Abit AirPace, ath5k and eduroam

I tried to connect my university workstation to the wireless eduroam network on the campus. The workstation was delivered with an Abit AirPace wlan card (probably an Atheros 5006 chipset). The first thing necessary was the ath5k kernel module (my first shot using ndiswrapper didn't work). Both Debian lenny and Ubuntu intrepid-updates provide it.

Now there are generally 3 ways to connect to the AP. All making use of wpasupplicant. Further the certificate (may differ for the universities) is necessary.

/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

This is described at the sites of my university. It's written in German, but it should still be easy to understand. Let's just mention the snippet for /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=2
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

network={
        ssid="eduroam"
        key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
        proto=RSN
        pairwise=CCMP
        group=TKIP
        eap=TTLS
        anonymous_identity="anonymous@tu-dresden.de"
        identity="****@tu-dresden.de"
        password="****"
        ca_cert="/etc/wpa_supplicant/TUD-CACert.pem"
        phase2="auth=PAP"

}

Instead of the script suggested at the site above, you can also use this snippet in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

/etc/network/interfaces

It is also possible to put the values directly into /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid eduroam
        wpa-proto RSN
        wpa-group CCMP TKIP
        wpa-pairwise CCMP TKIP
        wpa-key-mgmt WPA-EAP
        wpa-eap TTLS
        wpa-ca-cert /etc/wpa_supplicant/TUD-CACert.pem
        wpa-phase2 "auth=PAP"
        wpa-anonymous-identity anonymous@tu-dresden.de
        wpa-identity ****@tu-dresden.de
        wpa-password ****

network-manager

Here is a screenshot of the authentication dialog:

So now everybody at the University of Dresden wanting to use eduroam should hopefully be able to configure this connection on his Debian or Ubuntu system.

(WW) AllowEmtpyInput is on, devices using drivers <kbd> or <mouse> will be disabled

Maybe you will observe a changed mouse and keyboard behaviour after updating X.org recently in Debian Sid. Then you will probably discover the warning mentioned in the title in your X.org server log /var/log/Xorg.0.log. The very short and dirty solution to get things working for the moment is to put this into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"
EndSection

See the first entry in /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg/NEWS.Debian.gz and follow the mentioned links for more information. However, the above solution should only be a temporary workaround: Try to migrate things (I will post changes for my system asap).

Network doesn't come up after update to udev 0.140

The recent update to udev 0.140-1 lead to a system without network access to me. The error messages were:

Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done.
Setting up networking....
Configuring network interfaces...
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
Could not get interface ‘ath0′ flags
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]: No such device
Could not configure driver to use managed mode
ioctl[SIOCGIWRANGE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFINDEX]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWAP]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
wpa_supplicant: /sbin/wpa_supplicant daemon failed to start
/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wpasupplicant exited with return code 1
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
Failed to bring up ath0.
done.

It seems, the update added rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules by increasing the device number and applying the last applicable NAME directive instead of the first one. This lead to the following file here:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTRS{type}=="1", NAME="ath0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", NAME="eth0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX", NAME="eth1"

# PCI device 0x10ec:0x8139 (8139too)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth2"

# PCI device 0x168c:0x0013 (ath_pci)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="ath*", NAME="ath1"

So the devices created were eth2 and ath1 but /etc/network/interfaces contained entries for eth0 and ath0. So fixed /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and rebooted.

<rant>Is it really necessary to break network access with an update???</rant>

Update

I forgot this one: #521521.

Debian/Ubuntu packages of bluefish-unstable for amd64

Debian- and Ubuntu-packages of bluefish-unstable - the development series of bluefish - for the amd64 architecture are now available. Thanks to Olivier Sessink for providing a build-daemon.

Update to Lenny

Now that Lenny has been released I've updated some machines and found just one flaw. There is a cvsd installation, which has been extended with an OpenSSH server. After the upgrade the server refused the connection. Enabling debugging output showed:

sshd[...]: fatal: ssh_selinux_getctxbyname: ssh_selinux_getctxbyname: security_getenforce() failed

in the log. Searching the web a bit revealed, that the CHROOT now needs a mounted /proc. Done and everything works :)

Server paths broken

Because of a broken alias, the path /ubuntu/dists/intrepid/ was not available and resulted in a 404 error. This has been fixed now.

Update

/ubuntu/pool/ should also work (again) now. Thanks to Peter M. for the information.

bluefish-unstable packages for Etch removed from repository

The bluefish-unstable packages for Etch have been removed from the repository. The 1.1 development series has been superseeded by the 1.3 series (1.0 is still the current stable series!), which needs Glib/Gtk versions higher than available in Etch. Unfortunately, the necessary versions are also not available from backports.org. So I can't build packages for Etch anymore :(.

If you have some self-packaged or -compiled versions of these libraries, you can of course build the application from its source.