FON Boards

i am thinking of joining fon as a linus - i have found some la fonera's on ebay (new) which are cheaper than from the fon shop; can i buy one of those and still register as a linus, or do you become a linus/bill when you buy a router from fon.

thanks,
jon

You must have at least one registered fonera to became linus or bill, if the fonera is offline for some time you will be warned by email, if the fonera continues offline you lose the linus or bill status.

You do not need a Fon branded router though! If you can find a WRT54GS v 1 to 3 (I think) you can load the old Fon Beta 0.6.6 firmware on them, and turn them into Fons. That is what I did, but with my WRT54GL v1.1. I highly recommend finding one of these referb units at a reduced cost, (My WRT54GS v1 cost me $35 (us)) and loading the Fon firmware on it. From there, you can load DD-WRT and set up a chillspot. What that would do is allow you to act as a Linus, and get all the magna-awesome functionality from your router. It is important that you load the Fon Firmware first, because it has to register with Fon. There are ways around that, but this is much easier. I am in the process of doing it with my GL right now, and when I'm done, I will do it on my GS! =D

If oyu have questions, you can ask. There is another thread in here somewhere (I believe in general discussion, under Broadcom) that outlines how to do this a little bit. I'm kinda winging it. ;D

have you also tried OpenWrt? this one also got the FONheartbeat built in it's XWRT (not in it's Luci) web environment

Really, you do though. The problem with using the old firmware or using a non La Fonera router is that Fon treats it differently. The only reasonable alternative to buying La Fonera (which is really what Fon makes most of their money from) is to emulate a Fonera router fully, including cloning a MAC address from the range which they use.

it seems the original 0.6.6 firmware adds your mac to their database...

I'm sure every MAC address gets added to their database. But if your homebuilt Fon router doesn't identify itself as a Fonera, then it gets treated differently by Fon!

yes it gets a linksys icon on your Fonera Router status...that's all...
I got such one running...
no difference for the rest... as stated by David_FON recently...
so you can still be a BILL with a linksys FON!


Now the opposite is true... if you somehow acquire a Fonera (yes a REAL fonera/+)... from THE UK...
and you register that one...then your account gets "migrated" to the UK...yes you can have 1000 valid foneras... only 1 bad example needs to get registered with your foneroid...

result:
* you lose all your money you gathered untill now
* but you gain 16 euro's to spend on UK'ish BT OpenZone spots...great
* you will become a LINUS no possibility to become a Bill

have fun!
NOT

What kind of strategy would you propose, to get Fon to correct this problem? Be creative; they ignore complaints and must somehow be convinced that another plan will make them more money. And they must be allowed to pretend that they came up with the new idea.

Yes it does, and when I load DD-WRT I can get it to talk to Fon again, because of that fact. Not sure that I am going to anymore, but I might for the fun of it.

I have tried OpenWRT, and didn't like it as much. I know there are more out there that support the Fon Heartbeat, but DD-WRT is my favorite. And I feel like I get the most out of my router with it's firmware. Though, I could not set it up to talk to Fon without putting the Fon Firmware (0.6.6) on first. That is how my whole project started. Even thought I'm not as interested anymore, I may finish it just to see it work. =D

I hope you know DD-Wrt exploits free open source projects as well?
* http://xwrt.blogspot.com/2007/02/dd-wrt ... -open.html

Also remember...Dd-Wrt is not developped with security in mind:
* http://hackerblog.net/papers/dd-wrt-security-woes

I hope you know that, unlike Fon, DD-WRT provides sourcecode for EVERY BUILD, and not just the first ever mod.

Wow, from those sites I found this one.... I don't really know what to say, this is unsettling to say the least.
*http://www.bitsum.com/about-ddwrt.htm

NOTE: Not in line with the security topic, but very important if thinking about going 3rd party... I may be switching back to OpenWRT or xwrt again here VERY soon... =( I have no respect for people not giving credit to the amazing developers that put so much time and effort into making projects like DD-WRT so successful.

austintx: the FON-NG project is "open"...
you can allready build the "next" firmware
last change was 11h ago : http://trac.fonosfera.org/fon-ng/browser

the only issue they currently have is... they are not programming to support their own hardware (fon1/fon+/fon2)...
they aren't even selling the fon2 at this moment...
but they have called upon the opensource movement if they want to do so...
Eg the team of Luci (Cyrus) is updating fixes both in the openwrt as in the Fon trunk...

while Openwrt allready have a uPnp and uShare and ... plugins; FON choose not to take existing luci applications...
I hope to find out soon if they can be ported & used easily...
Why wouldn't my Playstation 3 be able to find my Fon2 and it's usb stick filled with mp3?