Changing a wireless router

More Ubuntu SMB woes
So much for my router problems. I decided a while ago to abandon the Vista pre-install on my Dell Vostro 1310 in favour of Ubuntu, the latest release of which (8.10) is a very competent and well-rounded distro, offering just about everything I need on a day-to-day basis.

The latest Ubuntu 8.10 release was therefore downloaded and installed onto the Vostro with no trouble at all, right down to configuring the touchpad, selecting the best possible screen resolution and, crucially, correctly identifying the built-in Wifi adapter and connecting it straight away to my wireless router.

I could even put the notebook into hibernation, wake it up and reconnect to the Wifi network with no trouble at all.

It was going fine until, a week or so later, I downloaded and installed the latest patches, as prompted by the update utility included as part of the distro.

From then on I could no longer connect to any Windows SMB shares on my network. Everything else worked fine, and I could still connect to the shares from another Ubuntu system that hadn’t been updated.

The notebook, however, refused to even display a list of Windows servers in its Nautilus browser. Instead it would hang about doing little before, eventually, telling me it had failed to mount the shares involved.

Naturally I started looking around on the web to see if I could find other users with the same problem and, hopefully, how to fix it. I found lots; some with the same symptoms, and variations on the theme. I also found a number of fixes, all of which I tried but with no success.

Unfortunately this is the second time I’ve been affected by SMB troubles in Ubuntu. I wrote about a similar problem in the 8.04 LTS distro in September 2008 and thought it would not only have been resolved by now, but that any new release would be free of such problems. Instead it seems to have found its way into the updated version too.

For many of us SMB file sharing is a fundamental prerequisite, this bug making my Vostro notebook more or less unusable. I spent about half a day trying to fix it but just as with my router I eventually gave up trying.

I could, of course, have changed to another Linux distro, but instead have junked Linux on my notebook for the time being in favour of the Windows 7 beta. This has no problems with SMB shares, at least not so far.

Email on storage
Finally, as a postscript to my articles on home email servers, I’ve long wondered why vendors of network attached storage (Nas) appliances don’t build one into their firmware.

Many now routinely offer built-in web, media streaming and other tools on top of the basic file and printer sharing, and a mail server would seem a logical next step.

Well, Synology has now taken that step with the beta release of its Disk Station Manager software which features an SMTP/Pop3/Imap4 server, called Mail Station.

Available to run on a range of Synology appliances, I’ve yet to download and try it, but it’s on my to-do list and, of course, I’ll let you know what it’s like when I do.

How to tailor your O2 wireless router
I’m used to being able to explore and tailor the configuration of a router via its web interface, but most of the options on the O2 wireless router are locked and can’t be changed, even when you log on as Administrator.

There is, however, a way of getting more access and, as one of the worst kept secrets on the web, I’m not giving anything away by telling you how.

What you have to do is log on using the name SuperUser and a password of O2Br0ad64nd, paying attention to capitalisation as shown.

You can only log on this way from the Lan, not over the internet, and you don’t get a huge amount of extra functionality. You will, however, be able to configure address-based filters, change the level of firewall security (not by much), create new user accounts and view the security logs.