Rev’s Thought Dump

So, after several hours of setup we learned an important lesson. The NetGear MA401 PCMCIA Wireless Adapter doesn’t work with wpa_supplicant and so I wasted a lot of time. Which makes me wonder.. okay.. so I have to get a wireless adapter that WILL work with wpa_supplicant. But if that’s the case.. then I’ll likely buy an adapter that just forking does WPA. Or am I missing that linux drivers don’t do WPA out of the box and so wpa_supplicant would be used in any case?

Too tired to think on it now.

Let me know what works for you.

Well, I’ve gotten a comment from somone stating that the ndiswrapper guys had given up on this nic since it’s drivers were just too dependent on windows. And I still haven’t found anything encouraging on google. So I’ll have to just write it off then.

Just so I know… what wireless cards are you guys using succesfully under linux?

Hey there. I was just looking through gmail while I was waiting for vmware to install. I noticed I had actual spam in my spam folder so I went to clear it. To my surprise it was all comments to my blog. I quickly let gmail know that these notices weren’t spam and set to work approving the comments. Two were really blog spam and the other three – which I approved – I will answer here. You can find the comments in my post about WU830G and IPv6. Sorry it took so long to get that cleared up.

Ummm WU830G:

I haven’t really touched much on this since I posted. Tried getting the newest ndiswrapper from their site thinking that the Ubuntu package might be stale. But that didn’t work either. I looked high and low for information on this nic but I haven’t found very much. Seattle Wireless lists the nic and it’s chipset – a chipset that brings up two unrelated sites when I google it.

My next approach with this is going to be to try and set it up on my sons machine which I installed DSL on. I noticed the ndiswrapper software is already installed there with a nice little wizard. Maybe I’m just a spazz as far as setting up ndiswrapper goes. But it seems pretty straight forward.

IPv6:

I’m not sure what isn’t working with your setup, Tom. I’ll take a closer look after I get a little work done today. =) I have to say though, that I haven’t found myself using any of the enhancements available with IPv6. I hardly know it’s there accept that I feel the presence of a gaping hole in my router – IPv6 isn’t NAT’d. But I’ve got firewalls up and such.

Which reminds me, I saw a post somewhere where in it was suggested that you don’t need firewalls at all if you compartmentalize the functions of our system across virtual machines via Xen. I don’t know about the no firewall thing… but I am constantly intrigued by Xen and the thought of using your system in new and interesting ways. But I’m afraid I’ll have to get some new memory before I get to doing any heavy linux work.

Well, I think that has it covered. Sorry didn’t notice the posts sooner. And I still find it freaky that I come up at the top of so many google searches *shudders*

Love had to go on bed rest this last week and while she was down I grabbed a wireless adapter so she could play WoW on the beefier AMD64 Box. I wound up with a Motorola WU830G because it was the only thing the local Target (gack) had and I needed it quick.

It’s fine for windows, but I haven’t gotten it setup in linux yet. I figure if I can get this done then I can toss it on the server in the garage and then route the other computers in the rack through the server.

I’ve taken an initial stab at ndiswrapper. I did an apt-get in Hoary.Ubuntu but that didn’t work. So I removed that and grabbed the latest source – as per the recommendation of the web site. Still no joy. The site mentioned not using the provided drivers but others based on the cards chipset. To be honest I was too busy to hunt those down.

Anyone have any success with the Motorola WU830G wireless adapter and linux?

I’ve been out of the writing hoop for a while. The family took of for the east coast this Monday and I took delivery of my new flat panel monitor on Tuesday. So needless to say I’ve been a little consumed… I sat down to see how well WoW would look on it… and well… Look! It’s Saturday already! I haven’t played WoW in so long. Not since I started going to SMUG meetings. It now seems my pendulum has swung the other direction with the purchase of this monitor and a week of free time.

oh well… let’s see if I can get back to the Code Side. Would that be the dark side or the light side?

Also, I tried moving my servers out to the garage and create a wireless bridge with my smaller laptop. But since I started trying to do that in earnest at like 9pm last night, I didn’t quite pull it off. So the servers are out there. Just no connection yet. I may petition for an access point once the pain of this monitor fades from the bank account.

But, yeah, this was all done to gut part of my office so I could setup an art studio for the family.

Oh well.. pictures, and more updates, to follow.

Got Beagle installed on the laptop. So far so good. We’ll see if it makes bug hunting easier. I don’t notice it scanning my web history. But, it’s installed and I can fiddle with it more later, that’s what linux is all about right? =)

Running two+ builds at the same time, updating ubuntu, browsing the web, and indexing with beagle is really punking my poor Cel 466 laptop. Maybe after little Locke is born I’ll pick up a new laptop. Yeah…. riiiiight. =)

Tried out QEMU at work and was really surprised at how well it worked. But I grabbed the latest beta of VMWare (5) to run XP on the AMD64 when I get things switched. I’ve still got a few things to do first.. like get my SVN repository off there. Fortunately I did the flat file storage rather than berkley DB.

Brandon left this week. Fortunately my pro-active of my two demi-bosses took the week off so I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed with requests. Oh.. but the one I did get made me want to follow Brandon to his new gig. They asked me if I could quickly extend MSI’s functionality so that it would let you roll back our installs on an uninstall. So say someone installs an update to our product.. they want to be able to remove the update and have it put the original files back – by the next release – July 1st.

While this might seem like some cool functionality and handy… it’s not the way MSI works. You install a patch to a product and you’ve got to remove it all and reinstall the original package to go back. But yeah.. it’s not trivial.. and I’m already trying to finish the System Management application I’m working on and make all the changes to the current installs. And find time to switch the build system to NANT and all the installs to WiX.

Okay.. enough boring MSI/Install stuff.

No real forward movement on ReadyReply this week. I got maybe a couple methods in. But now I’m into the meat of defining data handling methods and the UI rewrite. I’m thinking I’ll get a large chunk of work done at the Mono Meeting this Sunday. This twice a month thing is a good idea simply because it’ll get me to focus more.

Oh and it doesn’t help that I’d rather spend all my time booted into ubuntu when the project is on the win partition of the laptop.

Ever since I installed netapplet I’ve had problems with wireless in ubuntu. I’ve since ditched netapplet..but it’s now a chore everytime I boot the system. It’s not persisting key information at all (should it be?). And to get things connected I find myself having to throw it in by hand with iwconfig. Not such a big deal.. but it takes for ever for it to take and actually get up and running. This kind of “this can’t be that hard” problem makes one feel like a real feeb.

So I installed KWifiManager after reading about it in Linux Magazine… sucked. Wouldn’t even bring up the configuration menu. And, even though it showed I was connected to my AP… when I ran a scan for AP’s.. it said there weren’t any. Hmmm. SO I scrapped that. Anyone have any suggestions for wireless managment? It can’t be that Windows handles this better.

Oh and Chris and Eric are right.. KDE ui blows.

And, I’ve yet to grok the multiple desktop system. I just don’t tend to use it even though I’m obsessed with desktop realestate. I like to have enough room to see everything in one window. If it’s off the screen I run the risk of forgetting about it. But perhaps that speaks more to my scatter brained approach to things.

There’s an app called Skippy which apparently spaces out all the windows so you can pick one and then collapses them back with your selected window top most. Kind of like in Nat’s demo at BrainShare this year. Maybe I’ll install that and check it out.

Oh well.. I’ve babbeled enough.. MonoDevelop is done building… time to start hunting bugs with Beagle. =)

Well, I’ve got my tunnel… via tunnelbroker… and I’m having mixed results. On my Grond (the main linux box) I can’t seem to ping anything.. I can resolve ipv6 addresses, but it flakes.

I think installing Freenet6/tspc may have freaked it out a bit. I tried removing it (apt-get remove freenet6 tspc) but I notice the deamon still tries to start… so I wacked the conf file.

I think what i need is a good reboot.

I can monitor traffic from tunnelbroker’s site and I saw that towards the end of my 4am hack session last night I was getting in and out traffic and they succesfully pinged me (they ping the ipv6 network to determine wether or not the tunnel is in use else they drop it).

I think it was working on my XP laptop (looks surprised) as I could ping6 and traceroute6 back to it.

Oh well talk about quick immersion.

I still haven’t had a chance to check the improved range with the new firmware. And I haven’t used it long enough to see if it drops the wireless connectin like Brandon, and several folks on line (google it), have mentioned. But linksys makes indirect mention of setting “Beacon Interval” to 50 and “Fragmentation Threshold” to 2034. So if something does crop up.. I’ll try that first.