KanuxOS system is network ready from first boot, with ipv4 support. This document explains the various options.
Kanux supports the following connectivity devices:
- Ethernet
- WiFi
- Android USB
Ethernet connectivity should always be ready functioning. Simply plug the network cable to a dhcp-ready network and Kanux will acquire a DHCP lease automatically.
In order to enable the network interface for the USB port to work with tethering you need to do the following: Edit the following file as root sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces and add the line iface usb0 inet dhcp in the end of the file, which enables the dhcp service for the USB port.
After this run sudo ifup usb0 and reboot. Now enable tethering on your mobile device, just connect it to the Kanux and you should be online!
Raspbian Jessie is not following the usual Debian approach to networking with/etc/network/if-* scripts. Instead dhcpcd is used. dhcpcd is an implementation of the DHCP client specified in RFC 2131. It gets the host information (IPaddress, routes, etc) from a DHCP server and configures the network interface of the machine on which it is running.
It then runs the configuration script which writes DNS information to resolvconf, if available, otherwise directly to /etc/resolv.conf. If the hostname is currently blank, (null) or localhost, or force_hostname is YES or TRUE or 1 then dhcpcd sets the hostname to the one supplied by the DHCP server.
dhcpcd then daemonises and waits for the lease renewal time to lapse. It will attempt to renew its lease and reconfigure if the new lease changes, when the lease begins to expire, or the DHCP server sends message to renew early.
It turns out that dhcpcd has a very neat way of hooking up into the network configuration: all you need to do is drop a script in the /lib/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks directory, and it will get called at the various stages of the IP allocation process. The script will receive a bunch of useful variables like ${interface} and ${new_ip_address} that make it easy to get all the data we need. Check also the dhcpcd-run-hooks man page!
If you need to connect to other wireless networks, open the "Wifi" app icon on the right hand end of the menu bar, or execute "sudo kano-wifi" from the command line. Once you successfully connect to a wireless network, it will be remembered, so next time you boot Kanux it will automatically connect to the network if it is in range.
In case you need to fine tune more specific wireless secured networks, kano-wifi allows you to provide a custom wpa_supplicant configuration file, like this:
sudo kano-wifi /path/to/my/wpa_supplicant.conf
Make sure you provide an absolute path filename to avoid problems during automatic connect at boot time. As an example here's a small simple file to connect to a WPA2 network:
network={
ssid="myssid"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
psk="mypassword"
}
network={
ssid="myschoolssid"
psk="schoolpassword"
id_str="school"
}The wpa supplicant daemon log file is saved under /var/log/kano_wpa.log where you can find inner details on the association sequence.
If you need to configure the password as a 32 byte hexadecimal number you can use the tool wpa_passphrase "myssid" "mypassword"to generate it. As shown in the example, two different networks can be used (for example one for home and one for a school ssid.)
Note: As the hook scripts are initiated by a common bash process, the variables in them are passed through without the need of using an environment variable or sourcing the scripts onto each one.
The kernel has built-in support for IPv6 networking but is disabled by default. To enable it, either sudo modprobe ipv6 or add ipv6 in the file /etc/modules and restart the system:
More in-depth information regarding IPv6 and its use in Debian can be found here:
The way that the default wpa supplicant (v2.4) but also (testing v2.6 sid for armhf) ships with the new Raspbian based Stretch (Debian 9/May 2018) creates issues in the WiFi connection. A solution to this was employed by compiling a custom wpa supplicant based on the latest (v2.6) source and the following configuration:
cat > wpa_supplicant/.config << "EOF"
CONFIG_BACKEND=file
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_FILE=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_SYSLOG=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_SYSLOG_FACILITY=LOG_DAEMON
CONFIG_DRIVER_NL80211=y
CONFIG_DRIVER_WEXT=y
CONFIG_DRIVER_WIRED=y
CONFIG_EAP_GTC=y
CONFIG_EAP_LEAP=y
CONFIG_EAP_MD5=y
CONFIG_EAP_MSCHAPV2=y
CONFIG_EAP_OTP=y
CONFIG_EAP_PEAP=y
CONFIG_EAP_TLS=y
CONFIG_EAP_TTLS=y
CONFIG_IEEE8021X_EAPOL=y
CONFIG_IPV6=y
CONFIG_LIBNL32=y
CONFIG_PEERKEY=y
CONFIG_PKCS12=y
CONFIG_READLINE=y
CONFIG_SMARTCARD=y
CONFIG_WPS=y
CFLAGS += -I/usr/include/libnl3
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS=y
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS_NEW=y
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS_INTRO=y
EOF
It is important that P2P isn't defined as supported otherwise it creates a virtual wlan0 interface that conflicts with our approach to WiFi connection.
A few libraries needed to sucessfully build the wpa supplicant including:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libdbus-1-dev gobject-introspection libgirepository1.0-dev libclutter-1.0-devAfter a sucessfull compilation a custom debian package needs to be created. Additionaly two new configuration files "/etc/network/interfaces" as simple as in the following.
auto lo
iface lo inet loopbackand /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
update_config=1