Much better.

And sorry Vista, I tried, I really did.  I liked how your hot-swap driver support meant I could switch between stamina and speed modes without a reboot, but I hated your poor network performance against my NAS (even with SP1).  Maybe I’ll try again on the next new laptop.  Oh, and Sony?  Thank you for my XP downgrade CD and drivers.  Lovely.

I’ve sent a trouble ticket to support, but since they’re now owned by Netgear it’s anyone’s guess as to what’ll happen. Ideally I’ll get an empty chassis to put my (hopefully intact) drives in, and I can send my dead chassis back. Fingers crossed.

Update (6th July): I meant to blog this last week but: Kudos to Infrant/Netgear tech support.  I was contacted within a day by a tech support guy who took my diagnosis of dead PSU as correct and on receiving a PDF of my original invoice immediately authorised the shipment of a new PSU from the states.  This arrived a few days later.  Interestingly it’s a very different design to the original PSU, and includes a plastic riser to keep the cables out of the way of the air-flow.  It took a few minutes to install and my drives are all up and running again.   Great service!

You will need:

• A copy of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
• cdrom-1.21.iso from the m0n0wall site
• a blank virtual floppy image (you can create this inside MSVS)
• a real or virtual machine from which you will access your “router”

Create a Virtual Machine

Using the Virtual Server interface, create a virtual machine called “router” (or some other meaningfull name).  It only needs about 64Mb of memory, and it doesn’t need a hard disk.  (Click “Attach a virtual hard disk later”).  Attach the first virtual network adapter to the Internal Network for now.  We’ll add more NICs and change the network configuration later.

Once the VM is created, you’ll have a “router” folder under your Virtual Server default path.  Copy the cdrom.iso you downloaded earlier to this directory.

In the Virtual Disks menu click Create->Virtual Floppy Disk.  Select the location of your router folder in the drop down, and give it a sensible name.  RouterFloppy.vfd would be fine.

You’ve now got all the files you need created:

Now go into the config for your router’s VM.  Virtual Machines->Configure->Router.

Select the CD/DVD drive.  Hit the known image files drop down and select the cdrom.iso you downloaded and copied across.  Click OK.

Now select the Floppy drive. Again, hit the known floppy disks drop down and select the floppy you created earlier.  Click OK.

Now add two more NICs.  I add two because m0n0wall always expects the second NIC to be used for sharing a WAN connection (broadband internet) and it’s easier to ignore this interface and route between the LAN and OPT interfaces.  (This will make sense once you see the web interface.)

You should now have a 64Mb virtual machine with three NICs, a CDROM attached to the ISO and a floppy attached to our routerfloppy.

Starting the Router

Starting the router for the first time is a bit fiddly as the VM will attempt to boot off a non-existent hard disk – failing to use the CDROM.  When this happens you’ll see:

To get round this you’ll need to turn off the virtual machine and then as soon as you’ve turned it on, hit DEL to get into the BIOS:

Once in the BIOS, select the Boot menu, and then Boot Device Priority.  Change the 1st Boot Device to CDROM, then hit F10 to Save and Exit.

The Virtual Machine will restart, and start loading m0n0wall from the CDROM.  The floppy is there to save our router configuration.

After a bit of virtual thrashing about, the router will present it’s default startup screen:

(The “microuptime went backwards” seems to be an artifact of running in the virtual environment.  It doesn’t affect the running of the router.)

You’ll need to configure which router interfaces are connected to which physical (or in our case, virtual) NICs.  Hit 1, and follow the instructions – I usually say “no” to VLANs, and then assign de0 to LAN, de1 to WAN and de2 to OPT.  Allow the router to reboot once configured.

Now set the IP and subnet of the LAN interface – this will be your management IP.  Press 2.

In this example we’ll set it to 192.168.0.2 in a /24 with no DHCP:

That microuptime() thing gets really annoying.  Thankfull that’s the last time we’ll need to look at the console for a while.

The Web Interface

Remember that when we created it we put the router’s NICs on Virtual Server’s “Internal Network”.  If you have a virtual OS (Windows, Linux, whatever) running on your Internal Network you can connect to the router from that.  If not, you’ll need to move at least the LAN IP onto another network.

For our purposes I’m connecting it to my external network card – this way my real machine will be able to access the virtual router’s management interface.  Go into the configuration for the virtual machine, then select the Network Adapters link:

Once that’s done, you’ll be able to connect to http://192.168.0.2/ from your real machine.  Try it.  Your username is “admin” and the password is “mono”.

We used m0n0wall to route between three different sites using its traffic shaping features to simulate lossy and high latency links.  I may go into the details of how to set that up, although the manuals on their site are pretty clear.

m0n0wall combined with Virtual Server mean you can do some pretty smart infrastructure simulation.  I’ve successfully routed between virtual machines across multiple host machines and real machines on the same networks.  Neat.

To comply with current Internet standards, Internet Explorer limits the number of simultaneous downloads to two downloads, plus one queued download. This configuration is a function of the browser. However, as connection speeds increase, and the number of total connections that are allowed to Internet servers increase, the two-connection limit may be restrictive.

Please Note: Changing the maximum number of connections beyond two is a violation of Internet standards; use at your own risk!

To increase the number of simultaneous connections that are allowed, follow these steps:

1. Start the Registry Editor
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Internet Settings
3. Select New > DWORD Value from the Edit menu
4. Name the new value MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
5. Right-click the MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server value and choose Modify
6. Under Base, click the radio button next to Decimal
7. In the Value Data: box enter the number of simultaneous connections you want to set (for example 10 is a good value), and
8. click OK
9. Repeat steps 3 – 7 using the new value MaxConnectionsPerServer
10. Exit the registry editor

Voila. Assuming you have a reasonably speedy connection, pages should load a bit quicker!

Richard has blogged about doing something similar for Firefox.

On Monday morning, full of the joy that the idea of calling a tech-support person in Bangalore gives you, made the call to Dell. After waiting for 35 minutes, I was put through to a support agent. I explained the symptoms, and which diagnostics I’d run, and what happened when they ran. This completely threw him. He couldn’t understand how I’d known to run the diagnostics. “Who told you to do that?” he asked, as if I’d done something illegal. I pointed out that most people with half a brain and access to a diagnostics CD would have done the same. Placated, he continued, and asked me to run the diagnostics I’d just told him I’d already run! I asked him why I needed to run them again – and he said he needed to get the diagnostic code from the software. I tried to explain that he wouldn’t get a code because the laptop shuts itself off before it can return one, but he wasn’t having it. So, I ran the diagnostics. Again.

As I predicted, the system fell over about half-way into the seek test. Now the agent wanted to make sure that the system wasn’t just falling over when I did nothing on the machine. By this time, what with repeated diagnostic runs and the joy of explaining myself to three different agents, it was nearly 15:15. He asked me to open the BIOS, and just leave the system for an hour – to see if it would fall over when I wasn’t doing anything. The agent would call me back at 16:15 to find out what happened.

Well, 16:15 rolled around and, as I knew it would, the system stayed on throughout. 16:15 turned to 16:30, and still I had no agent call me back. Finally, at 17:00, I called them. Unfortunately I was put through to another agent who required the diagnostics to be run before he’d be confident of sending an engineer out. By the time those diagnostics had finished, it was after 17:30 – and all the people who book engineers had gone home. My “next-day on-site service” was NOT going to be next-day – I’d have to wait until Wednesday. Grrr! :(

You’d think that’d be the end of the problems, right? “Surely,” you’re thinking, “a well trained, highly competent Dell engineer came early on Wednesday and fixed everything to your satisfaction.” Well okay, maybe you’re not thinking that, but I was hoping for that resolution. How silly of me.

Late on Wednesday afternoon, the most incompetent, bumbling excuse for an engineer I have ever had the misfortune to work with arrived at the Barn. He started to disassemble my machine on his lap before I asked him to do it on the desk on his anti-static mat, then went hunting for the harddrive. That’s right – he was looking for it – like you would if you’d never seen an Inspiron before. After I’d shown him where it was, he removed it and replaced it. Then, after I suggested it might be a good idea (furrfu – where do they find these people?!) he ran the Dell diagnostics. Which promptly caused the machine to fall over in exactly the same way. Having reached the limits of his ability, he phoned Dell tech-support (on our phone I might add!) to ask them what to do. After an hour or so of him talking to an engineer on the other end of the phone it was decided that he would come back the next day with a motherboard, and another harddrive, and replace the whole lot.

He came on Thursday, earlier this time, and when left alone to fit the parts turned out to be a reasonably competent engineer. Maybe he read a book overnight, who knows. Anyway, the upshot is that he put it all back together with only one screw missing (I kid you not, there’s nothing holding my DVD-RW in).

Of course, that didn’t actually fix the problem. I’d fixed it myself that morning with nothing more than a compressed air duster. You know why? The Dell Inspiron line has a serious design flaw that causes dust to settle in the heatsink instead of being filtered out. Eventually that dust causes the system to overheat, and a thermal shutoff ensues – killing the system. I found this out on the user forums on the Dell site. As far as I’m aware Dell have yet to acknowledge this as a problem, and continue to send out engineers with all manner of unrelated spare parts!

Still, I got almost an entirely new system out of the deal, so it’s not all bad.

If you have an Inspiron 5150, I highly recommend you monitor the CPU and HDD temperatures regularly, and blast the heat sink with compressed air whenever the idle CPU temp. starts to rise. My system is idling at about 39C now – instead of nearer 60! A tool to monitor and control the thermal kit in recent Dell portables can be found here.