Running VMware Server Console on a Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I bought a 20″ wide-screen monitor which I run at a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. Working with all that screen space is fantastic (especially with 4 virtual desktops), except that I’ve got so used to it that the standard 1024×768 pixels on the notebook PC that I use for work seems too small and an upgrade is out of the question as the PC is only 18 months old.

For a while now, I’ve been running the notebook on the desk next to my main display but I’m running out of desk space. As I virtualised my corporate Windows XP build a while back, I thought it would be great if, when I’m working at home, I could run the Linux VMware Server Console on my Mac (which is connected to the large display). The virtual machine would still be limited to 1024×768 but I could access corporate applications in the VMware Server Console and do the big screen stuff (web, e-mail, document edits, etc.) natively on the Mac, using the whole display. Yes, I know that if I used Microsoft Virtual Server I could run it in a browser, but I’d need ActiveX and I’m not using Internet Explorer. Similarly RDP is an option, but I find it to be a bit flaky on an Intel Mac. Anyway, I’m a (pseudo-)geek and so I need to feed on problems like this from time to time!

Actually, much of the hard work has already been done for me – googling for vmware console mac soon turns up Rui Carmo’s article at The Tao of Mac on how to run [the VMware Console] remotely with Apple’s X11; however Rui’s article was written a while ago now and my VMware Server (v1.0.1-build 29996) installation on Fedora Core 5 doesn’t use the command vmware-console – instead I have to use vmware. Nevertheless, it got me 90% of the way there:

  • On the (Linux) VMware Server:
    • Configure SSH and X11 forwarding (my original post used a Windows client and public/private keys but the principles are similar – this time I used password authentication, making sure that the PasswordAuthentication yes and X11Forwarding yes lines were present in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restarting the SSH daemon with service sshd restart).
    • Locate an appropriate keyboard map in /usr/lib/vmware/xkeymap/, edit the map if necessary (there is a VMware article about keyboard mapping on a Linux host that may be useful – don’t worry that it’s a VMware Workstation document) and edit ~/.vmware/preferences to include xkeymap.language="keyboardmap" (I used gb101 for my Apple UK keyboard).
  • On the Mac:

At this point VMware Server Console ran successfully under X11 on my Mac; however whenever I powered on a virtual machine all I saw was a black screen and a message in the xterm window which read:

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.

After trying a remote VMware Server Console connection to localhost and restarting the Linux host (I’m not sure which, if either, of these made a difference) I found that the virtual machine was actually starting but that for some reason the display wasn’t being repeated in the X11 VMware Server Console on the Mac; however this time there was a different message displayed:

Unable to connect to the MKS: You need execute access in order to connect with the VMware Server Console. Access denied for config file: /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/virtualmachinenname/virtualmachinenname.vmx.

After setting execute permissions to the virtual machine configuration file chmod +x virtualmachinenname.vmx (changing the permission set from 640 to 751), I was able to successfully view the VM on the Mac (and simultaneously on the Linux host) – the only (very minor) issues are that the mouse pointer is solid white when accessing the virtual machine (so sometimes I lose it) and that the sound is not forwarded (no big deal). Now my notebook PC is docked on a shelf away from the desk, with the lid closed, and I’m running the VMware Server Console from the Mac, having reclaimed some space on my desk.

What was that password again?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In the course of my daily computing activities I have to remember hundreds of username and password combinations. Literally. Just at work there are two (yes two!) timesheet applications, then there’s my corporate domain credentials, remote access, mobile phone billing portal, etc., each with their own username and password complexity/expiry policies; then there are all the systems at home; and finally the plethora of websites at which I have an account.

There are those who say that writing down credentials is a bad idea, whilst others say that using a single username and password combination is bad practice – these people are absolutely correct as, once compromised, an attacker has access to all the systems that use those credentials but we also need to be pragmatic – how can any user seriously be expected to remember all the usernames and passwords for the multitude of systems that they access? Indeed, many of the credentials I used are stored in my browser’s password manager – I haven’t a clue what my password is and I just open up the page and let my browser auto-complete the fields for me.

If we cast our minds back a few years to the launch of the Microsoft.net Framework, Passport.net was supposed to take away a lot of the hassle for web service authentication and we all know what a failure Passport was (outside Microsoft) – people just didn’t want Microsoft holding the keys to all their systems – InfoCard could well succeed where Passport failed but I have an identity crisis right here, right now!

One of the systems that I access regularly was recently moved to a new server – hence to a new URL and so the stored username and password didn’t work for me. This is where one of the handy system utilities that I wrote about a while back came in useful – I went to the old URL for the application, let the browser auto-complete the details and Nirsoft AsterWin IE was able to scan for the stored password, which I could then manually enter at the new site.

Of course, this advice comes with all the usual caveats when using third party applications to probe for security details… I haven’t checked for any unwanted side effects of using this application and you have been warned!

Creating a FAT32 volume in excess of 32GB

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back I wrote about some of the issues I was having with using FAT32-formatted disks for data transfer between Windows, Mac OS X (and Linux) PCs, because although FAT32 supports file systems up to 2TB in size, the format utilities within Windows support a maximum partition size of 32GB and FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB (which doesn’t sound like an issue until you start copying .ISO DVD images and digital video files around).

Even though I use MacDrive for reading OS X disks on Windows XP, I still find it useful to have a FAT32 disk to back up the VMware Server virtual machine which I use to run Windows XP on a Linux notebook PC for my daily work. I did find a great utility a few weeks back for reading ext3 disks on Windows (I think it was Explore2fs), but it’s the universal acceptance of FAT32 that makes it so easy to use everywhere. The trouble is that my virtual machine is about 31GB in size and growing – consequently I needed to create a partition larger than 32GB.

In my original post, I mentioned that FAT32 volumes in excess of 32Gb can be created – Windows is able to read or write larger volumes it just can’t create them natively (the workaround is to use another operating system or third-party tools). In my case, I used the Mac OS X Disk Utility – the important point is to ensure that the disk options are set to use as master boot record (not a GUID partition table or an Apple partition map) after which MS-DOS File System becomes available as a formatting option, allowing me to create a FAT32 disk which filled my entire 55.89GB disk – plenty of room for my virtual machine files and more.

ThinkBook? MacPad?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Firstly, let me point out that I am not publicly condoning software piracy. To run Apple Mac OS X 10.4 on anything other than a properly licensed Macintosh computer would be very, very naughty.

If, however, you did have a spare copy of OS X and you wanted to install it on a well-built black notebook PC (say, for example, an IBM ThinkPad T40) without shelling out extra cash for a black MacBook, this is how you might do it. I’m not sure if the end result should be known as a ThinkBook or a MacPad…

Following Profit42’s advice for installing OS X 10.4.x on a “normal” PC (and assuming that all data on the target computer’s hard disk can be wiped):

  1. Make sure that the target computer supports at least the SSE2 instruction set (if you are running Windows then CPU-Z will help).
  2. Obtain a pre-patched OS X install DVD image (available to Apple developers… although I understand that googling for JaS OSx86 may help out a little…).
  3. Burn the OS X install image (e.g. 10.4.6.install.dvd.iso) to DVD.
  4. Boot the target computer from the DVD and press a key when prompted to install OS X.
  5. After the grey screen with the Apple logo, follow the installer prompts until there is a blue screen and a menu bar at the top. At this point select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Create a single partition on the disk formatted as Mac OS X extended (journaled). Then close Disk Utility.
  7. Continue with the installer prompts, customising the installation after selecting the target hard disk and ensuring that all appropriate patches are selected (e.g. 10.4.6.Combo.Update, Intel.SSE2 and 10.4.6.Radeon.Mobility.Support).
  8. Continue until the installation is complete and reboot into OS X.

If presented with a b0 error message, then there are a couple of methods to work around this. The basic problem is that the partition has not been set active (bootable). Live CDs such as GParted (or even an MS-DOS boot disk with FDISK) may help but one method is to boot from the install DVD again but this time don’t press a key. OS X should boot and once set up it should be possible to launch Terminal (from the Utilities folder, under Applications) and set the appropriate partition to be active, following the advice from Rammjet at Insanely Mac:

  1. Type diskutil list and verify which disk holds the OS X partition.
  2. Assuming that the disk is disk0, enter the command sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (note the r in rdisk) and enter your password when prompted.
  3. Ignore the fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory error.
  4. At the fdisk: 1> prompt, type p and verify which partition holds OS X.
  5. Assuming that it is partition 1, type f 1 – the response should be Partition 1 marked active and the prompt should change to fdisk:*1>.
  6. Save the changes with write then enter y to confirm that a restart will be required, followed by exit.
  7. Remove the install DVD and reboot.

Finally:

A few iTunes and Front Row tips

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Apple iTunes has supported podcasts since v4.9 and I stopped using a separate podcatcher soon afterwards but earlier today I wanted to add a podcast subscription manually (i.e. not through the iTunes store). It turns out that’s easy enough – simply select Subscribe to Podcasts… from the Advanced menu but it took me a bit of research to find that particular option (I had been looking for an appropriate command on the File menu and eventually found this out from Apple’s essential tips for podcast lovers).

Whilst writing about iTunes, I might as well add a few more tips that I’ve discovered in recent days:

There are still a couple of iTunes items that I’m trying to work out:

  • How to get my old (pre-iTunes native podcast support) podcast files to be recognised as podcasts (rather than sitting in my music library) – there is a script to re-add tracks as podcasts but I figure there must be a simpler way.
  • How to mark a track as explicit – for example I have a copy of a recent Madonna concert and whilst I may share the views on American politics that she expresses during her performance of I Love New York (which is great song but has just about the worst lyrics I’ve heard from an artist of Madonna’s calibre in a long time), my 2-year-old son does repeat a lot of what he hears right now so I’d probably better avoid playing explicit tracks in the car. One way to do this would be to exclude explicit tracks from a playlist but the explicit/clean tags only seem to be possible on podcasts and purchased music.

If anyone knows the answer to these, please leave a comment on this post.

Could this be the beginning of the end for DRM?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My friend Alex thinks that DRM is a good thing (he believes that it’s the only way that content producers can protect their investments). I disagree with Alex on this and agree with Robert Nyman’s argument as to why using DRM to protect content is fundamentally flawed. Consequently I was very pleased to hear that EMI’s digital catalogue will be available at Apple’s iTunes Store from next month, DRM-free and at a higher bitrate.

EMI is not the largest of the music publishers but it is one of the big four. Whilst it’s easy to see the attraction of this deal for Apple (who have been facing some legal challenges in Europe over interoperability between iTunes and other vendor’s media players), it remains to be seen what it means for EMI (apart from a 25%-30% increase in digital revenues for each DRM-free track sold via iTunes). It could actually increase legal digital music downloads and I’m sure Sony BMG, Universal and Warner will be watching to see what the effect is before they make a similar move; it’s also worth noting that 13,000 independent labels already sell DRM-free content via eMusic (albeit at at lower bitrate and using the MP3 file format).

The EMI deal will also allow iTunes users to pay £0.20/€0.30/$0.30 to upgrade the music that they have already purchased – it may be money for old rope from the point of view of Apple and EMI but it’s also attractively priced (and it allows the record labels to increase the price of music sold via iTunes – something which they have wanted to do for while now). Digital music sales may only represent a 10% share of the worldwide market for music but are expected to grow to reach 25% of earnings by 2010 (although the recording industry is still fantasising about matching digital revenues to the decline in CD sales – a market phenomenon brought about by music collectors replacing portions of their vinyl collections with “digitally remastered” CDs and unlikely to be repeated for todays new media formats).

Personally, I’m pleased about this deal for another reason. Until now, there has been little incentive for me to buy albums online (even with the recent addition of the complete my album feature). I buy single tracks online (I stopped buying CD singles a few years ago) but have become increasing frustrated as certain tracks are only available if I buy the whole album (note to greedy record companies – this strategy actually drives people to seek out illegal downloads – if I was so inclined then I could download the tracks that I want from The Devil Wears Prada soundtrack via BitTorrent as they are not available to me on iTunes unless I buy the whole album).

At present, if I buy a CD (from the supermarket, play.com or elsewhere) then I have the DRM-free media and can rip it for playback on my iPod – alternatively I could pay Apple for inferior-quality DRM-protected content but from next month, I can buy 256kbps AAC-encoded albums, without DRM, for about the same price as a CD (and for the same price as the existing 128mbps AAC files with DRM) and, because the whole iTunes experience is so simple, I probably will. This is what Apple and EMI are banking on; however it will also make me more aware of which label I am purchasing tracks from (at the moment I neither know, nor care).

Incidentally, I recently heard that teenagers and young adults are the section of society most likely to copy CDs and use peer-to-peer networks to share files. That’s nothing new. The technology may have changed but I started recording chart shows to listen to music when I was about 12. If I hunt around in the loft, garage, or somewhere similar, I’ll probably find a box of cassette tape copies of friends’ albums from when I was a teenager and my time at Uni’. Only once I started to work for a living could I finally afford to buy CDs (and I bought a lot of CDs over the following 10 years or so, right up until just before I got married, at which time my money started to be spent on “sensible” things, like a huge mortgage…). So what’s changed? Nothing really, illegal file sharing is just the modern equivalent of the high speed dubbing that we did on our twin cassette decks 20 years ago – the only difference is that today’s technology allows a perfect digital copy and most of us have stood next to too many speaker stacks at gigs to notice the difference in quality anyway!

Utility to discover detailed information about PC hardware

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I needed to know a little bit of very technical information about the hardware in one of my PCs today (whether or not the processor supported the SSE2 instruction set) and in the process I found a great utility that details just about everything I could ever need to know about a PC’s CPU, cache, mainboard, and memory – the utility is called CPUID CPU-Z is and it is freeware. It’s also worth checking out some of the other utilities on the CPUID website.

Trouble with torrents

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about my initial experiences of using a BitTorrent client for peer-to-peer file sharing, which, contrary to popular belief, is not only exclusively used for illegal content distribution. The trouble is, that I’ve found it difficult to get going with BitTorrent as a content distribution mechanism. My download speeds were very slow and certain clients seemed to prevent any of my computers from using my Internet connection. I tried a few clients (BitTorrent, Azureus and Xtorrent – all on the Mac, although BitTorrent and Azureus are available for other platforms too) and it looks as though I finally have a configuration that works.

My ISP does traffic shape to reduce the impact of P2P traffic but does not aggressively prohibit P2P traffic; having said that I moved away from the standard ports and picked something up high (above 10000) to avoid any issues.

Using BitTorrent, there was an element of doubt as to whether I had a working connection – peers seemed to be disconnecting me as though I was leeching (clearly I have to download something before I can make it available to upload) and I do use a NAT router (which can complicate things). One of the best features in the Azureus client is the traffic light system that it uses for various elements including share ratio and NAT traversal – I had a green light for NAT, but the share ratio was always red/amber so I struggled to get a decent download speed.

I heard on the Macbreak Weekly review of the Apple TV how Xtorrent is a very simple to use BitTorrent client for OS X and after trying it out I’m blown away with how simple it has been in comparison to the other clients that I tried. I’ve been trying to download a 1.3GB file for days now using Azureus and, because of the problem whereby it seems to hog my Internet connection (despite following advice for good connection parameters), I could only run it when I didn’t need to use the network (i.e. at night). Even so, after two nights, I had only managed to retrieve a measly 0.1% of the file. I’ve been using Xtorrent for a few hours now, have most of the file downloaded and have seen transfer speeds as high as 300Kbps (2.4Mbps), but there is a catch – after an hour, downloads are capped at 10Kbps (although the warning says 10kbps – i.e. 8 times slower) and search results are randomly disabled. I’ve also noticed (but cannot confirm) that connection speeds drop significantly if Xtorrent is not the active application.

The search is not such a big deal (all it seems to do is append “torrent” to the supplied query and submit that search to Google and Yahoo! using an embedded browser window) but the “all sales are final” notice at the bottom of the web page and the aggressive registration message when the application is running, combined with no mention of the free version’s limitations on the website do not exactly fill me with confidence about the product (the website encourages download of the $20 pro edition but does not mention that the standard version is limited – in reality there is a free, limited, trial and the full, registered, product is $20 with no “pro” features, it’s just an unlimited version). Xtorrent may well have been “hand-crafted with care” but it’s only just out of beta and there seem to be so many issues to consider with BitTorrent clients that I want to be 100% certain this is the right client for me before parting with cash.

As it happens, I probably will buy Xtorrent, as it seems incredibly simple to use, had no problem using the port I’d previously opened (and verified using Shields UP!) for Azureus, seems to work well, includes RSS integration, allows browsing of file content prior to download and lets me set bandwidth limits according to the time of day and how busy my computer is. All in all, the user experience is excellent – I just wish that the website was a little more upfront about the limitations of the free download.

Configuring wireless Ethernet with Fedora Core 5

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I wrote a post about my efforts in configuring wireless Ethernet with SuSE Linux 10.0. I couldn’t maintain a connection (at the time I was using an IBM ThinkPad T40, a D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card and a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ access point) but this week I decided to give it all another try, this time on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D, which was already running Fedora Core 5 and has a built-in Intel Centrino chipset (hence it should be more widely supported by Linux than the D-Link card was – avoiding the need to use NDISwrapper).

The good news is that the Lifebook’s wireless chipset does have Linux support in the form of native drivers. The bad news is that it’s still not as easy as it should be to get this working! Having said that, I went down so many blind alleys that I’m not really sure what I did in the end to get the drivers installed. Hopefully the jumble of notes below will provide one or two pointers for someone else.

Identifying the hardware

First of all, I needed to know what type of wireless hardware I had and a spot of googling quickly turned up Jean Tourrilhes Linux Wireless LAN Howto, which contains links to many resources but actually gives me the answer to my question – there are three main Intel PRO/Wireless chipsets – the 2100 is an IEEE 802.11b card, the 2200 adds IEEE 802.11g support and the 2915 supports IEEE 802.11a. The later cards also add support for increased security (WPA, etc.). I already knew that the card in my notebook supported 802.11g (pointing to an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200) but confirmed this with the lspci command, returning (in part):

01:0d.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)

Downloading and installing drivers

After arming me with information about my computer hardware, Jean’s howto set me off in the direction of two open source projects – the IEEE 802.11 subsystem for Linux and the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG driver for Linux project. One slight problem for me is that the drivers contained on these two sites need to be compiled… and I’m a sort of namby-pamby-need-to-have-it-already-built-for-me Linux user (sorry, but I am). Time to hit my search engine of choice again, this time turning up tutorials for installing Fedora Core 5 on a Dell Latitude D610 (it seems I’m not alone in not being “a ‘compile from source’ guy”) and installing Fedora Core N on a Dell Latitude D600 (including Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG support) as well as a comment on a Fedora Core 5 Tips and Tricks page that suggested the following process for installing the earlier Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (for which the process should be similar except for the actual driver files):

Some have asked for step by steps to install the drivers for the Intel Centrino Pro Wireless 2100 chip set. Here is an easy way to get up and running and have a nice GUI in GNOME. This assumes you already have NetworkManager installed from the base Fedora Core 5 repository.

yum install NetworkManager NetworkManager-gnome

Update your system to the latest kernel. Be careful as this can break other kernel modules you have installed, so be sure you have the source/RPMS handy for any packages that may need to be recompiled/reinstalled.

yum update kernel

Add the ATrpms (atrpms.net) repositiory to yum.

wget http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms

Next, install the drivers using yum. There are several dependacies [sic] that it will install as well.

yum install ipw2100

Next, enable NetworkManager to start on boot up.

chkconfig NetworkManager on
chkconfig NetworkManagerDispatcher on

Reboot your machine so the new kernel module is loaded.

init 6

Once you boot up and login to GNOME, you should see a new icon by the clock. This is very similar to the wireless manager one can find in a very popular commercial OS. (Names omitted to protect the innocent.)

This was all very well, until I got to the point of installing Intel/PRO 2200 drivers (using yum install ipw2200 in place of the yum install ipw2100 command in the quote above), which just flatly refused to find anything appropriate.

To further complicate things, in the process, I’d updated to the latest i686 kernel (2.6.20-1.2300.fc5 in place of 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5) and I could only find RPMs at ATrpms for:

  • IEEE802.11 networking stack and kernel modules.
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 firmware.
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 driver.

but crucially, not the kernel modules for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 (I’ve since found them listed in a section for RPMs that are still being tested) and rpm -Uvh ipw2200-1.2.0-45.1.fc5.at.i386.rpm returned:

error: Failed dependencies:
ipw2200-kmdl-1.2.0-45.1.fc5.at is needed by ipw2200-1.2.0-45.1.fc5.at.i386

Time to roll up my sleeves and compile some drivers… a task which I approached with some trepidation but with a lot of help from a LinuxQuestions.org thread about getting ipw2200 working with Fedora Core 4.

After downloading and extracting IEEE802.11 (ieee80211) v1.2.16 and Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 (ipw2200) v1.2.0 (with firmware v3.0), I ran ./remove-old twice – once from the the ieee80211-1.2.16 directory and again from ipw2200-1.2.0 (I had to run chmod +x remove-old first for ieee80211). Then, I ran make and make install for ieee80211 and again for ipw2200, although this produced a lot of errors and I’m not sure that it was successful. Only once I’d done that did I find that Fedora Core 5 includes ipw2200 v1.0.8 and all that is required is to install was the firmware (yum install ipw2200-firmware), which I had done earlier with rpm -Uvh ipw2200-firmware-3.0-9.at.noarch.rpm.

Not knowing what sort of state my system was in, I rebooted and hoped for the best. Fortunately, this mixture of installation methods had resulted in a working wireless network stack, as shown by the output from dmesg (only the relevant output is shown here):

ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm ‘NULL’
ieee80211: 802.11 data/management/control stack, 1.2.16
ieee80211: Copyright (C) 2004-2005 Intel Corporation <jketreno@linux.intel.com>
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

iwconfig eth1 showed that I had even connected to a network (completely by accident), although it was not mine (G604T_WIRELESS and BELKIN54G are popular free wifi providers in the town where I live)!

Warning: Driver for device eth1 has been compiled with version 21
of Wireless Extension, while this program supports up to version 19.
Some things may be broken…

eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:”G604T_WIRELESS”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:3D:BA:1F:B2
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0
Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=55/100 Signal level=-68 dBm Noise level=-88 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:14 Missed beacon:15

Connecting to my (secured network)

Once again, I found a guide on the ‘net (Durham University’s wireless Linux quick guide) which helped me enormously with configuring a connection to my (WPA) secured network. For some bizarre reason, NetworkManager (which should provide a GUI interface to connect to whatever networks are detected) refused to connect; however I managed to maintain a stable connection by configuring the wpa_supplicant configuration file (/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf) to read:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=users

network={
ssid="Home"
scan_ssid=1
pairwise=TKIP
psk="mysecretkey"
group=TKIP
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
}

Then, running wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to connect to the network (after I’d resolved some issues in the configuration file – diagnosed using the -dd option for wpa_supplicant – discovering that the SSID is case sensitive).

After issuing the dhclient eth1 command to obtain an IP address (and verifying that one had indeed been obtained using ifconfig eth1), iwconfig eth1 returned:

Warning: Driver for device eth1 has been compiled with version 21
of Wireless Extension, while this program supports up to version 19.
Some things may be broken…

eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:”Home”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:13:46:xx:xx:xx
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0
Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx–xxxx Security mode:open
Power Management:off
Link Quality=100/100 Signal level=-19 dBm Noise level=-88 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:1

Start the wireless interface at boot time

In order to make eth1 active at boot time, it was necessary to run system-config-network and add the device to the common profile. At first I followed Bill Moss’ Fedora Core 2 network profiles article but then decided that it would be better to maintain a single profile, with both wired (eth0) and wireless (eth1) interfaces activated when the computer starts.

In order to start wpa_supplicant at boot time it was necessary to add the following commands to /etc/rc.local:

/sbin/ifdown eth1
/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -Bw
sleep 5
/sbin/dhclient eth1

The main drawback with this approach is that the wireless radio is permanently active. Ideally, NetworkManager could be used with wpa_supplicant; however, for now the workaround is to use the Lifebook’s radio on/off switch.

Miscellaneous notes

One guide that I found suggested that the following commands were necessary in order to enable the wireless connection:

depmod -a
modprobe ieee80211
modprobe ipw2200

In practice, I haven’t found this to be necessary but this could be because Fedora Core 5 already included the appropriate configuration items by default.

iwlist, wpa_cli and wpa_gui are useful commands for examining connection properties. Other useful commands when troubleshooting are be lsmod | grep ieee80211 and lsmod | grep ipw2200.

Before the operating system would route packets across the wireless connection, I found it necessary to take down the wired connection (ifdown eth0).

Bizarre use for old networking hardware

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I dropped in on my mate Stuart today and noticed an old Cisco Catalyst 1900 switch in his study. The he showed me what he was really using it for – a signal booster for his DVB-T digital TV signal. It seemed to work a treat with the magnetic aerial stuck on the side!