After a brief amount of time searching I found a rather good explanation via MIT. It turns out that if you are running a mixed wireless network at home (i.e. providing B, G and N types at the same time) you could find your phone sometimes disconnects in this way.

Foruntately the page also points out a possible solution; Wi-Fi Fixer which is also available via Marketplace and I do recommend donations!

This has left a little tool running in the background that detects the loss of wireless and sorts it out.

My wireless is now reconnecting automatically; Perfect!

[user@host]$ ssh test -l user
user@test's password:
[user@test]$ ulimit -n
1024
[user@test]$ cat /etc/security/limits.conf
* soft nofile 4096
* hard nofile 4096

However switching to the same user you will see:

[user@test]$ su - user
Password:
[user@test]$ ulimit -n
4096

That the limit isn’t respect when logging in via SSH but when we switch user it is applied.

The reason for this is rather simple; the SSH is opening a shell that isn’t a login shell and therefore limits is not being applied. To correct this simply edit your sshd_config file and set it to use login shells.

[root@test]$ grep -i uselogin /etc/ssh/sshd_config
#UseLogin no

You can see that the entry is set by default to no; so simply edit the line and alter it to yes:

[root@test]$ sed -i.bak 's/#UseLogin no/UseLogin yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
[root@test]$ grep -i uselogin /etc/ssh/sshd_config
UseLogin yes

Now reload your sshd.

[root@test]$ /etc/init.d/sshd reload
 /etc/init.d/sshd reload
Reloading sshd:                                            [  OK  ]

And test again:

[user@host]$ ssh test -l user
user@test's password:
[user@test]$ ulimit -n
4096

That’s it! Sometimes odd behaviour like this can be difficult to track down without having a good read of configuration files.

• Open on of the mailing list e-mail
• Expand the “Show Details” link.
• Click on the “Filter messages from this mailing list” link

That’s it instant filter, then you setup the label you wish and the actions. Just one more reason why I really love using GMail!

Open the router web interface, normally http://192.168.1.1/
Advanced > System > Remote Access

Then tick the “Ping” checkbox and apply.

After this the box will respond to ping.

A quick Google pointed me towards a post on the useful Add-On Mirrors site. I then went to the homepage of the author and installed the nice tool KeyConfig.

A quick restart of Firefox, then open KeyConfig (via Tools > KeyConfig), search for the Ctrl+q key press and disable.

Another restart of Firefox and it’s complete, no more accidental quits of Firefox! KeyConfig is a very nice and simple to use Add-On and will certainly be added to my default Firefox pack from now on, ace!

Take for example this, imagine having a long hostname, with an odd port and a different user. Typing that would be a pain, most people would do something like:

alias ssh-short="ssh -p 12345 someotheruser@somelong.hostname.com"

In their ~/.bashrc, however the same can be filled into the configuration file. Edit the file ~/.ssh/config (or make it!):

Host short
  HostName somelong.hostname.com
  User someotheruser
  Port 12345

After doing this you can simply do:

$ ssh short

How much easier do you need it to be?!

The first step is to get your drivers and for Broadcom, which is relatively easy as they produce them for us. So first download the driver (these drivers support BM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based cards) and was also successful in this case with BCM4328.

Check that the package ‘linux-headers’ is installed, this is really just for completeness sakes. Gentoo would not work for long without this package!

(gentoo)# emerge linux-headers
... output ...

Unpack the downloaded drivers and build for your current kernel:

(gentoo)# tar -xzf hybrid-portsrc-ARCH-VERSION.tar.gz
(gentoo)# make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
... output ...

Remove any existing wireless drivers.

(gentoo)# rmmod ndiswrapper b43 ssb bcm43xx b43legacy

Add in some modules required for WPA wireless:

(gentoo)# modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip

Test the newly built wireless driver:

(gentoo)# insmod wl.ko
(gentoo)# iwconfig
.. output ...
(gentoo)# iwlist scanning
... output ...

If that is working we can copy in the driver to the kernel and add to the autoload:

(gentoo)# cp wl.ko /lib/modules/`uname-r`/kernel/net/wireless/
(gentoo)# rmmod wl
(gentoo)# modprobe wl
(gentoo)# echo 'wl' >>/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

So now we have a working driver we can go on to configure for WPA. Alter the /etc/conf.d/net (note we assume that eth0 is wireless):

# Prefer wpa_supplicant over wireless-tools
modules=( "wpa_supplicant" )
 
# It's important that we tell wpa_supplicant which driver we should
# be using as it's not very good at guessing yet
wpa_supplicant_eth0="-Dmadwifi"

Next set up the network in the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

# This setting is required or the connection will not work
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
 
# Ensure that only root can read the WPA configuration
ctrl_interface_group=0
 
# Let wpa_supplicant take care of scanning and AP selection
ap_scan=1
 
# Only WPA-PSK is used. Any valid cipher combination is accepted
network={
  ssid="example"
  proto=WPA RSN   # RSN is needed for WPA2
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  pairwise=CCMP TKIP
  group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
  psk=06b4be19da289f475aa46a33cb793029d4ab3db7a23ee92382eb0106c72ac7bb
  #The higher the priority the faster it connects
  priority=2
}

And that is it, you should find that your wireless is enabled on boot.

Thanks should also go to DJ Kaos for the preparation of the driver.

Simply download the key by using the GPG tool:

gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key E6F33B6628973CC0

Then import that key into either apt:

gpg -a --export 010908312D230C5F | sudo apt-key add -

Or rpm:

gpg --export -a 010908312D230C5F >key.txt
rpm --import key.txt

Simple!

First off lets make a simple script to convert the HTML into text. Several terminal based browsers exist and these can do the conversion for us (make sure to place it in your PATH somewhere).

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -z `which links | grep -v 'no links'` ]
then
  links -html-numbered-links 1 -html-images 1 -dump "file://$@"
elif [ ! -z `which lynx | grep -v 'no lynx'` ]
then
  lynx -force_html -dump "$@"
elif [ ! -z `which w3m | grep -v 'no w3m'` ]
then
  w3m -T text/html -F -dump "$@"
else
  cat $@
fi

Add this to your ~/.muttrc:

auto_view text/html
alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text text/html

And then this to your ~/.mailcap:

text/html;html2txt %s; copiousoutput

Start up Mutt and get nothing but text e-mails.

urxvt*urlLauncher:  firefox
urxvt*matcher.button:  1
urxvt*perl-ext-common:  default,matcher,searchable-scrollback
urxvt.matcher.pattern.1:  \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]

Now you need to make this work:

# xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

You may need to add this command to ~/.xinitrc or whatever startup script that your desktop uses. Most systems should automatically load it when your X starts.

Whilst I chose to use firefox as the browser you can set it to any other browser, indeed if you are using Gnome a trick to use the default browser is:

urxvt*urlLauncher:  gnome-open

This is actually rather handy because you can click on a variety of links not just web ones and it will open the correct tool for those links. Thanks to Nion’s blog I found out that you can colour the URLs too! Finally to those that wish to be mouseless, how about Bart’s blog for an awesome example of the abilities of URxvt!