IP-6600 Firmware History

This is the firmware revision log for the IP6600 family routers.

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This release adds the following features:

The number of IP address filters and Port filters was increased from 10 to 20.

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This release adds the following features:

- A new configuration page was added to each Ethernet interface allowing 3 proxy ARP entries to be configured for each. This feature was requested by our friends implementing the Metro Bus tracking application. Using proxy ARP to mascarade as their central server, as a bus travels from one subnet to another, it need not be concerned with changing gateway router or it's own IP address. It simply ARPs for the central server and the local IP6600 router will respond, causing the bus to send the packets to the IP6600 destined for the central server.

- An option was added to the PPP configuration that will allow LCP magic number negotiation to be disabled. Magic number negotiation is used to detected if a line is looped-back. This option was requested because some military radios do not support magic number negotiation nor do they properly NAK the negotiation request.

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- The Etherpoll feature would fail and not restart if any of destination address were unreachable. This error should not be treated as fatal.

- The "soft carrier" feature in PPP was apparently broken back when the alternate phone number feature was added. This was corrected.

This release adds the following features:

- An option was added to PPP that will allow it to ignore DCD. Now it can be used with a modem that doesn't provide a DCD output and it is not necessary to loop our DTR back to DCD. If this option is chosen, it is important that the "Echo test link" option be enabled, otherwise there is no mechanism to detect a dropped connection.

- The default configuration for the IP-6690 was changed so that it can accept a dial-in connection on the internal modem. This means that "out of the box" someone can dial-in and configure the IP-6690 remotely.

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This is amaintenance release for compatibility with hardware revisions with no functional changes or corrections.

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This release corrects the following:

- The driver for Ethernet-B did not correctly program the multi-cast address hash filter. This is only a problem when RIPv2 is enabled since it is the only application that uses multi-cast.

This release adds the following features:

- Added method to force the unit to defaults without using the serial port. If the unit is powered up with both switch 2 and switch 4 in the up position, the unit will start up without reading the configuration file. The user can then access the unit using the default IP address of 192.168.0.1. The user can then make changes and store a new configuration. The old setting will not be overwritten until the user stores a configuration.

- Added a PPP option to disable Compression Control Protocol (CCP) negotiation.

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This release adds the following features:

- Support for RIPv2 with simple authentication.

- Ethernet MTU option.

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Note: V2.6 was a test release.

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VERSION 2.03 IP-6600, IP-6690

12/21/2005

This release corrects the following:

- The kernel was allocating memory that was reserved for use by the boot-loader. In some cases, this was causing the serial setup program to fail just after storing the configuration to flash.

- Corrected several typos in the help and web screens.

- Ethernet-A Activity LED was inverted.

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VERSION 2.02

8//04/2005

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This release also includes unreleased V2.01 changes.

This release moves to a new uClinux. It upgrades virtually all system and application components. The Linux kernel is version 2.4.24.

Added Airlink modem configurations.

Added a "PPP-Backup" feature. This is different from the failover feature. PPP-Backup is a special mode that causes PPP mode to be enabled in the event of a connect failure on the other serial port. In other words, the IP6600 will try to make a PPP connection using a primary serial interface. If the call fails, it will retry using the backup interface.

The number of port forwarding entries, per interface, was increased from 10 to 40.

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VERSION 1.08

7/6/2004

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This release also includes the V1.07 changes.

This release adds the following features: (V1.07)

- Ping failover testing was added.

- More control was added to failover routing. Each route may be flagged as a failover or non-failover route. Previously, only the default route would be switched during a failure.

This release adds the following features: (V1.08)

- The user may now disable LCP echo testing on the PPP link.

This release corrects the following:

- On occasion, some changed configuration items would not take effect when the "Activate Changes" button was pressed. This was caused by a race condition between the web server and the configuration utility.

- If the user stored changes before activating them, they would see "The current configuration has not been activated" message every time they reset the unit.

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VERSION 1.06

7/6/2004

This release adds the following features:

- DNS Proxy Server support. This feature would typically be used when the IP-6600 is being used to dynamically connect to an ISP. Machines on the local network would point to the IP-6600 for DNS service. The IP-6600 will forward the request to the ISP's DNS servers.

- A new PPP options was added to select if the IP-6600 should request or provide DNS addresses during PPP negotiation.

- PPP was modified to not require that local and remote IP addresses be configured in order to use demand-dial mode.

- A new PPP option was added to select if the IP-6600 should force a remote device to accept the remote IP address. If the remote device refuses to accept the address, the connection will terminate.

- A new PPP timer was added to aid in the recovery of lost modems while in dial-in mode. A lost modem occurs when the modem is accidently reset or power cycled while the IP-6600 is in dial-in wait mode. When the modem is reset, it loses configuration and may no longer answer incoming calls and may also default to the wrong baud rate. The IP-6600 has no way of knowing the reset happened and will wait forever. The new timer limits how long the IP-6600 will wait for an incoming call. When the timer expires, PPP will terminate and restart. This will effectively re-initialize the modem.

- A new Modem Option was added. If the modem supports it, you can now set a Modem/Call statistics string. At the end of each PPP session, this command will be given to the modem and the results logged to serial log file. For the DCB D-series modem, the string is "AT&V1". This is not a standard AT command and not all modems have an equivalent command.

- The serial log file was increased from 12K to 16K.

- An ISP fail-over tool was added. The IP-6600 can be configured to detect communication failures to a primary ISP and to switch default routing to a secondary ISP. The tool uses DNS to determine if the state of the primary ISP. In order to use this tool, the primary and secondary ISP must use different DNS servers. Also, IP Sharing must be used for routing to properly fail-over from one ISP to the other.

This release corrects the following:

- For PPP dial-out on demand with IP Sharing enabled, if the local IP address changed, queued up demand packets should be discarded because they were generated with the wrong source address. These packets were being sent to the peer. Some routers would see these packets and would shut down or re-initialize the PPP link.

- The modem and the IP-6600 could potentially lose communication following an unexpected disconnect. The IP-6600 firmware was modified to ignore flow control from the modem while configuring it. It was also modified to insure that IP-6600 was not flowing off the modem.

- The modem initialization retry limit was changed from 3 to 5. In some cases, more time was needed for the modem to switch back from data mode to command mode. During each retry attempt, the IP-6600's input buffers are constantly being flushed to prevent the IP-6600 from flowing off the modem.

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VERSION 1.05

This release corrects the following:

- The # character could not be used in dial strings. It was being treated as a comment character and caused the rest of the phone number to be ignored. This character is commonly used with the cellular and satellite modems.

- In the PPP options, the maximum size of the username and password strings were increased from 15 characters to 39 characters. This is again needed for cellular modems where some configuration information is embedded in these strings.

- When controlling modems, the maximum time to wait for the CDC signal to drop following a drop in the DTR signal was increased to 16 seconds.

- An "internal modem" modem type was added to the IP-6690's sample modem configurations.

- An error was corrected with setting UDP port filters. The UDP filter would not work unless a corresponding TCP filter was also set.

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VERSION 1.04

This release adds support for the IP-6690 hardware. The IP-6600 and IP-6690 share a common source code tree, but separate executables are generated for each product.

The following modifications were made to support the IP-6690:

- Conditional compilation to substitute the product name IP-6690 in all of the web screens and setup screens.

- Conditional compilation to only allow the connection type of "modem" in the Serial-B PPP options.

- Conditional compilation to remove APS-01 from the Serial-B operational mode.

- Modification of the Help screens to replace the product name IP-6600 with the generic term "router".

- Conditional compilation of self-test to test the serial ports through modems.

The following modifications apply to both the IP-6600 and IP6690:

- Support for the APS-01 was added. From the Serial Operational Mode screen, the serial port may be put in APS-01 mode. When

enabled, an APS-01 control screen is available which is used to turn-on and turn-off the power.

- Modification to Config File "Transfer file to Router" to detect if the file is HTML encoded and to report an error. Customers are accidentally saving their configuration files as web pages. This corrupts the modem init strings because the character '&' is an HTML meta character and is replaced with the string "&".

- Modification to all web screens to properly encode HTML meta characters in user fields. The above corruption to the modem strings could not be seen in the web page because browser would decode the corrupted string back to the correct character.

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VERSION 1.03

This version was not released.

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VERSION 1.02

The DHCP server would fail to start if there were no DNS addresses set. This was caused by an error in the DHCP configuration file.

A DHCP status page was added to the status menu. It will display lease information.

When a PPP connection was configured for both demand-dial and IP Sharing, the network packet that caused a demand-dial would not have IP Sharing applied, thus causing the packet to be lost.

In Demand-dial mode, the IP-6600 will queue up to 20 network packets while dialing the phone. Previously, only the packet that caused the demand dial would be queued.

Baud rate error on Serial Port A. One of the UART registers was being programmed incorrectly causing the bit rate error to be greater than 5% on baud rates over 57600.

Several documentation errors were corrected in the help screens.

The PPP MTU can now be configured. The default is 1500 bytes, but it can be set to any value from 128 bytes to 1500 bytes. The IP-6600 will limit packets to the selected size and will also request the peer to limit its packets to this size also. This can help performance on poor phone connections.

Sample modem configurations have been added to the modem options screen.

When sending commands to the modem, a 5 millisecond delay is inserted between each character. This corrects the problem where the modem is

unable to detect the baud rate.

Additional manufacturing tests were added to the firmware.

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VERSION 1.01

This version was not released.

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VERSION 1.00

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Initial public release.

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