Enabling auto connect and wifi on bsnl routers

By AG
In Pune, India for a vacation.

Switched to boradband from dial-up and was trying to work around the router BSNL provides with the connection. It says it supports wifi, and it does so decently.

BSNL engineer usually will create a dialer on your machine and charge you Rs. 600 to enable auto connect and "multi user" support. Multi user is nothing but allowing multiple machines (wired or wifi) to connect simultaneously to the router. Since it is dialer-based only 1 machine can dial and access Internet.

Enabling all this is like eating Goober Pie in Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in DC (BTW, its amazing and a must try!). In short, very few changes are needed from the factory settings. Follow this to enable auto-connect and wifi on any of your BSNL dsl modem cum routers. Mine is DNA-A211-I.

1. Go to the default getway, most likely 192.168.1.1. If you are unable to get to it, feel free to reset the router to the factory setting by a small button at the back of the router.

2. Login using admin/admin, unless you have changed it. (You should!)

3. Go to "Advanced Setup" -> "WAN". Click on the "edit" button on the entry with values 0/35 for VPI/VCI and PPPoE for Protocol.

4. Select service category "UBR without PCR". Click next.

5. Select "PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE)" and Encapsulation Mode as "LLC/SNAP-BRIDGING". Click next.

6. Type username and password for your BSNL connection, "dataone" as service name and "AUTO" as Authentication Method. Check "Dial on Demand" and set 30 minutes (or whatever) as timeout. Check "Retry PPP password on authentication error" and "Bridge PPPoE Frames Between WAN and Local Ports (Default Enabled)". Click next.

7. Check "Enable WAN service". Click next, save and save/reboot.

The router should come up and have wifi enabled without having to provide BSNL password, ever.

Shiny new SuSE root file system for UML

Category: , By AG
All I wanted was a minimal root fs with development tools (gcc, make, ...) for UML. This is especially important when, say, you want to test new file system tools which snapshot a directory, and this is only possible when the tools are available inside the root fs. There are many root fs elsewhere on the web, but none with development tools (and rightly so, since for most cases you won't need those).

So created a VM using VMware Workstation and bzip2'ed the '/' without /proc, /tmp, and /sys and manually created those directories outside of the VM. Also chopped down the unnecessary things on startup using chkconfig(8) and modified /etc/inittab to give 2 xterms on boot. Root password is 'guest'.

Have uploaded it on my homepage: http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~gud/tools/suse11.1-rootfs.bz2