I use a Netgear FVS318N for my wireless connections and a frustration is that the region is locked to Europe, where the radio power is limited more than other parts of the world.

This means the highest achievable power is half, raising it to full results in this dead end:

Very annoying, this post shows how to get a region locked Netgear use all the power available, and to discover what devices in the area are competing for the wireless space.

Back to my initial problem of intermittent connections. Thinking the worst, the first hunch was a nearby miscreant creating a DOS attack by using de-auth packets, but this was quickly dismissed by a quick sniff on Wireshark.

Next was to discover the wireless devices competing with my access point, for this I use Inssider 3, the last free version of the product. Simply run the program, select your wireless card and a list of all discoverable access points display, along with their signal strength.

In this example, it’s clear why the disconnects were happening, my access point was competing a lot of others, including one that was on the same channel and power level as mine. Seeing something like this would normally be a cue to experiment with moving the access point to a different location to try and improve the strength, however for many this is not possible.

Moving onto the Netgear and getting the most power from it. While the web portal blocks the power rating, the command line interface (CLI) is not so sophisticated, but is just as useful in making configuration changes.

Getting access to this involves a Telnet connection. Using Putty, select the Telnet radio box and enter the IP address of the router. The username and password is the same used for the web interface.

To navigate the menus, enter a question mark to see the options that are available. To get to the radio section, enter dot11 radio configure to get to the radio sub menu.

Then default_transmit_power Full to set the radio power. Without fuss the CLI will just accept the command and displays a new line for the next. It’s important to commit the changes but typing exit to finish with the radio sub menu.

Then to exit completely, remove the pre-typed menu location and enter .exit to quit.

To check its successful, log in the web interface once more and the full power setting is populated when visiting the radio settings.

Note: clicking apply on this page with trigger the same region error as before, therefore if changes are to be made the power must be turned back down to half or lower in order to save. To get the full power back, Telnet into the router and repeat the above steps.

Revisiting Inssider, we can see that my access point has gained an advantage over the others for this location. It doesn’t look significant but is enough for my iPhone and other devices to keep a stable wireless connection.

Many newer IP cameras, including my Trendnet TV-IP572W comes equipped with a microSD slot for recording on a rotating basis. However, this has two main caveats, firstly the investment in a microSD card to be used solely for this purpose and of a high enough capacity to record enough footage, especially with the introduction of HD capture. Secondly is accessing the footage, as it is effectively held on the IP camera it is the gateway to the data. In my experience this process is slow, with having to download each video file manually and slow transfer speeds.

Imagine wanting to view an event that could have happened over a span of a few hours, and with video captured in segments of 5 minutes at most, the whole process can become tedious very quickly.

Therefore, I came up with another solution, one that uses my server’s hard disks for video storage to save on money while allowing larger video retention than a micro SD card. Also the ability to automatically delete older files to make way for new. This method uses Samba settings of an IP camera to save video to a Windows Server, and on the server itself, employing Disk Quota management to effectively trick the camera into thinking it only has a certain amount of disk space, to allow the cyclic video retention and prevent the footage taking up a whole drive on the server.

The benefit of employing Disk Quota management is that many cameras can record to the same volume or drive without fighting over space, plus with careful space management the days’ retention per camera can be manipulated. For instance an outdoor facing camera can be allocated more data and therefore more footage to search for suspicious activity, while an indoor camera can be set to record just a day’s footage in case of break ins.

Here’s how…

The heart of this system is to assign a user account per camera; this gives the ability to manipulate data capacity for each feed.

On the server

Open up Computer Management, on newer systems this is found by right clicking the Windows icon.

In System Tools, Local Users and Groups, right click Users and select New user.

Enter the details in the new user field, ensuring to check User cannot change password and Password never expires. Then click Create.

Next, on the drive of the video storage, right click and choose Properties, then choose the Quota tab.

Enable quota management by clicking the Enable quota management checkbox, and check the Deny disk space to users exceeding limit.

Then click on Quota Entries, then the new entry button .

Time for the drawn out Windows user selection, click Advanced, on the next window click Find now, then choose the newly created cctv account, then OK and OK to bring up the Add New Quota Entry.

Set the disk limit for this user, this is the maximum the camera will store on the drive, you can specify a warning level but most IP Camera will ignore this setting. On clicking OK the user will appear in the Quota Entries Windows, this window can then be closed.

Click OK on the drive properties window and acknowledge the warning, Disk Quota will be active.

On the Camera

Setting the camera up can vary drastically on the model, in the setup menu the recording menu needs to be found.

In the example of the Trendnet TV-IP572W, in the setup menu, choose Action then click the Recording checkbox to open the settings dialog.

Dependant on the camera settings, look for an option to save to a remote machine/server, or in this case a Samba share.

Use the credentials added to the Quota Management, and if available choose the Cyclic / Loop option so the camera manages deletion of the oldest files.

Review

Finally it’s time to wait for the quota to fill, and then check to see if the older data is being deleted automatically. For a more in depth review open the Quota Entries window, the camera will use the maximum available so will always be triggering the warning status, but this means that the maximum amount of data is available for review.

Recently while shopping for network cables to connect my new server I though it time to get a new line for the laptop since the plug clip on the current one was broken. I decided to go for Cat 6 cables just to keep up to date and nowadays there is not such a price premium over Cat 5e.

The first transfer of data through the new cable and instantly got 70MBps, nearly double the 40MBps I was getting before. Wondering why there was such a difference I looked at the replaced cable:

The old cable was in fact the first Ethernet cable I ever owned, acquired in 2000 as part of a Netgear home network kit and since had a lot of use as an emergency and temporary cable, it was used for the laptop only due to it not being used and long enough to reach. It turned out to be Cat 5 and in poor condition, so no wonder it couldn’t cope with speeds it wasn’t designed for.

Getting the most out of a Gigabit home network can be as simple as swapping over cables.

I took delivery of a Netgear FVS318N router to replace a basic hub, installed it and did a bit of cable management which involved unplugging my Sagem F@st 2504 that I use as a modem.

However upon powering up the Sagem after tidying cables, it has no life, apart from this strange arrangement of light on the front:

I called Sky (my ISP) support who happily informed me that there is a common issue with the power supply to the Sagem router that caused them to fail. Wanting to get back on the net immediately and conversation about a replacement power supply giving vague delivery lead times, I opted to purchase the new Sky branded router (dubbed the Sky Hub):

The outage lasted 5 days as I waited for delivery of the new modem. An annoyance of this is that I had a spare, working ADSL modem but this could not be used as Sky does not give out the credentials to log on to their network, instead choosing to pre-load them on the modem before shipping.

Overall its an example of the unexpected issues that can arise when running a home server on a budget.

BOOTNOTE:

It has been mentioned in many Sky internet forums that using an unapproved Sky router, i.e. one not supplied by Sky, will be in breach of the Terms & Conditions. However whilst on the phone to Sky broadband technical support the representative told me that it was acceptable to use a 3rd party router if the user was confident and acknowledged that no support would be given unless a Sky provided router was used.

The case may be that you still need to hand over the cash to Sky for one of their routers and keep it to hand, but after that the choice is yours!

Step 1: Start by downloading the basic version of the drivers from the HP website, choose Windows XP drivers if there are none for Windows 2003

Step 2: Open the executable file, allow it to extract and display the first setup screen. Here, depending on the printer chosen it may let you continue with the setup, or stop the installation there telling you the operating system is not supported.

Whatever the installation screen displays, DO NOT CLOSE THE WINDOW, while its open all the files you need are made available. Next navigate to your temp folder. TIP: Go to Start Menu à Run, and type  %temp%. This will bring up your temp files.

In the temp folder, look for a folder containing the setup files that were extracted as part of the installation, it will usually have .inf files that contain the printer model as part of the filename, below is an example of the drivers to install a HP C4700:

Step 3: At this point its best to copy (not move) the contents of the folder to a more convenient location. When a copy is made, you can close the installation utility as you have all the files in a new location.

Now navigate to Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes, and then start the Add new printer wizard.

After the intro splash, choose “Local printer attached to this computer” and un-check the box for “Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printer”

Note: Step 4 is for installing a printer over a network, if you are connecting via USB, skip to step 5.

Step 4: Click next, on the next screen you will want to select “Create a new port” and choose “Standard TCP/IP port” from the drop-down menu, as below:

This brings up a new wizard, after the intro splash onto the add port screen, type the IP address of the printer:

NOTE: To save reconfiguration in the future, remember to set the printer to have a static IP address as you are not installing the program that find the printer on a dynamic IP address.

The next screen, leave the settings as a “Standard device type” and “Generic network card”. Clicking next brings you to printer software screen.

Step 5: Click the “Have Disk” button and navigate to the copy of the installation files.

Only .inf files show, and you want to choose the most generic file name that is similar to your device, in this case above hpC4700.inf seems the most obvious.

If the right file has been chosen, you see your printer display as below.

If you get a warning message about a digital signature, choose “Continue Anyways”, but make sure you downloaded the drivers from a reputable site, such as the official HP website.

The installation wizards copies the files, then choose to print a test page to make sure all is well, and your HP printer appears in your printers folder.

Only niggle in my head was that the card I put Raspbmc on was 8GB, and that bigger card would be put to better use in my camera that was using a 4GB card. I thought it would be no problem to reformat cards and swap them over?

Wrong!

The 8GB in the camera was fine, and I used the Raspbmc installer as before to load it on the new SD card. The trouble was that when first booted up the Pi, it seemed to freeze on the

Sending HTTP request to server

No problem I thought, hop on my laptop and find out if other users experienced the same. But low and behold the internet on my laptop ceased to to work, with strange requests for proxy passwords to sites like Facebook and even the Weather gadget on Win 7!

First thoughts were that I cooked my router, as I been downloading a lot and on a warm day to (yes there was a warm day … I think!). But after it was off for as long as I could stand, powered it back on and normal service was resumed.

After rebooting all network equipment it finally dawned that the internet would go down for everything connected to my network when the Pi was powered up! I had never experienced this before and could not for the life of me fathom it out. I thought that it had a defect in the Pi meant that some sort of power surge was knocking out the system? This was quickly dismissed as local traffic was unaffected, meaning the network hardware was operating normally.

A quick glance at my Sky broadband supplied Sagem F@ST 2504 modem showed the internet connection had failed, with the internet indicator glowing orange with a red pulse every second. Stranger still, upon unplugging the Raspberry Pi, connection to the net restored within  seconds!

So how can a network device have the ability to target and destroy an internet connection? Its my understanding that a Pi has no ability to retain settings other than whats stored on a SD card, but this issue continued when using two different memory cards.

Drilling down to an extreme form of troubleshooting, all network devices, including my second switch/access point was disconnected from the Sagem router. leaving just the Pi connected. Then from Midori on Debian Squeeze (remembering that the internal network was unaffected) rebooted the router using the web interface.

Suddenly the Pi could connect, attaching my whole network back together I found that everything was back to normal,

Laptop, Pi, iPhone, everything!

And this is the worst thing, I don’t know what caused this, and what I specifically did in the reboot process that solved it?

So I would love to hear if this has happened to you, and if there was something you can pinpoint as the issue? This one has got me completely stumped!