fonosfera

OktoPussy is making making good use of it’s name. Here it comes as OktoPussy-2 ‘reloaded’

In no time it has changed to adapt to the environment. This is the new stuff it brings for you:

• Samba works on WAN! Oh yes…  You can finally connect the hard drive of your Fonera 2.0 from your home network! Some people were dying to have this
• More and more languages! Can you speak Traditional Chinese, Dutch? Then the OktoPussy-2 is for you!
• Hey! How about this? we like Windows too! (well, we don’t, but need to pretend). NTFS issues have been fixed so far. If you still experience trouble, go buy a new hard drive! :D
• We have added a nice timer for when you reflash the fonera and get rid of OktoPussy-2 to get the next animal. OktoPussy-2 will say goodbye like a real gentleman. No need to wonder if the flashing is over or not, it will let you know!

Guys… we’re getting closer and closer to the final release. We’re stable, we have closed most bugs. We only have a few features more to add to the base firmware. Get ready for the opening to the world!

What wil be the animal for the first production release?!? Give us some suggestions if you want ;) we won’t listen anyway hahahaha

As a special present, we have 1 more thing for you. Well, some of you. The OLPC plugin: this makes the fonera be the first AP to allow OLPC devices to connect to it!! Oh yes! All OLPC owners should get a F2, the Marvell WiFi dongle and connect it to the  F2!! Will F2 become the main Internet access for millions of children over the World?
The files:

• Image - md5sum
• Fon package - use only with Tantor or OktoPussy
• ddns plugin - with new languages (need to uninstall the previous version if installed)
• OLPC plugin
• FONBackup - The backup tool for your F2. Use it in combination with a hard drive and backup all you want. Win, Mac, Linux

So here we are… later than expected but happy enough to present: OktoPussy, the new fon-ng firmware release for the Fonera 2.0

And so what?  Well dudes, we’ve got some nice tools for you. First of all, we are finally releasing a few plugins. Most of the work in this month’s been to clean up the system to accept the plugins, make some of them (we are releasing 2 today but we have 2 more in the oven), fix a few bugs you discovered in poor old Tantor and adding new features.

Here we go with the presentation, welcome our new rockstar! OktoPussy!

OktoPussy represents the extendability of our firmware. It’s many arms resemble the plugins you will be able to install in it. It can use many arms at the same time, doing different tasks! It’s multimedia ;) (remember when this word was being use for the very first times for PCs? Now it’s come to the routers!)

The new features and fixes are the following:

• Improved look and feel: added a few new buttons and icons
• New status page. We still want to integrate more information and format it in a nicer way… but now you can see some traffic stats on the different interfaces. Tell us if you love the graphics like we do!
• Added and fixed access to some services from the WAN interface: ftp now works and the webcam can also be accessed from the outside. Samba is the pending issue though, sorry windows lovers…
• New languages! Hungarian is there (thanks bmpeter) and well… any others would also be there but we need you guys to translate! Here you can find what to translate…
• We fixed the whitelisting system. Sorry, some of you reported you couldn’t sell passes from your devices. Too bad… but over!
• There’s a button to reboot the device and one to reset it to factory defaults ;)
• Added the option to enable/disable replying to pings on the WAN side.
• Some internal working as I said… if you’re interested on what, check the svn logs.

And well, the first to arms of OktoPussy (official ones) are DDNS (DynDNS support) and, surprise, a FONBackup tool!

This Backup tool is still in development so, please, don’t use it as your main backup tool (although reliable, it’s still not as fast as we want it and you may end up jumping off a cliff… hehe). But it has very good points we want you guys to test:

• First of all: it is SO EASY. No installation, no configuration (almost). Just open it, pick the Hard Drive or partition of the disk attached to the Fonera (if more than one) and the folder of your laptop you want to back up. THERE YOU GO! That’s it!
• It is multiplatform. Of course! We’d never do Micro$oft only software. Use it in Windows, Mac and Linux! It’s Java ;)
• It’s incremental: you change something and only that will be sent to the backup, not the whole directory.

The application uses HTTP to transfer the files, but we will change to FTP for the next release. This will boost the transfer speed from the current 450KB/s up to 1MB/s which is far better than the Time Capsule of Apple (estimated at 600MB/s on 802.11g transfers). Additionaly, we are working on improving the 2 slowest parts, the time lost between different files and the time to calculate the changes (Yes, it’s incremental backup!)

Please, test it and let us now if you find it useful and what would you change to improve it. We are always to listen in the IRC channel #fonosfera (irc.freenode.net), the mailing list  or here in the blog.

So, as promised, here you’ve got the links for everything we mentioned above. Ciao!

Firmware:

• Bare image - md5sum 907b240308420b09b94812e1974f2ae0 (Valid for all versions using ssh or redboot, please check trac.fon.com and wiki.fon.com for instructions)
• Signed image - This is the binary ready to be flashed using the web interface of Tantor (not working with older versions, sorry)

Plugins:

• DynDNS plugin - it’s been signed by FON to ensure authenticity
• FONBackup 0.1 - it’s NOT a plugin. It communicates with the Fonera2.0 OktoPussy without installing plugins to it :P

Once again, thanks to all the team, specially Blogic as always, and Cyrus, Albert and Victor too for their nice last minute intervention with FONBackup!

The fon-ng Firmware  Team

FrancoFON released a beta version of its first La Fonera 2.0 plugin. Proxyredirector allows you to redirect the traffic going through the La Fonera 2.0 to a proxy. You may choose to redirect the traffic coming from the private signal, the public one or both:

* Yes the dashboard is now green if you are in developer mode (ssh access activated)

If you want to beta test the plugin you just have to make sure that you have the latest version of La Fonera 2.0 Firmware installed and a transparent proxy; you can install one on your own computer (i.e. squid for GNU/Linux). Then install the plugin from dashboard, the configuration will be in the ’setings’ menu.

FrancoFON is always in search for new talents in many different fields, feel free to contact them!