Wireless - Broadcom 43xx and WPA Supplicant

The wireless on my HP laptop wouldn’t come up until I found out the Broadcom chipset needed an extra step:

1. lspci | grep Broadcom\ Corporation
If this displays something like this:
“06:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)” then you need to continue if not then you need to GOOGLE.

Also these instructions are for 32bit not 64bit. The ubuntuguide.org can show you how to setup wireless on a 64bit machine.

2. Download the ndiswrapper (ubuntuguide has a link, I’ll have to repost to my site later, I think I was a bit overzealous in cleaning up)

3. cd “to wherever you downloaded the file”
tar -xf bcm4318*.tar.gz
sudo ./ndiswrapper_setup_Feisty

I had a hard time finding out how to do WPA with my Netgear wireless router. I managed to piece together the setup for it only to finally see the instructions in ubuntuguide.org. Here is my setup:

1. sudo vi /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

2. Enter the following informaiton:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid=”YOUR SSID”
psk=”YOUR PASSWORD”
***Use wpa_passphrase to encrypt your password if you are afraid of someone reading your conf file.***
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
}
Save your file.

3. sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

4. Enter the following information:
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dwext -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant
Save your file.

Misc Tips — Most Thru Command Line

* First advice is to upgrade/install Feisty Fawn. Especially if your like me and like to watch DVD’s while your working on something. Feisty Fawn fixed my issues with playing certain DVD’s.

* Edit server name — I had an issue with using the “sudo /bin/hostname newname” command to change the server name. So I manually changed the server name by doing the following:
1. sudo root passwd — change the root password to something else.
2. su root (enter new root password)
3. vi /etc/hostname
4. vi /etc/hosts

* Change timezone — sudo tzconfig

* Video Drivers — I used a program called Envy. This made it really easy to install the video drivers as I had some issues with directions found elsewhere. This also fixed my issues I had with configuring Beryl

* You can configure a network interface from the command line using the networking utilities.
Edit ip address “sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces”

* Configuring DHCP address for your network card
sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
The primary network interface - use DHCP to find our address
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

* Configuring Static IP address for your network card
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address x.x.x.x
gateway x.x.x.x
netmask x.x.x.x
network x.x.x.x
broadcast x.x.x.x

* Setting up Second IP address or Virtual IP address in Ubuntu auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
address x.x.x.x
netmask x.x.x.x
network x.x.x.x
broadcast x.x.x.x
gateway x.x.x.x

* Restart networking “sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart”

Installing/Configuring NFS Server

Most of the sites that had instructions seemed to leave off one or two things that needed to be done. I can only assume that the author was under the assumption that you knew something about configuring NFS on Ubuntu. Well I finally found these that were written by someone else, but I never did write down where I got them from.

1. at the terminal type “sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap”

2. When configuring portmap do =not= bind loopback. If you do you can either edit /etc/default/portmap by hand or run:

3. sudo dpkg-reconfigure portmap

4. sudo /etc/init.d/portmap restart

5. Editing /etc/exports the /etc/exports file is used for creating a share on the NFS server

6. invoke your favorite text editor or “sudo vi /etc/exports”

7. Here are some quick examples of what you could add to your /etc/exports

8. For Full Read Write Permissions allowing any computer from 192.168.1.1 through 192.168.1.255
* /files 192.168.1.1/24(rw,no_root_squash,async)

Or for Read Only from a single machine
* /files 192.168.1.2 (ro,async)

save this file and then in a terminal type

9. sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

10. Also aftter making changes to /etc/exports in a terminal you must type “sudo exportfs -a”

11. Install NFS client support “sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common”

12. Mounting manually
Example to mount server.mydomain.com:/files to /files. In this example server.mydomain.com
is the name of the server containing the nfs share, and files is the name of the share on the nfs server

13. The mount point /files must first exist on the client machine.
cd /
sudo mkdir files

14. To mount the share from a terminal type “sudo mount server.mydomain.com:/files /files”
Note you may need to restart above services:
“sudo /etc/init.d/portmap restart”
“sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-common restart”

15. Mounting at boot using /etc/fstab
Invoke the text editor using your favorite editor, or “sudo vi /etc/fstab”
In this example my /etc/fstab was like this:
* server.mydomain.com:/files /files nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

16. It is a good idea to test this before a reboot in case a mistake was made.
type “mount /files” in a terminal, and the mount point /files will be mounted from the server

Mounting CIFS

I had an issue with mounting CIFS on a NetAPP SAN not only with Ubuntu but with FreeBSD as well. I finally found these instructions on the net (sadly didn’t record where)

1. Create .smbcredentials file
sudo vi /root/.smbcredentials
username=winusername
password=winpassword

2. Change permissions on the .smbcredentials file
sudo chmod 700 /root/.smbcredentials

3. Edit /etc/fstab
sudo vi /etc/fstab
//netbiosname/sharename /media/sharename cifs

credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_ mode=0777 0 0

4. test mount
sudo mount -a