If you are one of the unlucky sites that gets a very poor adsl service and you decide to put in additional adsl lines to give more capacity you should look at the Draytek 3300 as an option for your business.
The idea of connecting adsl lines through an intermediate device (a draytek 110) to what would normally be used as a leased line firewall or gateway wouldn’t immediately jump out at most companies but the logic is this. The Draytek 110 passes through the connection (indeed it requires no configuration – but you can look at the line characteristics). You can then use up to 4 adsl connections and thus 4 Draytek 110′s to give the 3300 the combined up and down speed of the 4 links.
Then – by creating rules you can decide which types of traffic are allocated to each link or spread the usage based on available bandwidth on each of the links. More about this in future articles. Suffice to say the use of the 110 on a very long adsl line brought the downstream speed up by approx 20% so worth doing for that alone.
A sideways proxy for managing web usage »« Using Slax from a USB key on a TC1100
Sometimes you needs tools that can indirectly allow you to verify that a machine is working. In this case I wanted to boot a HP Tablet TC1100 to allow me to check that the hard disk and the files within are accessible (ie the disk is working to some extent).
So I used slax 6.10 in this case – the site which has more information on this issue and other Linux USB matters is http://www.pendrivelinux.com/. You could pick any number of distros but Slax caught my eye.
As per the article http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2006/09/20/all-in-one-usb-slaxzip/ you’ll need
A 256MB or larger USB flash drive (I used an Integral 4GB)
HP-USB Format tool (Optional) – google for it
SLAX-6.0.3.tar file
7-Zip or other archive extraction tool
A Windows Host to perform the USB install
and follow the instructions as given to
Download the HP-USB Format tool and format your flash drive using the Fat or Fat32 option Download the SLAX for USB .tar file
Using 7-Zip extract the files from the slax-6.0.3.tar to the root of your USB stick
Navigate to the boot folder on your “USB device” and click bootinst.bat (Click Continue if the Exception processing error appears)Follow the onscreen instructions to make the device bootable
Once the USB install script has finished, reboot your computer and set your BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the USB device Save your BIOS settings. On the next reboot, you should have a successful launch of your USB SLAX Linux compilation.
However this is where the owner of a TC1100 may have difficulties since it may not be immediately obvious where or how to set the bios options since the TC1100 bios is not exactly the most comprehensive in terms of options anyway.
The first thing however is to make sure that you have the latest bios for the TC1100. I noted at least 4 differences once I had updated using the bootable floppy option that HP provide using the USB floppy drive I mentioned before. Google TC1100 Bios and you should get a link – the file details are
Type: BIOS
Version: F.0F (6 Jun 2005)
Operating System(s): Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
File name: sp30961.exe (1.5 MB)
Run that program to make the bootable diskette.
On the TC1100 – boot the machine and then press the Toggle Key to get a menu when the option is displayed – the first option takes you into the BIOS setup. Go into Tools and ensure that under Device options that the removable devices is listed first – using Ctrl and the + key to move options up the list !! Save the bios changes on exit.
Once the bios is updated – turn off TC1100 – plug in the Slax USB key – boot and press the toggle wheel and go back into the setup. This time under hard disks press the plus key to see the internal disk and the USB key you are using – select the USB key and move it above the internal disk. Then move the category Hard disks to the top of the list. Save the bios changes on exit – reboot and press the toggle key – this time select the second option and ensure that the first boot device is hard disk and that another hard disk appears further down the list. Select that and watch the usb Key boot to the slax menu where you can choose full GUI or text boot. I also used the Memtest option to verify the machines memory.
Once Slax is booted you can get a good look at the internal disk and its contents – copying items off if required…..
Using a Vigor 3300 to connect multiple ADSL lines for load balancing »« We'll have none of that slacking (slaxing actually).
After a meeting yesterday I rebooted my HP Tablet TC1100 to install some updates. This machine has given virtually no trouble in all the time that I’ve used it and its travelled with me much more than any other machine.
I didn’t notice that the machine was constantly rebooting until much later and then began to investigate what was causing it. What I soon realised was that the device was blue screening – showing the blue screen for a second and instantly rebooting. So what to do ?
Well the first thing I was interested in was – is the harddisk intact and do I have some sort of xp boot issue. However with a device like the TC1100 with no floppy and no internal cd / dvd – you need to resort to USB key booting. I’m actually going to cover that in another article since its actually a very useful tool. The tablet runs XP pro – Table Edition.
Suffice to say the boot from a usb key using Slax confirmed for me that the internal 40GB drive was functioning correctly but after rebooting a few times and watching closely I could see that the message “Unmountable boot device” was being displayed – so lets deal with that one first.
Microsoft provide a tool to create a set of 6 floppy disks that will boot the xp setup. Attaching an external usb floppy drive which I got with my new vista 64BIT machine (who says they are old fashioned now Pauline!) and putting the first disk you create in starts the machine.
The program you need is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=55820edb-5039-4955-bcb7-4fed408ea73f&displaylang=en - and is WinXP_EN_PRO_BF.EXE – for Windows XP professional (make sure you get the correct version for home or pro!).
Once the 6 disks have been inserted – and the welcome screen is presented – Press R for recovery console.
Type chkdsk /r and press return
If it ask for the location of autochk.exe – the correct location of this file is C:\WINDOWS\system32 (if your windows was installed on C:) however you may actually require a copy of this to get past this particular problem (you can copy it from another xp pro installation)
Using Slax from a USB key on a TC1100 »« Give me a slice of that browser ( with extra pepperoni )
