[PLUG] Getting help remotely - Re: meeting on the 21st

[Carlos Konstanski]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2008, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:12:27 -0800
> From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com>
> Reply-To: keithl at keithl.com,
>     "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] Getting help remotely - Re:  meeting on the 21st
> 
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 04:58:26PM -0700, ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com wrote:
>>
>> I am sorry to report that my wife got worried about driving across Idaho
>> and Oregon in the winter weather.  Our Portland trip is off.  No meeting
>> for me.
>
> Darn.  I would fly the business jet out to pick you up, but
> it is currently in the shop with a bad case of imaginary.  :-)
> Stay warm and safe - we'll see you in the spring.
>
> We are crawling our way towards a swappable hard drive setup at the
> clinic, so people can bring in their drives rather than their whole
> machines.  We have fixed a few problems remotely with ssh login.
>
> But many problems require full network access.  One solution to that
> is a "VPN terminal in a box" that taps your network and connects to a
> service organization at the far end, but for now that is a lot of ad
> hoc effort to set up with something like OpenWRT programmed into a
> repurposed wireless access point or very small computer.  In the
> nearer term, it will be easier to just install OpenVPN on one of
> your computers, and connect to a port at our end.  Not yet.
>
> You are having problems with networking, IIRC (setting up wpa, right?),
> and working the client end of a wireless link via a VPN is difficult.
> Maybe in a few years we will have more experience or tools for that.
>
> For now, perhaps we can work through some of your problems via the
> list.  Keep in mind that you can set up secure communications with
> temporary passwords, get things working with our help, then replace
> the keys and passwords and IP address ranges when we are done.  As
> long as there is no network connection at the time you are making
> the experiments, and you return things to a more secure state before
> you reconnect, you can keep the security risks low.
>
> Keith

Richard, thanks for your kind words.  I'll try to do you proud by
staying alive this holiday season.

I'll start a new thread on the wpa topic, and explain where things
stand at the moment.  In a nutshell: with the madwifi driver, it works
but keeps disconnecting and reconnecting.  With the kernel ath5k
driver, it doesn't work at all.  I get errors like "noise floor
calibration failed".  I tested with the stable vanilla kernel, the
testing kernel, and the git kernel.  But let's put this in a new
thread.

Carlos