Command of the day: ^]

You may have seen it hundreds of times but few know what it means.

Escape character is '^]'.
It is actually quite obvious is you know that the caret ^ is a shorthand notation for 'Control' (or <Ctrl> as would be more familiar to windows users).

So what is it? It is not actually a command but a keystroke for the telnet command. It opens a command prompt from where you can enter a variety of commands.

Possibly the most exciting thing you can do is then press ^Z ( <Ctrl>+z ) and suspend your telnet session, returning you to your local shell. You can then resume later by using your shell job control (ie. 'fg').

Some other useful commands are

• quit (or press ^C)
• send brk (which if supported will send a break)
• speed 115200 (which if supported will switch the serial line speed)
• close (disconnect the session)
• open (establish a new session)
• help (list the available commands)

And there are many more documented in the telnet man page.

In this day and age, any server shell access should be via a secure protocol like ssh. telnet remains however as a handy tool for testing TCP servers and accessing specialised equipment like serial concentrators.

It is also worth noting that telnet is actually a protocol and not just a raw TCP stream. There is a lot of negotiation which is done to ensure that your terminal works correctly. Often this only becomes obvious when your terminal does not work correctly.

PocketWIFI and CentOS-6

Now that I have a laptop I can use on the train I can surf the internet using my Pocket WIFI. This is actually a Vodafone Hauwai E585 with a TPG SIM (Uses the Optus network).
It all works great but I don't get any feedback on the connection status and quality.
I have an app on my phone which does this but I could not find one for Linux so I decided to write one for Linux/Gnome.
Here then is my pocketwifi status applet.
 http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/pocketwifi-1.0-1.el6.noarch.rpm

1. Install the RPM
2. Right click on your gnome panel
3. Select Add to Panel...
4. Type in PocketWIFI
5. Click Add

The applet will automatically detect your route and find the PocketWIFI. It will then query the connection details and download the same status icons which are used on the PocketWIFI screen.

In the future I might add the option to use Gnome icons for  a more consistent look.I might also add support for some other models. If you want your model supported you can drop me an email.

Mobile Internet

I recently got a new work phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This is my first 'smart' phone and it seems to be a good fit with my Linux interests.

The problem is that work will not pay for mobile data so I can't make use of it on the train (some may argue that is a good thing). My workaround was to get a portable 3G to WIFI router aka, MIFI, Pocket WIFI etc.

I had already researched phone plans and worked out that the phone 'cap' seems to be one of the best marketing tricks ever schemed up. The only plan of interest to me is the TPG $1 per month pay as you go plan. Being an existing TPG customer I also get 150Mb of free data per month.

So the next question was which router to get? Most comparisons seemed to be caught up on the price of the data but I wanted to know which one works the best. In the end I went for the Vodafone Pocket WIFI. This is a Huawei E585 V2. It comes with a Vodafone SIM which you must activate and install yourself. On special for $40 I though I would give it a go. After several hours trying to activate the SIM and then a few more trying to make the phone get an address via DHCP I was on the internet. (The activation problem was because the Vodafone web site was asking for the wrong ID numbers. The DHCP is still an issue and is presumably a bug in ICS).

So, once it was all working I tried it out on the train and was most unimpressed. Although it would say connected it rarely managed to download as much as a web page. There are people complaining about this on the Vodafone forums and they insist that if there is a problem it will be fixed real soon now. Luckily, Vodafone did not factor in my plan so once my free month was up I unlocked the router and switched to TPG (which uses Optus 3G).

This is much more useful on the train though still does not knock my socks off. I have come to the realisation that the term 'Mobile Broadband' is a misnomer and should really be called 'Portable Broadband'. You can use it in one spot. You can take it and use it somewhere else, but try and use it on the way and it will not work very well at all.

Perhaps other networks work better. I see lots of new towers on the side of the train line. Perhaps other routers work better. The software quality on these things is never very impressive. Perhaps the whole thing is a joke and handing off to the next tower will never work (it does not work for voice, why would it work for data?).

Perhaps one day work will pay for my data and I can compare to the built in functionality of the phone.

Finally, it turns out that using facebook on the train is not as exciting as I was led to believe and my need for data is not that great anyway.