2012

Sat, Feb 18

<13:37 EEST> Yay! A weekend with nothing urgent to do, except to treat a fevery flu. Some preliminary symptoms showed up yesterday morning, but since they do not always materialize, I decided to proceed with the schoolday as usual — by watching a game of ice hockey.

It was a match between our local student team and a similar bunch from Grenoble, presumably important enough that everyone should see it rather than taking the afternoon lessons. I would have been happy staying at school doing my thing, but at least this was a kind of experience you don't get every day. I think the last time I went to see a hockey match was about 25 years ago, when the older brother of a classmate was playing.

Wednesday was time for a little hardware update. After a long while of keeping an eye on ADSL modems with gigabit switches, I finally found a reasonably priced and featured unit, the Buffalo WBMR-HP-G300H. I could have settled for a relatively dumb modem, but besides being the cheapest of its kind at 76.90 €, it is well supported by open firmwares like DD-WRT.

The difficulty of finding such modems has puzzled me for a while. Since getting the Powerbook in the spring of 2010, I realized all of my wired machines have gigabit ports, while the network is puttering along at the 100 Mbps of the Wippies modem. I did not have any specific need for higher speeds — for example, playing HD movies over NFS was fine — but on some level I was confused. Why did modems only have Fast Ethernet, while everything else was on gigabit? Why should I have to buy a separate switch to take up space and power, if I wanted gigabit?

Some people were quick to point out that ADSL and cable are generally slower than 100 Mbps, so there was no point in a faster LAN. Well, some people like to use the LAN for other purposes, and the different machines on one LAN might want to talk to each other. Besides, in recent years there has been a flood of 'consumer' applications for fast LAN, for example NAS boxes. So perhaps it was not surprising that Buffalo would be among the first to bring affordable gigabit modems to the market.

So far, there is nothing special about this modem, except that it does its basic work better than the Wippies Homebox. One reason I wanted another modem is that the WLAN AP in Wippies was acting up, causing problems for my N900. I also did not like the fact that it takes up an extra public IP, when the Wippies network is all but dead. Moreover, the USB print server was flaky. The Buffalo also offers a USB port for NAS and print service, so I figured it would do the trick.

Alas, I have not managed to print anything with it, using the stock firmware. The HP JetDirect way of Wippies did not work, but since the Buffalo was using Samba for NAS, it would probably share printers in the same way. Nevertheless, I have not gotten the modem to recognize the printer.

Or, actually, the USB-parallel adapter, which is probably the root of the problem. It has been flaky enough when used directly on a workstation. It turns out to work fine after a hint to use parallel: instead of usb: in the device URI. So at least I now have reliable printing on a local machine. The same trick should be possible on DD-WRT where you have more control on the modem, but given the general instability of the adapter, it seems better to keep things minimal.

One nice detail about the Buffalo modem is not rebooting on most configuration changes. All of my previous modems have seemed to want a full Windows-style reboot just in case. It would be a shame to reboot the wired network if you only want to update the WLAN AP, for example, and the Buffalo does the sensible thing to only restart the requisite subsystem. You can even telnet into the stock firmware to check the uptime :)