Devilfish
25th February, 2008, 08:33 AM
Posted yesterday on Gemini board.
With the release of the GP 4.3, we have added a feature to the Blue panel to detect fake Dreambox clones. We want to show our protest against clones and replicas of Dreamboxes. It cannot be in our interest, to allow the fake boxes to hard the big dreambox community and in fact our beloved hobby.
Like some of you should know, some weeks ago a new box came to the market. It?s sold as a completely new development.
But if you check that box exactly, you will soon find out that not only the same images, software and drivers were used, but also the nearly identical hardware, such as for example in the Dreambox DM500. According to some owners of this new box, it is being shipped and sold with a preinstalled Gemini Image, which is not in our interest. Even in the manufacturers forum, Gemini images where posted with a warning ?runs only on Box XYZ?.
We as a Dreambox board and Developer of the Gemini Images can?t tolerate this trend. It is not in our interest that our know-how, our knowledge of the Dreamboxes, and our time is used by a third party manufactorer to sell his copies with our software
In fact, the truth is that these manufactorers are themselves not able to provide a self developed image for their receivers.
The Blue Panel server is operated, managed and financed by private funds. Also the support we offer for the Gemini images and the genuine Dreamboxes is exploited by the fake clone developers and owners.
We can not prevent these people from using the Gemini images, but what we can do is making it as hard as possible for these people to gain money with our work. Therefore, we implemented in the images that are also running on the boxes described above a lock for the BluePanel server. The detection mechanism, whether it is a replica or a Dreambox, has been activated in the current DM500 release. Other Box types will follow. If a box is identified as a non-genuine clone of a Dreambox, the access to the BluePanel is locked.
Since this method of detection is still very new, it could unfortunately occur that even genuine boxes are identified as fakes and as a consequence the BluePanel would be locked also on original Dreamboxes. In the meantime, there are some known problems where repaired boxes can?t by recognized as genuine due to the replaced hardware parts. We will do everything the reduce the number of false identifications but nevertheless we cannot decrease the error rate to zero, as the necessary data from DMM is not available. If your Box is falsely identified as a fake box, please understand that we do this in order to maintain the Dreambox community.
We ask all users of our images to do everything possible to ensure that our hobby can live on and we will fight together against such unfair methods. We as developers want our Gemini images only to run on Dreamboxes...
The IHAD/Gemini Team
FIX
Gemini 430 Blue Panel fix
Gemini are checking to see if you have an original dreambox mac address which all start with 00:09:34.
I have sucessfully changed the mac address on the clone to one starting with 00:09:34 and now the gemini 4.3 image works 100%.
It is a software fix only and will not harm your box in any way. It just runs a file at startup which changes the mac address.
If at anytime you want to go back to the original mac address then just delete the file and reboot or install another image.
If this is the way Gemini are doing things now, you will need to do this with every Gemini image from 4.3 and up, who knows, it maybe that it is now part of the Dreambox CVS, and that every new image from any Group will need this for full functionality
Anyway the instructions are as follows.
Download the Gemini 430 image
Flash Gemini 430 image to box.
Reboot
Easy Method
Copy the attached file to /var/etc
chmod 755
reboot box
Remember to edit the mac address in the file or else everyone downloading it will have same mac adddress on their clone.
It must start with 00:09:34
The last three columns should either be numbers 0-9 or letters a-f
i.e. 0a:9f:cb.
So the whole mac address would be similar to this 00:09:34:0a:9f:cb.
To return to your original mac address just delete the file and reboot or install a different image.
Manual Method
Telnet to your box.
You will see prompt as follows:
root@dreambox:~>
Type the following lines...
cd /var/etc
rm init
echo \#!/bin/sh >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 down >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:09:34:xx:xx:xx >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 up >> init
chmod 755 init
reboot
(replace xx:xx:xx with your own mac address)
Summary
Both these methods create a file in /var/etc called init which runs on every
reboot, and changes your mac address to one like an original dreambox.
This will give you a fully working blue panel on gemini 4.3 but remember if you use mac address reservation in your router to give your dreambox a constant ip address, you need to change your settings there too.
To return to your original mac address just delete the file and reboot, or install a different image.
Thanks to Nightman1969
With the release of the GP 4.3, we have added a feature to the Blue panel to detect fake Dreambox clones. We want to show our protest against clones and replicas of Dreamboxes. It cannot be in our interest, to allow the fake boxes to hard the big dreambox community and in fact our beloved hobby.
Like some of you should know, some weeks ago a new box came to the market. It?s sold as a completely new development.
But if you check that box exactly, you will soon find out that not only the same images, software and drivers were used, but also the nearly identical hardware, such as for example in the Dreambox DM500. According to some owners of this new box, it is being shipped and sold with a preinstalled Gemini Image, which is not in our interest. Even in the manufacturers forum, Gemini images where posted with a warning ?runs only on Box XYZ?.
We as a Dreambox board and Developer of the Gemini Images can?t tolerate this trend. It is not in our interest that our know-how, our knowledge of the Dreamboxes, and our time is used by a third party manufactorer to sell his copies with our software
In fact, the truth is that these manufactorers are themselves not able to provide a self developed image for their receivers.
The Blue Panel server is operated, managed and financed by private funds. Also the support we offer for the Gemini images and the genuine Dreamboxes is exploited by the fake clone developers and owners.
We can not prevent these people from using the Gemini images, but what we can do is making it as hard as possible for these people to gain money with our work. Therefore, we implemented in the images that are also running on the boxes described above a lock for the BluePanel server. The detection mechanism, whether it is a replica or a Dreambox, has been activated in the current DM500 release. Other Box types will follow. If a box is identified as a non-genuine clone of a Dreambox, the access to the BluePanel is locked.
Since this method of detection is still very new, it could unfortunately occur that even genuine boxes are identified as fakes and as a consequence the BluePanel would be locked also on original Dreamboxes. In the meantime, there are some known problems where repaired boxes can?t by recognized as genuine due to the replaced hardware parts. We will do everything the reduce the number of false identifications but nevertheless we cannot decrease the error rate to zero, as the necessary data from DMM is not available. If your Box is falsely identified as a fake box, please understand that we do this in order to maintain the Dreambox community.
We ask all users of our images to do everything possible to ensure that our hobby can live on and we will fight together against such unfair methods. We as developers want our Gemini images only to run on Dreamboxes...
The IHAD/Gemini Team
FIX
Gemini 430 Blue Panel fix
Gemini are checking to see if you have an original dreambox mac address which all start with 00:09:34.
I have sucessfully changed the mac address on the clone to one starting with 00:09:34 and now the gemini 4.3 image works 100%.
It is a software fix only and will not harm your box in any way. It just runs a file at startup which changes the mac address.
If at anytime you want to go back to the original mac address then just delete the file and reboot or install another image.
If this is the way Gemini are doing things now, you will need to do this with every Gemini image from 4.3 and up, who knows, it maybe that it is now part of the Dreambox CVS, and that every new image from any Group will need this for full functionality
Anyway the instructions are as follows.
Download the Gemini 430 image
Flash Gemini 430 image to box.
Reboot
Easy Method
Copy the attached file to /var/etc
chmod 755
reboot box
Remember to edit the mac address in the file or else everyone downloading it will have same mac adddress on their clone.
It must start with 00:09:34
The last three columns should either be numbers 0-9 or letters a-f
i.e. 0a:9f:cb.
So the whole mac address would be similar to this 00:09:34:0a:9f:cb.
To return to your original mac address just delete the file and reboot or install a different image.
Manual Method
Telnet to your box.
You will see prompt as follows:
root@dreambox:~>
Type the following lines...
cd /var/etc
rm init
echo \#!/bin/sh >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 down >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:09:34:xx:xx:xx >> init
echo ifconfig eth0 up >> init
chmod 755 init
reboot
(replace xx:xx:xx with your own mac address)
Summary
Both these methods create a file in /var/etc called init which runs on every
reboot, and changes your mac address to one like an original dreambox.
This will give you a fully working blue panel on gemini 4.3 but remember if you use mac address reservation in your router to give your dreambox a constant ip address, you need to change your settings there too.
To return to your original mac address just delete the file and reboot, or install a different image.
Thanks to Nightman1969