mensi.ch

I finally got everything working: after some troubles with a faulty Thermaltake powersupply (It kind of died under some load; meaning one or two harddisks) and will be playing around with zfs a bit before deciding about what to use. The machine has a raw disk capacity of 2.5 TB which should be enough… at least for some weeks   As a FreeBSD guy, I already installed 7.0-BETA4… still waiting for the RELEASE though…

I recently got the idea to play around a bit with our spare ISDN line (we got ISDN back in the days when it was the only means of getting internet access and phones working simultanously) so I installed an AVM Fritz! Card PCI into “cheff” the Mini-ITX homeserver. The installation of CAPI drivers and Asterisk on gentoo is pretty straight forward, so I got a SIP phone with dialout and dialin working without problems. Now as Asterisk is quite flexible and I wanted some kind of notification of incoming calls, I built a little python script to broadcast incoming calls to the LAN. A quick and dirty C# app could then listen on a specific port and display a baloon tip whenever an incoming call occurs.

extensions.conf entry

exten => 7114988,1,System(/usr/local/bin/logcall ${CALLERIDNUM} “7114988″)

logcall

#!/bin/sh
PNUM=$1
TONUM=$2
echo “[`date`] $PNUM -> $TONUM” >> /var/log/call.log
/usr/local/bin/udp_broadcast $PNUM $TONUM

udp_broadcast

#!/usr/bin/python
from socket import *
import syss = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM)
s.bind((”,0))s.setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, 1)
s.sendto(‘call from: ‘+sys.argv[1]+”\nto: “+sys.argv[2], (‘<broadcast>’, 50000))

I recently had the chance to play around with a LaserBit Wireless Cable. It is very easy to use: I just acts like a straight LAN cable and comes with RJ45 connectors. Setting it up is pretty simple in theory: fix each transceiver on something and point them at each other; alignment however is quite tricky over large distances because you can’t actually see the laser; it’s IR. We had quite some trouble with our ~600m setup but finally managed to establish a stable link. It only held for one day though as one end was attached to a large tent; obviously not the best thing but our only option. We previously tried to use 2.4Ghz helix antennas (~14db gain) and standard WLAN, but it failed miserably at about 200m due to several obstacles and a little hill.

The whole setup: (internet access for a camp)

We got ADSL from a nearby farm, attached an ADSL modem and a WRT54GL accesspoint which provided coverage for an AP in client mode attached to one end of the Wireless Cable. The other end was at the top of a tent, attached to another WRT54GL, which provided covergage for the camp. Another WRT widened the range (per WDS) and had a printer attached.

It was an interesting project, however it was never used at its intended purpose; sometimes the laser had to be realigned, sometimes the ADSL connection dropped (the farm itself was quite abroad, so the line quality wasn’t that great…)