When the telephone line is noisy, attach the telephone to the splitter along with the modem connection to get connected to the BSNL Servers.  Most likely it could be because of the Reactive load offered by the telephone on the phone line ends up conditioning the Phase modulated signals for the Netgear modem to connect to the Servers.

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I bought Netgear DG834G from Ritchie street, Chennai for Rs 2900. This is a type 2 modem that comes with IEEE 802.11b/g hardware that can support upto 54Mbps data transfer speed and four 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports. The configuration of the modem is pretty straight forward. I had chosen the manual ADSL configuration method in setting up. I had all the details borrowed from the UTStarCom modem given by BSNL. A quick summary of the modem setting is as follows:

ADSL Setting

VPI: 0

VCI: 35

Multiplexing Mode: LLC BASED

DSL Mode: ADSL 2+

Basic Settings

Does your Internet connection require a login? YES

Encapsulation: PPPoE

Login:

Password:

Service Name: dataone

Idle timeout: 5

Internet IP Address: Get Dynamically from ISP

Domain Name Server: Get Automatically from ISP

Network Address Translation: Enable

There was a catch here. I did not know the BSNL password. From the ADSL modem, I could get only the username. So I tried using “password revealer” to get the password configured in the BSNL modem (I got the modem pre-configured while BSNL installed it in my home). None of the
password revealers work on XP and Vista.

Linux Fedora came for the rescue. Fedora comes with Ethernet promiscuous mode intercepting
tools like “tcpdump”, “iptraf” etc. I decided to intercept the ADSL modem configuration page for capturing the password which “could” be sent as plain text in the URL. TCPDUMP becomes an ideal tool for this requirement. I summoned “tcpdump” to capture all the packets destined to 192.168.0.1 (ADSL router IP). The command is the following:

tcpdump -A dst host 192.168.0.1 -s 5000 > dump.file

I had asked the command to redirect the outputs to “dump.file”, so that I can check the content offline. Once the command started, I opened the ADSL page in my browser (on a machine connected to ADSL via ethernet; also to remind, “tcpdump” runs on this machine!). While browsing
through the authentication page and the following pages, “tcpdump” started capturing all the html text transferred between my machine and the ADSL router.

Bingo, the URLs are dumped in the file. To my surprise, the password assigned for my BSNL account was “password”. Later, I figured out that “password” is the default password assigned
to all pre-configured ADSNL modems. Anyways, even if the password is different, my technique would have fetched the password for me.

This technique will not work for sites like yahoo, etc. Because they don’t send the password as plain text, rather they send the MD5 hash equivalent of the password. This technique will not work for any site that is running on HTTPS, as everything sent across or received is encrypted using 128bit SSL encryption.

Netgear DG834G promises reasonable signal strength for 35M (~100feet). It works even if I keep
the router is one corner of the house and try to access it from any other place out of which some areas are reachable only after multiple left and right turns.

DG834G is awesome. I recommend this router for domestic BSNL broadband use.

In fedora 8, by default the device is detected and an appropriate driver (iwl3945) is loaded as well. If the wireless network is not secured, the interface works without any modification.

I had configured by ADSL router to have WPA-PSK encryption based security. To make my laptop work with this secured network, the default network configuration dialog does not suffice. But still, we need to setup something in that dialog as well.

1. Open system-config-network dialog, choose to edit the wlan0 interface.
2. Select the “Wireless Settings” tab.
3. Set Mode as “Managed”
4. Set Network name (SSID) as “XYZ”, where “XYZ” is the SSID you had
   configured in the router. You may also leave it in “Auto” as well.
5. Leave the other inputs as it is.

From the command line, run “iwconfig” to see the status of your interface. You may see something like the following:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:”NETGEAR”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Encryption key:off
Link Quality=0 Signal level=0 Noise level=0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Note, I have configured my SSID to be “NETGEAR”.

Since we have not enabled the security “thing”, we are not able to reach the Wireless Access Point. To enable that we need to have the “wpa_supplicant” tool. Using wpa_supplicant, we can bridge the connectivity and security.

First create the wpa configuration file using “wpa_passphrase” command.

wpa_passphrase
Ex: wpa_passphrase NETGEAR alphabeta

This command would generate a file like the following:

network={
ssid=”NETGEAR”
#psk=”alphabeta”
psk=d0392dff9de884a7163058cebb41592bf7872decda1c8b79b072359bc5e93cac
}  

Dump this output to /etc/wpa.conf

Now, you have to run wpa_supplicant as:

bash# /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa.conf &  

Note,
I have used the “wireless generic extension (wext)” for the driver configuration. You may get some log message like the following:

Trying to associate with 00:1b:2f:a3:54:f8 (SSID=’NETGEAR’ freq=2462 MHz)
Associated with 00:1b:2f:a3:54:f8
WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:1b:2f:a3:54:f8 [PTK=TKIP GTK=TKIP]
CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED – Connection to 00:1b:2f:a3:54:f8 completed (auth) [id=0 id_str=]

At this point you are probably connected to the Wireless Access Point. Try running “iwconfig” command. The correct output should be like:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:”NETGEAR”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:A3:54:F8
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Encryption key:5A83-9BBE-BA9F-5C2B-46D1-0FEC-CE66-475F-A44A-DD05-4B16-63F3-3474-0C46-464A-6CF0 [3]
Link Quality=97/100 Signal level=-29 dBm Noise level=-64 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0  

try running “/sbin/ifconfig” to see whether you have the device up with an IP address. If IP address is not assigned, run

/sbin/service network restart
or
/sbin/dhclient wlan0
or
/sbin/ifup wlan0

You may probably see a “wmaster0″ interface as well, which may be ignored.

Most likely you are done by now.
Happy wireless networking.