Subject: Re: Running NetBSD on Netgear appliances
To: None <tech-ports@NetBSD.org>
From: Matthias Scheler <tron@zhadum.de>
List: tech-ports
Date: 08/25/2005 16:55:07
> I'm behind some Netgear right now, and I too think that its NAT has 
> problems - I can only have 1 outgoing TCP-connection (ssh, web), if I 
> start another one the first one hangs or gets dropped. Ethereal made me 
> believe the router messes up sequence number and retransmits and all sort 
> of fun happen (as far as I can debug from here, which is not much).

Try updating the firmware if you are able to. Netgear usually provides
updates for their appliance which actually fix bugs. When I bought
my Netgear WG602v2 access point years ago the web configuration interface
didn't work with Mozilla. Two releases later they actually fixed that.

> >2.) The sources which Netgear provides to be GPL compliant are completely
> >   undocumented. I couldn't even figure out how you are supposed to
> >   compile them to get a firmware image.
> If thet don't provid the neede Makefiles etc., that's a violation of the 
> GPL, see #3:
> 
> ``The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
> making modifications to it.  For an executable work, complete source
> code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
> associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
> control compilation and installation of the executable.''

Well, maybe they are there. It's just hard to figure out how to use them.
Imagine somebody would drop a NetBSD source tree without "./build.sh"
and no documentation on you and ask you to build a release. You can do
that without "./build.sh" but it is difficult and time consuming.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://scheler.de/~matthias/