Troubleshooting CUWIN installations

Having a machine with Windows 98 image connected on the wired interface of a non-Internet node got me more than a few headaches.

Having a machine with a default Windows XP image connected on the wired interface of a non-Internet node pulls a dynamic address on boot and allows you to visit the web interface of the node at 192.168.0.1.

OK, so you have your CUWiN Metrix box and are working to get everything up and happy, but you can't connect to it with a wireless connection and can't seem to get it to do.....well.....anything.

That is where we were a week ago, but there IS hope!

First off, the CUWiN box isn't a wireless router. Huh? It IS NOT A WIRELESS ROUTER as far as we have been able to tell you CANNOT connect to a CUWiN node with anything but another CUWiN node. If you want to connect to it you need to do it on the wired interface.

OK, so I want to connect to it using the wired interface, how do I do that?

You can't. SSH is set up to deny remote logins by default. To access to box and set it up, you need to do it throught the serial port. Log in using the default password and go to /etc/rc.d

Now figure out what the WIRED IP address is, type:

ifconfig sip0

You see the first line begining inet? you see the IP Address right after it? Mine is 10.218.211.254

OK write down the IP address and type:

vi /etc/thttpd.conf

you see the line that says: host=127.0.0.1?

scroll to the 127.0.0.1 entry and hit x until you have deleted it, now hit i and type the IP address you just wrote down, so now it looks like:
host=10.218.211.254

now hit esc
type :wq! and press return

now type /etc/rc.d/thttpd restart

Now hook your laptop or desktop to the CUWiN box, you can use a switched cable or a hub, be sure you don't have a dhcp server running on the network. pump your laptop configuration or ipconig /renew it if you are using windows. You should now get an IP address from the CUWiN box. Mine assigned 10.218.211.253

Open up a web browser and type: http://

You should now have the web interface, reset your settings as appropriate.

Next week: how to add a second card and set your CUWiN box up as an access point, or, if the damn cards are too expensive, how to hook a D-Link DWL-G810 up and use it to replicate the ethernet signal to a couple dozen local users.

OK, I went ahead and bought a Metrix board, set up PXE on a linux box, got a terminal and jacked it in, hooked up all of the hardware, built a POE injector (the COTS one is on back order) and got the CuWin stuff installed.

The cool thing is that it now only takes 5 min to install it on the next one :)

What now? I get the ssid on my laptop: cuwireless.net, but it shows up in adhoc mode. When I try to connect it says "thank you, but no thanks!" and kicks me off.

It just occured to me that this might have somthing to do with the fact that the Omni I ordered isn't here so I am using a proximity fix (i.e. the cuwin box is 6" from the laptop)

Though this may be the problem, I am getting a bunch of signal and I don't see the signal as being the main problem.

There are some other weird things:

When I log in via the serial port and change the password:

passwd
New password:
Fat Finger check:

It doesn't throw an error and works fine, but on reboot the password is still "changeme". I've done a lot of work on CD distros in the past and remember having to kluge together a solution to this, is there a setting for the cuwin stuff for this, or should I be calling another script? As I recall our solution to this for our kiosks (http://www.retail-navigation.com) was to create a new script and link the resulting shadow file.

Also: in netstumbler.....the MAC of the access point...all of the bits in the MAC are set, i.e. the MAC shows up as FFFFFFFFFF. This seems a little odd to me.

We are looking at putting up 144 of these APS, the first 3 are in-house, so we need to really ring them out ahead of time (http://www.lawrencefreenet.org) I am hoping to make CUWiN the sollution on our network because HSLS solves a lot of issues.

Last but not least......I have some skillz and so do several other folks on the project, however, many of the volunteers and most of the general public don't. Is there a set of documentation for using the CUWiN software that is written from a normal user's standpoint? If not, I'd be more than happy to drop the task on one of my volunteer's desk provided he or she can easily get in contact with the developers as the docs progress. We have 10 core volunteers here with maybe 20 supplimental volunteers, so man power is not an issue.

Thanks in advance!

Joshua Montgomery

I just got the Metrix Mark I and I'm brand new to working with the Soekris boards as well as the CUWin software.

I want to install the CUWin software and need to PXE boot the device. Is there a good link of step by steps that I can follow to set up the Metrix Mark I? Thanks.

Hey all,

We just got a node installed at our home and have not had much luck connecting to it/the rest of the network.

here's the story:

The node was installed this past weekend. So far, i've tried accessing the node over ethernet cable using two different computers/os's (mac x.3.9 and Debian linux sarge). On the mac, i've been able to get an IP using DHCP that seems to fall within the schema of the network, no luck getting a response using linux.

once I have an IP on the mac, i'm able to ping the "router/gateway" and can get a MAC address using arp, but that's all. I can't ssh to it, or pull up a web interface as suggested in the documentation.

I can provide the IP's and MAC addys if that will help, but wasn't sure about posting them out in the open.

any thoughts??

Thanks,
Jamie