Networking Lab Experiments

Today I went out and got a table to get my rack of Cisco gear off the floor. I first went to Lowe's and bought a 5 foot long folding table but it turned out to be a little too long, so I returned it. I wound up getting a Husky portable workbench at Home Depot. It seems quite sturdy and I'll probably get a good amount of use from it, and not just to hold up old networking gear.

(There's a mirror on the wall behind the Cisco gear, courtesy of our house's original owners. It'll be replaced with drywall when we redo the room.)

The power strip that everything is plugged into came from Lowe's this morning. It's their Utilitech house brand and has two USB ports for charging devices. I should be able to power a Raspberry Pi off it.

I was working on switch configuration, including VLANs, so I wanted to have more than one computer so I could verify connectivity between hosts was working (or not working, depending on how things were setup). So, I dragged out my old MSI Wind netbook, running Windows 7.

Well, something is hosed up with the networking on it so I decided to dual boot it with Lubuntu Linux. Nowadays my work with Windows is infrequent enough that fixing issues is more of a PITA than it should be, so I figured that Linux would be less trouble.

All my config work was performed using the MacBook Pro, accessing the switch through ZOC and a console cable.

PDANet for Android

I think I mentioned PDANet in a prior post.  If not, it's a program that installs on several different kinds of smart phones enabling their use as cellular modems (AKA "tethering").  With my Blackberry I had to pay VZW $15/month for this privilege but with PDANet on my Droid there's no recurring charge.

Today I was notified of an update to PDANet for Android.  It now supports USB tethering on Macs.  Previously, Mac tethering was supported only via Bluetooth, which is slow.  When I tried Bluetooth tethering my download speeds were in the 350 kbps range.  Via USB it's around 2 Mbps, quite an improvement.

I sent the developer an email requesting clarification on licensing.  Depending on which machine I'm using I may need to tether either my MacBook Pro or Hobbit, my MSI Wind Netbook running Windows 7.  I need to know if I need to buy one or two licenses, since a desktop client is required for USB tethering.  I'll post an update when I have an answer.

In the meantime, if you have a smartphone and the need to use it as a cellular modem, PDANet is worth checking out.

Edit 12/22/09:

I received the following reply from June Software regarding my desktop client licensing question:

Hi,

As long as you have PdaNet on only one phone device, you can install it on as many computers as you like.


Thanks,
June Fabrics PDA Software Support
http://www.junefabrics.com

Windows 7 on the MSI Wind U100 Netbook

Earlier this week I decided to install Windows 7 on Hobbit, my MSI Wind netbook PC.  Hobbit shipped with Windows XP Home SP3 installed, to which I added Ubuntu Linux in a dual boot configuration.

I have a couple reasons for installing Windows 7.  First, it's a much more up-to-date OS than XP.  In playing around with it at work I've been impressed.  Second, as an IT professional it behooves me to keep up with new technology.

To install Windows 7 on Hobbit, I first needed to acquire a USB optical drive.  I bought an LG Electronics GP08LU10 8X Slim LightScribe DVD+/-RW External Drive. (11/17/09 - Link updated from NewEgg to Amazon.)  Aside from creating the recovery media, booting DBAN from System Rescue CD, and installing W7, it will allow me to access optical media more conveniently on Hobbit.  (Previously, I've copied files from CDs and DVDs to a thumb drive using another computer, or accessed discs over the network.)

I then burned an XP recovery CD.  MSI ships the Wind with an XP recovery partition but no media.  They do include a utility to create a recovery disc. 

For my W7 install I wanted a clean slate, i.e., no OSes on Hobbit's hard drive.  I selected a Custom install, deleted the existing partitions, and created a 50 GB partition for C:\.  (I later formatted the remained of the drive as D:\ after I was up and running.)

The install went smoothly and all my hardware was detected.  After installing the Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus/antimalware suite, Firefox, and a few other apps, I used Hobbit over the weekend.  (My previous favorite AV program was AVG.  The last couple of versions have become increasingly bloated.  I've had good results with MS's offering.)

I am impressed.  Windows 7 runs very nicely on this hardware (1.6 GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB Kingston RAM, Intel 4965agn WiFi card).  In fact, I'd say it runs better on Hobbit than XP Home or Ubuntu 9.04 did.

So far so good.  I'll be using this setup frequently.  But if the initial impressions hold up I think MS has a winner on its hands.

MSI Wind WiFi Upgrade

As mentioned in a prior post, I ordered an Intel 4965AGN card to replace the OEM RealTek RTL8187SE WiFi adapter in my MSI Wind netbook.  It arrived today and was quick work to install.  The card had a sticker with an HP part number on it so apparently it was built as a spare for HP laptops.

After removing the bottom of the Wind's case, I found the OEM card next to the VGA-out port.  Removing it required disconnecting two antenna leads and one screw.  The new card is a bit longer than the original card, so installation required rerouting the antenna leads but was otherwise the same as if I'd replaced it with another RTL8187.

To get the Intel card recognized in Windows I had to manually install a driver from Intel's website.  (I downloaded it on my Mac and sneakernetted it to the Wind on a USB stick.)  With the driver installed, Windows Wireless Zero Configuration was able to see a pile of WiFi networks and after I reentered my WPA2 key, I got onto my WLAN.

Getting the card running under Ubuntu 8.10 was actually simpler.  From the Intel Wireless WiFi Link driver site:

Note: The iwlwifi driver has been merged into mainline kernel since 2.6.24. If you are using kernels after this release, please use the intree (drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi) driver directly. After 2.6.26 the intree driver iwlagn also supports the new 5100BG, 5100ABG, 5100AGN, 5300AGN and 5350AGN series hardwares.

The RTL8187 lacks similar support, so every time I upgraded the kernel I'd have to upgrade the wifi card driver.  That's no longer a problem.

Incidentally, the Technician's Pocket Screwdriver from Countycomm is perfect for dealing with the screws on the Wind.

MSI Wind Dual Boot XP Home / Ubuntu Linux 8.10

My MSI Wind netbook ("Hobbit") has a hard disk with a lot of free space, and is already partitioned into two logical drives.  I bought it largely so I could run Windows programs without having to deal with the annoyances of trying to access USB ports while in a virtual machine.  As anyone who's read this blog knows, I'm more of an OS X or Linux guy than a Windows guy.  So I decided to turn it into a dual boot XP Home/Ubuntu 8.10 system.  This gives me the ability to run Windows apps when needed but do most of my work in Linux.

Because the Wind lacks an optical drive I needed an alternative way to load Ubuntu.  So, I created a bootable USB stick running Ubuntu 8.10 Live, and ran the installer from it.  The bootable USB drive works just like a live CD, and like a live disc, can be very handy if you need to recover data from a system which won't boot.

To create the bootable USB drive, I first took my old 1 GB Microcenter flash drive, stuck it in a Windows box at work, and used Unetbootin (unetbootin.sourceforge.net), and told it to download and install Ubuntu 8.10 on the stick.  To get this done in a reasonable amount of time I connected the Windows PC to an SMCWGBR14-N router*, which has its WAN port connected to a Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem, provisioned at 160 GB down x 120 up.  (It's good to work for the ISP.)

Unfortunately, the Microcenter USB stick wouldn't boot, so I tried again with a Kingston Data Traveler 8 GB stick that I keep at the office.  I normally use it for sneaker-netting files between machines, and keep it loaded with various apps and utilities.  Before blowing it away to make an Ubuntu stick I copied them off to my MacBook Pro.  The Kingston drive booted my test PC just fine.  Compared with a live CD, the USB stick is definitely faster.  There's still plenty of room leftover on the Kingston, so I'll be copying the installer files I had on there back into a new folder so I can continue to use it in its old role, in addition to being a bootable recovery system on a stick.

As an aside, the reason for choosing Ubuntu is that there seemed to be a good amount of online documentation covering how to get it up and running on the Wind.

Since I'd been storing my data on the D: partition of the Hobbit's hard disk, I had to first move it over to C:, as I'd be installing Ubuntu onto D:.  With that out of the way, I proceeded to boot the Wind from the USB drive by rebooting the box and holding down F11 to get a boot menu.

Ubuntu installed easily on Hobbit.  The RealTek 8187SE WiFi card is not supported in the Ubuntu 8.10 kernel, so I downloaded a driver for it from forums.msiwind.net (http://forums.msiwind.net/debian/rtl8187se-drivers-for-ubuntu-and-deb-packages-t4954.html) using my Mac, sneakernetted it to Hobbit using a flash drive, and installed it using the GDebi GUI package installer (you can use dpkg from the CLI).  After a reboot was able to get onto my WiFi network using WPA2 encryption.

The RTL8187SE card is OK at best.  Compared with better cards is slower, not as sensitive, and has poorer support in Linux.  In particular, the driver for the Realtek device is kernel-specific, so if I install a new kernel as a security update, WiFi will break.  To improve stability, speed, and range I've ordered an Intel 4965 AGN card and plan to replace the Realtek card.

During the initial setup, going back and forth between a wired and a wireless network did not always go smoothly.  For example, if Hobbit is connected to a WiFi network and I then connect it to Ethernet, the box has problems acquiring an IP address.  I tried dropping to single user mode (# sudo init 1) from a terminal, but Ubuntu is configured to put you back at runlevel 5 when you do this.  I even tried setting the IP address statically, but wound up having to reboot the box before I could get the box back online.  Hopefully this issue will be improved with the Intel WiFi card.

I've been using Hobbit as a Linux box for a few days now and it's been quite a good experience once I tweaked the UI to my specifications.  I used the Synaptic package manager to install the XFCE desktop environment.  With a lighter footprint than Ubuntu's default Gnome desktop, it's ideally suited to netbooks IMO.  I still have access to the various Gnome programs but XCFE is less obtrusive than Gnome.  (In fact, were I starting over I'd be tempted to install Xubuntu, which uses XFCE as its default desktop.)

One thing to be aware of if you create a similar dual boot setup on an MSI Wind, is that when Ubuntu sets up the GRUB bootloader, it creates an entry in the GRUB menu called MS Windows XP/2000 (or thereabouts), in addition to the Windows XP Home entry.  The XP/2000 entry launches MSI's system recovery utility which restores the box to factory defaults.  I therefore went into GRUB's menu.lst file and changed the entry to "MSI WIND SYSTEM RECOVERY" to prevent confusion.

One of my bete noirs with Linux has been configuring printers.  Naturally, non-GDI printers are much easier to get working.  My Brother HL-2070N was automatically detected by Ubuntu's printer setup utility although a driver for that particular model was not included.  I configured the box with a Brother HL-2060 driver and it worked fine when I printed a couple of test pages.

Skype is one of the IM programs I use and it worked fine using the Ubuntu packages they provide.  The webcam worked with no special tweaking although I haven't tried any voice chats yet.  I have read but not yet confirmed that the input level using the Wind's internal microphone is too low, so to use it for voice chats or phone calls I may need to use an external mic or headset.  We'll see.

If you have an MSI Wind don't hesitate to give Ubuntu Linux a try.  With the exception of the WiFi card, everything worked with minimal tweaking.  The major change I made was to switch desktop environments from Gnome to XFCE, but that was purely a matter of personal preference.


* If you need an 802.11n router, this is the one to get.  It's fast and stable.