Installing an Atheros Based Wireless Card on the Eee 901

Allan Feid — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:28:14 +0000

So, I got pretty fed up with the Ralink RA2860 wireless card that comes with my ASUS Eee 901. It does not play well with Backtrack 3 nor does it do packet injection. I want to turn this thing into a nice little security machine that I can bring with me and easily start testing some networks. In order to do that I got a new Atheros based card from Gigabyte. This card is known to work well with Backtrack and of course is highly supported in the Linux world. For those that care, it is an Atheros AR5007 chipset.

Once I got the part in the mail I opened it up to install:

Very simple to open, all you have to do is remove two screws and take off the plate. To remove the wireless card, take off the two pigtail connectors, which I have circled in red, then remove the two screws circled in blue. Finally move the two pigtail wires and you should see the card pop itself up.

Remove the MiniPCI Express card and insert your new wireless card. Then screw it back in and pop on the pigtail connectors. You are now good to go. If you're using Windows I'll assume you have to install the drivers included but on Ubuntu and Backtrack my card was recognized instantly.

Enjoy your new Atheros based wifi card!

Eee Tips: Reduce disk writes by utilizing tmpfs

Allan Feid — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:07:09 +0000

I've got an ASUS Eee PC 901/Linux with the solid state drive (SSD). I've been having issues with the /tmp dir and /var/log dir utilizing too much of my 4GB drive. So to fix this I came across this eeeuser.com thread which talks about moving those directories to RAM. The process is pretty straight forward and will increase the life of your SSD. Find out what I did below.

Overview
This will move /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/logs to RAM using tmpfs which means everything will be deleted on a reboot. That is fine since both /tmp and /var/tmp are deleted on reboot anyway. For the logs, however, we can create a couple scripts to backup only the logs from the last session as it's not really necessary to keep tons of logs on a netbook. In case you're wondering, I'm running Ubuntu Eee on my Eee PC.

Edit /etc/fstab
As a quick warning, MAKE BACKUPS!! This file is crucial to the inner workings of Ubuntu. Once you've got a backup all you need to do is add a few lines to move the directories to tmpfs.

tmp     /tmp            tmpfs   noexec,nosuid,rw,size=8192k   0     0
vartmp  /var/tmp        tmpfs   noexec,nosuid,rw,size=1024k   0     0
varlog  /var/log        tmpfs   noexec,nosuid,rw,size=8192k   0     0

If you're wondering why I gave /tmp 8MB in memory it is because Flash videos need a good amount of space and will hang if you only give it 1MB. So if you don't plan on streaming anything through Flash you can lower size=8192k to 1024k.

Create a couple scripts for our log problem
So in order to only keep logs from the last session we'll make a simple script and have it launch on shutdown but before that create the directory /var/log_bkup.

sudo mkdir /var/log_bkup

That's where the tar archive of the logs will be stored. Here's the script to remove the old and bring in the new:

file: /etc/init.d/logbkup.sh

#!/bin/sh
if [ -f /var/log_bkup/log_bkup.tar.gz ]; then
        /bin/rm /var/log_bkup/log_bkup.tar.gz
fi

echo "Backing up logs to tar archive..."
/bin/tar czf /var/log_bkup/log_bkup.tar.gz /var/log

This next script will create a skeleton in /var/log so all the directories already exist to avoid any problems.

file: /etc/init.d/mklogdir.sh

echo "Creating directories in /var/log"
/bin/mkdir /var/log/apparmor
/bin/mkdir /var/log/apt
/bin/mkdir /var/log/cups
/bin/mkdir /var/log/dist-upgrade
/bin/mkdir /var/log/fsck
/bin/mkdir /var/log/gdm
/bin/mkdir /var/log/news
/bin/mkdir /var/log/samba
/bin/mkdir /var/log/unattended-upgrades
/bin/mkdir /var/log/installer

Make sure the scripts are executable

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/mklogdir.sh 
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/logbkup.sh

Link them to various rc directories so they run at the proper times (startup/shutdown)

sudo ln /etc/init.d/mklogdir.sh /etc/rc2.d/505mklogdir.sh
sudo ln /etc/init.d/logbkup.sh /etc/rc0.d/515logbkup.sh
sudo ln /etc/init.d/logbkup.sh /etc/rc6.d/515logbkup.sh

Finish up
Pretty much done at this point. Just want to remove everything in /tmp and /var/tmp to avoid any issues when remounting on next boot with everything running in tmpfs.

sudo rm -rf /tmp/* /var/tmp/*

Go ahead and reboot. You should now be running a system with a lot less disk writes. All your log writes will now only be written once per session instead of little writes here and there every time something happens.

Allan Feid - eee

Installing an Atheros Based Wireless Card on the Eee 901

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Eee Tips: Reduce disk writes by utilizing tmpfs

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