This is probably of interest to E-smith users in Australia and New Zealand. If you have customers who need broadband access and they are unable to get cable or ADSL, this is the painless way to do it. It's actually old news now, but I haven't announced it here before.
Short version: Contact your favourite Ihug reseller (including ahem, Ifost[*]). This is everyone who offers satellite except for Optus and Telstra. Order a satellite connection and request a SkyMedia 200D card. Then install the drivers below. rpm --install http://satconf.ifost.org.au/latest-driver.rpm or for the permanent location: http://satconf.ifost.org.au/e-smith-512-skymedia-satellite-1.0.0-01.i386.rpm Works on E-smith 5.1.2 Long version: Satellite links are a funny business, because they are one-way -- you still need to have an outgoing link (e.g. dial-up modem). So your e-smith machine will have two external interfaces, only one of which sends data. This means all sorts of fun for the masq scripts setting up the firewalling rules, which also get upset about traffic going out one interface with a source address of another! These drivers put template fragments all over the place -- updating httpd.conf, /etc/rc.d/init.d/masq, /etc/crontab, add new events to update the routing table when phone links go up and down, and adds a nice neat little manager page. You're supposed to sigh and thank me for doing all this work for you. What ends up happening is that you alias an ethernet or ppp interface to have the address of your satellite card, and then set your default route to be through that aliased interface. That means that any traffic leaving the E-smith box (including masqueraded stuff) has its source address set to something funny. The other end then replies back to the funny address, which gets sent back through the PAS8 satellite. OK, so how to do this complex setup and keep the "simple as possible" E-smith philosophy? Since you must already have an internet connection to use the satellite service, it can download its configuration automatically if you use the right provider. This is everything it needs to know including frequencies, symbol rates as well as the IP addresses to use. The autoconfigurer then writes the SkyData.ini config, runs SkyData, adds the ppp0 alias (or eth0 alias if the default route is across ethernet for the first hop) and updates the routing table as well. Then it sits around in cron, and wakes up every now and then to see if it needs to update anything. This makes it utterly trivial to set up; just align the satellite, run plug the card in and run the rpm --install command above. On the other hand, if you don't want your config being updated remotely, or if autoconfiguration fails for some reason, there's still an e-smith manager panel where you can fill in the details, and then events to take care of all the background tasks. You can switch between the two (autoconfigured or manually configured) pretty easily, and you can also disable the satellite link (e.g. when PAS8 is behind the sun) from the web interface as well. It's free, but I can't GPL the software completely. Telemann (who wrote the Linux drivers) have one .o file they link with, which they give away for free but don't provide source. Everything else (all the stuff that I did) is source-code available for use to your heart's content. I'll be aiming to keep it updated for each E-smith release; since there are kernel modules this can be a little tricky. Ihug may change cards soon, and implement an anti-hijacking method which I will try to keep apace with. That's all for now. Have fun with it! [*] Unashamed advertisment: http://www.ifost.org.au/Satellite -- Regards, Greg Baker The Institute for Open Systems Technologies Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone Int'l: 61 500 545 856 (GMT +10/11) Phone Aus: 0500 545 856 Mobile: 0408 245 856 -- Please report bugs to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] (only) to discuss security issues Support for registered customers and partners to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives by mail and http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo%40lists.e-smith.org
