New Manual

[lonnie]

David A. Bandel, a published Author of Linux books and Network and WiFi Trainer has written a manual for us and the initial release is available on the new downloads site.

We will be charging $10 for the manual, but for a limited time we will offer it for free.

Comments and suggestions/corrections will be much appreciated.

A BIG THANKS to David for doing this.

[David L. Vrablic]

I assumed that I would need a new account so I filled out the form.
It was accepted but as yet I havn't recieved the validation email.
Thought you might like to know.

[kbldawg]

Lonnie, although I haven't looked through it yet, I am on my way right now. I just wanted to say, thanks!!!

--

David, I had to dig mine out of my spam folder.

[lonnie]

You must be sure to use a proper email address or as suggested check your SPAM folder. This login will also be required to download updates and source code. It is a sample of things that we are working on. Does the file manager look OK to you guys?

[tony]

David, we have changed your username to remove the space, as it is an illegal username character. Your account has been verified, and is ready to log in.

Thanks

[knolan]

Tried to access the files area, it isn't accepting my email address as a valid email address during the registering process.

I have tried both keith@corkcommunitybroadband.ie and keith@coolroe.net

Regards,
Keith

[bquinner]

it looks like hotmail accounts are not acceptable

[tony]

Please try and sign up again. There was a requirement in place that all domains must resolve to an IP. Since some do not, and rely on MX records for delivery, this feature has been removed.

[tog]

The files area is nice, one small mention is that the 2MB manual I just grabbed downloaded at only 37K/sec, where I used to easily get 200 - 300K/sec while downloading files.

The manual omitted the mention of distance being able to go higher than 35 miles when using 2x or 4x cloaking.

Many nice touches in the manual, such as mentioning that SIP and IAX2 traffic is unaffected by the H.323 NAT helper, etc.

[tony]

Glad the file area is working well. With the new file area, also comes bandwidth control. No longer will our network get congested.

Thanks!

[tog]

Ouch, sir. I figured as much. How about 50K/sec? :)

[c.davis]

Folks, I do hope that you enjoy the new 'Files' area and make great use of it.

I would like to point out a couple of things in the hope to avoid confusion:
- Your License-Keys account username/password is not valid for downloading files
-- This possibilty was discussed but seemed to be unsafe for those that have given their credientials to employees, friends, etc... We, and you as well, can appreciate that there should be a dividing line between the two.

- You MUST provide a valid email address that you are able to check and reply from as you will not be able to login at all until you have validated your email address with the validation key that is sent after successfull registeration.

Some of you, especially those using gmail, hotmail or some other free service, will need to check your 'Spam' or 'Junk Mail' folder for the verification notice. The subject line will read 'StarV3 File Area: Validation Required'

Once again, I hope that you enjoy your experience with the 'Files' area.

[kbldawg]

It is a sample of things that we are working on. Does the file manager look OK to you guys?

As usual, the interface is very nice.

I would also like to say that I especially like star-os.com/store. The interface is awesome. It makes ordering very clear and easy.

Great Job!!

[tog]

I liked the star-os.com/store, too. None of the three available resellers have such a nice store, though buywispgear.com using osCommerce is a pretty good idea. It provides a very nice and appropriate shopping interface with the ability to optionally stick radios in the boards and also to provide quantity discounts, though buywispgear.com doesn't seem to be using the quantity discount part of it.

[lonnie]

All things take time so be patient. The interface should not be more important than having other sources of supply and better shipping.

[tkerns]

How long does it take for the confirm e-mail message? Waiting for mine.

tim@cv-access.com

[tony]

Based on your signup, your email is correct. Can you verify that your spam filter never ate the confirmation email?

[tony]

I have taken the liberty of activating your account for you as your email @ domain are valid. Please let us know if your activation email eventually shows up.

[tkerns]

Thanks Tony,

I have to leave right now to go earn some money, I'll look into the mail server logs this evening to see if it did. Can you help narrow my search and let me know what e-mail address it would be from? PM me the info if you want.

Tim Kerns

[tony]

No secret. The email will be from networks@valemount.com. Looking through our mail logs, it was successfuly delivered.

[knolan]

Tony,

I didn't recieve the activation email either? I registered yesterday (about 20 hours ago)

Thanks
Keith

[tony]

Thanks. Since you signed up with the same email address, as on the forums, I have enabled your account.

For others, please ensure email from networks@valemount.com are whitelisted.

[pachitoone]

Hi Tony.
I didn´t received the confirmation mail. My email is aorta at smart dot net dot mx. Sorry for the address in this format but I hate harversters and spammers. I´m a postmaster too. I have installed spamassassin. Will be trouble for receiving mail from you? I hope don´t.

[tog]

I use SpamAssassin and received the confirmation email from Valemount with a relatively low SA score with no whitelisting or anything specific being done at my end. No trouble at all.

[tony]

pachitoone, I have sent you a PM.

[Stratolinks]

For others, please ensure email from networks@valemount.com are whitelisted.


What would the source subnet be so I can check any firewall rules.

Thanks.

[tony]

207.194.72.41

[tkerns]

Tony,
I searched my mail server log files and I can not find any messages from networks@valemount.com or the IP 207.194.72.41. Can you let me know at what time you show the message as delivered.

Thanks,

Tim Kerns

[tony]

It was delivered immediately after your registration. All activation notices are sent right away, without any delays.

[blanco]

I'm still waiting for the confirmation e-mail.

Edit: Thanks Tony!

[tony]

It has been activated.

For others, please PM me.

[lonnie]

I have removed the manual for now. There has been over 100 downloads and yet not a single response indicating if the manual is any good or especially to thank David for his effort.

It sure seems that the discussion about the lack of a manual is something I can safely ignore in the future.

[tog]

The manual omitted the mention of distance being able to go higher than 35 miles when using 2x or 4x cloaking.

Many nice touches in the manual, such as mentioning that SIP and IAX2 traffic is unaffected by the H.323 NAT helper, etc.

Let me reiterate: nice manual. Very nice and professional work, David.

I think the presence and availability of the manual over the long-term to newcomers who are just wandering in is the manual's most important role. Those wandering newcomers aren't here yet...

[David L. Vrablic]

I have removed the manual for now. There has been over 100 downloads and yet not a single response indicating if the manual is any good or especially to thank David for his effort.

It sure seems that the discussion about the lack of a manual is something I can safely ignore in the future.

Please Excuse my bad manners and apparent lack of appreciation to both Lonnie and David.
I have been so busy cutting and pasting excerpts to staff members to cover the "apparent problems they are having " that I completely forgot to tell both of you how much this manual means to me personally.

I have been with the product from the beginning and I still have a few things that I find hard to explain to others.
The first thing they say when they have a problem is there isn't even a f------- manual. (Not that they would read it anyway) but not something comes up I can quote chapter and paragraph.

Also some quotes for equipment or projects require a copy of the manual.
Now I can play in that arena where I could not before.

David you did a super job and if I had an email address for your paypal account I would send you the 10 spot just to make myself feel better.
Thank you again,

Come on you lead heads, Momma must have taught you to at least say thank you when some GIVES you something ! :)

[Stratolinks]

I downloaded the manual on Friday. I have not had much of a look at it just yet, although my first impression is that it is a job very well done. Good quality writing, worded such that a new user should be able to understand it. Finally someone has put into print things about grounding and coax lines that I have been saying for years. I will attempt to provide any further feedback or suggestions as I get into this work a little furter.

One teeny bit of advice I can provide:
I can see from the artifacting around the text that the screen captures you have used in the manual are stored in jpg format. Jpeg is fine for compressing photos, but screen images are bitmaps and will reproduce best when an indexed image format is used. The difference is not likely worth redoing the job by any means, but just something to keep in mind for any future work. Not only that the GIF images are much smaller making for a smaller finished file size.

Same screen capture saved both ways. (original is 497k)
JPG (38110 bytes) using 15% quality in Photoshop
http://stratolinks.com/DemoJPG.jpg

GIF (8553 bytes) using 25% quality in PhotoShop.
http://stratolinks.com/DemoGIF.gif

If there were 50 screen captures this alone would save nearly 1.5Megs in the finished file.

[therealboss]

Now you have a first class manual to go with a first class product, thats another thing of that long list. I have only skipped through it but its full of the details my engineers need.

Thank you David & Lonnie, I have been working with your OS for over 2 years and with networks & PC's for over 15 years but find this manual is still handy to have.

I know this project has used up a lot of your time, but I'm sure it will pay off and users can us it to answer there questions and free you up to do what you do best :)

Thanks again.

[c.davis]

This message is concerning those that have had a spot of trouble receiving a validation email when registering to the new 'Files Area'.

First I must note, our mailer uses a strict SMTP protocol as defined in many RFCs, and this does in fact seem to be the issue for those that don't receive the initial 'Validation Required' email.

This being said, when our mailer doesn't receive the expected response of '220 [domain.name] ESMTP <optinal.server-software optional software-version>', we will try again a few times and then give up because the process running at the destination doesn't seem to be a SMTP server ready to receive mail.

The simplest suggestion that I can make is that, if you don't receive a validation email from us within 10 minutes of successfully registering for an account, try using a free web mail service to register. Ones known to work are gmail, hotmail and yahoo.

We will do our best to work with you regarding missing validation requests but we are simply powerless to send emails to non-standard SMTP servers. It was by design that you are required to reply to our email in order to activate your account in order to ensure that it is in fact you that performed the registration and not a bot or other sort of unwanted entity, the end result being a clean and easy to use interface that we can all benifit from.

If you are unsure, you can use telnet under Windows or Linux/BSD with the following command: "telnet <mail.domain.name> 25". If you don't receive a response similar to '220 <my.mail.domain.name> SMTP' then you will not get an email from us and you should look into either a free web-based email account or into your SMTP server configuration.

On a happy note, if you are one of the domains that does not reply to SMTP connections in the standardized way and are also having trouble(s) with yourself and/or clients not receiving emails, you now have a troubleshooting target from which to aim.

If you continue to have problems, please feel free to PM me and I will get on it straight away.

[ninedd]

I liked the star-os.com/store, too. None of the three available resellers have such a nice store, though buywispgear.com using osCommerce is a pretty good idea. It provides a very nice and appropriate shopping interface with the ability to optionally stick radios in the boards and also to provide quantity discounts, though buywispgear.com doesn't seem to be using the quantity discount part of it.Yes, out of the box the cart doesn't know how to do Qty discounts, so it's a LOT of mods to get it to do that. The wrinkle is that we also want it to limit Qty's to certain lot sizes as well. The idea is that certain things come in boxes of 5 let's say, so if there is a discount for 10+ pricing, that would be 10 or 15 or 20, not for 13. So, the modifications have to take into account both qty discounts AND lot sizes.

I have a mod that does both (again, a LOT of modifications required so it'll be next week before it's online. I've posted the prices that they'll be for 1+, 10+, 25+ etc if someone needs to order before that I can do it manually, but the mods will have to be done before the cart automatically will know how to do it.

[kbldawg]

Finally, I had a free moment to set down and read through the whole manual.

Very nice, I appreciate all the hard work that went into it. David, and everyone else involved did a great job!!

The screenshots were a nice touch and the information at the end of the manual was especially nice. I learned several design lessons from that area alone.

The only constructive criticism I have is I would liked to have seen more detailed examples (real world uses) for items such as:

Dynamic Routing Protocols (specifically OLSR)
VDS
QSHAPE
Firewall ScriptsPerhaps I have missed the scope of the manual and these are better addressed in the forums. It's just something I had hoped to have seen.

I had some trouble recently getting a VDS link established. It was not a typical VDS link (AP to CPE) so the config was slightly different than what would be convered. However, the first thing I did was look it up in the new manual, but there really wasn't anything helpful. Kinda disappointing.

I don't mean to sounds harsh or unappreciative, I am very appreciative, but it seems the information in the manual mostly contains stuff that I have been able to figure out own my own. The information that would have been helpful for me, was left out.

For example, when configuring the VDS link I was unsure of what IP to set as the master ip on the client end of the VDS link. Having a good example would have been helpfull.

anyway...

Hopefully, my review is helpful to those interested and I do appreciate all the hard work everyone involved has put into it, thank you!!!

[Stratolinks]

This being said, when our mailer doesn't receive the expected response of '220 [domain.name] ESMTP <optinal.server-software optional software-version>', we will try again a few times and then give up because the process running at the destination doesn't seem to be a SMTP server ready to receive mail.

My account has now been activated, but this information may help others who are having problems as well and to help the automatic process to work.

Just wanting a bit of clarification on this. Where you mention [domain.name] are you saying this response must match the domain name on the email address submitted to you, or it just has to answer with whatever domain name the server's primary domain is running. Many internet providers run a server which will answer with their main domain name, but accepts mail for many different domain names.

I have changed the response on my server to exactly match the fully qualified domain name for my server's IP address. It previously was one of my personal domain names although it has been accepting mail for my Stratolinks domain for a long time.

The response was: 220 mypersonaldomain.ca ESMTP Postfix


Thank You.
Terry Steeper
Stratolinks Inc.

[nickwhite]

I haven't had a chance to read through it all the way, but I skimmed over it and searched for some key things, and it appears to be very thorough. Great job guys, and much appreciated!

-Nick

[c.davis]

My account has now been activated, but this information may help others who are having problems as well and to help the automatic process to work.

Just wanting a bit of clarification on this. Where you mention [domain.name] are you saying this response must match the domain name on the email address submitted to you, or it just has to answer with whatever domain name the server's primary domain is running. Many internet providers run a server which will answer with their main domain name, but accepts mail for many different domain names.

[domain.name] is just a place holder for you email domain. It dosn't matter if one server or domain is used to receive mail for multiple domains. The important thing is that the server sends the proper greeting.

[tony]

Carl is correct. The reason we brought this up is that some people have been having some problems receiving their activation emails. After further investigation, some of the SMTP servers they use do not provide a required 220 welcome message in a timely manner (after 60 seconds).

[Stratolinks]

The important thing is that the server sends the proper greeting.

That's what I was wanting to hear. Although it doesn't explain why the confirmation didn't get to me through the usual channels. Oh well, we'll just call it a glitch.

Thanks

[mickeym]

I haven't had a chance to read through it all the way, but I skimmed over it and searched for some key things, and it appears to be very thorough. Great job guys, and much appreciated!

-Nick


Yes, this is very nicely done and has already supplied some needed info - this is really appreciated.

Thanks,
Mickey

[pachitoone]

Hi Tony.
Please resend me my email for activate my account in downloads area. I made some changes to my email server and I suppose that I will receive the email from you. Thanks. aorta at smart.net.mx

[tony]

You can get your activation re-sent to you by selecting the appropriate link on the files.star-os.com login screen. (new feature)