Jason Antman’s Blog

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Brother HL-2170W that I got for my mother. It seemed absolutely wonderful. Until the night of March 31st, just before Conficker was supposed to strike. Being that mom’s computer is the only one at home running Windows, I finished up a long-standing project – and moved her desktop, printer, and AppleTV over to a separate VLAN that’s not routable to anything else internal (i.e. anything important, or anything of mine). I’d already had the “client” VLAN setup for a while, so it was just a matter of tweaking the firewall rules and moving the static DHCP assignments from one subnet to the other.

Well, that’s where the problems started. While her Windows XP desktop and AppleTV coped nicely, and got their new addresses in DHCP as they should, the HL2170W did not, As a matter of fact, after two hours, I hadn’t seen a single DHCP request, even though I had the lease time set to 10 minutes for both subnets. So, I tried administratively downing the switch port a few times, to no avail. After a day of waiting, I came back to the problem – and still found nothing in the DHCP logs from that printer. I emailed mom and asked her to power-cycle it a few times… still nothing! It wasn’t even requesting DHCP when rolled, let alone at a regular interval!

Fast forward a week or so, to today. I’m ready to call Brother Support, as my mother hasn’t had use of her new printer in a week and a half. I’m infuriated – I’ve rolled the printer dozens of times, and not a single event in the DHCP log. I know it’s sending traffic from the port – I’ve reset the counters and they’re changing. I tried moving it back to the original VLAN and confirmed that it still has its’ original IP. I could get into the web interface via lynx and *tell it* to refresh DHCP, but this seemed quite pointless – there’s no way it’s physically possible to send the web request and then switch the port to the new VLAN before it gets DHCP.

So, I’m ready to call Brother Support. I then notice that the printer is turned off at the moment. From the switch log, it looks as though it’s been powered off for six days. So, I turn it on. And then go about starting my prep for the Brother call, first opening up a tail on the DHCP server log, grepped for the proper interface. And, wouldn’t you know, as I get up to let the dog out, the printer starts spitting out pages!

As far as I can tell, there’s something seriously wrong with the Brother HL-2170W DHCP implementation. Specifically, it didn’t get an address on the new VLAN until it was powered off for a *long* time. Even reboots wouldn’t trigger a request, until the box had been powered off for days. More importantly, though, it seems that it only gets DHCP once when it boots, and totally disregards the lease time!

Reviews dhcp, hl2170w, printer, vlan

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any meaningful updates here. And it’s not for lack of work – actually, I have a page-long list of projects I’ve finished and things I’ve discovered that I want to share with… well… whoever finds me on Google. I’ve got some new code that needs attention – lots of tiny little make-life-easier scripts and some not-so-tiny stuff – as well as a few interesting things I’ve found, and some projects that deserve updates.

So, over the next week, I’m going to try and make it my purpose to start posting updates and shortening the list of things to mention. However, I’ve also decided to set aside a few minutes at the end of each day to post whatever I did/found that’s interesting, or add some updates on ongoing projects. Perhaps also have a weekly writing hour (probably on the weekend) to post larger updates.

It’s also worth note that, for the most part, I never started a blog in the hopes of having subscribers. I simply think of this as a place to post some useful things that I do or figure out, in the hopes that other people will stumble by and also find them useful.

So, what have I been up to lately? Let’s start with the past two days:

• Trying to get FreeRADIUS to authenticate with groupOfNames objects in OpenLDAP, the intended end result being centralized authentication for m0n0wall’s captive portal.
• At work, designing a system to test the client-visible functionality of a large captive portal system (on the order of 700 AP’s and 50k users) – essentially, sitting on a client VLAN and checking DHCP, DNS, HTTP redirects, and the validity of the login page.
• Security auditing of everything at home, and trying to find a working Nessus web interface.
• Continuing on my move over to static IP – specifically starting to roll out HTTPS for some internal stuff.
• Trying to get Vyatta’s VPN to work with a dynamically-IPed m0n0wall endpoint (in network-to-network).
• Some cabling upgrades at home and at the ambulance corps.
• Slowly but surely trying to make major changes and release a new version of PHP EMS Tools.
• Get Bacula working better.
• Load test this web server, and decide if it’s time for new hardware.
• Some new stuff for my truck.
• Get rid of MediaWiki as my homepage and replace it with a CMS.
• Continue my move to SubVersion and setup ViewVC for it.
• Rewrite my resume and start looking for jobs, as I’m finishing classes in July.
• Try to get some sleep and keep my sanity.

Personal updates