,
  using 192.168.1.1 as gateway and dns, and then point at http://192.168.1.1 for admin. login (ubit for both username and
  password) and heay presto. I was asked did i agree to the license, and then im in.
• by default, NAT is off… i turned it on, and enabled DNS and was able to surf.
• I also noticed the software was out of date… Oddly, there did not seem to be an option to update automatically, but
  you can manually download the tar and upload it, which i did.
• so far, so good… not sure yet if i will be using it as my main router, but it may end up being a VoIP router.

Finally, speed test result below:

After my post about the Raspberry Pi acting as a VoIP server, and being able to add a 3G Dongle and allowing it to act as a Mobile Phone gateway, it got me thinking… Why not have something that allows you to rent a mobile phone number in a country, send and recieve text messages, phone calls, etc, all from anywhere in the world? Thats where Mobile Phone as a Service comes in…

I have been using an iPhone 4 as a wifi hotspot for a while now. It does not have a “phone” SIM in it, with calls and texts enabled, instead it has a 3G Data SIM from a dongle… It works OK, but there are a few issues i have with it…

• No easy way to see how much data is being used, unless you Jail Break, and then battery life goes away…
• not very hackable… other than Jail Break, and thats not hackable enough…
• not a lot of storage: 16Gb, and most of that is takin up by Music and Apps
• no background network daemons… more on that in a second…

The Network Daemons i am thinking would be useful for a WiFi Hotspot would be Squid, WANProxy, SSH, PPTP or OpenVPN Client and possibly a downloader of some sort. What i am thinking is as follows:

I have been running a Dedicated Server from Hetzner for a while now, but have started to look at what i am running on the site, and reailized i under utilize the machine a lot… For example, this site is generated using Jekyll, which takes up very little power, and becomes static HTML files. My other blogs (Tiernan’s Comms Closet and GeekPhotographer) are both low traffic WordPress sites, and I run a couple of other static sites also for friends… All in all, not a lot of power…

In my previous post on WANProxy, i did not really go into detail about what it actually was. The direct quote from their site is WANProxy is a free, portable TCP proxy which makes TCP connections send less data, which improves TCP performance and throughput over lossy links, slow links and long links. This is just what you need to improve performance over satellite, wireless and WAN links. This is something that has interested me for a while, so i have been looking into it, and so far so good. In my last post i mentioned i was proxying Squid traffic, in todays post, i still am, but with some tweaks.

I am a UPC Ireland customer, and have 2 cable modems into the house, both Cisco EPC3925s. These are not exactly great modems for power users, but are grand for normal use. Me, however, being a poweruser wanted something a little more, how should I put it, powerful.

A couple of months back, a tutorial was posted on Boards.ie which showed you How to enable “bridging” on your UPC modem. When i say “Bridging”, they used DMZ, turned off firewalls, static IPs internally, turned off WiFi and DHCP, etc. It worked, quite well actually, but was “odd”. Today, however, there is a new tutorial Enabling REAL bridging on a Cisco EPC3925. I have tried this, and so far, it works! now just to set my router to work correctly, and update my IPs if they change.

I have been very interested in VOIP stuff for the last while now, and finally started looking at implementing it in the house. Here are some links which may be useful. I will do a full post soon.

• Asterisk 1.8 with chan_mobile on Centos 6: chan_mobile allows you to use a Bluetooth phone to make calls with Asterisk
• Use an old Mobile Phone as a GMS Gateway in asterisk: again, similar to above, but with Ubuntu.
• 3CX: my current choice in VOIP software.

The main VOIP hardware I use is: