A view from the hill

The other issue is that I never got hibernation working on the server and I fixed that today, too. I use a vanilla kernel.org self-compiled kernel on the box, so I could have gone for Suspend2, but as I have sysfs_power_state working on my Ubuntu laptop without much hassle, I wondered what was the problem on the server. As it turned out, suspend to ram (mem) doesn't seem to work and as that always had failed, I think I never really tried suspend to disk. Additionally, I hadn't added a resume line to my grub configuration, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. After a freeze in NetworkStop on my first try with suspend to disk, I added the rt2570 module to the list of blacklisted modules and now suspend to disk (and resume, of course) works. Yay! I'll be able to continue my hacking on UCW without having to boot it all the time, for instance. Here is what is actually doing the work from the config file:

[root@bauhaus->root]grep -v '#' /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf | sed '/^$/d' UseSysfsPowerState disk PowerdownMethod shutdown Verbosity 1 LogFile /var/log/hibernate.log LogVerbosity 1 Distribution debian SaveClock restore-only UnmountFSTypes smbfs nfs UnloadBlacklistedModules yes LoadModules auto DownInterfaces rausb0 eth0 UpInterfaces auto XStatus x XSuspendText Preparing to suspend... XResumeText Resuming from suspend...

I finally fixed a very annoying bug in the network setup. Bauhaus is connected via an USB wlan stick by Conceptronic, which has a Ralink chipset (rt2570). I made that thing work quite some time ago, although the (legacy) module from
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com required a small patch at the time.
What I couldn't fix though was a very annoying behaviour of the driver: It wouldn't connect on the first try. Only if I re-started /etc/init.d/network, the server would connect to my AP. I had figured out that the driver required the interface to be upped before you would be able to set ESSID etc., but I couldn't get it to work with Debians ifupdown scheme. Some days ago, somebody in de.comp.os.unix.linux.misc posted his configuration and he had a pre-up ifconfig rausb0 two times, so that makes three times the interface gets upped. This actually did the trick. I now have the following in my /etc/network/interfaces:

# The wlan interface auto rausb0 iface rausb0 inet dhcp pre-up ifconfig rausb0 up pre-up iwconfig rausb0 essid XXXXX pre-up iwconfig rausb0 channel 10 pre-up sleep 3 pre-up ifconfig rausb0 up pre-up iwpriv rausb0 enc 3 pre-up iwpriv rausb0 auth 3 pre-up iwpriv rausb0 wpapsk XXXXX pre-up sleep 3 post-up /etc/network/if-post-up.d/bauhaus.fw

And this finally allows to connect the damned thing at boot time, which is nice for two reasons: It speeds up my boot process (before dhclient would fail after an awful lot of time) and my clock will be much more precise. Now the next thing would be to try the new implementation of the driver, aka rt2x00, and go for WPA2 (which the current legacy driver is not capable of). I'll leave that for another day, though.

No, I didn't stop listening to music, I just forgot blogging about it. But, hey, I remembered today.