fonosfera

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

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

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Announcement, FON, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.