Wireless IP support

I note the riscosblog item about the PiFi due to be launched at Wakefield.

Just a few comments on the item itself and points from it:

From what I can gather from Andrew Rawnsley’s announcement on CSA Announce, the PiFi is essentially an Operating System (presumably with some kind of simple GUI for configuration) that turns your Raspberry Pi into a RISC OS compatible wi-fi adapter.

Sounds like a copy of Rasbian, possibly cut down, with drivers for the fitted wireless and wired interfaces

It’s designed to be compatible with RISC OS web browsers such as NetSurf and can be hooked up to a number of devices as well as 32-bit RISC OS computers – giving them wireless connectivity.

Sounds like the GUI avoids using flash and maybe also avoids javascript.

I haven’t been able to source much information on the ‘PiFi’ but if it really delivers what it says it should, it really will be a marvellous solution for everyone running RISC OS on native modern hardware.

Useful and handily packaged setup that is known to work with RISC OS connected devices – other, off the shelf, devices can be difficult to setup or plain not work.

Especially considering it’s been discussed previously that to develop a wireless networking stack for RISC OS would be so enormously resource and cost intensive, that the possibility of it supporting wireless connectivity natively is just a pipedream unless something changes quite dramatically in the coming years.

Which still is the case, but R-comp now provide a known working work around for the problem.

It must be said though that if the base board of your new machine includes a wireless hardware component e.g. the IGEPv5 includes wireless (the lite version does not) then using the onboard would be a better solution.

So, how much work is it to port a driver? And how much work to get the dot1x support?
Has anyone looked?
Note: If it isn’t distributed with the rest of the OS then GPL will actually do.
Yes, I actually said that…

Useful and handily packaged setup that is known to work with RISC OS connected devices – other, off the shelf, devices can be difficult to setup or plain not work.

Indeed. My Vonets adaptor works very nicely BUT (and its a big BUT, as you can clearly see), the eccentric non-standard configuration requires a PC to set it up. I have decoded the (rather simple) protocol for configuring the device, but haven’t had much success with assembling raw Ethernet packets on RISC OS to do the talking-to-the-thing part.

I’m thinking a RaspberryPi to act as a WiFi interface is overkill for the solution, but hey, if it works then it works. And no doubt there may be some enterprising people to come up with some, er, alternative solutions. Like, hey, why bother trying to use DigitalCD as a webradio when your PiFi “router” can do it for you.
You’ll need to count me out as I know zip about Linux, but this sounds like it has great hack potential. Asides from, you know, its advertised purpose. ;-)

Yes, it would be better to be able to use the on-board hardware, or a plug-in ten euro USB WiFi dongle. Maybe in time this may be possible. I think we may need an update of the basic internet system first, so it can cope with stuff like the network coming and going and changing IP address along the way (which is par for the course with WiFi), not to mention advertising and offering/auto connections to all open/known networks. That sort of stuff. Oh, and of course the lurking IPv6 monster is getting ever closer, but not in any great hurry as the major ISPs dragged their heels for so long that huge amounts of “smart” devices are IPv4 only. Not that I disagree, I really love the idea of running stuff via NAT, having the broadband router direct specific ports at specific machines. The day I can’t hide my hardware behind a brick wall and am required instead to connect everything directly to the internet all with its own unique “address” is the day I give up and learn how to knit…
Anyway, the tl;dr version of the above chunk of text is “onboard WiFi, nice idea but can our stack handle the specific requirements?”.

I’ve done something similar, made some B+ Pis into wifi bridges using Rasbian. This was for connecting a number of Trend boiler monitors to the wifi where I work. I don’t see any difference in this situation, any ethernet capable device could be wifi enabled using a wifi bridge.

The details how to do this can be viewed here

The only caveat is, there is no way to change the settings from RiscOS as the Pi acting as the bridge has no IP address, you have to connect it to a monitor and keyboard, do your configuration changes then connect it back up to your device running RiscOS. With regards to DHCP, the device running RiscOS needs a static IP address on your wifi range, DHCP not being used and any DHCP server on that range set to exclude that IP address from distribution.

Note: With reference to my last post in that thread, I did go on to change all the ath0 references in the files to br0 and the bridge continued to function normally.

One thing though, I expect a crossover cable will need to be used between two Pis (if a Pi is being used as a RiscOS machine), they probably will not autosense the wire mapping.

The day I can’t hide my hardware behind a brick wall and am required instead to connect everything directly to the internet all with its own unique “address” is the day I give up and learn how to knit…

Don’t go looking for knitting patterns just yet there are translation systems
Googling for IPv4 to IPv6 gateway will give you lots of links about the methods in use.

There’s also the fact that BIG takeup of IPv6 will be driven by the yanks running out of IPv4 address space, and since they grabbed a very large percentage of the total map a while back that won’t be soon.

PS. Cisco have a view on the proposals from RIPE (european area).
Translated to normal speak it says (in 2011) nice idea, we can talk about it and think about what to do, let’s not rush.
I haven’t found an update from them, so I guess they aren’t rushing.

the talking-to-the-thing part.

That’s a shame. Although the Vonets VAP11G, which I think you have, is among the cheaper options, it is not the cheapest. It is also getting long in the tooth and there are smaller, possibly faster, options available. The limitation with these is that they are configured through a web page interface, maybe requiring IE, and they may not make their ability to act as a bridge explicit.

I like the concept of PiFi and the notice does mention employing an unused Pi for it. Otherwise, it is rather expensive, bulky and power consuming as a solution for a single connection. I look forward to more info after today. Has anyone else spotted other pieces of equipment called PiFI? I hope the trademark position is clear. ;-)

Has anyone else spotted other pieces of equipment called PiFI?

Well a very brief search throws up PiFi / PiFiZone

I hope the trademark position is clear

Seems pretty clear on the PiFiZone website – they have the nice TM marking for “PiFi” as well as “PiFiZone”.

They’re Canadian BTW. They do market in the UK. Perhaps a rename is in order, I’ll be generous and suggest PiWi for free¹ use.
Or is WiPi² a better bet?

¹ I reserve the right to do a GPL and “upgrade” that notice.
² That one too…

Don’t go looking for knitting patterns just yet there are translation systems

Oh. Wow. Another thing for ISPs and budget box manufacturers to mess up. :-/

Remember I was saying about how awful the Livebox software update was? Well they have finally pushed out an update that makes things work – like it can now tell you what equipment is connected etc, and setting up NAT actually seems to work correctly. And finally the login has changed. You’re still “admin” but the password now is derived from the default WiFi security key (instead of being “admin”!). So it only took them, what, half a year or so after inflicting their borked beta on everybody before we got one that seems to behave. So, yeah, this IPv6 stuff. I wonder how the transition to that will actually go?

It is also getting long in the tooth and there are smaller, possibly faster, options available.

Smaller concerns me. I have a tiny USB key that I use with the P4 box and it frequently loses the signal. The Livebox is maybe seven metres away, but a metre and a half of that is a solid stone wall. The iPad will hold a signal if it receives it but will rarely detect a signal if it doesn’t have one. Ironically the iPad is probably the most expensive piece of shiny I have but it is absolutely the worst at locking into weak WiFi signals. So my concern is the stability of something that maybe doesn’t have space for a large antenna inside. The Vonets is not so bad in this respect.
As for speed, my ADSL runs at 2M/800K which translates to roughly 260KiB/sec down and about 65KiB/sec up¹. The Pi has never managed to pull a file at more than ~120KiB/sec under RISC OS (timing from NetSurf downloading larger files); so the broadband speed is not so relevant if the Pi can maybe only saturate a single megabit…).
Still, I’m open to suggestions of reliable replacements, it would be useful to have a spare.

The limitation with these is that they are configured through a web page interface

That’s a step up from mine. ;-)

maybe requiring IE

At least consumer equipment has moved beyond IE6 ActiveX things.

Otherwise, it is rather expensive, bulky and power consuming as a solution for a single connection.

Yes. That’s why I’m thinking the ability to mod it may be a large factor in how well the system works. After all, there is a lot of processing power otherwise going unused…

¹ This should probably be closer to 80-90KiB/sec but for larger transfers the rate bounces all over the place (WinSCP status) but overall seems to run at about 65KiB/sec. I’m not complaining, I was originally artificially limited to 256K up channel which was really slow…