cathalferris

The Ireland ISP is HEANet who had the interesting note of being the only Irish ISP that was not forced to filter the Piratebay when that court order came through, as it's an academic supplier and not a home supplier. One SSH port forward later from a machine I had access to on an academic network and I once again had unfettered net access via a proxy. That was very useful when I was abroad and using Irish websites that were geo-locked.

Agreed re: DNS as one of the easy ways to block/lose portions of the net. The other interesting way is BGP poisoning - and that's really interesting to see who trusts who!

You would be better off keeping IP addresses of alternate DNS servers than keeping a local offline copy of DNS. The likelihood of global DNS failing will be more remote than large swathes of IP inaccessibility.

Ones I have memorised:

217.159.0.17 - Satlynx german satellite ISP DNS server, I used type this in so often it's in muscle memory at this point.

8.8.4.4 - Google's alternate DNS

8.8.8.8 - Google's main DNS

193.1.193.194 - Ireland's university ISP dns server

208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 - the OpenDNS servers.

I had an MLA-30.

Dump the 5-12V step up, and get a real bias-t injector from somewhere else and run it from 9-12V. The amount of RFI that the step-up converter caused was crazy.

Don't forget to play with the gain control in the "antenna box", should be the only visible screw adjustment.

Also it would help a lot to swap out the terrible coax it comes with for a real coax with lots less loss.

I have stopped using mine since upgrading to this (https://active-antenna.eu/). The MLA is moderately reasonable, but pales in comparison to the decent quality output from the Active-Antennas product.

A quick and dirty "fix" would be to run a regular cronjob to execute a script; the script checking to see if wlan0 is present, and if not present / valid then reconnect wlan0.

Create a file called check_start_wlan.sh in root's directory ("/root/check_start_wlan.sh")

#!/bin/bash
if ! `ifconfig | awk -F: '/^wlan0:/ && $0 != "" { getline; print $0}' | awk {'print $1'} | grep inet > /dev/null`
        then `connmanctl connect _managed_psk`
fi

Change the "your_wlan0_connection_string" for your particular wlan0 connmanctl connection string

then as root:
crontab -e
Add this line to the end of the crontab:
*/10 * * * * /bin/bash /root/check_start_wlan.sh

make sure to add an empty line after that line, then save/exit.

Verify the crontab looks sane
crontab -l

This should every 10 minutes via cron: check the output of ifconfig, look for the line starting with "wlan0", get the next line and check if there's a valid IP address present (checking if the "inet" phrase is present), if "inet" not present then ask connmanctl to connect that connection.

Note - only tested in my head, error conditions not trapped, running scripts as root creates a theoretical security risk etc etc etc.
Happy to take suggestions/improvement

I ended up using connmanctl to set the configuration of the interfaces, as I was trying to get wireless working on the Beaglebone Black. I now have the pair of Kiwis almost identical in setup.

Amusingly one of the Kiwis decided that the wireless card would work again, but would only talk to the network on the ethernet connection. This meant that the Kiwi thought the ethernet was not the LAN, and required the use of passwords for local admin access etc. Went in with connmanctl and disabled wifi, problem resolved.