ZeroDev

After (about) two long months, finally i'm back online,
"new" house[1], my "old" adsl connected again.

[1] For the record: after a long search, i moved to another house

well not really my home (due to my current job i'm about 1500 km far from my real home), anyway holidays are gone and i have a lot of stuff to do.

For example on July 30 a new version of VirtualBox was released (1.6.4 it's a maintenance release), currently i'm bumping ebuilds and dealing with an annoying compilation problem with the OSE edition.

Stay tuned.

.......finally,

i really need it

Well,
finally i have an adsl connection, so it's time to sort up things and provide a link between
my desktop pc (Thunder) in my bedroom and the adsl router (Zyxel 660HW) placed in the living room (unluckily the only RJ-11 plug resides there).

The only solution is a wireless link, i can't cable this house, so i went out on saturday and purchased the only wireless pci card available, a D-Link G510 rev B.
(and i was happy because i saw a nice-tuxed-logo "Linux Support" on that card box).

Once returned at house i plugged the new card and fired up an lspci, and i learn a terrible thing:

05:08.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g

OH NOES! a ralink chipset!!!
the same vendor who drived me crazy in the past with the DWL-G122 (usb adapter, rt73 driver)

I spent the last to days testing various drivers:
- net-wireless/ralink-rt61 (the original ralink driver)
- net-wireless/rt61 (the legacy reworked driver from serialmonkey)
- the rt2x00 no more in portage because was merged in the linux kernel starting with 2.6.24

I only focused on a wpa-psk/wpa2-psk setup (i don't mind to run the wireless link with wep or without encryption at all), but it was a steaming pile of failures...
wpa_supplicant is not supported by both net-wireless/ralink-rt61 and net-wireless/rt61, 'cause they use a strange set of commands available via iwpriv,
the recently merged in to kernel rt2x00 driver instead supports it but had several problems when used with wpa/wpa2 (is still an experimental driver written from scratch to support all the ralink chipsets), i tested several kernels patches, and snapshots but nothing...

(uhuh someone said ndiswrapper? nevermind i'm on amd64 and there are not 64bit drivers for this chip by d-link)

So atm i resumed my fonera, updated it to DD-WRT v24 std., and configured the client bridge mode (it works fine in this release) and all it's working like a charm with wpa2-psk......this time i learned the lesson, in the future i will never buy again another D-Link/Ralink adapter...

NEVER!

Incredible, after only 4 business days i got a brand new adsl connection in my "new" house!

That's amazing! let's see what appened:
- I requested it via online form it on 11 june night.
- A technician was sent in my house yesterday 17 june at noon.
- Today, 18 june at evening i plugged my zyxel adsl router in the phone plug and i got the adsl carrier..

Note that:
- I live in Italy (extremely slow in phone services activations).
- My current house had no phone line/connection at all.
- My current provider is not the one that holds the physical lines in Italy.

The line works like a charm, the provider is the italian company Tiscali,
it's the first time that i got a brand new adsl connection in only 4 business days, and without problems of any kind (no dumb call centers phone calls, no infinte rants, no pointless tickets..), way to go!