Category: Uncategorized

Well, there are a few ways to check the upload / Download speed of an internet connection, one way is speedtest.net which uses flash to download a file, and upload a file, both to a server close to you

On systems where we do not have a browser or do not have a browser that supports flash, one can download a file (With wget  on Linux for example), the quest would be this

You will need a file that is hosted on a network that you know for fact is faster than your own internet connection, for me, i have been using this one very successfully

cachefly.net 100mb.test

So, on a LINUX system, entering

wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

On a casual 2.4Mb (That’s Mega Bit not Byte) , it should result in something like this

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--2012-04-19 11:41:09--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 140.99.93.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|140.99.93.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

 6% [=>                                     ] 6,897,290    284K/s  eta 5m 41s
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While on a much faster connection i have somewhere else (theoretical 100Mb), the results are like this

--2012-04-19 08:44:20--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 140.99.93.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|140.99.93.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 41.2M/s   in 2.4s

2012-04-19 08:44:22 (41.2 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

There are also other factors in internet connection speed that i will get to soon, for example, latency, and efficient routing.

things that i will get to when i have the time.

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I accedientally pulled the power plug of a PC from the socket, and that PC was just starting to boot. The seagate hard drive inside stopped working, and the bad sectors turned out to affect the partition table, in any case, i slaved it on a windows vista PC, then into the Computer management, disk management panel, and what do you know, as if it has no paritions…

The solution to detect the boundaries of the 4 partitions it had is software called XXXX

Ran the software (The analyze option) , and what do you know, my partions exactly, 100MB made by Windows 7, a 479 GB partition for Windows, a 1GB swap partition for linux and an EXT3 partition for Linux…

So happily i asked the software to write the partitioning info to the disk, but the disk won’t hold the data, the bad sectors are where Windows writes the partition information

So, i ran down to the computer shop (In our building), and got the same exact drive (Seagate 500GB Model number xxx)

Mounted both on a Linux machine as slaves, both the damaged and the target.

To find out which one is SDC and which one is SDB, i watched as the linux machine booted, and as it booted, it threw in errors saying SDB all the time, so i know that SDB is the busted drive !

Installed gddrescue (apt-get install gddrescue), and ran it with the following command

ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc resumelog.log

(The additional log file helps us resume in case of interruption)

Once that is done, i put the new hard drive in a Windows machine, still can not see any partition info

1- Ran xxxx, it can see the 4 partitions, write changes… and what do you know, the partitions stick, we are good to go, i restart, but still, Windows can now see the partitions, but thinks drive G is not formated !

So i opened the command prompt (Elevated), then ran the command

chkdsk g: /f

the /f stands for fix, the thing took some time, but after the restart drive G works fine, all files are in there, and no one wants to kill me no more 🙂

NOTE: This post was updated on feb, 1, 2013

Today, i got a new Wireless Lite N router for JD20 (Around $28), and it works like a dream, in reality, the following is a sampleof the routers web GUI response headers

Server: TP-LINK Router
Connection: Keep-Alive
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="XTECH 150Mbps Wireless Lite-N Router WR771LN"
Content-Length: 26344
Content-Type: image/jpeg

200 OK

Some Hanania Investment Group seems to be responsible for this new XTECH Brand, and for this router, it is well worth the money.

The RJ45 eithernet cable mentioned on the outside as included is not included, but then again, why would i need 1 more eithernet cable.

This model seems to be the same as TP-WR741ND TP-WR840N (since the TP-WR741ND is the same but with a detachable antenna), and if you know what little endian, big endian, and a hex editor are, you may be able to put the “Open Sourced” TP-LINK software back on this hardware.

The reason you can not is that those routers check for file name when you upload, and only 3 people in the world know what the firmware file name requiered by this router to accept new firmware is. I am about to become the fourth to know and hopefully everyone else can come later, (FYI i dont know who the three people are, i just assumed there must be three people)

Anyway, i hope all other XTECH stuff are as good as this one

NOTE: The only reason you may want to have the TP-LINK firmware back on this router is that there is no mentioning of this router on xtechinternational.com and therefore i can not find a firmware upgrade, TP link will surely have the upgrades as soon as they are out though.

—————–
Naming the firmware update file:

Update, although this is a re-branded TP-Link, i switched my TP-Link to dd-wrt, i think i will switch this to open-wrt or dd-wrt and not to the original tp-link firmware, mind you, we still need to know what the existing firmware expects for a firmware name.

In a TP-LINK, the answer is simple, you download the file factory-to-ddwrt.bin from dd-wrt, then you rename the file to be identical to the update file from tp-link.com, namely wr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin , but for xtech (The re-brand), there is no update file, and therefore we don’t know the name of the acceptable update file.

So lets see the similarities, and see what options we have
tp-link TL-WR740N gets wr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin
X-Tech xt-wr771LN should get ?
wr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (same: NO)
wr771nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
wr771lnv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
xtwr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
xt_wr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
xt-wr740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
xt740nv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin (NO)
xt_wr771lnv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin
xtwr771lnv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin
wr771lnv1_en_3_12_4_up(100910).bin
—————–

The router is probably an atheros chip router with a

HYNIX 933S C
HY5DU561622FTP-D43 RAM

If anyone wants some photos, i can post them here for you no problem

you can find this router almost everywhere, SmartBuy Carefour, and others are stacking piles of it.

Good Luck