WING LOON

Recently, I read a news article that surprise me. High speed broadband comes from underground via the sewers? A company from UK, H2O Networks has been in negotiations with water firms for the last five years and began rolling out its fibre-via-sewers network known as FS Focus System (Fibre Optical Cable Underground Sewer System) in 2003. Universities in UK like Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Bournemouth are enjoying high speed fibre connections with speeds of up to 20Gbps while council offices around the UK are also benefiting from this high speed broadband. H2O Networks plan to roll out its Focus next month to move to a new phase which could see it supplying high speed fibre networks to businesses and consumers around the UK.

Using the sewers for fibre is not new. Country like Japan has a fairly widespread sewer-based fibre networks. Laying fibre through sewers is an alternative good way to avoid digging up the road. The roll out of fibre through sewers will shorten the deployment time. There is also a huge cost of reduction in benefits. With this benefits, I hope consumer will get cheaper broadband.

Can Malaysia Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides cheaper and high speed broadband through sewers?

Source: H2O Networks Dark Fibre Solutions | BBC NEWS - Technology

I bought a new PROLiNK Hurricane 6300G ADSL Wireless Router last week on Saturday to use in my mother’s house. It is an 4-Port Ethernet ADSL2+ firewall router with 802.11g wireless access point. I bought this economical product is to replace a PROLiNK Hurricane 9000W ADSL Wireless Router.

You may wonder why I am doing so. I have used the PROLiNK Hurricane 9000W for 3 years plus. The reason behind this is I am facing a problem connecting to my office’s email and IM after a VPN is connected. The problem is solved once I deployed it.

This ADSL wireless router complies with worldwide ADSL standards. It supports downstream rates of up to 8Mbps with ADSL, 12 Mbps with ADSL2, 24Mbps with ADSL2+ and upstream rates of up to 1Mbps. With this technology, it is sufficient enough to cater for 5 years or more on the current pace of broadband advancement in my country.

With the integrated 802.11g 54Mbps wireless access point, it gives me an easy access and mobility to roam anywhere at home via the 5dbi antenna. It is also backward compatible with any existing 802.11b wireless client devices. PROLiNK Hurricane 6300G ADSL Wireless Router supports not only the Wireless Encryption Protocol but also Wireless Protected Access (WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK) whereas the PROLiNK Hurricane 9000W ADSL Wireless Router only supports WEP.

The PROLiNK Hurricane 6300G ADSL Wireless Router has a built-in NAT firewall feature with Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), Denial of Service (DoS) attacks prevention and packet filtering. It complies to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and it support only DynDNS.com Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS). It also supports Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) for time synchonization, Domain Name System (DNS) relay, Virtual Private Network (VPN) pass-through, Dynamic Host Client Protocol (DHCP) and Simple Netwok Management Protocol (SNMP).

The web user interface provides a clean and easy management for users to install, configure and manage the wired and wireless network. Upgrading of firmware and romfile can be done via the web user interface easily.

Source: PROLiNK

With the recent mitigation spam exercise in TM Network, I received phone calls from my friends complaining on unable to access remote SMTP server listening on port 25 from TM Network. TM Net took an immediate action on the same day itself the email notification was sent out as well as the news notification was published in their website. I quickly relay this message to my friends and they got frustrated. To overcome this email relay issue on SMTP port 25, some of the local web hosting provider had created an additional SMTP port for email relaying to their affected clients.

So, I would like to share on how to setup EXIM, QMAIL or SENDMAIL to listen on additional SMTP port using iptables in a Linux mail server box if you are a web hosting provider or you have a co-located server in a data center. Make sure iptables is installed. Just run the following command below: -

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 2525 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 25

The iptables command above will redirect any request access to TCP destination port 2525 to port 25. You can change the port number 2525 to your preferred port number. Hope this help you guys. Good nite.

If you found these helpful, please contribute to help:

Recently, I had read a news regarding Google Maps with My Location. Google has launched a location service for mobile users that doesn’t rely on GPS. This service is currently in beta. Users can be located on their location to a nearby cell tower without having to own a GPS-enabled cell phone.

Back to the title above. Do you think that Malaysia celcos is capable of doing that? If they are capable to provide this service, do you think they should charge a small amount of service fee on this? With this service in Malaysia, I can say the rate of missing people and person got kidnapped will be lesser.

Source: InfoWorld

Finally, the Text Link Ads check I bank in one month plus ago is cleared on 3 December 2007. This is a long wait for me. I had decided to change my payment type to PayPal to fasten the process of my earnings with Text Link Ads. I will use this money to reward my readers on my blogging contest. I plan to launch my blogging contest either on December 2007 or January 2008. Watch out for it.

I received the above mention title in my email today. I have been receiving a lot of spam emails originated from TM Net’s ADSL broadband dynamic IP addresses. I am glad that at last they have finally come out with a solution to lesson spam by blocking outbound SMTP traffic from its dynamic IP addresses. Hopefully this solution will not interfere with other customers which are using fixed IP addresses. Please see below screen shot for more info.

I changed my current theme from Blog Oh Blog v2.0 to Pop Blue 3 Columns for December 2007. This is another cool theme I like from BOB. I made some modifications to suite my needs. It is a clean, simple and lightweight theme. Pop Blue 3 Columns theme is based on previous Pop Blue 2 Columns theme.

If you do not know, Blog Oh Blog was sold for $ 10,000 USD. BOB is from Malaysia. His blog is 5 months old. Making that amount of money in 5 months is amazing. Please read here for more info.

Source: Blog Oh! Blog

Deluge 0.5.7.1 released on 1 Dec 2007. Deluge is a full-featured lightweight cross-platform BitTorrent client. It is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Please refer to the changelog below for the version changes.

Deluge 0.5.7.1 (1 December 2007)
* Tweak full hd warning so that it only displays itself once per torrent that it has to pause
* Fixed crash and corruption of persistent.state while adding a duplicate torrent. Also caused yet another invalid handle error
* Increase tracker timeout

Source: Deluge

VLC is a cross-platform media player and media server. It supports various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a media server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Below is a full changes between 0.8.6c and 0.8.6d: -

Various bugfixes:
* Mozilla plugin: supports a reasonable amount of MIME types on Windows
* Linux: Fixed S/PDIF passthrough with ALSA
* Automatic recovery on unexpected stream discontinuity (clock gap) occurrences in input
* Use field order (top/bottom) for correct bob/linear deinterlacing
* Fix invalid free in bookmarks loading code

Windows and Mac OS Binaries:
* FLAC Security Update (CVE-2007-4619) to prevent multiple integer overflows

Active X plugin:
* Security update (VideoLAN-SA-0703)

Mac OS X Interface & Port:
* Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with enhanced functionality
* Improved Video Output compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
* Improved behavior of the Fullscreen Controller and mode changes between Fullscreen and Windowed Video Output
* Softened the white flash artifacts that may appear during the transition of two different movies
* Support for current Ogg file formats
NOTE: This release requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. Mac OS X 10.3.9 is not supported anymore.

Encoders:
* Improved H.264 encoding speed on Mac OS X

Other changes:
* The automatic updating facility was removed
* You now need to append –m3u-extvlcopt to your command line to enable EXTVLCOPT options parsing in m3u playlists

Soruce: VideoLAN

I had been assigned a task to create a simple script for finding and deleting files older than 1 day, 7 days and 30 days for a backup directory. As usual, I will use Google (the ultimate search engine) to search for my answer. I found the answer from the How-To Geek.

Below is my simple script: -

#!/bin/bash

FIND=`which find`
RM=`which rm`

DPATH="/backup/daily"
WPATH="/backup/weekly"
MPATH="/backup/monthly"

DDAYS="+1"
WDAYS="+7"
MDAYS="+30"

if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: ${0##*/} [daily/weekly/monthly]“
exit 1;
fi

if [ $1 == daily ]
then
$FIND $DPATH -mtime $DDAYS -exec $RM {} \;
exit 1;
fi

if [ $1 == weekly ]
then
$FIND $WPATH -mtime $WDAYS -exec $RM {} \;
exit 1;
fi

if [ $1 == monthly ]
then
$FIND $MPATH -mtime $MDAYS -exec $RM {} \;
exit 1;
fi

Source: the How-To Geek