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Nokia E90 part 1

After way too many months of waiting, we finally got our new Nokia E90. Apart from the design and manufacturing bugs, which pushed back the street dates, and apart from Vodafone’s cock-sucking mentality over the firmwares, which caused a few days of headaches, here is a litle debate over the firmware versions and the phone’s WiFi/WPA-capability.

Vodafone provided the phone with another product ID than the usual unlocked phones are. Failed to provide the latest firmware not immediately, but weeks after the release date of the normal phones’ firmware, making the NSU (Nokia Software Update) unable to update to the currently latest 7.40 firmware.

By some *pooof* *magic*, we were able to update the firmware to this version – TBH, we just wanted to see how AGPS and the new kernel performs -, but this unveiled a strange bug when connecting to our multi-SSID WPA network based on Merakis and OpenWrt. The phone rebooted. The bug was reproducible. It didn’t happen with the earlier 7.24 firmware.

After an evening of tweaking and almost fucking up my Meraki, I found out that we might have ran into a bug which happens when combining OpenWrt’s hostapd-0.5.8 and E90 7.40. Using hostapd-0.5.7 from a stable Kamikaze 7.09, the error did not occur, even with multi-SSID test networks.

I have yet to try to some other combinations, but it seems that I have to bug around with some sniffing with 7.24 and 7.40 versions, and hostapd-0.5.7 and 0.5.8. Bug or feature? 😛

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Testing Linux network appliances

It seems that one of my customer would like to have some kind of a network appliance in front of its windows server (good idea!), and I have some strange animals^W^Whardware lying around, I decided to do some performance testing. Following will be used:

  • Gateway 7001 AP – Intel XScale IXP422-based AP with 2 ethernet ports and 1 miniPCI.
  • Atmel NGW100 – AVR32-based development board with 2 ethernet ports
  • PeeCee with various hardware – “pick your favourite mobo brand and build some crap”

Testing will include NAT, some IPsec with various crypto engines measured with iperf, and also some power consumption measurement if I can get a good meter.

Results will be posted here, so check back later.