Onedrive puzzle answer

The solution lies in replacing the letters in the folder as per the wheel mapping. Translated it roughly reads as follows.


"The first hundred thousand users to log into onedrive.com at 11:11 AM PST today (February 19, 2014) will win 100 GB of extra storage."

All the best !

android wifi proxy in windows office domain

I am sure there are a lot of people who have tried to connect their android devices through their office network in order to save the mobile bandwidth costs.

While some phones like samsung have built in proxy settings most of them do not. The issue with connecting to office networks is that most proxy use NTLM domain authentication that is not widely know and most stock solutions do not provide capability to connect and authenticate to these types of proxies.

Recently ProxyDroid available in the marketplace allowed for these types of connection for rooted devices.

After installing start the application. It will request for SupoerUser Permission. Grant the application the requested permission.




Select New profile


Then select each of the parameters and fill it up

In Host put the address of the proxy server

In port, fill up the proxy server port

Proxy type select HTTP

Scroll down and check the Enable Authentication tab


Enter the username , enter the password and enable NTLM Authentication (important)

Finally select the Domain option and enter the Domain name of the connection. Now you should be good to go !

Android Screen Control Without Root

The ability to control the screen of my Android phone has been a major pain since I moved from Windows Mobile to Android quite some time ago.

The only solutions required root permissions. However there are scenarios where that is not an option such as in a corporate environment / providing remote support for a device that is not your own.

Android 2.1 onwards ( as far as I know) supports a API called MonkeyRunner that is to be used for application testing. Using this along with java sources provided by "The Android Open Source Project" I have put together a small application that will capture the screen and allow passing of click and key press events to the device.

It is highly limited to the extent that it allows only for touch events and keystrokes. It currently does not support drag events and typing of special characters but something is better than nothing :)


Download the zip file from here

http://www.mediafire.com/file/a8870ynh151vm9d/ScreenControl.zip

In order to run the files, you need to ensure that the device is connected via USB cable only and debugging has been enabled on the device.

Once this is done, Fire up the screen.bat and it should load up the window. The screen.bat is a single line command calling java.exe along with all the required class and jar files required to make this work.

I have also included adb.exe which is required, you could replace with your own, however mine will probably be more stable.



Again, Consider this only if your device is not rooted. If you have rooted your device I would recommend you use the either of the following better softwares

Android Screencast
http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/

This works with the USB connection

Droid VNC Server by José Luis Pereira
http://www.onaips.com/wordpress/?page_id=60

This works with Wifi



I hope this has been helpful for some of you all. Am sure there are more brilliant people out there who can modify the sources to add drag functionality as well. Do let me know !


UPDATE
F.J. Wechselberger has integrated this functionality into MyPhoneExplorer through native TCP-Calls. Its not possible for him to implement Java-Library into the PC-Program but he was able to translate the source of MonkeyRunner. I Would recommend you download this if you are looking for a simple solution for controlling the screen.

www.fjsoft.at


Cheers,
Vikram Sridharan.

Compress large files on windows server 2008

This started out as something else. We had a large database of about 100 GB that we wanted shift to our DR location. Due to bandwidth restrictions we started out to explore options on how we could reduce the overhead of transferring such a large file.

Now compressing a 100 GB file is not a joke. After some looking up I came across an interesting article by Chris over at solo-technology talking about Compression v/s Speed. It talked about a related issue but the same capability could be used for handling large files.

The best tool for doing this is 7Zip. It is an awesome freeware by Igor Pavlov handling a large number of compression formats. Check it out over here.



http://www.7-zip.org/


That aside, by using the command line version of this you could zip you file. When we started the zip file took 5 hours to finish just 30 % of compression. On check the task manager, I found that the whole process was just running at 100 % on a single thread of the 24 cores available on the server.

By using the following options,

I was able to compress the 100 GB SQL Server 2008 database backup file to just 16 GB ! in just 1 Hour !!!

This was way beyond my expectations :) Here is that technical syntax to use this


7z a -tbzip2 -mx=9 -mmt=on backup.zip backup.bak


"7z" is the program to initiate
"a" is to append the file
"-tbzip2" is to use the bzip2 format, this is important as only this format allows for multithreading for both the compression as well as the decompression
"-mx=9" is the number of passes, this is optional, I didn't use it, the system defaults this to 5
"-mmt=on" is to turn on the multithread capability, again this works only for the bzip2 format
"backup.zip" is the file that will get created
"backup.bak" is the file that needs to get backed up.

You could read through the technical literature available with 7zip to get a better hang of the application. This were just the specific options that are required to manage this requirement.

One other note, I did read the the bzip2 format has a restriction that it can include only 1 file at a time. I didn't try for multiple files.

Hope this helps in saving you precious bandwidth !!!

Microsoft Association Rules / Data mining in SQL Server 2008

Since the release of SQL Server 2005 Microsoft has dabbled quite a bit with Data mining models. While I have read that Data mining capability has been available with one of the later releases of SQL Server 2000, I haven't been able to come across too much material on the same.


First up I would like say the best place to start if you are serious about learning about Data mining is to go get yourself this really good book on the topic. Its extremely easy to read and the examples used are quite practical.

The book is

Data Mining with SQL Server® 2008

by
Jamie MacLennan
ZhaoHui Tang
Bogdan Crivat


Back to original reason of the post, being a techno functional individual, I was keen to see how we could effectively cross sell products to stores since we had their complete sales history. Ensuring that our consumers never left the store without the products they wanted goes a long way in ensuring consumer loyalty and company performance.

Having most of the data already available in SQL Server 2008 I was keen to see what we could use to help identify these gaps. In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft has the following Data Mining Models

Microsoft Naıve Bayes
Decision Trees Algorithm
Time Series Algorithm
Microsoft Clustering
Sequence Clustering
Association Rules
Neural Network and Logistic Regression

The best fit for the requirement I had was the Microsoft Association Rules. It allowed me to build the model utilizing the classification of outlets that we already had.

I built the model using three classifications we had for our outlets along with products that the outlet already sold. In order to do this I needed to create a nested table for the products as one outlet could sell multiple products. Also important to note that the data types for Data mining objects are slightly different from the data types that are used by standard SQL queries. The DMX I used is below.




Post creating the structure , I applied the Microsoft Association Rules Algorithm requested the prediction of the product utilizing the standard support and probability the model is generally used with.



The next step was to feed in data into the model to let it build the association rules. This was done using the following syntax. Am important point to note here is that the key data needs to be sorted. Sometimes in spite of sorting it still gives errors saying the data most probably is not sorted. The solution for this is to ensure that the key that is used is specifically a nvarchar source data type. I faced a problem when my key happened to have numeric data as well as string data. Needed to convert everything before I could successfully load the data into the mining structure.




Once the data is loaded into the model, the last step is to retrieve out the recommendations that the model would generate. I have done this for the store ABC by passing the store along with the products that the store purchased into the model and asking it to return 5 recommendations based on the model as well as the classification of the store and the products that the store sells.
This is done through the following DMX statement.




In case you want this data in the standard query windows you could always create a Linked server to OLAP where the Data Mining model exists.

Do let me know if you have any comments !

Acer eMachine E725 XP Drivers

Since this laptop is bundled with Linux, you need to have all the drivers in place before you can install XP on this E725 Laptop.

Acer has the drivers as part of the E720 release and you could get all of them on the below ftp site of acer itself

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/.em/E720/XP%20SP2/


Incase you want to do Vista on the Acer eMachine E725 instead , go to this location

ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/.em/E720/Vista%20SP1/

Hope that helps, do leave a comment !!

Nokia 5230 Free Navigation / Maps

Recently Nokia made Navigation free atleast in India. However if you now tried to connect for free navigation it still asks for you go to the store. The reason for this is that Nokia has allowed free Navigation using Ovi Maps only on the new version of the software.

So if you have bought your phone couple of weeks ago there is a very good chance you are on the old version. What you need to do is go to the Nokia site and upgrade your version of Ovi maps to the latest version.

There are two ways of getting this done, one is to download the software on your computer and then Sync with your phone which would then automatically upgrade the version of Ovi Maps that is present on your phone.

The second option is to directly download the software to your phone and run it from there. However this would require a data connection from your service provider.

The link for downloading the software is here

If you want to get the map data stored directly on your computer you should go through this post.

http://piglings.blogspot.com/2010/01/nokia-5230-maps.html

Nokia 5230 Maps

My dad just got his Nokia 5230, nice phone that comes with Ovi Maps 3 installed however there were no map data available. Since he didn't have GPRS enabled on his phone I decided to do some digging around to make use of the GPS device bundled into the Nokia 5230.

Credit to symbian underground for helping me get this to work.


The first step is to have you your external card ready. Run Nokia Maps on your phone once before you add any maps or voices. This will create the required folder structure on your memory card. Quit the application after that.

On my Nokia the folder structure is cities with a subfolder called diskcache, filled with 16 subfolders called 0 to 9 and a to f, and each of these folders have another 16 subfolders 0 to 9 and a to f.


For India, download the following file from Nokia itself

India Maps

Extract the zip file into your local computer, once done copy drop the 16 folders called 0-9 and a-f into the diskcache folder of the Nokia 5230. You can do this by connecting your device as a external hard drive via the Micro USB port.

Thats it, maps should now work. You should now disconnect the connection to the computer and only then run maps again.

If you want voice as well download the following files

English or Hindi

Extract all the files into the cities folder. That is it.




For other countries check the maps links here
http://diabo.freehostia.com/symbian/indexmaps.htm

The voice links of other languages are here
http://diabo.freehostia.com/symbian/nokiamaps/voices001.html

If you want to enable free Navigation, do read this post
http://piglings.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-5230-free-navigation-maps.html

Hope it helps, do leave me a comments. No files are hosted on this site !

SQL Server 2008 Memory Leak / windows server 2008 high memory utilization

Having working with Cubes on SQL Server 2000, I had grown used to the fact that SQL will use and release memory depending on its need and I would be able to track the about of memory each program is utlizing through the task manager tab.

However its important to note the following. With windows server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 ( probably SQL Server 2005) the above mentioned assumptions are completely wrong. SQL Server 2008 will utilize as much memory that is available on the box, in my case 64 GB if any job works with high volumes of data but will NEVER EVER release this RAM back to the system once the job completes.

In short, the memory get reserved for SQL Server 2008 till the service / Server gets restarted. In case SQL needs to run some other job that requires data to be loaded, it internally will flush out the older data and load what it needs and yes even then nothing gets released back to the server.

Also to be noted is that in the task manager, none of this memory is ever shown against any of the processes that are running. Even if you use process explorer (sysinternals) this memory does not show up against SQL Server 2008 there as well.



Sadly this leads people ( including me) to come to the conclusion that there is a memory leak in SQL Server 2008. To convince yourself, just limit the amount of memory SQL Server can use and then check out the memory utilization in task manager. It will be that amount plus whatever is required to run your server.

There is article that describes this much more technical detail here ...

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2009/08/24/troubleshooting-the-sql-server-memory-leak-or-understanding-sql-server-memory-usage.aspx

Its a good idea to prevent SQL from utilizing the entire memory else the server can become unstable.

P.S. There is no memory leak :)

Excel 2007 OLAP Writeback SSAS 2008

We wanted to build an application based on the Writeback capability of Microsoft. The dream was to have a cube with multiple dimension allowing our users to analyze data by slicing / dicing this cube and based on their analysis make changes to the numbers at various levels.

Once they were happy with the data post changes we were to flow this data to a downstream system. It was to be a highly interactive system for a reasonably competent user to plan target setting by carrying out what if analysis on the existing data.

The front end for the user was Excel 2007 as the navigation / user interface was phenomenon and all our users in our company were fairly competent in Excel.

The path we started down was to have SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 as the backend sitting on a Hexacore 4 processor Windows Server 2008 box. We then enabled the cube for Writeback. The way this works according to me at a high level is that whatever numbers you choose to writeback, it does not make the change directly to your cube, what it does however is to create a writeback partitition that stores the net off data so that you could see the required number on your front end.

Let me explain that a little more with an example, lets say for one depot for one product the value initially was 100. As part of the writeback lets say you want it to be 70. What actually happens is that an entry takes place in the writeback partition for that depot and that product as -30. Based on a join of these two the number dispayed is 70.

While this works perfectly for small sets of data, it fails miserably for larger sets. The solution becomes impractical and very sluggish if the writeback is at an aggregate level and affecting large number of leafs / touples. Post engaging with Microsoft Consulting we confirmed that this was not going to work out for the application we had in mind.

OLAP Writeback sucks, period !!! and even Microsoft didn't have a response :) Now just because the writeback using the writeback partitition is hopeless it does not mean that its the only way to writeback user inputs into the cube.

The path we finally deployed our solution was a combination of the following.
VBA ( Macro coding) / Web services / SQL Server 2008 Integration services and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services.

The excel that was shared with the users had a custom built macro code that essentially looped through the page / row / column fields to gather the user selections. Care had to taken to be able to loop through both the dimension member as well as the attributes. ( This is feature of SQL Server 2005 + , do read up if you are unaware) Also note it gets more complicated in Pivot 12 as there is extended capability in terms of Value and Label filters, both of which needs to be captured as well incase someone has applied them.

Once all the filters are looped and the details captured, the macro uses this data to frame a create sub cube query that gets passed to the server using a web service. This sub cube that gets created on the fly contains the entire data from the main cube that needs to undergo the writeback / change.

The next step is to strip this newly created sub cube to retrieve the underlying rowset of data that makes up the cube. Once we have that into a table, we have the option of applying pretty much any rule on this data, disaggregation / static values / percentage of existing value / percentage of another value.

Post applying the rule, the data gets updated into the base cube data and an incremental process is carried out and voila you have implemented your writeback.

Just to share some of the numbers, we were able to carry out a writeback affecting 3 Lakh records ( Thats three hundred thousand records :) in India) in a little over 2 minutes with the majority of the time in the incremental processing. This ofcourse will depend on the size and complexity of your own cube.

If your curious about the rest of the design, well since we had the changes in the table we could build an SSIS package to incrementally flow this information down stream into a DB2 environment using OLE/DB2 providers which ofcourse has its own problems in life :)

Motorola RAZR V3 - Charge via USB on PC

There are other articles that explain this but finding the files for this can sometimes be a problem. Basically the usb does not work directly, software drivers need to be installed on the machine that you want to use to charge.

These drivers can be downloaded here ...

http://ofg.osnn.net/razr/


The detailed article for the same can be found here

http://www.somelifeblog.com/2007/02/motorla-razr-v3-charge-via-usb-on-pc.html

IBM OLE DB provider for DB2 sql server 2008 / DB2 Administration Client Windows Server 2008

While setting up our production environment we ended up wasting a day as we couldn't create a linked server using IBM OLE DB provider for DB2 as it wasn't showing up in the options. We apparently were trying to install the 32 bit client of the server while we needed the x64 version. After figuring that out we began a hunt to download the required file which in reality was quite painful as it wasn't clearly mentioned anywhere.


In order to save others the trouble, the driver comes along with the installation of the "DB2 Administration Client " as part of the 8.2 versions and as "IBM Data Server Client " in the 9.5 versions. The links in the document are valid for Windows Server 2008 utilizing x64 architecture. If your on 32 bit , you can navigate to the right download from the given pages itself.

The page for the current version of DB2 v9.5 is as follows, make sure you download the "IBM Data Server Client" file. It is part of the fix pack 3b which is latest at the time of this article

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=71&uid=swg21288113

The direct file

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ps/products/db2/fixes2/english-us/db2winX64v95/fixpack/FP3b_WR21447/v9.5fp3b_ntx64_client.exe

In case you are using / want the DB2 v8.2 client, make sure you download the "DB2 Administration Client" file. It is part of the fix pack 17a which is latest at the time of this article

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=71&uid=swg21256105


The direct file

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ps/products/db2/fixes2/english-us/db2winAMD64v8/fixpak/FP17a_WR21442/FP17a_WR21442_ADMCL.exe

Please note that there are different versions for different architectures x32 / x64 / IA64. Download the right file for yourself.

Additionally if you are looking for the Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2, it is available as part of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, October 2008 located here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=228DE03F-3B5A-428A-923F-58A033D316E1&displaylang=en

Do let me know if this has been helpful. Cheers !

Google Chrome not working / Google Chrome stopped working

I had this really weird issue where google chrome stopped working on my laptop, did some search and I finally found this obscure post on google's own site asking the user to try something to make it work. Interestingly it did, the version for which the solution was written for was different but essentially the method is what is important.

The issue was that on clicking the chrome icon nothing happens, the browser does not load up, and the task manager does not show the process to be running. Not sure what triggered this though.


The solution is to go to the following path in your command prompt

C:\Documents and Settings\(user name)\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\(version number)\Installer

Run the following statement

setup.exe --rename-chrome-exe


quit the command prompt with an exit. Chrome started working for me after that, hope it works for you as well. The link of the google page from where I got this from is below

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=2680b41d121dc73a&hl=en

Do let me know if this has helped you, if your feeling generous you could donate a dollar via paypal :)

Airtel blocking Websites partially

I had this unique problem on my parents laptop, certain sites such as facebook, yahoo groups, hotmail would be able to log in but thats about it, nothing else would work after that with the page just timing out when you click on anything.

Mail on the POP3 would download but SMTP mail send would fail occasionally by timing out.

Wondering why my ISP was preventing this from happening. The Airtel Beetel Modem is connected to a Netgear Router for wireless access.

It turns out that the issue was a combination of my ISP along with the wireless Router. There exists a setting on the wireless routers called MTU size in bytes. This typically is found on the WAN tab of your router and is set to 1500 bytes. The type of connection between the modem and the wireless router is a PPPoE type of connection. For this sort of connection the ideal value for this parameter is 1492. The technical details of this can be found on the following link.

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/695

By changing this parameters all the problems just disappeared ! Further read up has shown that this could cause problems to other services as well such as telnet / ftp / https / VPN like securepoint etc.

In order to change this setting, log into your wireless router and navigate to the WAN setup link. Make the change and click apply.


Do let me know if this has been helpful by dropping me a comment.

Blog Language Translation

Reading up that the majority of users the world over search for information in languages other than english it obviously makes sense to provide the option to translate my blog into different languages.

Unfortunately it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be as the widgets offered by Blogspot didn't seem to have it directly available.

I finally managed to find the translation engine provided by google itself as a widget. Go to the translate.google.com site

Select the tools tab and you will get the code for added to your widget in your site.

The code is as follows

<$source src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/translatemypage.xml&up_source_language=en&w=160&h=60&title=&border=&output=js"><$/script>

Make sure you remove the $ between < and script in the start of the code and in the end between < and /script. I needed to add that to make this blog treat it as text and not html code :)


Additionally there was this good resource I found with additional information about language translation I found over here

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/add-language-translation-to-website.html

Hope you found this useful. Do drop me a line would love to hear from you.

Automailer Batch Script using Blat

Quite sometime back we needed a simple way to inform our customers the status of their order, the system was able to generate a text file with the code of the customer but we still needed to figure out how to get it to them.


Instead of coding a complicated solution we decided to use a small batch script that did this job. We basically get all these files into a single folder and get the script to run every fifteen minutes to send across a mail to these customers with the file attached.

To enable this we use a small freeware program called blat. Its a command line mailer, a program that allows you to send a mail from the dos prompt.

Its available here

www.blat.net

The script works with a list that has the customer code in one line and the email addresses that the file needs to be sent to on the next line comma separated without any spaces. If a new customer is added, the code and email address would need to be added to the file

For this example the file is called customer.txt and the contents are in the following format

1234
abc@abc.com,def@def.com
5678
abc@abc.com,def@def.com,xyz@xyz.com

The script loops through all the files in the folder and picks up the email addresses it needs to send the email too and send it across. It then moves the file into the respective folder of the customer code.

To understand how it works, its important to understand how blat works. Blat needs to first be configured with the smtp server before the script works.

The usage is blat -savesettings

The normal usage is shown below and can be brought up by blat/?


The script is below


:start
echo off

rem This allows for the variable to work within a for loop
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

rem This resets the variables used
set a=1
set rs=none

rem This is the loop that goes through for each file in the current folder and sets the
rem every line of the customer.txt to variable i
rem The variables a and b are used to alternate between the customer code and addresses
rem The rs variable is used to store the customer code on every alternative line of the txt file

for /f "tokens=*" %%i in (customer.txt) do (

if "!a!"=="1" set rs=%%i
if "!a!"=="1" set b=2
if "!a!"=="2" if exist *!rs!*.txt blat -t %%i -body "Order details" -s "Order report - !rs!" -attach *!rs!*.txt
if "!a!"=="2" if exist *!rs!*.txt move *!rs!*.txt !rs!
if "!a!"=="2" set b=1
if "!a!"=="2" set a=1
if "!b!"=="2" set a=2)
echo on

Hope you can get this script to work for you the way you want to. Do drop me a comment would love to hear from you.

Excel 2007 Macro Security Problem

I had written certain Macro on an Excel 2003 Workbook to be distributed hence the Sheet was protected as well the the Macro. It used to work perfectly, it even used to work in Excel 2007 after opening up in Compatibility Mode.

Recently after finding the need to work with larger sets of data I decided to save the file as a Macro Enabled Worksheet. Unfortunately my woes just began. On opening the newly created page I received the Security Warning that macro have been disabled as shown below.


On selecting options there was no longer an option to enable this content. Adding the location to the trusted location etc etc did not have any affect. After reading up a bit I came to know that there exist a registry hack to disable Excel 2007 from mandating that the Macro needs to be scanned by the Antivirus.

You can either save the below code into a .reg file and execute it or go into your registry to the location mentioned. Add the DWORD and set it to 1

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security]
"ExcelBypassEncryptedMacroScan"=dword:00000001


Post the registry correction you have the option to enable this content as shown in the image below.



The helpful resource that helped me solve this problem was

http://www.rondebruin.nl/password2007.htm


Another useful site that I have come across to help users move into Excel 2007 is

http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/asstvid.aspx?assetid=XT101493291033&vwidth=1044&vheight=788&type=flash&CTT=11&Origin=HA101491511033


It allows you to quickly find out where each of the option of Excel 2003 are found in Excel 2007. Hope you found this useful, do drop me a comment if possible.

Port Forwarding Airtel Beetel Modem / Netgear WRG614

Would recommend reading of my previous post as it talks about how the setup exists between the modem and wifi router.

http://piglings.blogspot.com/2008/09/airtel-beetel-modem-netgear-wgr614-wifi.html

The Wifi router is setup as an access point so the Beetel Modem acts as the DHCP and the port forwarding needs to be done on the Beetel itself.


Okay, port forwarding needs to done to enable certain application / games to interact across the internet. It provides the capability to forward traffic from the ip that currently terminates at the Modem to the computer that needs to receive it.

Step 1

Access your Beetel Modem on the following address

http://192.168.1.1/main.html

Username: admin
Password: admin

Step 2

Select Advanced Setup ---> NAT ---> Virtual Servers




Step 3

Click Add, check if the application you need to port forward exists, if so please select and in the Server IP address put in the address of the computer you need to forward to 192.168.1.10.

Make sure that the IP of this machine is made static, refer my above blog entry to figure out how to do that else, this will not work if your computer keeps getting different IP addresses.



Click the save apply.

Step 4

This step is to be used if the application you need to do port forwarding for does not exist in the list that has been provided in the DSL Modem.

Select Custom Service, put a name for example I have put VNC.

Put the start port number and the end port number, the internal port numbers will automatically fill up.



If the Service requires multiple ranges, you can enter in each of the ranges on the next lines.

If your not sure of whether the service requires a TCP or a UDP would suggest you select the option of TCP / UDP in the Protocol drop down.

Step 5

After saving you need to reboot the system for it to take place. Best way to is to power off and power on the setup.

The best way to check if your setup is working is to go to a site that lets you check for example

http://www.canyouseeme.org/

Keep in mind the IP of your computer you need to forward to is static. If this works do drop me a line, would love to hear. If your feeling generous click an ad :)

Asus Mobile Phone Service Center Bangalore

I recently had a problem with my Asus P320 mobile phone, looked up on the net and couldn't find details of the service center for Bangalore, apparently it recently shifted last month. Thought I post the details here to help out others. The service center services all ASUS products, not just mobile phones.

The ASUS Service Center or Asus Royal Club as it is called is located at

Number 1105, 3rd Floor, Kambi complex,
Near Corporation circle,
Bangalore 560002.

In terms of Landmark it is behind the LIC building adjacent to Adigas restaurant.

The phone number is (080)22112942. Prior to this I came across an All India toll free number but I couldn't get anyone to pick it up, the number was 1800 2090 365.

The timing are 10 am to 8 pm on weekend days and 10 am to 5 pm on Saturday. You will need your bill as proof for warranty.

I have put together a blog for this phone over here

http://p320.blogspot.com/

If you have found this useful, do drop me a comment, if your feeling generous click an ad :)

There is a lot more information available on the Asus P320 at the following site

http://p320.blogspot.com

Airtel Beetel Modem + Netgear WGR614 Wifi Router

There are a couple of articles available on the internet explaining how to set this up but I after playing around a lot I realized that there are much easier ways of setting up a connection such as Airtel / BSNL / Tata with your own Wifi router such as Netgear / Buffalo / Linksys.

The most widely published explanations involves converting your ADSL Modem / Router (Beetel) into Bridge mode thereby only making it work as a modem and making the Wifi Router (Netgear) do all the work.

While this works fine it involves changes to be made to the configuration of the ADSL Modem in terms of setup as well the requirement of the username and password to entered into the Wifi Router setup. Also once you do this setup you will lose access to your Modem, requiring you to unplug the wifi router to access it.

Will be descibing a method below on an easier approach to getting your wifi online without needing to know your password or change any other settings on the ADSL modem.

Step 1

Plug in the network cable coming out of the ADSL modem /router ( Beetel) into the network port of your computer / laptop.

The computer should automatically get assigned a ip address of the following series

192.168.1.2


This means that the ADSL modem address would be 192.168.1.1. Type in the following address to access the page of the ADSL modem.

http://192.168.1.1/main.html

It is will pop up a username and password

username : admin
password : password

Other standard is admin / admin

Step 2

Click on Advanced Setup --> LAN, you should see the following page , or something very similar. This is fine , no need to change anything, though you may want to change your password for security reasons as this page can be access from the internet as well.


From the device Info ---> Summary Screen write down the Primary DNS Server address and the Secondary DNS Server address.

Step 3

Disconnect from the ADSL modem, switch on your wireless router, if you have a system with wireless, switch on your laptop wireless, it should connect to the wireless on the router. Otherwise plug in the network cable into one of the LAN ports of the router with the other end into your computer.

Let the router assign you an IP. It typically would be of the series 192.168.0.2 ..

Type the following address to access the main page

http://192.168.0.1

It is will pop up a username and password

username : admin
password : password

Other standard is admin / admin


Step 4

You should see the following page

Make the following entries

Does your Internet connection require a logn ---> No

Account Name ---> Blank
Domain Name ---> Blank

Internet Connection

Check the box that says use Static IP Address
Enter the address as 192.168.1.x where x is a larger number larger than the number of system you ever plan to connect, in my case 20 so that it never gets assigned by the ADSL router.

The 192.168.1 needs to be the same that you used for accessing your ADSL router.(192.168.1.1). Basically now this router is part of the ADSL addressing system.

Check the box that says use the following DNS server
Put in the DNS address you have copied in the previous step

Step 5

In the advanced menu, click LAN IP Setup, you should see the screen below.


In the LAP IP Setup, enter the IP Address, the same as entered in the previous screen, 192.168.1.x, in my case 192.168.1.20

Enter the subnet as 255.255.255.0

Leave the other options as is.

Make sure the Use Router as DHCP option is Unchecked !



Step 6

Click on the Wireless setting tab , you should see the screen below


assign any name you want for your wireless connection. You can choose to have no protection but its unsafe. Its very important to password protect your internet connection. There are typically two types WEP and WPA. Make sure you write down the password you are setting because you will need this to connect wirelessly. The password in the above case is for WEP connection, it is the hexadecimal code.

Below is the option for WPA. You need to remember the passcode you have entered here. WPA is much more secure, WEP can be hacked, I've done it :)



Step 7

You are almost done , but pay attention. Power off both the ADSL modem / router and wifi router. Take the network cable and plug it into the available LAN socket on the ADSL Modem. The other end on the LAN cable need to be plugged in any of the Wifi Router's LAN sockets. Be very careful not to plug it into the WAN socket, this is a single socket, typically the Netgear Router will have 1 WAN and 4 LAN sockets. So I say again, the LAN socket only, if your still confused, just plug it into the middle socket. :)

You Wifi router is now working as an Access point and all the computers that connect to it will be assigned IP from the ADSL Modem / Router in the 192.168.1.2 , 192.168.1.3 series once you enter the password based on the protection you have choosen.

You are now up and running :)

Points to note

1. You can still access your ADSL router page with 192.168.1.1/main.html
2. You can access your Netgear Wifi router with the new address of 192.168.1.20

Do drop me a comment if you have found this useful. If your feeling generous you could donate a dollar via paypal :)

Will link in port forwarding separately. Ok have done the port forwarding part, its available here

http://piglings.blogspot.com/2008/10/port-forwarding-airtel-beetel-modem.html

Incase of errors in connecting to certain sites / VPN / mail etc do check out the following page

http://piglings.blogspot.com/2009/03/airtel-blocking-websites-partially.html