If you’re not familiar with Dropbox, let me tell you a bit about how I use it.  I work at the office and at home and have employees that work on a “Tech computer” at the office and the office manager’s computer.  We all use Dropbox.  On all my computers that I use regularly, I install Dropbox and setup with my username and password.  All those computers stay synced with all my files… all the time.  I can sit down at any of them and work on my most recent projects or access a file from months ago.  Recently, I deleted some files by mistake and realized a few weeks later when I wanted to access them.  By logging into Dropbox on the web, I was able to retrieve the older versions of the file and get my work back.  Sweet!

My employees have their own accounts, under their email addresses and I share the relevant folders with them.  The office manager has financial information and the Tech computer has the router build files.

Why should Google buy Dropbox?  Because Dropbox is doing what people have dreamed and drooled about Google providing for years… the vaporware “gDrive”.  As early as 2006, lightyears in web terms, people have blogged, conjectured and dreamed of a Google supported resource for a cloud based file service that was easy to access as your hard drive.  In four long years, Google has failed to deliver…  Dropbox has.

Dropbox has clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux and I use it on all three!  No longer am I tied to OS and with the web access, I’m not even tied to any computer.  I can access any of my files at any time from any computer… even my iphone has all my files for ready access.  In fact, I can take a picture on my iphone that saves into my dropbox and is automatically synced with all my computers.  Incredible!

Anyway… Whatever the cost, Dropbox is the type of company that Google should buy and bring to the masses.  It literally changes the way you view file storage.

Roku is a media device that connects to your computer and to the internet by wireless or wired connection.  It links into Netflix, Amazon on Demand, Pandora, Radiotime, YouTube, Archive.org Major League Baseball and many others and streams them to your TV.  When we first bought Roku almost 2 years ago, it only streamed Netflix which was exactly what we needed.  At the time, Netflix had almost 10000 movies and TV shows.  A lot of it was older stuff but LOTS to keep you entertained when you were looking for something to watch.  I particularly liked that they had Rockford Files and some other great old TV shows.  Today it’s got probably over 20000 movies and TV shows and getting really current stuff.  For your $8.95 a month Netflix account, you get full access 24/7 to whatever you want to watch, indie, comedy, TV, etc.

Netflix is now only a small part of the picture.  Imagine an unlimited selection of movies and TV shows combined with MLB, Pandora for streaming music, RadioTime with access to the world’s radio stations including your home ones, video releases on the day the DVD is released on Amazon Video on Demand, surfing YouTube, National Public Radio, Nightly News from the major networks, and the list goes on and on and on.

These boxes start at $69 right now and the most expensive is only $99.  Two years after I bought one for $79, it’s not only still working strong but getting better by the day.  That’s the kind of product I love.

This combined with your Sabai Technology StrongVPN router means you have incredible entertainment choices, no matter where you live

The dd-wrt Keep Alive screen

In dd-wrt, under the Administration Tab, Keep Alive subtab, there’s a great feature that I recommend you take a look at.  I develop routers that work with the StrongVPN service.  It’s an amazing service, run by great people.  The dd-wrt router configuration for PPTP is wonderful but if the connection gets dropped, it isn’t able to reconnect.  That’s a limitation of the dd-wrt PPTP client, not StrongVPN.  In order to address the problem, I recommend turning on the WDS/Connection Watchdog under Keep Alive.  You can see from the image above how to set it up.  I set the interval to 360 and the address to a known address that will always be available if the internet is up.  8.8.8.8 is one of the public DNS servers that Google provides.

Basically, with the configuration above, the router tries pinging the Google DNS server at 8.8.8.8.  If it gets a response, no action is taken.  If there is no reply to the ping, the router reboots.  In our case, the PPTP connection is established as a part of a startup routine, so the reboot forces that reconnect.

Wow!  It’s been an amazing week.  A lot of work and some big progress.

We’ve been honored to be working with the incredible folks at StrongVPN since February selling StrongVPN client routers.  They’re an amazing company and we work hard to be a great partner.

In the beginning, our ecommerce site started on Auctiva Commerce.  Honestly, Auctiva was a great site to start with because the learning curve wasn’t too steep.  As we’ve grown, we’ll realized that it would be hard to scale to a larger volume.

During the past month, I’ve been exploring various ecommerce platforms and eventually focused on Shopify and Volusion.  Both looked like great solutions and both would present a more seamless experience for our customers… the most important aspect.  We finally settled on Volusion and have spent the past week and a half migrating the store to the new platform.

Let us know what you think!  We’re really interested in hearing your feedback.  I’m cranking back up the blog because we’re better able to integrate it with our new store.  Keep checking back here for new posts!

We’ve got the best customers in the world and working together with the best VPN company!  We’re blessed and honored to be working with you all.

I’ve been developing a client router for the StrongVPN service.  One of the walls I hit was that my main router was not always allowing the VPN traffic through.  I’m running a WRT320N with dd-wrt Mega build (EKO big) as my main router.  In researching a solution, I came across this gem of a statement on the dd-wrt forum “If you have followed the above steps and still cannot connect to the VPN, try forwarding the PPTP Port (1723) with TCP protocol to the LAN IP Address of your router (i.e. 192.168.1.1). Although it seems like this is a weird approach since you are using your router to forward to itself, it often times allows the VPN connection to succeed.” The full link is here.

As soon as I did this, the floodgates opened.  No problems since connecting my VPN.

By the way, the StrongVPN client router is developed, tested, and working strong!  Here’s the product page http://sabaitechnology.com/StrongVPN-Client-Router-N-P841634.aspx

Do you have an XBox, DirectTV DVR, TIVO, Blu-Ray Player or other devices in your Entertainment Center that you want to connect to your wireless internet? You can, easy, with the Sabai Technology Entertainment Connect. This one device will connect to your wireless internet and serve that internet through wire for up to 5 media devices. No more messing with a wireless adapter for each device, or running cables all over the house. You can buy the Entertainment Connect at  http://www.sabaitechnology.com/entertainmentconnect.html

Here’s the video, I’ll include some instructions at the bottom of the post, once I have a few minutes to work through the steps on paper.  You can buy these routers with dd-wrt already installed at our website, www.sabaitechnology.com

To enable wireless bridging between two routers, one router is an access point.  This is your standard router setup that you would get from the store and is usually the router you already have installed.  If you’ve gotten both an Access Point and Client Bridge from Sabai Technology, set up the Access Point first.  These setup instructions will assume that you’re running a Linksys primary router with the default IP address 192.168.1.1. Let’s call this Router the primary. The router you purchased from Sabai Technology is connecting to the primary in “Client-Bridged” mode. Let’s call the Sabai Technology router bridge.

Your Sabai Technology router comes with the following standard settings:

Username: admin

Password: password

IP Address: 192.168.199.1

Subnet: 255.255.255.0

If you requested the router pre-configured, you should be set and do not need to do anything with these directions except store them for future reference!

If you wanted to configure the bridge yourself, then follow these directions:

1.  Give your PC a backup static address.

a)       In Windows, open Network connections, select your LAN card, change settings, Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), properties

b)       on the General tab choose obtain an IP address automatically

c)       then on the Alternate Configuration tab click user configured and enter 192.168.199.10 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.  You don’t need to bother with Gateway or DNS setting.

d)       Click OK twice, then close the adapter window.

e)       Now your PC will try to run the DHCP client, but if it fails, it will use the Alternate Configuration, static address 192.168.199.10 instead.

2.  Connect your PC to LAN port 1 (not the WAN port) on your bridge with the included Ethernet cable wait 10 seconds and enter 192.168.199.1 in a browser.

3.  Once you’re seeing the status page click on the Setup tab and enter the username “admin” and password “password”

4.  Each time we make a change, we’re going to “Save” and wait to hit “Apply Settings” until the very end.

5.  Setup > Basic Setup: Set the Local IP address to an address in your home network.  For example, if you run a primary router with an address of 192.168.1.1, then enter an address for your bridge of:

a)       192.168.1.252

b)       subnet mask 255.255.255.0

c)       gateway 192.168.1.1

d)        local DNS 192.168.1.1.

e)       Click Save.  (NOT APPLY)

6.  Wireless > Basic Settings: choose “Client-Bridged” as Wireless Mode and set the SSID exactly as it is on your primary router including any capitalization.  A great way to do this is to check with a laptop and see exactly what your SSID is.  Ex. Linksys and linksys are two different SSID’s.  Click Save (NOT APPLY)

7.  Set the Network Mode to the one you prefer.  Usually “g-only” on our CB1 (the g model) or on our Wireless N model (CBN1), choose “N-only” if you’re connecting to a Wireless N primary router or “g-only” if you’re connecting to a router with only g capability. Click Save (NOT APPLY)

8.  Wireless > Wireless Security: Enable Wireless Security and configure it as used in your local network. You should be using WEP, WPA Personal, or WPA2 Personal. Click Save (NOT APPLY).

9.  Setup > Basic Setup: Check the “assign WAN port to switch” box. Click Save.  (NOT APPLY)

1. Status > wireless: scroll down and click site survey

a)       click the “Join” button next to your wireless network.

b)       Click “Continue”

c)       Click “Save”

d)       Click “Apply Settings”

e)       Wait 30 seconds.  The router will reboot with the new IP address and settings.

1. Once the router is fully booted, unplug the power from the bridge, place it where you want the bridge and connect it to your device(s), then plug it back in.
2. It should be all set up and connecting to your network.  You can place it anywhere within the primary router’s wireless range and it will bridge the network.  The devices that you plug into the Ethernet ports will receive IP addresses from your primary router.
3. Go to an Internet URL in your browser, e.g. google.com
4. Be patient. It takes a minute or so to connect to the wireless network when it first boots. Click reload on the browser if it says page not found too soon. Wait at least a couple of minutes to allow it to sync.
5. Remember now that your router is accessible off your main network at 192.168.1.252 (unless you had set it to a different address than in these instructions).
6. Congratulations!  You’ve set up your client bridge and it will not have to be changed unless you change the SSID or Encryption on the primary router.

If you have any issues getting it set up, send an email to support@sabaitechnology.com or give us a call at 864-881-1119.  We’re here to support you!  If we’re on another call, or it’s after hours, please leave a message and we’ll get back with you ASAP!

You’re Awesome!

Check us out at www.sabaitechnology.com

Sabai Technology is about empowering the everyday user of Technology to do really geeky things, really easily. Without needing to know how to flash a router, picking the right models and version numbers, and going through the time and expense, we’ve got your router ready with the ability to do wireless client bridge, wireless repeater, repeater bridge, access point, hotspot, and many others. The list of features included in various models are:

VPN,quality of service,802.1x Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP),Access Restrictions,Ad Hoc, Afterburner, Client Isolation Mode, Client Mode, DHCP Forwarder, udhcp, DHCP Server, Dnsmasq, DNS Forwarder, DMZ, Dynamic DNS, DynDNS, easyDNS, FreeDNS, No-IP, TZO, ZoneEdit, Hotspot Portal, Sputnik Agent, Chillispot, IPv6, JFFS2, NTP, ntop, Remote Statistic, OpenVPN, Port Triggering, Port Forwarding, PPTP, VPN Server, VPN Client, QoS, Bandwidth Management, QoS, l7 filter, RFlow, Routing, BIRD, Samba FS Automount, Syslog, Rx Antenna, Tx Antenna, Processor Utilization, Site Survey, SNMP, SSH server, SSH client, dropbear, Firewall, Static DHCP, Variable power from 0 mW to 251 mW, UPnP, VLAN, WOL, WDS, Connection Watchdog, WDS, Repeater Mode, MAC Address Cloning, Wireless MAC Filter, WMM, Wi-Fi MultiMedia, WPA, WPA2, TKIP, AES, Xbox Kaid, Kai Engine