[MLB-WIRELESS] WRT54G and bigpond heartbeart

[David Ashburner]

>I connect my router to a cable modem, and have had a couple of
>complaints about how it handles the 'heartbeat'.

That is why I started rolling my own firmware. The original integration of 
BPAlogin is a little bizare, with he sveasoft version is still basicly the 
same.

There  is a bug that screws up the allocation of the heartbeat port if you 
provide the address of the HBS. It tries to do a DNS lookup and fails and so 
the port it listens to for the heartbeat is 0 instead of 5050. What this 
means is that you time out on the heartbeat every 5 minutes and re-login 
again.

You only notice this if you change the logging preferences but the 
/tmp/bpalogin.conf file is written by the rc binary( it's a multicall binary 
like busybox that does a lot of the init/rcS  stuff though why Linksys did 
it as a binary instead of scripts I have no idea).

He he, and once you fix that ( I can post a patch if anyone is interested)  
then you find that you are timing out on the heartbeats because Bigpond 
delivers then at 5 min 13 sec which is 13 sec after the max hb interval 
timeout.  In the bpalogin.conf there is no specified max but the code has a 
default value of 300 sec.

Even with a longer max hb interval you will still get long perods without 
heartbeats where your linksys will login  again and again and again.  You 
won't notice any disruption to service except when the login fails (probably 
because there are hundreds of devices doing this )  and you session gets 
booted.



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