Asus 6 Series Wireless Routers - FINALLY an AP with Decent Strength / Coverage for Home / SMB

Update:


Sorry for being a slack-ass.

Rather than have a fluffy write-up of the unit, I've now actually got one in my hot little hands (my old-trusty Netgear WNDR3700 decided to pack it in after four years).

Although the reviews on SmallNetBuilder are good and I love the work they do, their theory could go a little way further.

I'm currently working on a wireless article that brings together the theory of wireless plus how this applies in the real world, and all the factors that you should bring into the equation when talking wireless (and uplinks as well!).

In the mean time, don't bother buying anything else except an Asus RT-N66U or one of it's 802.11ac variants.

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In the enterprise environment it's pretty much taken for granted that wireless AP's will throw wireless signal a decent distance (generally about 15M in a spherical pattern with the AP in the middle) and handle up to about 20 clients when using factory internal antennas.

In the situation where I need to throw signal further than that of a factory internal antenna, I employ an AP with external antenna connectors and then model the RF coverage based on an appropriate external antenna to ensure the required coverage is delivered.

Home AP's (generally sold as wireless routers) always seem to have the same if not better wireless throughput and routing performance than enterprise APs (at short range) but always skimp out on the antennas and internal amplifiers resulting in piss poor coverage and in-turn poor throughput within the home (unless you're generally within 10m of the AP).

Thankfully, that has now changed.

The following models of Asus Wireless Routers have the same if not better processors and 2.4/5GHz radios than their enterprise counterparts and also pack 2.4GHz and 5GHz amplifiers and use external antennas (reportedly 5dBi gain).

RT-N66U (802.11n Simultaneous Dual-Band)
RT-AC66U (802.11AC 1750)
RT-AC68U (802.11AC 1900)

The signal transmit power is significantly better and receive sensitivity also much better than a standard SOHO AP.

In the real world, this means that high throughput applications such as playing a video file off another device on the same WLAN will have much better performance within the same environment when compared to a standard SOHO AP.

As a quick overview, the specs of these AP's is as follows:

The System On a Chip (SoC) processors used in these APs provide fantastic routing performance between interfaces within the device (i.e. Gigabit LAN and 2.4GHz / 5GHz radios)  and the Broadcom chips used for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios are generally regarded as some of the best in the industry.

RF Coverage Pattern (Antenna Modelling):

Example of coverage and throughput provided in a house:

In the event that you require more coverage than what is provided by the included external antennas, using the Asus 6 series you have the option of purchasing additional external antennas to throw the signal even further.

nfDump and nfSen = All round netflow goodness.

CentOS 7 Released

New version available.
Apparently adds some things that were unique to Fedora up until now.
:)

The state of Hypervisor Virtualisation 2014

I wish someone would just make the perfect hypervisor.

Basically I guess what I'm asking for is ESX and VCenter to be released as Open Source products and the file system changed to EXT4.

I guess I need to provide some background to that statement...

I recently had a disk drop out of my home ESXi server with nothing particularly important on it but just for curiosities sake I thought I'd see what's involved in restoring a VMFS partition (more specifically, a VMFS5 partition).

Let me sum this up for you: good f#$%ing luck.

While NTFS and EXT3 have many good recovery tools available, there are basically two for VMFS:

PartedUtil and vmfs-tools for Linux.

PartedUtil sucks. Sorry, there's just nothing else to say about that application.

vmfs-tools (a VMFS5 enhanced version of the Google open source VMFS3 driver) is somewhat better but is still a very basic tool for something that a Windows or Linux application would barely break a sweat to achieve the same thing.

I started talking about VMFS with some of the more knowledgeable server engineers I work with who advised that "now that I mention it" they seemed to also think that disks may very well die faster in VMWare environments.

Obviously in an enterprise environment you will be running your disks in enterprise grade SANs so in the event of a disk failure it's a simple swap out / swap in and add to the array but it did seem very odd that disks failed faster when acting as targets for a VMWare environment.

Conspiracies aside, I've developed gripes relating to the changes that occur between different versions of ESX.

Finally, license costs.
Oh the license costs.

In a world where Xen, Hyper-V and KVM are taking off, VMWare licensing costs should only be going in one direction.


So, as I need to be across all things hypervisor in my job, I thought I'd run up Xen (and in time KVM) to see what it's like at this point in time (as I remember about two years ago Xen was incapable of CPU resource reservation).

In recent times, Citrix has relinquished Xen to being an Open Source product once again (which means it has now gone full circle) 

There are two options for running a Xen hypervisor at this point in time.

The first is to used the last cut as released by Citrix which is at least stable with a good interface.

The second is to install XenServer on top of a Linux distro of your choice.

This is quite a new option and not one that I have time to play with right now.

On a sidenote, Amazon Web Services apparently run their own custom cut XenServer environment.

I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

Anyway, I fired up the latest Citrix rolled up version of Xen (6.2) and not much has changed.

It still can't do CPU resource reservation (high medium low is not reservation) and the drivers for DVD / BD drive emulation still don't work properly for Windows guests.

These are the exact same problems I had two years ago. Fail.

Oh - and the recently released CentOS 7 doesn't boot after install.

There are two potential issues I see with Xen.

First: How much has Citrix mucked with Xen and are these changes actually for the good of the product?

Second: Now that it has been re-released into the Open Source domain, the dev community has to scramble to work with an inherited codebase.

The code might not actually be what devs want to work with (as in they might disagree with the way some elements of the app are built) and given that the code is so established, that could be a problem. 

This might result in a slowed development cycle and lack of community support.

So, back to ESXi for me for the time being.

Hopefully KVM has more to offer...

Restore SMS Backup Plus to Messages on CM11 (KitKat 4.4.3)

As all tech husbands and partners know, it's in your best interests to make sure your better half's tech works correctly.

So, being that I had to move the wifey's phone to CM11 to make BLN work, I thought it would be a good move to put mine on CM11 as well (so that it can be the test monkey when I have to perform trial and error to make something work).

So - we're both merrily using our CM11 loaded devices when we realise we can't restore messages using good old SMS Backup+.

As it turns out, Google has changed the SMS database security on KitKat and by default SMS Backup+ won't be able to write correctly to the Messages database.

So, scouring the internet revealed a lot of people recommending "join the SMS Backup+ community on Google+ and then you'll be able to access the Beta program which will fix the issue".

Well, that beta program seems to no longer exist.

So, what do you do?

Head over to the play store and grab yourself a copy of AppOps.

Make sure you use the one with no space in the name.

This program allows you to change an applications permissions to ensure it will work correctly for you on KitKat.

Be aware that you will need root access on your phone (not an issue if you're on CyanogenMod as it has root automagically - even if you're on a stock ROM, rooting is sooo easy these days!).

As it turns out, SMS Backup+ isn't given the permissions it needs to do it's job properly on KitKat by default.

So, once installed, fire up AppOps and scroll over to Personal.

Select SMS Backup+ from the list and scroll down to Write SMS DB.

You will notice that by default this is set to Denied.

Set it to Allowed and kick off your SMS Backup+ restore again and you're back in business.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (i9195) Back Light (BLN) - How to Make it Work

The time had finally come to replace the old faithful HTC Desire S (Saga) for the missus so after much looking around we landed on the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.

It ticks all the boxes for what we needed it to do but upon arrival we noticed it was missing one small but important feature we've taken for granted on every phone we've ever had between us (and yes - going back to our late 90's Nokia's as well!).

Believe it or not, the S4 mini doesn't include a notification LED.

Luckily, being an Android phone, there's always a way to fix things :)

To start the adventure, pretty much everything I read advised that BLN requires a patched kernel that has BLN support enabled.

So, wanting to stay on the stock ROM (touchwiz), I began the laborious task of finding a patched kernel that would work.

Amazingly, I found two!

There are two patched ROMs floating around. namely:
f4ktion_1.3.0-eur_lte-ML1
and
Vikinger-JB4.2-STOCK-eur_lte-18.01.2014

So, I gained root, installed CWM and flashed the kernel through CWM.

Then I installed BLN from Google Play which reported that the patched kernel was ok.

And....... Nothing.

Of note though, the Vikinger kernel absolutely kills your battery super fast.

So, at this stage, I thought ok, I'll downgrade the ROM to an ML1 ROM as that's what the patched f4ktion kernel was based on.

Still no dice.

At this point I arrived at the conclusion that (despite the odd person claiming they had BLN working on a touchwiz ROM but never replied to anyone that asked HOW?!) that the ROM itself must need to support for BLN as well.

As what is turning out to be a regular thing, I ended up finding out that CyanogenMod 11 has full kernel and ROM support for BLN included (when you install it the CM11 kernel will overwrite your existing one).

So, I headed over and grabbed the CM11 ROM from get.cm (the CM codename for the i9195 is serranoltexx), flashed it (don't forget Google Apps) , installed BLN and holy shit batman!
It works!

Being CyanogenMod, the ROM already includes root so there's one less thing to worry about :)

Interestingly, a CM11 ROM is about 200MB in size.
That's a bit better than the average 1.6GB Touchwiz ROM.

Now, for anyone who hasn't used a CyanogenMod ROM in a while, they've come a long way.
Apps are stable and all hardware works correctly on the 9195.

In addition, pretty much every little nicety that exists on Touchwiz is present on CM11 as well.
And if something's not there, you can be guaranteed there's an app or widget on the Play Store that will bring it back (we haven't found one yet).

The only problem I encountered on CM11 was restoring SMS's through SMS Backup +.
To fix this, check out my post Restore SMS Backup Plus to Messages on CM11 (KitKat 4.4.3).

So, there you have it.

Unless you're a lucky so and so who somehow manages to get BLN working on a Touchwiz ROM, as usual CyanogenMod is here to save the day :)

Enter the Chromecast

Tiny but huge.

Whether you're just after a device to wirelessly display your screen at a meeting or run your entire home media centre from your phone, the Chromecast dongle is your new best friend.

What is unique about the Chromecast that makes it special?

Two Words:

Cheap Convenience.

Need to show your mates a YouTube clip on the big screen? Just whip out your phone and Chromecast it.

Want to watch a video using your phone as the playback device?

Ezstream will take care of that.