Tag: Fedora

Posted on

Linux and AVM Fritz!Wlan USB Stick N v2

USB-Wireless-DongleI bought a USB Wireless dongle from AVM called Fritz!Wlan USB Stick N v2. The wireless chipset of this dongle is usually Ralink RT5572 (this device has had a few revisions, hence the v2 should be this Ralink chipset) which is supported under Linux by the rt2800usb module.

This dongle is particular, it is first seen as a CD drive. This is meant for Windows users so that the system will automatically install the correct driver, eject the CD and then transform itself into a Wireless dongle. On other platform, it also shows up as a CD drive, if you eject it (automatically or manually) it becomes a Wireless dongle.

Once you plug it, you can view it on Linux directly running: lsusb -d 057c:. However depending on your version of Linux, it might shows as a CD, broken, or potentially in the future as a Wireless device.

On Debian Wheezy, it was seen as a CD drive. A simple manual eject command and it is working. Slightly annoying, but fine.

On Debian Jessie (which uses systemd) and on Fedora 22 (also using systemd), the device is not mounting as a CD not as a Wireless dongle. So you can’t use it.

I don’t know why, but there is a package (already installed on both distribution by default) named usb-modeswitch which tries to be clever and detects USB devices like the one from AVM and do automatically for you the necessary kirks to make it work as intended. It seems that an Wheezy, it was not triggered. But on Jessie and Fedora 22, it was triggered but wrongly configured.

I have the solution which work flawlessly on both distributions and will allow you to just plug your USB dongle and see it as a wireless device (as expected! Thanks AVM x-( )

You either need to create or modify the file /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/057c:62ff so that it contains exactly the following text:

# AVM Fritz!Wlan USB Stick N v2
TargetVendor=0x057c
TargetProductList="8501,8503"
StandardEject=1
NoDriverLoading=1
MessageContent="5553424312345678000000000000061b000000ff0000000000000000000000"

On Debian Jessie, this file did not exist. Adding solve the problem!

On Fedora 22, this file existed but the last line was missing. What this line is meaning is beyond my understanding. But it is taken from the creator of the usb-modeswitch tool. He has a reference file with many USB devices and solutions. The AVM USB wireless dongle is in there, and that’s where the line come from.

Side note: this device is pretty cool if you need to do advanced wireless stuff. For example, it is possible to build a WiFi rogue AP detector with this device and some tools.

Picture credits: Picture was created by me using elements from the KDE project. The original materials were licensed under GNU LGPLv3, and the picture is also provided under this license terms and conditions.
Posted on

Linux 4.1 = +50% power efficiency (when idle)

Increased battery efficiency
Increased battery efficiency

On my laptop, I’m running Fedora 22 which was shipped initially with a Linux 4.0 kernel. It was difficult to get 4h of battery life (3h30 was usually enough to deplete the battery down to 5%). Recently, the kernel was changed to 4.1 and because after 5h working on my laptop I got notified that I still had 10% power I got curious,

Therefore with a fully charged battery, I booted with Fedora 22 Linux kernel 4.0.4-301. I used powertop to measure the battery power usage in Watt in graphical (ex-init 5 level) and multi-user target (ex-init 3 level). I then rebooted using Linux kernel 4.1.3-201 and did the same measurement. I waited each time that the system settled down and that successive measurements where constant. Nothing was running, WiFi was ON and connected (Link Quality=64/70), screen brightness at 30%, Graphical target is using Gnome 3.

SystemD Target (~init level) Linux 4.0 (in W) Linux 4.1 (in W) Progress
Multi-User (init 3) 12,8 8,66 -32%
Graphical (init 5) 13,1 8,51 -35%

Wow! That’s great. And the estimated battery power is now up from 4h to 6h30 with WiFi ON. But with light browsing usage and some Arduino development, I got a bit more than 5h15 without requiring a wall power connection!! That close to 50% more battery life than with earlier kernels.

Where does this come from? I don’t know. There seems to have been a few pull requests about power management for kernel 4,1 but none stroke me as relevant for such a huge improvement, Matthew Garrett has proposed a patch to improve dramatically the power efficiency of Intel’s Haswell and Broadwell CPUs (and I happen to have an Haswell one), so that could have been that patch, but I did not find it in the kernel 4.1 changelog, so I doubt it was yet implemented. So I really don’t know what made change in the kernel bring such an improvement. (note: I’m running Fedora 22 and without software update, just by selecting kernel 4.0 or 4.1 at boot, I can see the difference in power consumption. So this is really a kernel-side improvement).

Did you also witness improvement when switching to Linux kernel 4.1? Let me know using any social media means!

Note to self: telinit is now deprecated in favour of systemd targets. Runlevel 3 can be reached by invoking sudo systemctl isolate multi-user.target and the switch to the “runlevel 5” can be triggered using sudo systemctl isolate graphical.target.

Picture credits: Picture was created by me using elements from the KDE project. The original materials were licensed under GNU LGPLv3, and the picture is also provided under this license terms and conditions.
Posted on

Home Server – What do I want?

What service do I want to run on my Home Server?

I do have a NAS already which has the following services: File Sharing (Samba, AFS and NFS), Media Streaming Server (DLNA), VPN Server, Cloud Sync Repository. So I do not intend to have redundant services on my Home Server. What is left?

My Home Server could support:

  • Backup: Having a proper backup of all important files from the NAS and our laptop. Implementations: rdiff-backup, Box Backup, fwbackups*, duplicity*, rsnapshot or storeBackup.
  • (N)-IDS: As I have services open to the internet, I want to take some precautions and check that no exploits is taken advantage of. I am not sure this is enough, but it is the least I can do. Implementations: AIDE or Suricata.
  • DNS cache/server: I am thinking of hosting my own DNS server to perform some caching and hopefully enhance a bit the browsing experience in terms of performance. Though I would need to benchmark this to make sure I have any gain as I suspect my old router to do some caching. Implementation: dnsmasq.
  • DHCP server: My home router is a Netgear WG614 and its features for what concern DHCP are fairly limited, having my home server addressing this issue is a nice idea (until we get a better router). I could be even tightly coupled with the DNS server (see earlier bullet point) so that one could use hostname within the local network. Implementation: dnsmasq.
  • Syslog server
  • Maybe – ownCloud: maybe one day I would prefer to use an open source solution for Cloud Sync rather than the closed source one from my NAS vendor.

*: FreeBSD support is uncertain.

As one can see, I could use Linux or BSD based OS or a mixture. However, ZFS is so compelling that I am seriously considering to go for FreeBSD+jails and basta cosi! February will be the month where I try to set-up a FreeBSD server.

Posted on

My Future Home Server – Part 2

I am experimenting with different OS to find the right settings for my Home Server. I was interested by Fedora especially because there are several “Red Hat” technology which I would like to use on my server, namely: oVirt and virt-manager. Furthermore it sports a recent Linux Kernel (3.7 as of this writing) which could be beneficial if I choose Btrfs for the underlying file system.

However, testing the upgrade path from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18, I am not so thrilled by the robustness of this OS. I have managed after painfully hitting 3 different blocking bugs to recover from the upgrade and have a nice Fedora 18 up and running. But this gave me little trust in the Q&A of the community. It seems that it is not the first time such problems happen (see Fedora 11).

I am still willing to give a go to Fedora. But out of precaution, I am going to experiment first with Ubuntu (for which I had since 2006 only once an upgrade problem). I want to see the state of oVirt and virt-manager on this OS before I am making any choice.

Or maybe I forget entirely about Linux based OS, and I go for FreeBSD with several jails instead of using virtualisation. Though I would need to check the state of technologies like ownCloud, (n)IDS, etc. on this OS.

Posted on

My Future Home Server – Part 1

I have finally my Home Server built, it has its first storage hard drive and I upgraded the memory to something decent. Time to install the operating system.

I am not yet fully decided which operating system to implement on my Home Server, I would love ZFS as a file system for managing my storage, but I would still want to use Linux and not make the full switch to BSD. I decided to go for Fedora as the main OS, and install BSD in a virtual machine and see how this setup performs.

I had tried for a few month Fedora 17 in a virtual machine, I liked it, although I prefer the Debian package manager over yum, but this is really based on my own feelings and not on technical grounds.

So let’s go and install Fedora 18 (just released) on my server.

Continue reading “My Future Home Server – Part 1”

Posted on

Linux distributions trends

Google trends - Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat based, Debian, SUSE based) and Windows Vista

I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.

You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.

At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.

So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.

To conclude, you could check this other trend comparison between various version of Ubuntu, interesting…

Continue reading “Linux distributions trends”