OpenWRT/LEDE Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H Getting 5GHz Radio Working

I had a problem with my Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H, I couldn’t get the 5GHz radio wireless interface working along with the 2.5GHz radio.

In the end I used the following /etc/config/wireless configuration:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option phy 'phy0'
        option txpower '7'
        option country 'GB'
        option hwmode '11g'
        option channel '7'
        option htmode 'HT20'

config wifi-device 'radio1'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option phy 'phy1'
        option txpower '9'
        option country 'GB'
        option hwmode '11a'
        option channel '120'
        option htmode 'HT40'

config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option mode 'ap'
        option ssid 'my2500KHz'
        option network 'wlan'
        option encryption 'psk2'
        option key 'password'
        option wmm '0'

config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio1'
        option mode 'ap'
        option ssid 'my5GHz'
        option network 'wlan'
        option encryption 'psk2'
        option key 'password'
        option wmm '0'

This configuration seemed to work for me only after I rebooted the router.

LXC Container Reports PTY allocation request failed on channel 0 On SSH Connection

I tried upgrading my LXC from Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 by running sudo apt-get install lxc because, by default, the lxc package was not being upgraded.

But I then had problems getting consoles/terminals with my existing LXC containers.

This problem exhibits itself when attempting to ssh to a LXC container with the following message:

# ssh ubuntu@10.0.3.201
ubuntu@10.0.3.201's password: 
PTY allocation request failed on channel 0

It also exhibits itself when attempting to lxc-console a LXC container:

# sudo lxc-console -n mycontainer
lxc-console: commands.c: lxc_cmd_console: 722 Console -1 invalid, busy or all consoles busy.

(although a workaround is to connect using sudo lxc-console -n mycontainer -t 0).

The issue is that every container config file needs to have some extra lines added:

# required for lxc-console to work
lxc.tty = 4

# requires for interactive SSH to work
lxc.pts = 1024

One other issue I came across was that I would get the following errors when trying to start a container:

# sudo lxc-start -F -n mycontainer
Failed to mount cgroup at /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd: Permission denied
[!!!!!!] Failed to mount API filesystems, freezing.
Freezing execution.

This was bypassed by adding the following to the container’s config file:

# disable apparmour restrictions on container
lxc.aa_profile = unconfined

VLC on Ubuntu 16.04 with NVidia Graphics Card – Divx Video Playback Blank

I attempted to play a divx-encoded video on VLC 2.2.2 running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The video was blank, although if, while the video was playing, I selected Video > Video Track > Disable, then select Video > Video Track > Track 1 from the menu it would display the current frame as a still image.

I opened up the messages window by selecting Tools > Messages from the menu. I then altered the Verbosity from 0 (errors) to 1 (warnings). Then I pressed play on the video for a short period to capture the warnings:

It displayed messages like:

avi warning: multiple riff -> OpenDML ?
avi warning: detected OpenDML file
avcodec info: Using NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 384.59 Wed Jul 19 23:45:51 PDT 2017 for hardware decoding.
avcodec warning: cannot decode one frame (337 bytes)
core warning: VoutDisplayEvent 'pictures invalid'
core warning: VoutDisplayEvent 'pictures invalid'
avcodec warning: cannot decode one frame (337 bytes)
avcodec warning: cannot decode one frame (190 bytes)
avcodec warning: cannot decode one frame (190 bytes)

This led me to thinking the VDPAU driver was maybe failing.

A simple fix (although possibly not efficient) is select Tools > Preferences from the menu, select “Input / Codecs” from the icons at the top of the Simple Preferences dialog box, and change the first option, “Hardware-accelerated decoding” from “Automatic” to “Disable”. Then clicking “Save” at the bottom of the dialog box.

USB Tethering From CyanogenMod Android to Ubuntu Trusty 14.04

My laptop could not connect to the hotel’s WiFi but my mobile phone could. So I went into my phone settings, selected “…More”, selected “Tethering & portable hotspot”, and enabled “USB tethering”. This was while my phone was configured to be in “charge only” mode on USB.

My phone was attached to my Ubuntu computer by USB cable. And if I clicked on the Network Manager applet on my start bar (using Xubuntu) it showed me the option of “Ethernet Network (my phone model)” but it was greyed out. So Ubuntu had detected the phone had tethering turned on but wasn’t able to connect to it.

Automatic Option

Click on the Network Manager applet. At the bottom of the menu choose “Edit”.

Press “Add” to add a network connection.

Choose a connection type of “Ethernet” from the drop-down and press the “Create…” button.

Give the connection a name, e.g. “Tethering My Phone USB”. Select your USB interface from the drop down list of “Device MAC address” on the “Ethernet” tab (which is opened by default).

Choose “Save…” and the tethered network should automatically begin to work.

Manual Option (if all else fails)

The solution was to open a terminal and run:

$ sudo ifconfig usb0 up
$ sudo dhclient usb0

Now I had an IP address assigned to my usb0 interface and a default route.

ZFS Grub Issues on Boot

I had a problem when attempting to boot into my ZFS root and landed in initramfs rescue prompt.

Using advice from this article:

Command: zpool import -N
Message: cannot import '': no such pool available
Error: 1

Manually import the root pool at the command prompt and then exit.
Hint: Try:  zpool import -f -R / -N


BusyBox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) zpool import -f -R / -N rpool
(initramfs) exit

Begin: Setting mountpoint=/ on ZFS filesystem  ... done
Begin: Mounting ZFS filesystem  ... done
Command: mount -t zfs -o zfsutil  /root
Message: filesystem '' cannot be mounted, unable to open the dataset
mount: mounting  on /root failed: No such file or directory
Error: 1

Manually mount the root filesystem on /root and then exit.


BusyBox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) build-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

(initramfs)

To fix this issue I ran:

(initramfs) zpool import -R /root rpool
(initramfs) exit

Unfortunately there is a known bug in Ubuntu 16.04.1 grub-probe command which states “error: unknown filesystem” when running update-grub.

The work-around is to update /etc/default/grub and add:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="boot=zfs root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT"

This results in the grub menu specifying the root parameter twice on the kernel boot line in /etc/grub/grub.cfg but the second one takes precedence.

Monitor No Signal on Xubuntu 16.04.1

My Dell server seemed to stop outputting to the monitor on the VGA cable. No signal, the monitor said. It was blank, it was black, it was powered off. I tried unplugging the cable and plugging it back in, no joy.

I tried pressing ctrl-alt-1 to switch to the text console, and the screen came alive, but all I could see was a flashing underline of a cursor in the upper left-hand corner, no login prompt. Same thing for ctrl-alt-2. Tried ctrl-alt-7 to get back to graphics mode and the monitor turned off again.

The following repaired the issue for me without having to reboot, but it did kill my GUI session and all open windows:

sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm restart

My monitor came back alive and I found myself at the GUI XFCE login prompt.

Using wget to Automate Logging Into Websites

The open-source wget tool is useful for automating website access/scraping. In particular because it can store/retrieve cookies from a file.

# create a name for the cookie jar/file
COOKIE_JAR=/tmp/cookies.$$.txt

# save cookies from homepage access
wget --spider --save-cookies $COOKIE_JAR --keep-session-cookies http://www.smrt.com.sg/

# now submit request using saved cookies
wget -O - \
  --load-cookies $COOKIE_JAR \
  --save-cookies $COOKIE_JAR \
  --keep-session-cookies \
  --header "Referer: http://journey.smrt.com.sg/" \
  --post-data='startlat=1.357348601&startlng=103.9884093&endlat=1.276243657&endlng=103.8545958&routeopt=fastest&start_type=mrt&end_type=mrt&mode=TRANSIT&use_lrt=yes' \
  https://connect.smrt.wwprojects.com/smrt/api/journey/

Note that –spider performs a HEAD request and does not download the response. Options useful for debugging and seeing what is sent/received are -d and -S. For cookies the –keep-session-cookies option is essential to save session cookies (with no expiry time set) to the cookie file.

Bash Script to Run Apt-Get Upgrades on All LXC Running Containers

If you have several LXC containers on your system that you want to upgrade in a loop you could use a sensible infrastructure management platform like Ansible.

Here, however, is a simple BASH script for logging into each running LXC host one at a time and letting you answer yes or no to the apt-get upgrade taking place:

#!/bin/bash

# declare an array variable
declare -a LINES

# store each line about running LXC containers into array
LINENUM=0
while IFS= read -r line; do
  echo "  processing LINENUM=$LINENUM, $line"
  LINES[$LINENUM]="$line"
  LINENUM=$((LINENUM + 1))
done <<< "$(sudo lxc-ls -f)"

# iterate through each line in the array
INDEX=0
while [[ $INDEX -lt $LINENUM ]]; do
  # squash up the spaces and delete commas from line
  CLEANLINE=`echo "${LINES[$INDEX]}" |tr -s ' ' |tr -d ,`

  # extract the hostname and ipaddress fields
  HNAME=`echo "$CLEANLINE" |cut '-d ' -f1`
  IPADDR=`echo "$CLEANLINE" |cut '-d ' -f5`

  # ssh into host if a valid IP address is present
  if [ `echo "$IPADDR" |grep -E '^([0-9]+[.]){3}([0-9]+)$'` ]; then
    echo "== $HNAME ($IPADDR) =="
    ssh -t ubuntu@$IPADDR 'echo "== $(hostname) =="; sudo apt-get update; echo "== $(hostname) =="; sudo apt-get upgrade;'
  else
    :
  fi

  INDEX=$((INDEX + 1))
done

This script makes use of BASH arrays. In addition it was discovered that attempting to change variables inside a read loop that was piped was fruitless because the pipe was run inside its own shell and thus the variable changes were lost.

Conditionally adding a directory to PATH if not already in PATH

In BASH it is possible to check that a directory is not already in the PATH environment variable before adding it.

The basic string-in-string search function was adopted from this forum post.

stringContains() { [ -z "${1##*$2*}" ]; }
stringBegins()   { [ -z "${1##$2*}"  ]; }
stringEnds()     { [ -z "${1##*$2}"  ]; }

# call as inPath "$PATH" "/my/new/path"
inPath() {
  if stringBegins   "$1" "$2:";  then return 0; fi
  if stringEnds     "$1" ":$2";  then return 0; fi
  if stringContains "$1" ":$2:"; then return 0; fi
  if [ "$1" == "$2" ];           then return 0; fi
  return 1;
}

If you wanted to, say, add “/home/myuser/bin” if it didn’t already exist, you could add the above functions and the following:

if inPath "$PATH" "/home/myuser/bin"; then
  : # do nothing
else
  PATH="$PATH:/home/myuser/bin"
fi

Windows 10 TCP/Internet Slow With Chrome and OpenWRT Router

So I was having issues getting a Windows 10 laptop running Google Chrome connected via wifi to a router running OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1.

The Windows 10 laptop would take a long time to establish a connection and then a long time for any data to transfer at an incredibly slow rate.

At first I thought it was Google Chrome but downloaded Firefox and was still having the same issues.

There are many proposed solutions but the commands that appeared to make a magical difference and instantly speed things up were:

netsh interface tcp show global
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

At this stage things did not magically get better.

Then I tried:

netsh interface tcp show heuristics
netsh interface tcp set heuristics enabled

Now the Internet suddenly got quicker.

To undo these changes (if they don’t work for you):

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal
netsh interface tcp set heuristics disabled

Also, because I messed around with the MTU on the WiFi interface I had to run the following to restore things to a relatively normal default:

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface “WiFi” mtu=1458 store=persistent