The new house doesn't have structured cabling, and I won't be doing
anything to address that until we start work on the extension. In the
meantime, therefore, we're using Homeplug AV (networking over the
power line). I had two plugs, I needed a third so I bought the
cheapest one I could find on Ebay.
When it turned up it had no buttons - which made it a little difficult
to add to the existing network. Usually you press the "pair" button
on the new plug and then on the existing plug and count to ten and
wave a dead chicken around[*] and do a little dance, but that doesn't
work when there is no button. Here's how to do it, assuming (1) it's
an Intellon chipset, and (2) you have a Linux or other Unix-like box
with an ethernet adaptor to plug it into.
1. You need faifa . To build it,
you need libpcap and libevent: here's a quick and hacky Nix derivation .
2. Pick 8 random bytes to use for your encryption key. I did dd bs=8
count=1 if=/dev/random |od -x. This is a shared secret which you
will need to install on all your adaptors, so probably you should save
it somewhere until you're done. Note: the faifa source code
seems to suggest that the key you provide is further hashed before
being used, so maybe any amount of random stuff is OK here and there's
no need to be precious about the format.
3. For each adaptor you want to configure, you will need its MAC
address. Hopefully this is printed somewhere on the device itself: I
don't know how to get it programmatically.
4. Plug the first adaptor into the mains and attach it to the machine
where you built faifa. Now run it
$ sudo faifa -i enp0s31f6 -m
5. You should get a long list of "supported frames" which I will assume
are about as meaningful to you as they were to me, followed by a
prompt to choose one. If you were to choose, for example, a000
(which is "Get Device/SW Version Request), it might respond something
like this:
Choose the frame type (Ctrl-C to exit): 0xa000
Frame: Get Device/SW Version Request (0xA000)
Dump:
Frame: Get Device/SW Version Confirm (A001), HomePlug-AV Version: 1.0
Status: Success
Device ID: INT6400, Version: INT6000-MAC-4-1-4102-00-3679-20090724-FINAL-C, upgradeable: 0
6. To set the encryption key, the frame type is 0xa050 (Set Encryption Key Request). It prompts you further for "local or remote" (I have no idea what this means, but "local" worked), for the key itself, and for the MAC address.
Choose the frame type (Ctrl-C to exit): 0xa050
Frame: Set Encryption Key Request (0xA050)
Local or distant setting ?
0: distant
1: local
1
AES NMK key ?0001020304050607
Destination MAC address ?b0:48:7a:b9:00:00
7. Repeat for the next adapter, until you have done them all.
I make no claim that this is correct, but it seems to work for me, and
now I can plug my new Odroid C2 (I'll write about that another time,
but there's little to say so far, it just runs Kodi) into the TV
without the use of a 5m HDMI cable.
[*] make sure it's dead. Waving a live chicken is stressful for all involved.
Uh, yeah. I moved house quite recently and am only just starting to
get back on top of stuff. Without further ado:
Things I have done
Some forward progress and some sideways movement. The forward
progress is that I have been able to bring up WiFi on the GL-MT300A
which was until recently my primary domestic router. I don't know how
fast, reliable or stable it is, but judging by the number of OpenWRT
patches I haven't applied, I suspect the answer is "not very, yet".
The sideways movement is that the top-level configs (backuphost.nix,
wap.nix etc) are moved into the examples/ subdirectory and I have
ceased pretending they're device-independent, because in practice they
turn out not to be. Building abstraction layers over things like
switch vlan settings is a distraction from building the things themselves - which
is not to deny its importance, just to say that i don't want always to
be having to do both at once.
Note that as of the time I write this, the repo is still in a state of
some flux: the only thing that has a hope of building/booting is
`defaultroute.nix` and that doesn't even work for use as a router as I
haven't even tried to configure pppoe yet.
Things I have learned
The GL-MT300A is based on the Mediatek MTK7620A SoC (hopefully this
means the hard parts are also done for the MT300Nv2, based on the very
similar MTK7628NN - when I eventually find it again after moving
house, I will try it). The Linux driver for this is
rt2x00
but verifying this is correct/current/best was a long process because
when I first compiled it into my kernel it utterly failed to find any
hardware.
This took a certain amount of digging[1] to find out what the problem
was. It turns out that although there's a config option for RT2800SOC
which is enabled by SOC_MT7620 (which might make you think it's
supposed to work) there is no description of this hardware in the
upstream mt7620a device tree, so the kernel (reasonably) has no idea
that it should be using this code for anything. The fix is two-fold:
first, use the much more fully-featured device trees files from
OpenWRT
instead of upstream, and second, patch the driver so that it
advertises a compatible attribute which matches the compatible
attribute in the device tree node. It turns out that OpenWRT has
done this already as
well
and now my kernel knows it has wlan hardware and a driver which are
compatible with each other.
The fix for this is also in OpenWRT patches: it needs to be told to
get the eeprom whereabouts from the device tree, and then it can read
the actual eeprom instead of
I-have-no-idea-where-it's-getting-that-from and it gets the right RF
chipset ID.
One other thing I noticed while doing this is that the OpenWRT patch set here
didn't apply cleanly to any kernel version I had previously associated
with OpenWRT, so I went looking a bit deeper to find out what they
did.
What they did will surprise you! At least, I need to dig further to
confirm this absolutely, but on the evidence so far, it's surprising
me. Here's how it looks: Not only do they have different kernel minor
versions for different target devices (currently 4.9 for atheros
devices and 4.14 for everything
else ) but they build
these kernels to exclude all wireless support, and then build a
completely separate out-of-tree module based on a completely different
tree to provide the appropriate wifi support modules. See
the mac80211 Makefile
I have not replicated this pattern for NixWRT, mostly because I want
to see if I can get away without having to. Right now I'm picking
patches from that set and applying them
selectively
to my basic monolithic kernel, and it seems to be working. In this
regard, let me briefly tout the last item on my "things I learned"
list: filterdiff , a command line tool which
manipulates diff files so that you can drop patches applying to files
you don't have, rewrite file names, skip hunks and so on, which means I can apply
patches cleanly direct from OpenWRT and don't have to maintain patches-on-patches.
Next step: I will probably turn this into a wireless range extender on
a separate ssid than my usual, just because everything I read about
the reliability of rx200 driver suggests that if I want something
stable and performant I should also apply the rest of those (currently
inapplicable) patches to fix txpower and other random stuff which I
have no idea what it is, and my userbase - the family - won't like dogfooding on my
behalf. One of the (many, most irrelevant) changes in the new place
is the internet connection: my new ISP sent
me a free router with a dual band radio, which is in some ways much
nicer than the ones I'm building NixWRT on (came pre-configured with
all the IPv6 setup, plus 5GHz band is practically unused around here
whereas 2.4G is more congested than the A406 on a Saturday afternoon)
and in other ways is doing my head in (weird slow GUI, no real shell,
no way to tell which of the 14 devices in the house is saturating the
line) but it'll do for the moment. Apparently it's a broadcom chipset
so porting NixWRT to it might not be the best possible use of time.
Next next steps, therefore: research dualband router SoCs I would like to
port NixWRT to, and also find out how to set up all the IPV6, because
native IPv6 is kinda new and kinda fun.
[1] Which is to say, alternately staring at it and googling randomly
Latest in my ever-expanding series of diversions from NixWRT is this
foolish attempt to write a Wayland compositor using a language I don't
actually understand. I'd add:
not for the first time , except that now I check the link I see that was going to be a text editor not a compositor.
Anyway. This time it's a Wayland compositor, using the wlroots
library (described by its author as "about 50,000 lines of code you
were going to write anyway") and written in Lua. Mostly because when I
get a bit further along with it I'm going to integrate
Fennel into it, and then with a bit of luck
will have a respectable replacement for the once-brilliant but now
rather long in the tooth
Sawfish . I say "when" but
we all know I really mean "if".
At the time of writing it works to the extent that I have a Lua script
that can set up the display appropriately then allow me to display a
Konsole window into which I can type, and it renders a pointer which
moves around in expected and unsurprising ways when I stroke my
touchpad. It has no knowledge, though, of window decorations or of
stacking order or even of focus or the channeling of pointer
button/movement events onto a client.
(Decorations? Yes, I'm with the KDE guys on this one. Requiring
clients to render their own window borders and resize themselves on
the screen is like a bank requiring customers to track their own
account balances and know which market funds their deposits were
invested in: how can you ever be sure the app you thought was
"Password Wallet Master Key Entry" was actually that and not, I dunno,
"I'd like to add you to my professional Botnet" if you don't have some
kind of trustable fence around the rectangle it's permitted to draw
into. Honour system?)
Some brief notes on how I'm doing it, for the benefit of future-me and
potential benefit of present-other. I'm using LuaJIT: not for speed
but because the FFI can parse (most) C header files and there's a
lot of FFI in this project. So far I have made a fairly literal
transcription of the code in Drew DeVault's blog
posts
parts I-III, and then a rather sketchier interpretation of the code in Input handling in wlroots
Some stuff has changed since the blog posts were written. Here are
the differences and/or relevant gotchas that I noted or can remember
wlr_renderer_begin now takes int width, int height as second and third params instead of needing a wlr_output
wlr_compositor.surfaces is probably the old name for what is now wlr_compositor.surface_resources
wlr_render_with_matrix has become wlr_render_texture_with_matrix
without an xkb keymap set (wlr_keyboard_set_keymap) you won't get
any key events. You might think there's no need for keymaps if all
you want is to look at the raw codes, but nope, it doesn't work.
wlr_seat_set_capabilities is not mentioned in the blog, but you
need it set right according to the inputs available at your "seat"
to render the mouse pointer when you're running wayland-under-X (for
development, before the server is ready for dogfooding) you need to
call wlr_output_render_software_cursors(output, nil) while
rendering output. So you don't leave a ghost trail of former
pointer positions whenever the mouse is moved, you probably also
want to call wlr_renderer_clear as the first thing after
wlr_renderer_begin
there's a bit more to wlr_xcursor than it explains, and TBH I'm just going to point you to my diff instead of trying to explain it here. Because while as a general rule I would never claim that "life's too short" for doing fun things, I must concede that the remaining available time for sleeping before my alarm goes off tomorrow morning is rapidly getting that way.
There are a few reasons I've not been blogging much lately, but chief
among them is that a month or so ago my laptop was crushed by a taxi,
and setting up my blogging environment anywhere else was deemed Too
Much Of A Faff.
Happily my contents insurance company eventually agreed to pay me
money to replace it, and now I have replaced it, and various kinds of
pre-crush activity including blogging and nixwrt hacking may now
resume. This entry is mostly just a placeholder and "welcome back"
message, but it does contain a link to my presentation at Nixcon 2018
An unusual - and potentially ill-advised - method and apparatus for
the querying of an external database from a
re-frame
Single Page Application.
Bit of background
Re-frame, is described by its author as "a pattern for writing
SPAs in ClojureScript, using Reagent" and "... impressively
buzzword-compliant". Both these things are true.
The documentation talks a lot about "dominoes": there is a six step
loop that goes around and around.
events (these are re-frame events, not DOM events) are dispatched.
This might be in response to timers or to user commands - usually
you'd put DOM event handlers (on-foo and friends) on document
nodes that call re-frame/dispatch. (If you're wondering how those
elements came to exist, they were rendered in the previous iteration
of the loop.)
event handlers are pure functions which are called by the framework
when the events they're registered to are dispatched. They receive
the value of the application state (app-db), and return an updated
value. (This is an over-simplification: in general, event
handlers are pure functions which return a description of some
effect which something else needs to make happen, but updating the
app-db is almost always a required effect so in practice we tend
to focus on it.)
effect handlers are the magic that do side effects based on the
values returned by the event handlers in the previous stage.
There's one builtin to update the app-state, and you can plug others
in to e.g. do XHR or other stuff.
"query" functions - also known as subscription handlers - are
registered, which do computations (or just lookups) in the
application state.
"view" functions call query functions as required and generate
hiccup (HTMLish clojurescript data structures). These are made into
React components for you, and you attach your top-level component to
some element (typically a DIV) in an otherwise static HTML document.
Reagent/React does its thing: every 16ms, it renders your components
using the minimal amount of DOM changes to make its model of what is
match its model of what should be.
Then the user clicks on things, and DOM event handlers are called, and
the handlers call dispatch, and the loop goes around again.
Signal graph
When you read the example application, the query functions you see are
so simple that you might wonder why we even bother with them -
;; 4 lines of code to register a query called :time that returns
;; an app-db key of the same name, what is the point of this?
(rf/reg-sub
:time
(fn [db _] ;; db is current app state. 2nd unused param is query vector
(:time db))) ;; return a query computation over the application state
but where it gets interesting is that
queries can take parameters
queries can depend not just on app-db but on the result of other queries, and
queries are evaluated only when called for, and only when their inputs change
so we actually have a query graph with the app-db at one end of it and
the view functions at the other end, and only the relevant bits of it
are computed when needed. Hold onto that thought
Prior art
The re-frame documentation has an incredibly useful page on Subscribing to external data which describes two sensible ways to do it and warns against a third:
With subscriptions
If we start from the premise that components must always get their
data from a subscription handler, the obvious route is to create a
subscription handler which kicks off an async request to the external
data source, then returns a reaction which wraps some path within
the app-db where the results will be found when ready. The async
request, when finished, runs a callback function which stores the
results in the said path.
Bit of a learning curve here if you've only previously looked at the
example app, because you won't have learned what a reaction is. A
reaction is a "a macro which wraps some computation (a block of code)
and returns a ratom holding the result of that computation" and a
ratom (short for react atom) is like a regular clojure atom but with
extra gubbins so you can subscribe to it and be told every time it
changes.
With events
With a different premise, we get a different answer. Your requirement
to look something up externally is most probably driven by some user
command which is mapped onto a reframe event. In this approach, the
event handler is responsible for getting the data it needs to handle
the event, and pushing it into the app-db. Probably this means you
have one event to initiate the transfer which dispatches another event
when the server eventually responds.
Using React lifecycle methods (don't do it)
Views should be dumb. Don't do this.
A third way (unless it is the fourth way)
What if we said: the external data lookup is notionally a "pure
function" (let us suppose that the server gives the same response
every time it is provided with the same inputs, and for the moment let
us handwave over error conditions), so should sit in the middle of the
signal graph somewhere and provide its output as a subscribable value
instead of scribbling into app-db.
The reason I started doing this was that I was trying to write an XHR
subscription handler per the first approach above which subscribed to
app-db so that it could find the query terms, and because it was also
writing to app-db, it was triggering itself. Probably I was doing
something wrong (it occurs to me now that it should probably have
subscribed to a query of only the search term and not to the entirety
of app-db) but that thought did not occur to me at the time, so this
pushed me into looking for another way.
So let me start by showing some example code, and then I can try explaining it:
What are we doing here? The value we want to send on through the
signal graph is not returned by anything we call, it's provided as an
input to our ajax callback function. This means we can't use the
reaction macro, so we have to create a reaction by hand and take
care ourselves of updating the value it wraps. To do this we use
reagent.ratom/run!, which (to my limited understanding) is kinda
sorta half of the reaction macro - like reaction it runs a loop
every time the subscriptions change but unlike reaction we have to
call reset! on our ratom every time we want to provide a new value
downstream.
On the whole I think I like this pattern, at least for services which
(we can reasonably pretend) are functional - i.e. they give the same
answer every time when called with the same inputs. The external
service doesn't put stuff in app-db, which I guess might be an issue
if it needs to be merged with other data from other sources or if
multiple downstream subscriptions want to use it (but in that case why
can't they subscribe to it?) but I haven't/can't see how that
hypothetical would become real.
