Rev’s Thought Dump

I made the move to update one of my servers to dapper because I’d heard that they’d made changes that had the Atheros wireless chipset working a lot better… no more static IP. Well… I’m not sure yet. First thing that happened is Shorewall refused to start because they’d changed the config files. So I had to go in there and adjust that. All of my wpa_supplicant files were made into .bak files and restoring those still doesn’t get me a connection. I have umpteen million errors listed on the interface. Oh well. Keep on keepin’ on.

On my work box that I did update to dapper I’ve got about a dozen packages - OOo2 among them - that refuse to upgrade/downgrade/or otherwise get the hell off my computer. This is an interesting problem.

Oh and is Webmin part of the dapper repository? I went to install it and it didn’t come up.. I’ve got universal selected and all. Oh well.

Nice to know I’m consistant. =)

Picked up two AirLink Desktop Wireless cards. Going to setup them up and move my gateway box out into the garage. This is their Atheros SuperG card - they’re at home so I don’t have the model # on me.. I’ll update it when I get home - so it should work just as well as the PCMCIA card did. Same chipset and all.

Got them at Fry’s for 14.99 a piece. Not too bad for wireless and like I said, they seem to work great with linux. I was a little put off of AirLink at first because it’s not as big as NetGear or LinkSys - at least by appearences. But I’ve been pretty pleased so far. I almost bought the SuperG MIMO router for 20 bucks. But I realized I REALLY didn’t need to spend anymore money.

Speaking of spending money…

I’ve been trying to figure out which new computer I want and how I’m going to get it. Well, it occoured to me this weekend that I’d completely overlooked InfoTech. The computer I’m running now at home is from InfoTech and it’s still churning along even after all the reconfiguring and case swapping I’ve done. It certainly outlasted the 64bit Athlon I got at Fry’s.

My father-in-law took my recommendation to use them a year or two ago and he put together a system on their site. They were nice enough to call him and let him know that he didn’t need a few things he ordered like network card and sound card because they were integrated into the motherboard. I think that right there is a big point in their favor. Most companies would say “Hey.. the customer is right, right? More money for us.” But they called and verified what he wanted and saved him a nice chunk of change.

They build out your system, bench test it, and ship it within days of ordering. I got mine, plugged it in, and I was off and running in no time. Nice.

So I’m looking at getting a box off their site and it’ll be significantly cheaper than Dell - primarily because I can leave out things I have already like drives and monitors and keyboards - and I’ll get the parts that I want, not the cost cutting crappy parts that Dell - or any prebuilt computer company - uses to cut costs.

While I still like the iMac and OSX I think that XGL will give me the eye candy I wanted to play with and allow me to get a 3.2Ghz box for $600 rather than paying $1,000 - $2,000.

And with virtualization I can run OSX enough to get it out of my system… oops I didn’t say that.

A lot of misc. data today:

Wireless:
Got the dish off the deck. It’s a Dish Network dish and not like the one in the O’Reilly Wireless Hacks book. Anyone have any experience with this model? The camera is back with my father-in-law (Who owns it) so I didn’t get any pictures.

MonoCast:
Got two decent microphones for MonoCast. They’re a normal earphone style jack though and not the three prongers. One says it’s a condensor mic but I thought those needed to be 3 prong and have phantom power. Guess not?

I’m still a little stumped about recording. I saw online where I can get a new $50 mixer on Amazon and a really nice mic for the same. But I don’t have the cash for that at the moment. I’m thinking I’ll need to get it though.

Going to get the developer interview for MonoCast this week. I swear!

Non-Profit:
Still haven’t gotten to my father-in-law’s non-profit needs. They’re still busy. But I’ve got another friend who will need some of the same work done. I’ve been thinking about Asterisk more and someone pointed me to Asterisk@Home. A nice live CD that apparently handles most of the setup for you.

Now I need to think about hardware since I don’t think they’ll want to switch to linux and run software phones. =) I may set this up at home to play with. I have a spare box that I thought Aiden might use. But he likes his laptop just fine.

WoW:
We ran SM last night and were with in minutes of finishing the last 3 bosses in the Cathedral and then we’d be able to get the Sword of Serenity. But then the guys we were questing with had to drop because the time they had at a net cafe expired. Doh!

Work:
I’ve had a lot of time to write this because due to policy changes at work that wiped out GoogleDesktop and iTunes access my computer ate itself. I put in a “Ticket” to get this resolved. But till them I’m running MonoLive on the box. I’ve checked our corp manuals and it doesn’t look like I “can’t” run linux. I may just dump windows. At least put it in a VM and not worry about crap like this anymore.

MonoCast Extra:
The MonoCast page is up now www.mono-cast.com. I might change the colors a bit but it works. The forums are… sparse. I’m going to fill those in more in the coming week.

That’s all for now.

Rev

I’m constantly referring to Justin’s O’Reilly Wireless Hacks book as the Seattle Wireless Hacks book. I even tried typing that just now. I guess - at least in my mind - they’re becoming pretty ubiquitous.

Packed up the whole family and headed over to CJ’s place tonight. We had a great time chatting and getting to know each other. It was nice to hang out with people who had kids so we didn’t have to constantly chase ours around going “Oh no… put down the glass decoration. Oh no… don’t set the kitty on fire. No no.. don’t put the expensive thing in your mouth.”

I think we decided that was our first meeting. LOL. Hopefully the next one will be a little more tech centric. =)

Midway through CJ handed me a new in the box Intel Pro 5000 Access Point. Looks like it’s one of the ones from Seattle Wireless’ HackNight. They promptly took theirs apart and started a wiki entry on it. It doesn’t look like they’ve got much down about it at the moment but we’ll see what I can do with it.

I guess I’m supposed to get it hooked up to the satellite dish I’ve got and get it pointed at Everett. I’ve got Justin’s copy of O’Reilly’s Wireless Hacks so we’ll see what I can do. Maybe I’ll get out there this week and take my dish down from the back porch and haul it to the next meeting. I’m dieing to try out the cordless cold soldering iron my father-in-law got me for my birthday.

So I’m sitting at my desk at home with this box and I open it up and check it out. I’m feeling like I’m in a movie where I’m in a hotel room and the bell boy has delivered a package. I’m supposed to open it up and figure out what to do with it before the spies catch me. lol.

Anywho. Had a great time and now I get to hack on stuff. I didn’t get a chance to talk to CJ about Public IP. I still have SOME reservations about an open access point with access to MY internet IP. I don’t want all my bandwidth sucked up and I don’t want crazy crap being downloaded on what is essentially my account. But I’m sure we’ll get to chatting about that.

Just thought I’d warn you. I found this article via digg. I mean.. given enough time almost anything is crackable. Anything is possible.

Just got to make sure to go here when you’re coming up with your WPA key. Helps to have a USB key to tote it around on. Of course. Don’t go leaving it laying around. Or, read it off over the cell phone to someone while you’re on the bus.

Apparently my geek taxes on this project are paid. I fired up the laptop to check that it’ll connect with our any nudging and all looks good. Woop. Now on to writing secuirty sinks for my remoting stuff at work.

I’ve been busy the last few hours paying Geek Tax: The amazing waste of time that you must endure when crap stops working.

Justin told me about it today when I was describing my sudden inexplicable problems with WPA and my new card.

After having everything in order the night before last I cuddled up in bed next to my love and her iBook and got ready to write some code. I fired up my laptop and zonk. No connection. I wrestled with it for a few hours last nigt before love enticed me back to bed and got me to forget about it.

Tonight between rounds of screeming and feeding with my little son, I worked on it some more. I totally wiped out wpa_supplicant and wifi-radar and started all over. One thing I found, madwifi has issues passing dhcp info. So I had to go with a static ip. When I used wpa_passphrase for my key it failed saying the key was wrong. If I plain texted it like linux journal said i’d need to. It worked fine. Finally I got all things in place, restarted wpa_supplicant and restarted networking and it’s back up.

For the moment.

So there is Geek Tax paid. I’m finding lately that I pay a LOT in geek tax.

Found a handy tutorial for setting up WPA quickly in Breezy.

I had most of this done already but I went over the steps again when I gave up on freeRadius. On my radius box I kept getting the error message that rlm_eap_tls.so couldn’t be found. And sure enough.. I couldn’t find it. Hrmm Oh well. I gave up. But now I’ve got WPA going.

And while you’re setting up WPA. Here’s a good passkey gen.

I just picked up the Atheros based Airlink AWLC4030 so I can use WPA and enable freeRadius - and of course use G rather than b for the speed boost. Another benefit was going to be running netapplet so I can easily take a look at APs - my current card wouldn’t run iwscan.

So once I got everything setup I installed netapplet and found that I would loose connection every few seconds and then it would come back up. At first I thought it might be a problem with the network monitor not registering properly or some such nonesense. But a quick download of the latest Short Attention Gamer podcast showed that it really was stopping every few seconds. Then I worried it was the card itself. It is, after all a 14.95 card.

But I turned off netapplet and everything was fine. So off to good I went and I came back with this thread.

Looks like the madwifi drivers for the Atheros chipset have issues running iwscan without dropping the connection for a brief amount of time.

I did try installing wifi-radar and that worked better because it only runs the scan when you open the applet to view the local APs. But then it did not appear to be correctly reporting the speed of the APs. They kept showing up as b.

Oh well. No big worries. If you’re having this problem I guess we just have to wait and see if madwifi can take care of it in upcoming releases.