Wifi Roaming

Some of you may have read my post a week or so ago entitled Wifi is too Fiddly. Well, according to this press release on Engadget it seems that the GSMA and WBA agree with me. It is nice to feel vindicated.

Essentially they are proposing that SIM based authentication could be utilised to connect to WiFi access points. Thus your mobile service provider could setup some access points in areas where there is very high data usage and shift users onto this, thus freeing up the radio network for voice traffic and users outside the wireless range. Areas like airports and train stations immediately spring to mind for this type of hand off.

Wifi is too fiddly...

I have to travel a fair bit for work and hence waste a bit of time connecting to various wireless networks hotels, offices etc.

If everything goes smoothly then typically the steps are something like this:

1. What's the name of the wireless network?
2. The password is "ASDAHSDknaksdnaskjdnSAdasdasdaslkdj" great thanks.
3. Re type password.
4. Re type password
5. Re type password
6. Connect to wireless.
7. Wait 30 seconds for IP address to be assigned and to get actual internet connection.

More typically in hotels etc you have no security and a web landing page that you have to answer some questions on, so it goes something like this.

1. Find wireless network "AwesomeHotelWifi" "Free Airport Wifi"
2. Open browser and try to go to random page (better not be a https page though).
3. Repeat for ~45 seconds until login page appears. (Or alternatively when you have opened your browser all of your saved tabs have reloaded and gone to the network landing page that doesn't have working redirect after logging in.)
4. Enter details
5. View cheesy ad/sign life away
6. Get disconnected after ten minutes for no apparent reason.

A recent post on BuddeBlog got me thinking that there has to be a better way of connecting to wifi networks that would make them more widely used, trusted and less frustrating. The main idea is a better way of communicating the connection information or rather a method that allows most of the above steps to be automated.

I've seen a couple of applications, like Wifi Joiner, that have basically nailed the connecting to private network problem.  Wifi Joiner lets you create QR codes with network connection information and then others to scan it to connect, no need to enter pesky passwords. While this is a great idea I think to be successful we need to see it expanded initially to other smart phones (I'm looking at you here Apple) and secondly into desktops via a little config utility. In addition, beyond just carrying the bare bones network information it could also contain account details etc so that your login can be personalise and automated. Obviously you would need to have the data on the laptop initially for it to be useful but consider this.

1. You book at a new hotel overseas that has internet over wifi.
2. Hotel sends a confirmation email containing a config file/text string that contains all the information needed to connect to the network.
3. You check in, sit down in your room open your laptop and run the network utility.
4. It connects to the correct network, logs into the access control system and connects you to the internet in one step.

I would also like to see more advanced routing in mobile phones, so that I can go to a dedicated site over wifi connection but maintain the rest of my connections over my mobile data link. Think of the uses, you are in a shopping centre and the store is giving you discounts if you use their app or similar. Or you would like to be able to look at the directory for the centre to find a particular store. In this case the centre would like to provide you access to a certain webpage but nothing else. So you scan a QR code in the store, automagically connect to their network and this adds a route so that you can hit their server over the wifi, but everything else stays on your data connection.

Obviously there are some security implications that need to be worked out for these scenarios and I can't profess to have thought of all the attack vectors and problems with the new approaches. (Now that I work from home I don't have anyone technical to bounce my ideas off before posting.)

C# Documentation Generation

Seriously I didn't think it would be that hard, all we needed was documentation on a couple of C# projects for an API that we where releasing unto the unsuspecting masses. Java has JavaDoc, C# has nothing, well basically nothing.

DoxyGen is a jack of all trades document generation tool, which does work with C# (and C++, C, Java, PHP, Fortran...) we tried this but for some reason it doesn't resonate with the developers that I work with and really when you think about it. Why doesn't Visual Studio (which we use for everything as we're a windows .Net development shop) have built in documentation tools?

C# is Microsoft's language and they added the ability to document your code with \\\ style comments. Unfortunately the ability to get comments out of the code into some form that is appropriate for documenting an API, has been ignored or rather, not yet standardized or implemented or whatever excuse MS wishes to use.

A bit of poking around reveals that MS has their own tool which they use to generate their MSDN API documentation, Sandcastle. Sandcastle is possibly the most poorly documented project in existence. (In fact I wondered if it was a deliberate attempt at irony but then just remembered how lazy developers are). Thankfully there are some other kind souls out there that have bludgeoned through figuring out how to use Sandcastle and they developed Sandcastle Help File Builder which is a GUI for running Sandcastle and also gives you the ability to generate .chm files if you so desire.

In my case we just want the HTML output as we're going to be hosting it on a webserver. Playing around a little but with SHFB (namely changing the HelpFileFormat) allows me to get output as a webpage instead of the default .chm output format. This is pretty good, but we needed to get it styled up so that it fitted in with the rest of our sites. No worries, I'll just read through the documentation on how to do it.

Creating New Presentation Styles

TODO - recommendations and examples on creating new presentation styles (generally inherit from an existing style)

Ahhhhh, hmmm, did I tell you how awesome the documentation for this is?
It turns out that the best way to change the design and style is to copy and existing style and modify it with the additional complication that SHFB requires that the new style contain the name of the style that you have copied (go figure that one out....).
So after figuring it all out I found this post which pretty much explains everything and could have saved me a little bit of time. Anyway, the basic steps are as follows

1. Install Sandcastle and SHFB and its prerequisites. 
2. Open up SHFB and start a new project. 
3. Select the sources you want to use by "Adding Documentation Sources" 
4. Tweak the settings as desired. 
5. Click build. 
6. The output will open in a new browser window. 

Thats the basic steps, next step is I have to figure out how to get rid of the web page errors, which are caused because of a reference to a link of type "ms-help" in the html files. These links are apparently needed for when the .chm files are being generated but all they seem to do in my case is cause errors. It turns out that each "Presentation" has a "Transforms" folder associated with it so by commenting out the offending ms-help insertions I can alleviate that problem.
Next step is to figure out how to customise the header fully, currently we seem to be only allowed to change the text and perhaps stick an image in using the Post-Transform Component perhaps that will be sufficient for us.

Setting Up Wireless Distribution System

So, having moved from the trusty ridiculously slow and overpriced 3G internet connection to a super speedy ADSL2+ connection at home I ran into an unexpected problem.

Wireless signals and modern reinforced concrete buildings don't mix very well!

While I was sharing the 3G connection with a wireless router this was situated on the middle floor of the house, very centrally located and there where no issues with the signal strength any where in the house. Obviously with the new internet connection I needed to connect to a phone line, for some reason in this brand spanker of a house that I know reside there is no phone outlet on the middle floor of the house. So I had to either plug the new router in the living room, or in the bedroom. Given that the new connection came with a bonus SIP account and I'd purchased a voip enabled router it seemed to make sense to have this 'living' in the living room.

The Problem!

This however created a terrible, terrible problem not enough WiFi signal strength in the bedroom to use the iPhone in bed. I know this may not seem like a pressing problem but my partner seems to adore doing this (and it's growing on me a bit as well I must admit). So this, obviously, HAD to be fixed.

The Failed Ghetto Fix!



I attempted a ghetto reflector to boost the range of the router that I had picked up. I got the details off binarywolf.com which updated instructions from freeantennas. And I must admit that mine didn't look as good as the one pictured here because I have the craft skills of a clumsy 3 year old.

The Solution: WDS

So it was back to the web to search for solutions, WDS seemed to be the answer. I had toyed with Wireless distribution systems in the past, but only fancy commercial systems that used multiple radios etc etc to pull together different access points. In my various net wanderings I had read about WDS but never looked into it.  There is a good background on WDS on Wikipedia if you want some more information.

Having discovered the possibility of WDS I was then resigned to the fact that neither the cheap ADSL/VoIP/WiFi router (Billion 7401R3) nor the 3G/Wifi router ('3' branded Huawei D100) I'd been using for the old connection would support it. I scoured the net for the manuals (oddly both were only available as RAR downloads...). Much to my delight I discovered that they both supported WDS.


The Setup
WDS required one major change to the current wireless setup. First of all it will only work with preshared keys in WEP or WPA and not the newer more secure WPA forms of encryption. FYI this is because there is no ratified standard for mesh network encryption although it looks like draft 802.11s will soon be ratified. Furthermore the 7401 doesn't even support it with WPA-PSK. So I had a downgrade the security from WPA2 to WEP, to give me some glimmer of security I enabled MAC filtering for the wireless devices we have in the house. So this will block a determined hacker for about 1/10th of a second.

The setup is pretty straight forward basically set the two APs to the same SSID, channel and key, then get the MAC of one router and copy it to the other and vice versa. Now as usual I didn't quite read the manuals properly and after having a quick skim decided that I could stumble my way through and it would be all good. This led to me stupidly setting the D100 to "bridge" instead of AP mode, a couple of days later trying to figure out why the signal kept dropping out it occurred to me as I re-read the manual while waiting for a site to load at work that I may have this wrong and once I fixed it all was good. So a friendly warning to all to set both routers to AP mode, not Bridge!


The Payoff
Happily laying in bed surfing on facePhone. :)