With over 25 new features and bug fixes, the RouterTech team is proud to announce the release of version 2.92 of it’s firmware. Details of all changes and fixes are shown in the list below.

1. New shell script: ap_restart.sh (wireless firmwares only) – restarts the wireless access point.

2. Busybox “sync” has been replaced with a stand-alone sync utility (wireless firmwares only).

3. Fixed a display issue with the printenv command (problem with printing newlines).

4. Fixed a display issue for pppoe on the Status menu.

5. Following a poll on the forum, the bwbasic interpreter has been removed.

6. Following a poll and other discussions on the forum, the default DSP driver for the standard firmwares has been set to dsp75.

7. New feature: udpxy added to the wireless firmwares. The program allows you to relay multicast UDP traffic to a client’s TCP (HTTP) connection (unicast). This allows you to use IP TV (UDP multicast) services via wifi. Example: “udpxy -m br1 -p 88 -S”
where: m – interface (LAN group) where the IP-TV bridge connection added.
-p – the port to listen on… here, it is port 88
-S – enable the bandwidth statistics. The status page is available at http://192.168.1.1:88/status (router ip and 88 port from the -p 88 option). Also the -B option can be used to setup udpxy’s cache size, e.g: “udpxy -m br1 -p 88 -B 1024K -S”
After this you can use the IP-TV as unicast by ethernet and wi-fi, for example if the udp multicast url is udp://@233.132.142.30:1234 – you can access it as http://192.168.1.1:88/udp/233.132.142.30:1234

8. The darkstat feature has been removed from the firmwares for routers with 2mb flash.

9. The rt_commands.html file has been removed from the binary firmwares.

10. Busybox has been upgraded to v1.15.3.

11. New shell script: start_httpd.sh – to start the firmware’s http server, optionally specifying the http server’s port (the default port is 80). This script runs during the boot-up process to start the http server for the web configuration.

12. New environment variable: http_port – to specify a port for the http server. If this is set to “none”, then the http server will not be started during the bootup process – this can save significant memory on low memory routers – but you will not be able to open the web configuration with this setting. If you thereafter wish to configure the router from its web interface in such a case, you will need to run start_httpd.sh from the command line, either with no parameters, or with the desired port number.

13. Slight change to the syntax of auto_defragenv.sh to: auto_defragenv.sh –threshold=<number> (note the “=” sign).

14. The dnsproxy server has been upgraded from dproxy-nexgen to dnsmasq v2.51 (still masquerading as “dproxy”) for its up-to-date caching dns proxy functions only (NOT lan dhcp). The code has been patched, to reduce size by disabling unused options and functions, to ignore command line parameters, and to do all configuration by configuration file. Additional conf files can be added to /tmp/dns.d/. dnsmasq supports many options and enables additional functions such as auto selection of the fastest responding dns server from all configured, and domain blocking – exploited by the extra_dns and adblock functions below.

15. New shell scripts: adblock.sh and adblock_multi.sh – to assist in blocking popup adverts by means of “dns poisoning”. It is basically obsolete if you can use Firefox and adblock plus – but otherwise (e.g., if using IE) it is very useful. Advantages (a) it only needs to be implemented once – on the router – and all clients would benefit from the ad blocking, etc (b) it works with all browsers such such as IE which don’t have adblock (c) some of the hosts in the hosts block lists do some of what tinyproxy could have achieved, re: parental control. For this purpose, adblock.sh downloads and converts one of a number of common internet resources (“small”, “medium”, “large”, or “xlarge”) of ad servers to be blocked. The largest of these uses a lot of cpu cycles on the router (about 20%) – but since the router’s cpu is largely idle most of the time, this is not a major issue. The smallest consumes only about 5% cpu cycles. Run adblock.sh with no parameters to see the syntax. adblock_multi.sh is a shell to adblock.sh, allowing it to download more than one of the internet lists at once (e.g., “adblock_multi.sh exit small large”). Note that, for routers with low memory (i.e., 8mb RAM), you should never use “large” or “xlarge”. In fact, “small” might be the only one that such routers will be able to cope with. If you try to download more lists than your free memory can cope with, your router WILL crash!
NOTE: you MUST always run “adblock.sh exit” to remove the adblock features from memory, before any attempt to upgrade the firmware.

16. New environment variable: adblock – use this to schedule adblock_multi.sh to run when a WAN connection is made. The values should be the parameters that you wish to pass to adblock_multi.sh (e.g., setenv adblock “exit medium xlarge”). On routers with 8mb RAM, you should only supply “small” – do NOT try to use the medium/large/xlarge lists on such routers.

17. New utility: pixelserv – a tiny webserver that serves up a single pixel to any request. It can be used in conjunction with the adblock features.

18. New shell script: uptime – parses and displays the system uptime information.

19. New shell script: memavail – reports the amount of RAM that is available to be used.

20. New environment variable: extra_dns – to add DNS servers from a selection (“All”, “OpenDNS”, “Google”, “UltraDNS”, “DNSResolvers”, or “BT”) in dnsmasq format. You can set “extra_dns” to any of these, to a combination of them, or to “All”, and you can use either their full names, or the first letter of their names – e.g., setenv extra_dns “O U D B” – will select DNS servers from OpenDNS, UltraDNS, DNSResolvers, and BT; setenv extra_dns “A” or setenv extra_dns “1” will select all of them.

21. New environment variable: extra_resolvers – to add ALL the DNS servers specified above, in resolv.conf format. These servers are prepended to /etc/resolv.conf. In the TWNETW1350A firmware, only the first three will be used.

22. New environment variable: static_dns – this is useful mainly for those with DHCP (as opposed to pppoa/pppoe) connections, who do not have the “Use Peer DNS” button in the firmware’s web interface. Set it to 1 to prevent the dhcp server from overwriting your static DNS entries.

22. The ssh server (dropbear) has been upgraded from v0.51 to v0.52 in line with upstream package source. A default idle timeout of 120s has also been enabled, to prevent disconnected instances of dropbear from hanging around wasting memory and preventing further logins (maximum 2 simultaneous allowed). To avoid the timeout please enable a keepalive of say 30s in your ssh client (supported by putty and winscp, for example). The dropbear code has been patched to accept this null packet keepalive – the default code acts only on data transfer.

23. The upnp daemon has been upgraded to v1.4 20091102 in line with upstream. Additional optional configuration items include the ability to not show the Internet server in Windows “My network places”, by specifying a null presentation_url.

24. New hook to run a user-supplied script (/var/tmp/onclose.sh) when before rebooting or shutting down the router via the reboot or shutdown commands. When either command is executed, it will search for “/var/tmp/onclose.sh”, and, if it is found, it will be executed immediately. After this, the normal house-cleaning on reboot/shutdown will continue.

25. Wide display support enabled for the “ps” command. This is triggered by running “ps -ww”. The downside of this is that “ps aux” will now generate an error. So you can only run “ps” with no parameters (which will behave as it would when you used to run “ps aux”), or run it with “-w” (132 column width) or “-ww” (2048 column width. Users who have written scripts with “ps aux” will need to change their scripts to just call “ps” (busybox ignored the “aux” anyway). The command “ps -ww” will display everything (up to a width of 2048 characters). It would however need to be used with great discretion, because all the username and password, etc., passed to pppd will be displayed in its full glory (i.e., you don’t really want to post the output of “ps ww” on the forum!).

26. Text files with the mtd calculations for each firmware image now added to each firmware release. Each firmware image has a corresponding “_mtd.txt” file, which shows the correct mtd partition settings for that firmware image. The text files are in unix format (for very good reasons), and so to view them under Windows, you will require a text editor that understands unix line endings.

Thanks to all who worked hard on making this release possible

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 1:01 am by Kieran and is filed under Announcements . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.