How to do a wireless MD?

[MediaMonkey]

I read in another thread that it is possible to have diskless MDs even with wireless netwoking. I would really like to build at least one wirelss MD.

It requires BIOS to be able to use a wireless card without a driver, am I right? None of my wireless does network boot from wireless card. Which wireless cards (or chipsets) support diskless MD?

I read somewhere that you can have a simple Linux boot loader on a floppy with just the network driver and use that to do a network boot. Anybody tried that kind of a MD setup before?

Edit: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/GRUB_PXE_network_boot

TIA

[rafik24]

 Hello,

 I did setup few wireless md's, i looked at how to pxe boot from wireless cards and found some methods with grub but only for conventional 100MB nics. So i tried doing a mini boot sort of thing but i could not find a way
to replace the running kernel when switching to pxe.

 I shall warn you that wireless has it limits in terms of bandwidth, some adapters even give really poor performances but not all; depend of your gear.

 So there is another method which consist of:

 - installing kubuntu, setup the wireless card (i do this editing /etc/network/interfaces manually because i can't use network manager with my ralink rt2500)

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wireless-essid SOMETHING
        wireless-key 2ADXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 /etc/init.d/networking restart ( make a copy of interfaces since hte installer will change it removing the essid and the key (which is a paint cause i dont happen to know my wifi key by heart)

ssh linuxmce@dcerouter

 scp /usr/pluto/deb-cache/mce-installerxxxxxxxx.deb

right click on mce-installer and select install package

edit /etc/apt/source.list and comment all the lines leaving the first entry (deb http://archives.    feistyi main)

apt-get update ; apt-get install portmap nfs-common nfs-kernel server

 know click o the install lmce icon on the desktop

 on the install finishes, check /etc/init.d/interfaces and use the ipaddress provided and add the wifi essid and key

  should be it,

Please give me some feedback if you encounter any problem so i can update this and put it on the wiki.

 Hope this helps,

Rafik



 

 

   

[Matthew]

How about wireless HDMI (from MD to TV)? TZero has ZeroWire products using UWB like a wireless/TV adapter and a wireless miniPCI card. Since UWB is a different band than WiFi, the MD bandwidth to the core doesn't compete with HDMI bandwidth, and no wires (except power). Anyone using any of that kind of stuff?

[MediaMonkey]

- installing kubuntu, setup the wireless card (i do this editing /etc/network/interfaces manually because i can't use network manager with my ralink rt2500)

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wireless-essid SOMETHING
        wireless-key 2ADXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 /etc/init.d/networking restart ( make a copy of interfaces since hte installer will change it removing the essid and the key (which is a paint cause i dont happen to know my wifi key by heart)

 Hope this helps,

Rafik

Thanks Rafik. So your wireless MDs are not diskless, am I right?

[MediaMonkey]

How about wireless HDMI (from MD to TV)? TZero has ZeroWire products using UWB like a wireless/TV adapter and a wireless miniPCI card. Since UWB is a different band than WiFi, the MD bandwidth to the core doesn't compete with HDMI bandwidth, and no wires (except power). Anyone using any of that kind of stuff?

Is it available for purchase?  I am sure the pricing will be beyond me!

I just ran a very long HDMI cable (75 ft) so that I could use my DirecTV HD-DVR from two different locations - one in the basement family room and the other in the second level loft. Even though the rooms are on the same side of the house there was no way to run the cable straight up. ZeroWire product would have been a perfect solution!

[Matthew]

How about wireless HDMI (from MD to TV)? TZero has ZeroWire products using UWB like a wireless/TV adapter and a wireless miniPCI card. Since UWB is a different band than WiFi, the MD bandwidth to the core doesn't compete with HDMI bandwidth, and no wires (except power). Anyone using any of that kind of stuff?

Is it available for purchase?  I am sure the pricing will be beyond me!

Googling says it'll be something like $3-400 at first, probably $200 in a year, if its marketing works.

I just ran a very long HDMI cable (75 ft) so that I could use my DirecTV HD-DVR from two different locations - one in the basement family room and the other in the second level loft. Even though the rooms are on the same side of the house there was no way to run the cable straight up. ZeroWire product would have been a perfect solution!

I think 75' is too far, but there's not yet a lot of UWB field results to judge from. But I do think this is where things are going: WiFi buses for connecting media processors to each other, Bluetooth for connecting people to devices, and UWB for connecting devices to media processors. UWB might just replace WiFi for all media, though it's not TCP/IP so it won't have the flexibility and momentum.

[rafik24]

 Hi MediaMonkey,

Thanks Rafik. So your wireless MDs are not diskless, am I right?

 Not they are not and i dont think it is possible to make a diskless md over wifi this is way.
If you need to load the full system from pxe you'll probably find that the md will be unusable because not enough bandwidth over wifi and too much packet dropping, nfs mounts are bad enough on disked md's over wifi i avoid using the nfs shares and that's how i get this to work.

 I looked at some insteon stuff and it has the ability to send data over the 220V mains, i do not know which kind of troughoutput we can get this way but i think this worth a look at.

 Regards,

Rafik

[hari]

i use a OpenWRT box as wired to wireless bridge (wet mode). Should work with other "gaming adapters", too..
so you don't have to mess with ssids and keys on the MD and can boot straight from the bios with pxe.

but everybody knows: wireless is bad there would be no wires if wireless were a perfect match... a single cat5 run should fit nearly everywhere...

regards,
Hari

[MediaMonkey]

Not they are not and i dont think it is possible to make a diskless md over wifi this is way.
If you need to load the full system from pxe you'll probably find that the md will be unusable because not enough bandwidth over wifi and too much packet dropping, nfs mounts are bad enough on disked md's over wifi i avoid using the nfs shares and that's how i get this to work.

Oh! That's right even boot image has to be delivered over the network! I was trying to find out if it is possible to squeeze a boot loader with network driver so that it can boot over wireless.

[Vagabond]

Hi Rafik,

I tried to follow your steps, but with no success. Not sure I understand the procedure... could you please elaborate more on that?
Couple of questions embedded below.. sorry if they're too dumb for you

...cut

 - installing kubuntu, setup the wireless card (i do this editing /etc/network/interfaces manually because i can't use network manager with my ralink rt2500)

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wireless-essid SOMETHING
        wireless-key 2ADXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 /etc/init.d/networking restart ( make a copy of interfaces since hte installer will change it removing the essid and the key (which is a paint cause i dont happen to know my wifi key by heart)

ssh linuxmce@dcerouter

We did ssh from the MD being set up, right?

 scp /usr/pluto/deb-cache/mce-installerxxxxxxxx.deb

What is the destination of this scp?

right click on mce-installer and select install package

On which machine should I click? I assume newly created copy should be clicked - so back to previous question.

edit /etc/apt/source.list and comment all the lines leaving the first entry (deb http://archives.    feistyi main)

On which machine should I edit? Core or MD? MD seems to have the only one entry.. "deb file:/usr/pluto/deb-cache/ ./  ".
FIrst entry of sources.list on the core also has the same... not http://archives

apt-get update ; apt-get install portmap nfs-common nfs-kernel server

Should this be executed in the same terminal window on the MD under ssh to the router? Or where?

 know click o the install lmce icon on the desktop

This one should be on the MD's desktop in the end... right?

 on the install finishes, check /etc/init.d/interfaces and use the ipaddress provided and add the wifi essid and key

Just a couple comments on this also, please...

  should be it,

Please give me some feedback if you encounter any problem so i can update this and put it on the wiki.

 Hope this helps,

Rafik

   

[1audio]

I have played with the T-Zero stuff. (And several of their competitors.) Its not available yet nor are any others now. The real pricing will be more like $500-$900 a pair at launch and will only come down if a lot of people buy it. Expect no more that 30' in clear space with UWB. With the legal limits and physics that all you will get. Powerline could be better, its supposed to give 100 base-t performance, but in my house it usually doesn't get very far. Some like it for surfing the web but not for video. I have seen it work but only in demos or new construction.
Long HDMI using 2 cat 5 cables works pretty well. So does the optical stuff. You can get matrix switches that allow sharing of HDMI sources finally. And they mostly work.

I tried a network boot over powerline a while ago. It took 10 minutes! and was flakey. A local boot and then connecting over 802.11N could work on paper. I just ordered a Linux friendly PCI card that claims 300 MB throughput. I'll believe it when I see it.

[Matthew]

PXE boot for MDs is great to avoid local storage and easily updating all the MDs' software at once. But over slow/flaky wireless, startup times aren't just slow, they're unpredictable. Hibernation instead of powerdown could eliminate rebooting that requires reloading the OS across the network.

If the MD BIOS could PXE boot from a local cache instead of across the WLAN every time, that would solve the problem. The way to also get PXE booting advantages would be to control the booting by state on the PXE server. The server can already specify whether the MD should boot from the server image or a local one. If the MD could send an MD5 checksum (or functional equivalent, like maybe just a trusted version#) to the server, the server could tell whether the MD needed a new PXE image, or could be directed to boot from its local one.

I also found evidence that PXE boot data can be cached outside of that system, so the MD could have a BIOS that decided where to boot from based on client/server state handshaking or other logic. Tinkering with the BIOS is outside the current LMCE scope, but maybe it will be necessary to make MDs behave properly as "network peripherals" rather than "network hosts". OTOH, maybe a standard "Wake on LAN" packet can force PXE boot of a tiny bootloader that has the cache/retrieval logic.

There's a lot of points in the boot process that could have logic inserted to map network behavior better to deployment conditions.