Wippies Underground

Improved Huawei E169 support is starting to look good. Tested this today and the speed is about the same as if the 3G dongle would have been connected directly to the computer (or then the 3G network just wasn’t as busy as usually ). What I’ve heard and read of on the forums etc., with earlier firmwares the speed has been somewhat slower when connected thru Homebox so this issue has been clearly addressed.

Annex M support kicks asses now too! Handshaking of Homebox Black with Sauna29 was approx. 2Mbit more downstream and 200Kbit more upstream when tested against Telewell TW-EA510v3 with Annex M enabled.

Open-minded Wippies can request Sauna29 firmware (for Homebox Black only) at Wippies IRC channel (#wippies / IRCNet). 3G dongle, Annex-M and multicast support has been improved again.

Hard to say how long this chance is out there since usually few alpha testers are enough but you can try your luck if you will.

Edit: See also the official post about the subject at Jarkko’s TechBlog.

Just noticed new Wippies boxes are not free anymore. Wippies has become a paid service. Some details can be found here. Quote from the thread:

It was free from the start but if you want to order one now then you will have to pay. For everyone who already have ordered one before they will NOT pay anything, just to clear it out.

That’s sad since I think free has been the main thing that has kept Wippies going on the way it has been growing. My personal selling argument for Homebox to my friends has always been “it’s the best basic box on the market and it doesn’t cost a dime” but obviously I can’t use that anymore.

Of course I personally think Homebox is a great box still but now when it costs approx. the same price as other boxes on the market it’s interesting to see what happens to the “revolution”.

Here’s some “new” features that have not been in there too long. Probably the features have been added some time ago already but there hasn’t been any official notification about them.

1) Editable spam filter options like white lists and black lists: My Wippies > Email > click the mailbox name (not the address) > Spam filter

2) Forward email to another address: My Wippies > Email > click the mailbox address > Forward to address

3) WLAN Guest network visits made by you (I guess this has been in there for some time by now, but at least I haven’t notice there is a log for this): My Wippies > Device Settings > Wippies usernames / Modify > Wippies network visits

Edit: This feature has been removed later on. There were technical issues with displaying the log correctly, so Wippies staff gave up on keeping the log in there.

Yesterday, October 10th, the Wippies DynDNS (your_name.wippies.net) was activated and confirmed to be working. You can find it from My Wippies (Device Settings > Misc. Settings > Dynamic DNS). It adds an A record to name services and to get some use of it you need to add port forward for the wanted port, whatever you might want to use it for.

For instance, if you’re running a web server behind your Homebox, forward port 80 (the pre-made HTTP port forward) to your web server LAN IP and then you’re able to access your home web server with your Wippies DynDNS address.

Hey all, I’m just another fanatic Wippie who likes to follow the Wippies deveploment very closely and am very much interested in the new features even if they are small ones. As you might have noticed the community doesn’t get too much information about small updates and improvements thru any official channel so I thought this sort of blog would be nice to have.

I try to be active in posting here and noticing and informing about the new stuff in firmware updates and new features in Wippies services.

By the way the latest unstable beta firmware at the moment is Sauna28. It has fixes for E169 3G dongle support and for Annex-M support. If you want to get it you can request it from Wippies Support (contact information) or at #wippies via IRC in IRCNet (Mon to Fri on 8:00 – 16:00 Finnish time).

So welcome here ya Wippie and let’s see if this is worth for something!