The IPTV video streams used by Movistar come in two types: regular channels (Multicast/UDP) and video on demand (Unicast/UDP). In this post I describe what needs to be done on the Linux router for Movistar to make “Video on Demand” work. They use the RTSP protocol which requires our router to support Full Cone NAT. The set-top boxes request videos via RTSP from their control server, but the video is sent from a different server with an unknown IP, so if we do nothing the video traffic will be dropped. Let’s see how to solve this. …

This post describes what’s behind (at a technical level) the IP service offered by Movistar Fusion FTTH (Fiber) and how to replace the router they install with a GNU/Linux-based machine that will act as a Router (along with an Ethernet Switch) to provide the same Data, Television (IPTV), and Voice (VoIP) services. After reading this post, I recommend continuing with video on demand for Movistar and the lab to extend your local network to a remote site with an Ethernet Bridge. …

In this technical post I’ll describe how to set up a home VPN Server based on OpenVPN, which remains the best solution today despite being more complex to implement. The goal is to have access to the internal services of my home network from the internet. …

Geek quote: “Logging what happens is wise…” In the past I used ULOG to analyze which packets were being dropped by iptables, but since it’s been marked as deprecated I’ve switched to NFLOG. …

Making backups should be mandatory. Unfortunately, most of us have learned over the years that this statement is dead serious. The problem is that doing it is a real hassle, so any program or method that automates it is welcome. …

What are “SMB”, “CIFS”, “Samba” and the version confusion? SMB (Server Message Block) is an application-level network protocol that enables sharing of files, printers, and other resources between devices on a network. Originally developed by IBM in the 1980s, it was later adopted and extensively improved by Microsoft, becoming the foundation of file sharing in Windows networks. The SMB protocol has evolved through multiple versions over the years. SMB1 (also known as SMBv1 or NetBIOS) was the initial implementation but had security and performance limitations. Microsoft introduced significant improvements with SMB2 in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and later SMB3 with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, with each version adding better performance, improved security, and new features like data encryption and compression. …