Benavent

I’ve to confess I feel myself a little bit older for some stuff … but curiosity has been a strong force inside me.

Since I bought my brand new wrt54g-l for SoHo use I’m testing a couple of wi-fi cards.

A lot of people has wi-fi cards that they don’t use. Nowadays laptops has wi-fi inside them so it’s easy to find wi-fi cards that had fall into disuse. There’s a great chance for me to experiment with them without expend a buck.

I’ve tryed out an atheros wi-fi (thank you Nacho) and now I’m testing a U.S. Robotics. The U.S.Robotics belongs to Pablo who is helping me further than letting me his card, he has quite deep wi-fi knowledge (and also he’s a real Red Hat BOFH).

The atheros card is fairly well recognised by Fedora Core 6, you just need to insert into you pcmcia slot and type lspci then it appears. I’ve let it go by now ’cause even you cand find atheros wi-fi driver my first attempt shows that as far as I know a driver compilation was required for the atheros card.

I’m too lazy to compile it, keep myself worried about when a new dirvers appears, and re-compile it if needed. I want an easy to keep up to date driver, and easy to install wifi card ’cause I deeply believe Linux is mature for that I just have to search for it.

As long as Pablo is a wifi fan (and a hardware trasher) he offers me to test their U.S. Robotics. Well here I finish ’cause I’m on the task right now. By now, is a slightly different, forget lspci command. You put the card into your laptop slot and type pccard ident, Fedora shows something like that:

Socket 0:
  product info: "U.S. Robotics", "IEEE 802.11b PC-CARD", "Version 01.02", ""
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
  function: 6 (network)

Here I stop. Next comming posts will talk about my succes or failure with U.S. Robotics. While I was browsing looking for some info about all that stuff I’ve found a pdf quite long in my opinion about wifi cards and how to identify them (look at point 6.5) and that pdf comes from a HP guy! nice stuff.

First of all, this is just my own experience from an Red Hat magazine named How do I use the faillog program to track failed login attempts?

Let’s go:

1. Open the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file for editing.
2. Add the following lines:
   
   auth required pam_tally.so no_magic_root
   account required pam_tally.so deny=2 no_magic_root
   
3. Save the file and exit.
4. Test the configuration by attempting to login as a root, but using a wrong password.
5. Here’re my 5 cents: type this: (my output appears in spanish)
   [root@soseck ~]$ faillog -u root
   User Fails Máx Last Active
   root 1 0 03/01/07 07:40:02 +0100 pts/0
6. Keep in mind that if your’re using the authconfig tool your changes at /etc/pam.d/system-auth will be lossed next time authconfig runs.

More from my own: as a root you should use system-config-suthentication (by typing from a console, for instance) if you want to have a look on how yor system is configured. I recommend you have a look on faillog manual page. It comes with very useful parameters that makes me feel I ‘ll need a next post to talk about it, such a lock-time that lock an account during a number of seconds after a failed login.