The first obstacle to overcome is getting 2.5.x on the machine. I found an an unofficial 2.5.21 port but it was giving me some errors on my OpenBSD 4.1 laptop. I look around some more but didn’t find a more recent port. I did find directions for compiling 2.5.16 on OpenBSD 3.8/3.9 so I pulled some configure options and hacked together a rough port of my own using version 2.5.23 since it’s current. My build errors went away but I had some errors on install while it was building the package. It was basically some man pages that existed but were in a different directory than it was looking for and a defaults file. I copied the man pages to the right working directory and created an empty defaults file. It installed fine and created a package. I used this package on a clean install since this laptop has been upgraded a couple times to be sure it was working cleanly. I upgraded both machines to OpenBSD 4.2 today and FVWM is still working fine. I’m going to do a fresh install of 4.2 on the test machine and give the port another look to see if I can get it to compile and install cleanly.

Download and install the theme and it looks like it’s supposed to but the scripts for wifi, battery and volume aren’t working since it’s trying to pull values from FreeBSD’s sysctls. This was to be expected since the original scripts were on linux and pulling stuff from /proc. A little fiddling with wicontrol, apm and mixerctl using awk, cut, etc. and I had working scripts again. I just added the FreeBSD portions of the scripts back in and used uname and some if statements to determine which to run. I guess I could add the linux version back in for completeness.

I did notice I was missing a couple things on the fresh install since it was pretty minimal. I needed to add ImageMagick, imlib and Esetroot (from eterm port) to get everything working. If you already have a fairly complete desktop then you likely already have it all but just double check before you decide it’s not working. You’ll also need to edit ~/.fvwm/config to set the path to your icons and set your preferred apps. I’m using aterm for the terminal and aumix for the volume but you can change it easily enough in the config file.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Downloads:

fvwm2-devel-port.tar.gz
fvwm2-devel-2.5.23.tgz
fvwm2 configs ver 1.1

The port file is hackish but I’ll add checksums if/when I clean it up. The pkg was compiled on a 4.1 box but it’s working on a couple of upgraded 4.2 boxes now. You are welcome to it but use at your own risk. :^)

The webserver that I hosted my websites on died and the backups were dated. That poor old Sun box decided it couldn’t take anymore and imploded. The box belongs to a friend of mine and he let me and another friend host our sites on it. It was in a colo facility in a rack that his worked owns. He changed jobs and they allowed him to keep his stuff there but the future looked uncertain for a while. I debated on moving off the box but as time went on, it seemed that everything would be fine where it was. That’s why there hasn’t been a lot of updates on any of my sites. I should have made a new backup anyway because I started updating everything right before it died.

All my website stuff has been moved to another box in the same rack but it’s much more powerful. The bad news is that it’s a production box so I can’t do whatever I want. It’s not that bad since basically everything I need is already installed and I was keeping an eye on a website running on it anyway. I already have a full backup saved offsite and will be setting up regular syncs to keep it going.

Unfortunately Google forgot me in the month of downtime. I used to have the top result for shrauger and strog. Now I can’t even find the main pages in the first several pages of results. Oh well, I don’t know of anyone who was acutally trying to find me that way. We are back on track and will be updating with some kind of frequency now.

I usually run without login managers (xdm/gdm/kdm/etc.), splash screens, etc. on my main desktop but I like to have my BSD laptops looking a bit nicer when I pull them out at work or wherever. So let’s talk about adding a splash screen to FreeBSD. The format of the picture needs to be a bmp or pcx file that’s 1024×768 or smaller and 256 color. Put the following in your /boot/loader.conf, copy splash.bmp to /boot and reboot.

splash_bmp_load="YES"
splash_pcx_load="YES"
vesa_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="/boot/splash.bmp"

You should see your splash screen after the bootloader hits the bitmap_load command. If you don't then more than likely it's larger than 1024x768 or more than 256 colors. If it's pcx format then you still need to have the splash_bmp_load for it to work. You can press a key to get the boot process so it doesn't have to get in the way. There's a splash screen page back from the 3.x days and I still like a couple of the splashes from there. Probably about time for someone(s) to come up with some new ones base on the new logo.

I see that SLiM has been ported to FreeBSD. It’s a simple lightweight login manager derived from Login.app. I might convert this theme to SLiM sometime if I get the notion.

Download it here

I was looking around and ran across PEM’s Fvwm page and decided I wanted to give this theme a go. I really liked that the topbar, dock, etc. weren’t some addons but they are just built-in Fvwm modules. There’s a lot of shortcuts and tweaks for things like 3ddesktop, pseudo transparency, weather popup, icon thumbnails, etc. The icons for battery, wireless and sound all change to match the varying levels of each. The config is very modular and makes it easier to tweak. Most of the apps are setup as variables so you just fill in the variables in the ~/.fvwm/config with your terminal/browser/etc. of choice and it uses that everywhere else. It also can use gnome icon themes easily (I’m still using the gnant theme).

The one downside to this theme is that everything is hardcoded to the screen width (height doesn’t matter since it’s relative to top and bottom). I worked around this by making versions for 1024, 1280, 1400 and 1600 and making a script that copies them into place. I call the script (~/.fvwm/scripts/resolution.sh) from my ~/.xinitrc. Since X is running when .xinitrc is invoked, you can grep the resolution from xdpyinfo and copy the correct config before the window manager starts.

There’s a bunch of scripts in here that rely on Linux’s /proc, /dev/shm, etc. so I knew I’d have to rewrite some of the scripts for FreeBSD. The sysctls made this part of it a lot easier than I thought it was going to be since their output was what I was looking for. There’s sysctls for battery runtime, battery percentage and a whole lot more. There were some interesting ways to grab the info from proc on Linux so I was expecting worse. There’s a long thread on fvwm’s forums and it might be linux-centric but there’s a lot of good info because there’s a lot about the configs and application setup. I also posted a thread on Screaming Electron Forums discussing my fvwm desktop too.

This relies on the 2.5.x fvwm (fvwm2-devel port) since it added new features and the new layout. I also used xosd for battery and wireless output. Everything else (mixer, icon theme, browser, terminal, etc.) can be set as a variable in the ~/.fvwm/config. It will automatically start 3ddesktop when it loads if you have it installed (nice cool factor to have). I have a link for my configs, the gnant icon theme and the background here if you want to use them. Extract the config to your home, put the icon theme in /usr/X11R6/share/icons and copy the background to ~/pics/.current (or change the path in the config but still name it .current) to autoload.

Before:

After:

Sample Wireless output:

Configs:

fvwm configs

gnant icon theme

background

I haven’t gotten everything ported to FreeBSD yet and there’s more tweaking that could be done to this. I’ll make updated versions of this as I go but I wanted to get this going. The weather script needs fixing, the wireless icons should change with signal strength, etc. I’d be happy to add any tweaks someone wants to send me.

Even if this theme doesn’t float your boat you could check out Fvwm Crystal Theme, fvwm forum configs or the fvwm wiki for more ideas. Fvwm is extremely customizable but you have to dig into it to make your own.

For the few visitors that visit here, I’m sure you noticed some slowness and ocassional connection reset for a while now. There was a network problem at the colo and it made upload/download directly to the box a nightmare.

Hats off to elmore since he went down to the colo and tracked down the issue. Thanks a lot man!! Apparently there’s 4 pieces of fiber between the distribution and the rack andsomeone replaced one with multimode fiber when everything else issingle mode. I’m amazed that it even worked at all. Long story short is that everything is working wonderfully again.

I was looking at the OpenBSD changes since 3.8 was released and I noticed they added a new driver for the touchpads in the new Powerbooks/iBooks. I had 3.8 on here but the external mouse and lack of multiple consoles made me try ubuntu on the Powerbook. Ubuntu was ok but there were several patches and every patch seemed to break something else. I had it working pretty good except the cpu was still running at full speed on battery. I wanted BSD on here so the fight was over. I immediatedly grabbed the latest snapshot and blew away the ubuntu install on here.

A quick netinstall and it’s time to find out if my touchpad works on here. I login, fire up X and the touchpad works great. I started building ports and it was smooth and working well during that. I took the laptop home after work. I started it up again and it was erratic and I had to plug in an external mouse. I tried it again later and it works fine again. Guess I’ll need to play with it some more. I’m just happy it’s making progress.

We had a bunch of Belkin wireless bridges leftover when we had a dept moving around and finally got into their own building. I found out that they had a mini-PCI card in them that could be removed and put into a laptop. I saw that it was a Broadcom chipset (Windows drivers only) until I had a couple Windows laptops at work that we wanted to add wireless to. I had a extra one sitting on my desk so I decided to put it in the Dell laptop and see how far I could go with FreeBSD 6.0.
Installation was easy enough since it had two antenna connectors on the card and the laptop and the slot is right behind a panel on the bottom of the laptop. I knew the drivers were hard to find until I found out the Dell 1300 wireless cards had the same chipset. We used those drivers on the Windows laptops and they worked great so I decided that’s what I’ll be using for this too.

Ndisgen makes building a kernel module pretty easy. You need the inf and sys drivers files from Windows and your kernel sources. It built the kernel module and then copied it to /boot/kernel with the other kernel modules. I loaded up the module by hand to make sure it would load fine and then added it and ndis to my loader.conf. A quick reboot to test it all and I see it in my dmesg when it only showed an unidentified PCI network device before. Ifconfig shows ndis0 in my interface list and it appears to be ready to be configured.

I read the man page and found a couple good examples for wpa_supplicant. This seems to be fairly straight forward so I loaded the kernel module, created a config file and fired it up. Everything seemed to work so I ran a dhclient on ndis0 and it immediately picks up an address. I was a bit suprised that it went so smoothly but it’s been working great for the last couple days. One of the limitations to using NDIS wrappers is that you can’t use monitor mode with the cards so wireless sniffing is out. I have an Atheros and a Orinoco card that I can use for that and besides, the Powerbook and KisMac do a better job at that anyway.

]]> http://strog.org/2005/project-evil-and-wpa/feed/ 0 http://strog.org/2005/another-network-change-already/ http://strog.org/2005/another-network-change-already/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2005 01:00:00 +0000 Strog http://strog.org/index.php?/archives/5-guid.html

Work is providing a Sonicwall VPN/Firewall/WAP device for remote access. This complicates my network setup but I like a good challenge. I already have 4 subnets, IPSEC & OpenVPN VPNs and a wireless connection. This will add another IPSEC connection, firewall with NAT, wireless and a couple more subnets.

I plugged it into the DMZ switch first thing since that is a restrictive subnet as far as firewall rules are concerned. I wanted to disable NAT right away but I don’t see any good way to do this with this firmware (or the latest after I loaded it). I did find the NAT one-to-one options and assigned a couple ranges to the wired and wireless ranges respectively. It won’t allow wireless to LAN unless you are encypted so I enabled WPA and setup the Powerbook to connect. I plugged the Dell laptop into one of the LAN ports to test the wired side of this setup. I still have the VPN client on the Powerbook to connect directly so I logged into the main VPN concentrator with that and used the Dell to connect to the local. I had a functional tunnel in less than 5 minutes.

It looks like the detect dead tunnel option is kicking in faster than the heartbeats to keep the tunnel active. That basically means the tunnel isn’t staying up unless I keep traffic running across it. I have to initiate it from the client (home) side so that means I can’t get back to home from work unless I tweak this setting. I wrote a little ping script running in screen on the Dell to test and it seems to keep the tunnel up fine. This 802.11g connection isn’t really doing much better on throughput than my old setup which was just a 802.11b PCMCIA card in a PCI slot running on a system cobbled together out of spare parts. Guess I’ll have to look into this some more.

I also need to put another NIC (or two while I’m at it) into the firewall and move this to its own DMZ so I can lock the firewall rules down with more control. An upside of not running the wireless over OpenVPN is that I don’t have to push the default gateway. That makes external access a lot easier to manage since it reduces the bandwidth going through the home connection.

I installed OpenVPN on the firewall/WAP to replace WEP permanently. It’s pushing the subnet and remote gateway as default. This is working great on wireless but the same setup works on the external interface too and I’m not so sure that I want to push the default gateway when I’m logged in from work/out/etc. That can be a lot of data to push to home and then out. This needs some tweaking. I’m using Tunnelblick front end on the Powerbook and it’s working nicely.

The client/server setup only uses tun devices which works great for *nix but Windows only has tap drivers available. I could setup another instance of OpenVPN to create a point to point connection for Windows but I think I’ll just enable an authpf profile for this. I don’t have a laptop running Windows so this isn’t really a big issue right now. The Powerbook has an install of Win2k on it that I use once in a while but it routes through OS X and the old Dell laptop runs FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux. The other option is Windows is wired instead of wireless.