サン電子 Rooster G8.0 (SC-RS810G)

rooster G8 home page
IOS used is RS810G-3.00, May 29 2009 17:01:51

We bought one of these to run some gear in a shop. A moderately large supermarket. We actually have a number of their earlier model deployed
and for people considering a wireless (as in HSDPA) router, here is a quick review.

One word summary “don’t.” Unfortunately, the choice for HSDPA routers is very limited and so sometimes you have to buy these things. For one machine, an HSDPA card in a pcmcia/usb adaptor is a much better bet.

If I find a better HSDPA router, as in one that works. The roosters will be jumped on.

Nice things about it.

Amazingly enough, they actuall mention that there might be some GNU stuff in there, a grand total of 1 paragraph on page 1. This is a big improvement.

Well, the box is nice, it’s brown and made of cardboard. The manual is small and unedifying in that unique way that manuals are, where you read it and arrive at the end wondering who the main characters were and if Hollywood will make a movie out of it.

The actual router manages to avoid being a shapeless piece of ugly black plastic by being roughly betamax shape with some blinkenlights on the ugly black plastic. And unlike its predecessor, it doesnt crash when you eject the pcmcia card!

Not so nice things about it.

Where to start? It would be unfair to compare it to a Yamaha RT router since Yamaha routers cost less, work longer, harder, better, are not unstackable shapeless lumps of ugly black plastic, have a better interface, (telnet/ssh in English as well) different colour plastic and a feature set far in excess of the rooster (bgp/ospf/radius/firewall and so on). If they supported wireless cards, we’d have 200 of them instead of roosters. No, that would be unfair.

So that’s what we will do. Fair is for losers.

• Telnet interface speaks SJIS and only SJIS. (Yamaha is euc/sjis/ascii!)
• Firewall features are awesome. (Yamaha firewall is merely excellent.)
• Mail account settings are useless. (Yamaha mail notification works.)
• Logging, it claims syslog but you can’t set the facility.
• The awesome firewall features.
• Virtual servers cannot route to different ports. (No such limitation.)
• Reboot for even the most insignificant changes. (Yamaha is a real router!)
• Dynamic dns support. (netvolante DNS.)
• VPN …

Admitted, Yamaha firewall/nat/masquerade doesn’t like bit-torrent and skype but
that can be fixed by blocking those annoyances. If you have to use bit-torrent to download those american tv shows, it may run out of nat slots and melt.

In theory, the virtual server lameness is dealable with, most of the 400 plus places only have 1 machine and thus doing things like port 10000 to port 3389 on machine A, port 10001 to port 3389 on machine B, is unnessary. But the best solution is a pcmcia adaptor and an HSDPA card per box. That’s how good the roosters are.

To clarify the awesome firewall. More often than not, the rooster will decide that return packets such as responses to HTTP requests, DNS queries, are evil hackers and block them. The solution is to reboot or disable the firewall completely.

Sorry, but there actually is one nice thing about them.

The hardware watchdog works.

Afterword.

Zoolook.

If this gives the impression that the writer doesn’t like Rooster routers, that is entirely intentional.

All USB Flash are created different. But some are more different than others.

USB flash comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, SLC, MLC dual and quad channel. But it’s all much of a muchness when trying to do stuff. What bothers me is the erroneous speed claims.

Since I boot off USB a lot (windows xp embedded) it helps to have blazingly fast flash or a really slow brain. A particular tool I like is the
Flash Drive Tester
which will write all over your flash and tell you how fast it did it.

Sony Pocketbit USM16GLX.

No silly plastic cap to lose, which is a plus. However, its speed claims appear to be… shall we say optimistic. The blurb sheet that comes with the flash says.

Survey says, write 13, read 25.

Fortunately, for this particular usage, the capacity (windows PE SDI tools are dumb and cant do smart filesystem copies.) is what counts. The performance is mediocre. The TDK (insert packaging rage) writes at 15~17 and reads around 22~24. but it runs clonezilla and that does do smart filesystem copies.

I went on business day. Not that many maids.
Here is a brief run of things, while I remember.

• Cat Shit One. – Only set in the 90’s in Afghanistan (Camels this time) Anima
• Eden of the East. – On Noitamina. Juiz
• Valkyrie Chronicles. – BS11 April 11, Saturday 2300~ (Based on the Sega game).
• Queens’ Blade. – Tits out for the lads. Zeppelin Tits with swords, the anime.
• Shangri-la. – Girl with boomerang. April start.
• Hanasakeru Seishonen. – NHK BS2. Naive girl “Kajika” has to choose a husband.
• Redline. – Loud, insane racing with huge explosions. Quite silly.
• Chrome Shelled Regios. – “Grab the sword of glory!” As the Kadokawa flyer says.
• Natsu no Arashi. (School Rumble author.) Time travelling girls, chaos, the usual.
• Kobato. (CLAMP) NHK 2009 Autumn. Levels of cuteness that will make you ill. Just think, CLAMP have been together for 20 years now.
• Summer Wars. – Madhouse. The heroine in her onepiece looks a bit like Rin Ogawa from another of their titles, Rideback. Looks like fun.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st. – Just goes to prove that magical girls didn’t die out with Pretty Sammy.
• Zamd – why pay the playstation store when you can watch it on tv from april.
• Eureka Seven movie. Pocket full of rainbows April 25
  h2. Cat Shit One.

Motofumi Kobayashi writes what you might call military fiction. 5 volumes so far.
The trailer they showed was more of a 90’s desert storm one, but the original comics address ‘Nam. Featuring animals instead of humans.

Sogovision.

No goggles 3D. It’s pretty freaky as you walk past the screen and Sakura jumps out at you.

Other.

• There was a gainax stand. I didn’t pay any attention to it except to note the absence of that eternal re-write. Evangelion.
• Satellite completely deny that “Valerian” (Time Jam, whatever) existed at all. Their new chew-toy is “Basquash”. Wherein we begin to wonder if Kawamori has lost his mind.
• Gintama still rocks.

This is a fun easy going comic about the Alien Affairs deparment in Tokyo.
Sumi Makihara’s average day is quite stressful, dealing with all sorts of strange creatures makes for light-hearted comedy. The day-to-day nature of things makes this a relaxing read and for those that live in Tokyo, this sort of near-future SF has landmarks they may recognise.

“Was Taro Okamoto really human?”

Note, if you take the sleeve off, the cover is different.

1. Title: Ventla ventla 1
2. Author: Ryouma Nomura
3. Publisher: Kodansha (Afternoon KC)
4. Price: 524
5. ISBN: 978-4063145533
6. Publication date: 20090223

This is textpattern, it likes to make an insane number of mysql queries per page, but that’s about what you would expect with php.

It does, however, have a really nice editorial interface.