Use WiFi router as switch

My workplace uses WiFi everywhere. Yet, my office room has a very poor WiFi signal. I was not sure whether it is poor signal problem or the ISP problem or any other problem, my Internet connection is suffered from the instability. When I use the Internet, or sending email, it is slow like heck and the messenger always disconnected from time to time. This is really annoyance. No Internet is better than slow or unstable Internet, because I need not wasting time to try to check mail or try to search information. Really wasting time.

Since my office room has an Ethernet cable port on the wall, and I was told by my colleague that using the cable is stabler and faster than using WiFi. Therefore, I decided to install a router in the room for me and my colleague. Without actual networking knowledge, I have to look for the information, and I found this page.

Since I do not have much information about the network topology of my workplace, I just try the solution and it works! In my workplace, when connected to WiFi network, then I can use the network printer and have Internet connection. My computer is assigned with IP address and also DNS servers IP addresses are given.

Thus, in order to install the router, yet can still connected to the network printer, online, and automatically obtain the IP address, I have to disable the NAT and DHCP server so that the router works as bridge or switch only.

I connected the computer to the Ethernet port on the wall to get the IP address of the default route and some other information such as DNS servers.

Since the router was no more acting as a router, and it did not assign IP address to the connected machine, with the available feature, I configured the router to use the remote DHCP server.

Enable the WiFi access point, then I can connect to the router with the wireless network and work as expected.

Since the network is using another IP address class, so I cannot access my router unless I configure my connection to connect to the router.

Though the connection is smooth and stable, there is a drawback. When using some Arch Linux commands such as yaourt or cURL, the connection does not work properly. Yet I have no idea how to solve this problem.

 

2014-10-29

The problem of yaourt and cURL I faced was showing the message such as “port: 80 No route to host” when using yaourt, or “curl error: Couldn’t connect to server” when using cURL, for some domains. After looking for some information from Internet, some forums mentioned that it is caused by IPv6 problem, by disabling it, the problem can be solved.

I have tried to disable it from the Network Manager. Then I found that it is not the solution. To disable the IPv6 effectively, I have to disable it from sysctl too. Now everything works fine.

(Without the router, there is no such problem. I am not sure that whether the router is configured incorrectly.)

Running multiple Firefox with different versions in Linux

Previously, in my post of the other blog, I mentioned that I have to use command-line to run multiple Firefox with different versions. Now, I found an easy solution to solve this problem. Please note that, running different version of Firefox should using different profile, just to avoid downgrading and upgrading the profile based on the Firefox version.

Assuming we installed Firefox Nightly version,

1. Firstly, using the command-line to create a new profile using ProfileManager,

   firefox-nightly --no-remote -ProfileManager

2. Then create a profile, such as “Nightly” as the profile name. After creating this profile, we can exit the Profile Manager.
3. Make sure that we did not change our default profile, that means running “firefox” or “firefox-nightly” will use “xxxxxxxx.default” profile. This also means that whenever we run Firefox, the “xxxxxxxx.default” profile will be used.
4. To run the Firefox Nightly version without entering the command-line “firefox-nightly –no-remote -P Nightly”, we can create the “desktop” file to the ~/.local. We can do this by copying the installed “desktop” file, such as

   cp /usr/share/applications/firefox-nightly.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

   This will copy the firefox-nightly.desktop to the ~/.local/share/applications/ and override the default “desktop” file.

5. Edit the ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-nightly.desktop, at the Exec key, change it to

   Exec=firefox-nightly --no-remote -P Nightly %u

   This will result that when we launch the Firefox Nightly from the Applications Menu, the “Nightly” profile will be used instead.
   As a result, we need not to use the command-line to run the instance with different profile.

Now, you can enjoy Firefox with Nightly, Aurora, Beta, or any other Firefox versions in one OS.