Jimmy’s weblog

Today I realized that the grml bugtracking was broken. Every mail was rejected with “Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table;”. The reason was that I updated the server to sarge. debbugs was already taken from sarge before so I thought everything will work. But the postfix default configuration for users, that are not in /etc/passwd, has changed. Those mails are rejected now. So I had to append this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

local_recipient_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/non-unix-users

This file looks like this:

@bugs.grml.org          ACCEPT

The word ACCEPT is NOT a keyword. According to the documentation any word can be used.
I’m sorry if any bugreport was rejected but I think only spammers sent mail to this address since it was broken

During the last weeks I tested two IBM servers, a x206 and a x346. Both have the Adaptec HostRAID controller onboard (except you buy another IBM ServeRAID controller). Because this is just a fakeraid I used mdadm to setup the raid. But I was curious if it would work under linux. Adaptec and IBM provide drivers for SuSE and RedHat but I was interested to get it running under Debian. There is no source for the driver (a320.ko for SCSI and aaarich.ko for S-ATA) so it was impossible to compile it for my kernel. Have to find out if I can get the source code
Besides that the hardware worked perfectly with Debian Linux.

I had two versions of this card: v2 and v3. v2 has a Texas Instruments ACX111 chip, v3 a broadcom. For v2 you can use the acx kernel module (included in grml), which you can get from the ACX100/ACX111 driver prject. Works stable, but no WPA since WPA supplicant doesn’t support that chip.
For v3 you need the drivers from the bcm43xx project. Follow the instructions there. Drivers will be included in grml soon. In the meantime you have to fetch them from the grml repository via apt:

apt-get install bcm43xx-modules-2.6.15-grml

I’m not sure if WPA supplicant supports this driver, too (ran out of time, again). BTW: Tested this driver with the WPC54GS (speedbooster), too. Worked perfectly.

In the last posting I described how to use a wrt54gs in client mode with WEP. This posting describes how to use it with WPA, based on a HowTo in the openwrt wiki.

To enable WPA we have to set a few nvram values:

nvram set wl0_akm=psk
nvram set wl0_crypto=aes
nvram set wl0_wpa_psk=test1234
nvram commit

Install some packages:

ipkg update
ipkg install wl

Reboot the router and check if everything works.

Notes

• This setup only works with WPA1
• You don’t need nas for WPA1

In fact I wanted to test WPA2 but then I found out that WPA is rather simple. WPA2 didn’t work for me because nas didn’t work. Have to spend more time to find out what was going wrong

I installed a wrt54gs for some relatives. There was also a computer in the cellar which should be able to connect to the router. But all tested cards didn’t get a signal so I decided to install a second wrt54gs in client mode. It worked really good, better than expected. I used the ClientModeHowto as reference.
The router to the internet (master router) had ip address 192.168.10.1, so I setup the client router with ip address 192.168.10.2. I also set the mode to “wet” and disabled the dhcp server on the client as described in the Howto.

nvram set wl0_mode=wet
nvram set lan_ipaddr=192.168.10.2
nvram commit
rm /etc/init.d/S50dnsmasq
reboot

For the first test I didn’t touch the wlan settings because the factory defaults were ok (Both had the same SSID and security disabled).

Turning on security options
First, I enabled the MAC filter on the master router and disabled the SSID broadcast (It’s the MAC address of eth1 on the client router). Next, I changed the SSIDs on both routers and enabled WEP encyption:

nvram set wl0_ssid=jimmy
nvram set wl0_wep=enabled
nvram set wl0_key1=9ECAABBDCD6C20103CAE62B38A
nvram commit
/sbin/wifi

There’s also a Howto for configuring WPA2, which makes more sense than WEP. Have to try it ASAP