69mb

See part one here.

Figured out what was causing downloads to timeout after 2-3 minutes and sorted it out. To understand what the problem was, it is important to understand one aspect of the login process.

When you fire up your browser, you get automatically redirected to their portal page where you can select your login method: isp account, scratch card… Until you login successfully, you get short dhcp leases of ~2-3 minutes. I’ve been using the 200/- scratch cards which give me 12hrs of access and when I login, I get a dhcp lease of 12hrs. They also use these leases to disconnect you when your time is up.

What was causing me to get disconnected ever 3 minutes or so was that the linux box was the one acquiring an ip address via dhcp and it had a different mac address from that of the wireless interface of the ap which is the mac address that was visible on the Butterfly network. So even after logging in successfully on their portal, I wasn’t getting the 12hr lease and thus the disconnects every 3 minutes. To sort out this issue, I just set the mac address of the wireless interface to match that of inteface on the linux box and that was that. Doing the revers i.e. changing the mac address on the linux box to match the one on the ap’s wireless interface would not work since the wireless and lan interface mac addresses on the ap were the same.

Changing the mac address on the AP happened by fluke. I’d figured out that the AP is an atheros based device which is supported by the OpenWrt project, and I was already compiling the firmware(figured I need to get linux to change the mac), when I accidentally stumbled onto the factory menu in its telnet interface and found a command for changing the mac addresses. 

I was just typing random commands hoping(rather half heartedly) I could get some engineering menu and when I typed “admin”, I was prompted for a password and after a couple of attempts(1234, password…), I got in with password “atheros”. The command for changing the mac address once in the factory menu is “netifMac”.

Now I’m able to sustain downloads. I’ve tested by downloading the 45mb linux kernel from kernel.org and that came without any hitches. Download came down at ~13KB/s which is 128KB/s net speed. Below is are speed test results form testmy.net:

 Something else I realized over the weekend is that I was getting really fast speeds for local traffic. I was able to apt-get packages onto my linux box @131KB/s (1 Megabit) from the skunkworks mirror!  

AOB: Looks like I’m not the only one who has found it difficult to get the scratch cards. Many of the dealers listed on their portal page(at least the ones I’ve called so far) are no longer selling them. I’ve had to go to the KDN offices on Mombasa road to get them.

EDITED TO ADD: I could have sworn I had published this post. Anyway, it has something to do with the wp-database-backup plugin because it was doing a dump when I published this last night.  

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