“Network Administration with FreeBSD 7″ (paperback, 280 pages) by Babak Farrokhi (farrokhi@) is an excellent walk-through style book that guides the reader to how to perform, both common and uncommon, administration tasks with FreeBSD, ranging from basic system configuration to firewall and network services configurations.

This book is divided into three sections, system configuration, network configuration and network services and together they cover a lot of ground.

Chapter 1 through 4 deals with basic system configuration ranging from partition layout, swap configuration, quotas, software RAID (GEOM framwork) to maintaining and keeping a system updated and secure, not only the FreeBSD system itself but also third party applications.

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Thanks to the great work of Ganaël LAPLANCHE the hso driver and the hsoctl utility can, as of today, be installed through FreeBSD ports from comms/hso-kmod.

Existing users should note that hsod has been renamed to hsoctl and that the utility now properly updates resolv.conf.

Device IDs for the following devices have been added to the driver. However, this is completely untested, if you have any of these devices, please test and report if it works or not. Thank you.

• Option GlobeSurfer iCON HSUPA
• Option iCON 401

I’ve uploaded a new version of the hso driver that fixes some minor bugs related to the TTYs. I’ve also added device ID for Option GlobeSurfer iCON 225 after some initial positive feedback.

In addition to this I’ve published the first version of a connection utility (called hsod) that creates and maintains a UMTS/HSDPA connection and makes life a lot easier. The utility is still beta and requires some more work, for example I would like it to run in background so that it can be launched from devd when the interface is brought up (ifconfig hso0 up).

Both the driver and the connection utility can be found at the hso page.

I’ve published the first public beta of my FreeBSD driver for Option HSDPA modems. The driver is still beta but have been successfully tested (and used) with a Option GlobeSurfer iCON 7.2 S device (using a Turbo 3G account from Tre/Hi3G Access Sweden).

The driver is available for download together with instructions at the hso page. Please report successes and failures.

The newer WWAN (HSDPA/UMTS/3G/whatever) USB devices from Option does not come bundled with CD that carries the drivers, instead they are accessible from a mass storage device, this is marketed as by Option as “ZeroCD”. This also means that the device needs to be “switched” from the storage device to the modem/network interface before it’s usable. Read the rest of this entry »