[buug] ZeroShell adventure

[Ian Zimmerman]

I have just replaced debian wheezy with ZeroShell [1] on the Eeebox that
I use to connect to the wifi in my apartment.  This was part of a
broader project of mine to reduce my dependence on our favorite
distribution, because I am worried about its future.  This project
occupies a major chunk of my time these days [2].

In my opinion ZeroShell does an excellent job of making an old x86 based
computer look like a Linksys product.  No irony intended, I mean that's
a good thing.  In fact the web interface is much better than Linksys /
Cisco ever managed; almost all the information is there and easy to find
(with one exception, see below), and the Back button works :)

I have 3 critical notes, 2 minor ones and 1 major.  Starting with the
minor ones.  There are dynamic DNS update clients for NoIP and DynDNS;
in a system which is plainly meant for hackers first, I miss a client
for the great marketing-free and free-as-in-beer FreeDNS service [3].
It cannot be because it's hard to write - I have one in about 10 lines
of shell script code.

The other minor nit: you can ssh into the box, but you don't get a Unix
shell, at least not directly; you get a console-based menu system that
is mostly a subset of the web interface, and one of the items in this
menu is an escape to a real shell.  I'd have preferred it the other way,
for ssh to give me a general shell as usual, and the menu just a normal
command.  But I understand that it would clash with the ZeroShell name
:)

Now to the one real problem I found.  It was far from obvious how to set
it up as a wifi station, as opposed to an access point.  I knew it was
possible because it was mentioned offhand somewhere on the website, but
I couldn't find anything related in the web interface, and the clear
candidate among the menu items, WiFi Manager, led to dialog screens with
wording still suggestive of an access point.  It did occur to me early
on that these subsidiary screens might be dual purpose, so to speak,
i.e. identical for the AP and station setups.  But there was no
authoritative document to assure me such was the case, and without one I
was really afraid to go there, because had I set up an AP with the same
SSID as the existing network by mistake or accident, I'd have disrupted
service for everyone else in the apartment.  In the end I gave in to
desperation and tried it, and it worked.  But it cost me a couple of
very stressful hours.

Now my Eeebox has been stripped of its hard disk and runs with the
ZeroShell SD card as the only storage.  I was even tempted to unscrew it
from its pedestal and set it on its side, which would make it resemble a
router even visually :P  But I didn't because supposedly that would
obstruct the air flow and lead to thermal trouble.

[1]

http://www.zeroshell.org/

[2]

I have already replaced wheezy with gentoo on my laptop.  When I am
finished with that, including transfering all the data to the laptop,
I plan to similarly convert the desktop.  The mail server will be last;
upgrading it to jessie proved to be quite painless, with systemd
invasion fenced off easily, and before jessie is out of support I'm sure
to have more substantial problems to solve :P

[3]

http://freedns.afraid.org/

-- 
Please *no* private copies of mailing list or newsgroup messages.
Rule 420: All persons more than eight miles high to leave the court.