The Treehouse Blog

I’ve added the first WAN link to the thtech network: 802.11g to Chris‘s house. We used garden hose as conduit for about 250’ of CAT5e from my shed to the WAP. The WAP was mounted on a pole inside of a tupperware container. Ethernet handled the distance fine, but a trivial POE implementation arrived at by splicing the power adapter that came with the WAP into the CAT5 didn’t work. There was too much resistance on the line for the 5v power to overcome. So, we tried stepping up to 12v with a DC-DC converter on the other end. This would result in the WAP partially powering up, but continually rebooting. I figured that this was due to the WAP drawing too much power when it tried to power up the radio. I purchased a higher capacity DC-DC converter at WalMart, and all has been well. We’re currently getting 600 KB/s, but earlier tests had us at about 1.1MB/s. We’ll have to do some antenna tweaking to try to remedy that.

UPSes are great things. During the storm today in the Shippensburg area, my house lost power. When I got home from work an hour later, the UPSes were still running fine, but the Internet connection was down. When power returned, all was well, so it would seem that Kuhn has either no or insufficient backup power for its equipment… great.

In other news, Intel seems to be pretty good about warranty returns. Despite the fact that they don’t accept RMA requests online (only by fax or mail), they have acknowledged my RMA request by mail, and receipt of the broken NIC, almost instantly by e-mail. My replacement NIC is now on its way.

I’ve spent maybe 10 hours on this now (not all this week, mind you, but still). Getting WPA-PSK w/ TKIP certainly isn’t as easy as it should be, but that is probably entirely due to driver issues. Seems you can’t buy a great 802.11g card for Linux.

I had tried various versions of the Linux IPW2100 drivers, 1.1.0 most recently, and always ended up getting errors saying that the IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT ioctl was not available. This is a symptom of a driver that doesn’t have the WPA support, but lsmod clearly showed the TKIP and other encryption-related modules loaded. Google suggested using the load and unload scripts provided with the driver, and to check the initrd for an old driver that might be overriding the freshly-compiled one. modinfo confirmed that the new drivers were getting loaded… still no luck. That’s where I was for a long time, retrying every once in awhile to see if anything was happier.

As it turns out, there is a problem in the way the drivers are compiled as modules which can be fixed with this patch (local cache). Keep in mind that the post I’m referencing here is only two weeks old… so, I’m probably not the only one having this issue. I’m somewhat amazed (and very happy) that Google has indexed it that fast.

Now, technically, that was enough to fix my problems. However, I spent the next 45 minutes or so trying to figure out why my connection would reset several seconds after coming up… which turned out to be another instance of wpa_supplicant in the background screwing things up. Tip: run one wpa_supplicant at a time.

Now that’s what you call a non-trivial pile of Cisco! The 3550s (qty: 45) are all for ResNET. The 2950s (qty: 70) are all for campus. The whole order is meant to facilitate deployment of “Campus Manager” (someone’s proprietary software on their black-box linux machine) throughout campus. Somehow this is all supposed to get done before the start of the semester, despite the fact that Campus Manager hasn’t arrived yet.

Ship isn’t the only thing doing replacements. I purchased a 3361 off of eBay to replace my 3360 that has the squeeze-hard-to-make-display-visible and the characters-are-inverted-or-something issues. Moving my account to the new phone was relatively painless… call in, they tell you to turn old phone off, power on new phone (that’s already AT&T-ified) and dial a special (probably one-time) number. Just about instant.

Lastly, Doug forwarded me an e-mail from Dennis saying that the Kodak DX-7630 6.1 MPixel camera was on insane sale at Office Max. Although $250 for a $400 camera is a great deal, the Office Max experience was a bit of a pain. First, it was in-store only. Carlisle didn’t have any in stock. Their default warehouse (queried thru a Unisys amber-CRT terminal) had none either. Their raincheck system (a web browser based thing in the back of the store) wouldn’t work either. But, the manager used the Unisys again and is getting one shipped to me from Denver. I just hope it can do landscape shots as well as Doug’s can.

LAN party tomorrow… getting ready.

Well, I spent (wasted?) most of the evening working on my Thinkpad R40 review, which, no, isn’t yet done.

That having been said, Ship got new toys to plug into toys, including a huge Brocade SilkWorm 12000 switch. All I have to say is… I hope it supports SNMP.