Oh, I did have a hiccup, solely my fault - registered with the wrong google account and couldn't get my purchased apps. I had to do a factory reset and root it again :-(.
A Nook color. Bought for $200 plus tax B&N deal on ebay. Thanks to my friend Ramesh for ordering it for me and my BIL Srini for getting it to India. Also have acquired a iPad (also thanks to Srini) and should be getting a Samsung Galaxy S2 from letsbuy.com in a few days. I was appalled that somebody would pay 25K+ for a phone and here I have ordered one for 33K.
Any way, very impressed by the iPad. Nook has been somewhat below expectations. Touch screen response is pretty poor compared to iPad. Browsing is also a lot slower. Loaded CM7 via an 8GB SD card and also tried another SD card dual booting Phiremod and Honeycomb. Liked stock CM7 better without Phiremod enhancements and Honeycomb is beta quality anyway. Stuck with CM7 for a couple of weeks now and not really happy. It's quite slow, likely to the fact that it's running off an SD card. So manually nooted it today, if I feel like it I'll update the status in another blog post :-)
Sneha has started school - GEAR International - she has started in M0 Montessori. GEAR is one of the reasons we moved because "traditional" schools were admitting even for playschool only if the child completes 3 yrs in June. Sneha is November end born and GEAR wants to take in children into Montessori at 2.5 yrs which kind of matched our timeline.
My previous apartment in Jayanagar has been given out on rent since November. I miss Jayanagar but love the commute from the new apartment. There is a back road that leads to Cisco's back entrance; which was previously a bad road but now nicely done and hardly takes a 3 mins drive. I still need to drive about 1 KM on a mud road to the back entrance of APR but not touching ORR is a bliss. Things will probably improve on ORR once the construction is done but the back road is perfect for Cisco.
Since December 15 2011, I've also moved to a different Business Unit in Cisco - SAVBU. That's a big change after a 9+ year association with Andiamo/Cisco.
I am still leaning towards the Android but I think I'll hold out for Samsung Galaxy S pricing before taking a decision on my next geek toy ;-). Ganesan
We're also looking for an experienced kernel programmer (4+ years) to work on the protocol stack in the kernel.
Work will be on Cisco's NX-OS which is based on Linux. Platform would be MDS 9000 and/or Nexus 7000 datacenter switches. Please send your resumes to grajagop at cisco.com.
After ignoring facebook for a long time I finally took the bite. Seems to be a really happening thing, looks like I am a dinosaur in this social networking rage ;-). Found some old friends which is really cool.
Sneha's a year and 8 months old. She has a allergy and asthma problem which seems to be affecting a lot of kids in Bangalore. Allopathy doesn't seem to be helping much. We tried Ayurveda but it's very difficult to get Sneha to take the medicines. So we're trying homeopathy now. We just started with Dr. Latha of Raghavendhra Home Clinic in Jayanagar 7th Block (near KR Road). Let's see how it goes. At least, Sneha takes the medicines easily :-). Hey, thanks to all the folks who sent in references by the way.
Work is tight - as usual :-). Still find it hard to balance work and life after so many years!
Latest toy is a Nokia E63 mobile phone. Didn't have the heart to splurge nearly 20K on the E71. E63 cost about 12.5K. Like it so far - so finally giving my Treo 650 a good bye. I tried a E51 briefly but the screen was too small for my comfort. Like the E63 a lot so far. My biggest requirement was to sync Address book and Calendar. Mail was lower priority. Cisco has Exchange sync enabled over WLAN and I was able to set it up relatively quickly. Works like a charm and no costly mobile bills :-)
In my recent trip to San Jose (Sep/Oct), I was waxing ebulliently about VoIP ATA adapters to my friend Ramesh Panuganty when the topic of putting the VoIP phone in another room came up. These ATA adapters (Linksys PAP2T, Grandstream Handytone 503 etc) come with a regular ethernet port. Both our homes don't have a wired LAN configured, so this was a problem. When we looked at wireless bridging options, we found the solutions to be quite expensive and supported only one port (See Linksys WET54G for example, 90 bucks for 1 ethernet port!).
Compare that to the price of Linksys WRT54GL for only $64 at the same website. You can get other brands like Netgear or Buffalo for even cheaper. So the question of whether you can use these devices for bridging to LAN segments came up. A bit of googling and reading confirmed that this is called "Client-Bridge" mode and is supported by all of the open source firmware options for the WRT54G.
Incidentally, I was feeling a dire need for a ethernet hub to debug the SIP registration problems (no low end home networking switch seems to support span). Wouldn't it be nice to run tcpdump right on the WRT54G for this purpose? So it was time to dust out my little box and play with it. It turned out to be surprisingly simple. I initially downloaded the DD-WRT version which seemed to be more popular. Following the advice in the wiki pages, I first downloaded flashed the mini generic version of v23 SP2. Without even checking it out immediately upgraded to the WRT54G "voip" version (no good reason, the "voip" just sounded attractive :-). Wireless bridging worked beautifully. Just configured my SSID and my WEP key and everything worked flawlessly.
There was one small problem. After wasting half an hour on it I realized that my 4MB box had no free space to install tcpdump. So I switched to the mini WRT54G version which gave me enough space. After wasting another half an hour on it because I didn't configure the IP router and DNS correctly, I managed to install tcpdump package using ipkg. Only, tcpdump didn't work. I always got a bus error. Okay, what next?
Fortunately I had already downloaded X-WRT image bundled with the OpenWRT "White Russian" firmware. I download the X-WRT because it promised a better Web UI and I didn't really want to muck around with the CLI trying to configure the box. This one worked great. The original settings from the DD-WRT firmware worked fine for the OpenWRT firmware too. I was able to get tcpdump working. OpenWRT is more Linux/Debian like (more software options and no weird Microsoft like SP2 naming for the image). So everything is hunky-dory now :-).
So it turned out that the BSNL Huawei modem had a messed up NAT. Response to the outgoing registration packets from the Linksys were coming to the PC! So I rebooted the modem but that didn't help either. I just retyped my password in the Linksys and that did the trick. I am reasonably confident that it was NAT translation issue; so BSNL is not at fault on this occasion. At least not since yesterday.
Some one commented to my previous post that BSNL is blocking specific range of IP addresses which may very well be true. I tried logging out my PPPoE session a couple of times to get a new IP Address. It didn't seem to help, I didn't have the patience to keep trying. But really, this sucks.
On a related note, it's pretty painful to debug what exactly going on with these headless devices. This is not just a Grandstream device issue. I face the same issue with the Linksys PAP2. Grandstream did provide logging to an external server which helped me quite a bit. However, I need either a hub or a low-end switch that can do span. I do have a Linksys WRT54G, I can put openwrt firmware and do tcpdump right on the box. That's a project for another day.
Incidentally the Grandstream box appears to be running Linux though Grandstream website makes no mention of it. I'd love to get a shell prompt on it. It's a very small and sleek device.
Suddenly, BSNL appears to blocking SIP ports. The clue is your device fails to register with the SIP server. For all I know this may be a regular thing because the problem keeps popping up for me once in a while in the short time I've used the device. I always thought it's a device issue but today I decided to dig deeper and here's what I found. Outgoing port 5060 (the SIP port) is definitely blocked for both tcp and udp (I test with an external BSD box where I have ssh access). So I found another VoIP provider called Callcentric which conveniently provides SIP port 5080 and SIP registration appears to go through fine.
The summary above looks simple but I had to go through a lot of trial and error. At first it appeared that ports 5061 through port 5080 were also blocked but right now just after I started posting this I was successfully able to get through to callcentric. I am using an excellent utility called sipsak to help me with debugging this. Any way, if BSNL is indeed blocking SIP calls that's really bad. VoIP is legal in India for individual users and BSNL has no right to do this. Ganesan
Oh well! By the way, if you're reading this and consider yourself a good C programmer (3+ years experience!), you know how to reach me ;-). We're looking for good Unix/Linux Network and System Programming Skills for working on an Enterprise networking switch.
This brings me to the strange problem of getting connectivity in the first place. The consensus (at least in my Office) is that Airtel is the best (connectivity wise, don't talk about billing :-), followed by BSNL, followed by other options like Sify, Hathaway etc and to never go near Tata Indicom. However, getting Airtel or BSNL appears very tough. Even being in a "well connected" locality is no guarantee to get a connection. It seems that BSNL has virtually stopped giving connections in Bangalore. There seems to be a big "last mile" problem in Bangalore.
Which is where WiMAX comes in. There are reports that some company (probably Airtel) plans to cover whole of Bangalore with 2 Mbps WiMAX in 2007. The trouble is, while there are lots of news articles talk about WiMAX in Bangalore, no company website has any information about the launch. If that happens, it will be really a good thing.
I was pretty excited to see ads for a LG DVD recorder (model DR 165) in Bangalore Times of India for 11.5K. Though Samsung India has had a model (DVD-R121) in India for a while, I didn't know about it till later. Any way, the LG model is DivX capable (player only, not for recording) and quite a bit cheaper. Unfortunately, I can't find it any where in Bangalore (by any where, I of course mean checking 3 or 4 shops in Jayanagar area ;-). If any reader knows where I can get one, please let me know.
