Internet in Dubai

Hi everybody,

I am in Dubai now and want to share some information about the internet connction there. I live in a house in a community called "Arabian Ranches". The ISP is du Telecom or know as EITC ( Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company ). They are the only ISP providing Internet service in the gated community " Arabian Ranches " (despite that there are only two telcos in UAE anyway, du and Etisalat ).

Okay, so I live in a house in this neighborhood. As I couldn't get any informations prior actually being in Dubai in my house, I ll try to give some information for people who might have similar question.

DU offers FTTH here. There is a CPE in a cabinet in the house. The CPE is doesn't need power, so I assume they are using a passive optical network (PON). Speeds are up to 100 Mbit. I sticked to the smallest bandwith with 8. Upgrade is always possible.

So the CPE is connected with a double optical cable to the so-called "optical" Layer 2 switch. They installed a Vood 292 "Layer 2" switch next to the CPE. This makes the transition from optical to copper RJ45. You ll find more information on the Vood 292 on the internet.

http://www.t-2.net/media/Dokumenti/Stikala/Switch_Vood_200.pdf

http://www.oslagbart.se/i3_VRG-VTA_Config_Ver6E.pdf

http://www.netmedia.fi/products/tilgin/vood200.html

http://www.hakukaista.fi/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=16&Itemid=50

Two Rj11 are available for analog phone (they do it VoIP -style). Works. 

So the technicians came, did some stuff, asked me where my computer is did some more work and left. They told me to buy a router if I want wifi. After they left, I checked their work....  They did some wiring in the cabinet, put the Vood 292 in and connected the house-cat6 cables to the Vood. The funny thing is, that they did a bad job regarding wiring. They were friendly and all, but they obvious have no idea to a proper cat-wiring.

All the Cat6 cables from the house terminate in this cabinet and they are punched down onto a "Block 66" not a patchpanel! As it hurts my eyes looking in this cabinet, I ll get a patchpanel and install it there. The cabinet isn't a 19"-rack and there are only 10 cat6 so a small patchpanel for wallmounting will be enough. I ll add a small switch and do the job properly. Once I find my camera, I ll make some decent pictures.

You can hardwire your stuff to the Vood 292 and they ll get an external IP. But As I wanna use homenetworking I ll just hardwire one of the eight Vood LAN ports to the WAN of my router. the 7 other won't be used. I am pretty sure if you gonna use IP-TV ( DU offers over 200 FTA channels ) your IP-TV decoder box gonna need hardwire contact on the Vood LAN as they probably use vLAN tagging.

Softether - Raspberry Pi

Just found a very good writen German manual.

Also für alle dies auf deutsch lesen wollen, schaut euch ihn mal an:

http://go-seven.de/softether-vpn-auf-dem-raspberry-pi/

Copyright Pascal Tippelt

Virtual Ethernet LAN cable

As an ongoing effort, I am trying to connect my different homes and flats with some kind of VPN so that we can all share the same resources. I recently tried connecting my routers (which run DDWRT or TomatoUSB) with some kind of client/server construction based on PPTP or openVPN. Neither of the protocols were to my satisfaction as openVPN requires routers with more flashmemory and ddwrt is a mess with its GUI.

Enter... Softether

http://www.softether.org/4-docs/2-howto/1.VPN_for_On-premise/3.LAN_to_LAN_Bridge_VPN

I stumbled upon this nice piece of software one day as I was looking a solution again for my problem. It is just perfect for me. It's a bit similar to Hamachi, but in my oppinion even a bit handier.

Imagine Softether being a virtual network cable expanding your existing home network with a virtual lan cable going to a virtual "cloud switch". Adding Softether to all your different home networks amd connecting them to the same cloud switch just connects all your networks on layer 2! Its really like pulling network cables from all your places to one central switch without actually pulling real cables between your homes/flats.

Those virtual network cables are route through a special VPN tunnel and terminat in the virtual hub in the cloud. The network really behaves like being linked with a regular patch cable! It works so good, that I even was assigned an IP address from router A's DHCP pool, even though I was actually on router B's physical net ("problem" was solved by enabling "Filter DHCP packets on Virtual Switch").

So, like I said, this can be used to merge multiple networks to one big one. I am using this even on the same TCP/IP subnet 192.168.67.0, here is how:

Router A has 192.168.67.1 with DHCP pool ...2-...99
Router B has ...100 with DHCP pool ...101-...149
Router C has ...150 with DHCP pool ...151-...199

Every router is by default the gateway of its physical network, but all devices are in the same subnet. Using printers, IP-cams, NAS like on your homenetwork.

My network C is in an VoIP restricted country. I can't use SIP over there. Ports blocked, deep packet inspections running on ISP side, SIP via VPN is not as easy too. Because you can't port-forward thru VPN that easy. So my SIP-phone on network C is configured manually to use IP 192.168.67.254 (out of every DHCP pool) and use 192.168.67.1 as gateway and DNS. Router A has a portforward on port 5060 to 192.168.67.254, so it is reachable from outside.

Sounds like a nice setup right?

But now even better: Softether of course requires to run on each physical network segment you want to connect with each other. You could put it on a regular desktop machine and its fine. But it needs to run 24/7 so that the virtual cable is up. But that'S not preferable solution, too much waste energy.

Enter ... Raspberry Pi

There is a Linux ARM build available from Softether. So easy to install, so low energy, such wow, so lol.

2GB SD card. fresh debian for Raspberry, connect raspberry with router (lan cable), power the raspberry (i used usb port of routers!), ssh into your Pi, apt-get update upgrade, expand filesystem, set timezone

meanwhile set up dhcp reservation for the pi, portforward 5555 to pi  (only necessary for server pi)

ServerPi: wget latest Softether Server ARM EABI build for Pi, follow these blog post more or less:

http://tomearp.blogspot.de/2013/11/setting-up-l2tpipsec-vpn-with-softether.html

Client Pis: wget latest Softether Bridge ARM EABI build for Pi, same procedure like server just replace server everywhere with bridge

I even doubt anyone will ever read this but if someone ever does and is stuck, just comment. Just a rough sketch of what to do.

To config all the settings on the Pis just use the "Server manager Tool" on any desktop machine and connect to the Pis IP. There you can setup everything. All you need to do on the Pis is installing Softether moduls and ensuring the autostart on boot. The whole config stuff is easy made from normal computer with nice GUI

More Z-Wave Stuff

I recently added some door/window contact sensors to my setup. Easy install. In addition I also added a motion sensor and a siren. All products are battery powered. If they sense a motion or an door/windows opening, they wake up from hibernation and send their new state to the z-wave controller.

The siren is also battery powered, but it useses something like Flirs. It sleeps for 900ms seconds, then wakes up, checks for new instructions for 100ms and then sleeps again. This way it can conserve battery power but is also ready for new commands like "power up the siren, we have an intrusiuon!".

But until I haven't tested the whole setup for false alarms and tripping sensors, I ll stay with email notifications until i feel comfortable enabling the siren in the alarm pattern. Because once this thing goes off, it really makes a hell of a noise.