I started using ZFS a few years ago, and it’s been nothing short of amazing. However, one area that I wanted to take advantage of is the fact that zfs send/recv act as a very convenient incremental backup system. After some research, I found that very few providers natively supported this, and the ones that did didn’t seem to have competitive pricing for a home-tier usage (i.e. enterprise grade redundancy and reliability not required). With a pool of about 7TB and growing, most of the options just ended up being too pricy. After looking at my options, I decided to apply a bit of DIY.

After having my Mox for over a month now, I’ve made a few changes, and have a few more complaints.

I ended up salvaging an internal antenna from another device, and using the original WLE900VX card instead of the SDIO WiFi for 2.4GHz. It only has two antennas for the time being, but that’s still no worse than SDIO card (and, you know, it doesn’t have bug-riddled firmware).

I’ve also slowed down the fan a little bit more, so that the card still stays under 70C under most ambient temperatures. It is a tiny bit hotter with the extra card running in it.

So, what are the problems?

The first is a bit of instability. There is a known issue with soft rebooting some Moxes, and mine seems to be one of them. However, since the Mox has the same auto-updates as the Omnia (including kernel updates, which require a reboot), it’s hard to tell what really happened when you come home and the Mox is unresponsive.

The main problem I have is the case design. It certainly looks fine, but there are some functional issues I have with it:

• Thermal management, or utter lack thereof
• Have to disassemble large parts of the case to access one module
• Limited places to put antennas, and high risk of accidentally pulling a cable

Read on for the details.

I finally got my Turris Mox. I’ll start with an “as-is” review, then head into the improvements that I made.

I recently ran into an issue, where I had a loop that was to be run concurrently in multiple threads, that looked something like this:

loop:
    main_stuff()
    only the last thread to get here in every wakeup cycle should perform this:
        additional_stuff()
    wait()

In other words, the goal was to have every thread run main_stuff(), but have additional_stuff() run after every thread has had a chance to run main_stuff().

The first solution I came up with was this (pseudocode):

AtomicInt totalThreads;
AtomicInt waitingThreads;
Object notifier;
try:
    totalThreads.increment()
    loop:
        main_stuff()
        if waitingThreads.incrementAndGet() == totalThreads.get()
            additional_stuff()
        synchronized (notifier) {
            notifier.wait()
        }
        waitingThreads.decrement()
finally:
    totalThreads.decrement()

At first glance, this would seem to work. Some testing indicated that it did. However, if an OS has exceptionally poor scheduling, or only has one CPU core to work with, then what would happen is:

1. Let’s say two threads are at the wait() part
2. They both get the signal to proceed
3. One thread gets all the way back to the check before additional_stuff() before the other thread gets to the decrement()
4. Because the number of waiting threads is still equal to the total number of threads in the loop, it runs additional_stuff() when it shouldn’t have.

In this particular case, additional_stuff() running an additional time wasn’t harmful to the operation of the program, merely a performance issue. But the issue didn’t even manifest until testing it on multiple different platforms.

The fully-working solution that I came up with after seeing the problem was this:

AtomicInt totalThreads;
AtomicInt waitingThreads;
AtomicInt counter;
Object notifier;
try:
    int lastCounter = counter.get();
    totalThreads.increment()
    loop: 
        main_stuff()
        if waitingThreads.incrementAndGet() == totalThreads.get()
            additional_stuff()
        synchronized (notifier) {
            while counter.get() == lastCounter():
                notifier.wait()
        }
finally:
    totalThreads.decrement()

void notify():
    synchronized (notifier) {
        notifier.notifyAll()
        counter.set(0)
    }

Notice this version correctly handles this, by having the notification operation reset the variable, then waiting for every thread to catch back up. It also accounts for multiple notifications happening while one or more threads are still processing main_stuff().

OpenWRT seems to have issues with inserting bad data into RRDs, especially after reboots. I made the below script to fix affected files:

#!/bin/bash

FILE=$1
TIMESTAMP=`date +%s`

if [ -f $FILE ]
then
 rrdtool dump $1 > $1.xml
 sed -i "s/<lastupdate>.*<\/lastupdate>/<lastupdate> $TIMESTAMP <\/lastupdate>/" $1.xml
 rm $1
 rrdtool restore $1.xml $1
 rm $1.xml
else
 echo "File does not exist: $1"
fi

Save it somewhere in your $PATH, and chmod +x it. You may also wish to change /bin/bash to a different compatible shell, as you may not have bash installed.

To use it, simply stop luci_statistics (and anything associated with it – check ps to see if any collectd processes are still running). Then, run something like this:

find /srv/rrd/ -name '*.rrd' | xargs -n 1 rrdfixer

where /srv/rrd/ is the path to your RRDs that you want fixed, and rrdfixer is the name of the script.

What happens to the RRDs is that instead of proper timestamps, “NaN” gets inserted instead. Simply replacing these with the current time won’t fix the bad data, but it will at least allow new data to be written to the file.

I was able to get in on the early bird deal for the Omnia, so for me it was only $200 including shipping. I can safely say it’s worth every penny of it.

There are a couple outstanding bugs, like:

1. certain RRD graphs not working
2. A bug that affects dhclient+LXC
3. kresd not supporting (or not configured for) local name resolution

In addition, the auto-updater will reinstall certain packages even if you removed them manually.

Apart from that, everything is great. The 12 LEDs on the front can all be individually colored and can be either left to be controlled by the hardware (except for the PCIe and user-defined LEDs) or have triggers manually specified.

The device easily has enough horsepower for the purposes of a networking device, and there is a 2GB RAM upgrade available. As for networking, the main switch (the 5 LAN ports) has two connections back to the CPU, allowing for more bandwidth on topologies with multiple internal networks. The WAN port automatically switches between TP and SFP, allowing you to connect to certain fiber ISPs without a modem or interface converter.

The system provides three miniPCIe slots, with the one closest to the CPU supporting mSATA and the one furthest away supporting a SIM card. The middle slot is pre-filled with the full-length 2.4/5GHz Wifi card, with the one closest to the CPU having the half-length 2.4GHz-only card. This means that if you want to use a third full-length card or cellular card, you’re good to go. However, if you want to use an mSATA drive, you’ll need to move the 2.4GHz card to the SIM slot. This entails taking the entire board out of the case, since you’ll need to move the mPCIe standoffs from half-length to full-length and vice versa, which requires taking the board out of the case. You might have to do that anyway if you aren’t careful, as I was able to make one of the standoffs come unscrewed simply by trying to remove the card. Other users have also reported some lose screws.

The case itself has five holes for bulkhead-mount pigtails/antennas. It comes with three 2.4/5GHz antennas, with the outer two using signal combiners/diplexers to run on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, with the inner antenna being 5GHz only. You can use the extra two antenna holes to add extra antennas for a third band or a cellular modem, or just add dedicated 2.4GHz antennas rather than using diplexers. However, this might prove to be insufficient antenna holes when 4×4 MIMO hardware becomes more commonplace (Compex has a card in the works, but it’s currently in pre-order, and only then it doesn’t include an RF shield). Still a downgrade from the 16 antenna holes on my RSPro case.

The board also provides plenty of headers to use. 10 GPIO lines, 2 UARTs, JTAG, and a 12/5/3.3v header which could be used to power a hard drive (assuming it supports enough current). It also has 2 USB 3.0 ports, a nice step up from the RSPro’s single USB 2.0 port.

One very useful feature is schnapps, which is a program that manages BTRFS snapshots. You can make use of the second reset mode (hold the reset button until two LEDs light up) to reset to the latest snapshot. This allows a faster option to get the router up and running in case of locking yourself out, but you lose the ability to drop into a rescue shell to fix the problem non-destructively. In addition, resetting with 3 LEDs on reverts to the factory snapshot. If it’s still hosed, mode 4 allows for a reflash from a USB drive, while 5 LEDs enables a recovery shell via UART. This has several advantages over the more traditional squashfs root + RW overlay, but has the disadvantage of not having compression. It also keeps the kernel in the filesystem and allows it to be updated, something that you would normally have to reflash for.

Overall, I’d give it a 9.5/10. Only things stopping it from being a 10 are the aforementioned software bugs, and a possible lack of future expandability as M.2 replaces mPCIe. I ran into the same issue with the RSPro and its miniPCI slots, but the difference here is that mPCIe to M.2 adapters are readily available, cheap, and still offer enough bandwidth (500MB/s per slot with the Omnia’s PCIe 2.0) compared to the much less common miniPCI to miniPCIe adapters which would be a bottleneck anyway once Wifi starts breaking gigabit speeds. As for >1gb WAN connections, you might run into trouble there, but in theory, it would be possible to rig a 10GbE card up to the Omnia and still have it operate at 4gb/s.

Need WiFi in a Firebox? No problem. You just need a PCIe to miniPCIe adapter, a PCIe flex adapter, and a Wifi card (preferably one that supports AP mode of course).

Now, I made the mistake of trying to do this with the WLE900V5-27 as pictured. It’s a great card if you can get it to work, but barely worth the hassle. The card uses external ground and 5v connections, and it’s massive. The two problems that the card’s size presents are that you need a miniPCIe adapter with enough space around the slot (I used the MP2W), and you have to deal with the huge RF shield on the bottom of the card too. The RF shield means that not only can there not be any components on the board below, but you’ll also have to tape over anything possibly conductive. I used the MP2W adapter, which came with some capacitors which were in the way of the card. Fortunately, they weren’t necessary for the adapter to function so removing them was safe. Unfortunately, I missed a part that needed to be insulated the first time around, so one of the FFC cables let some magic smoke out and I had to switch to the other one. Nothing else was damaged so everything worked fine once I fixed the insulation issue.

On top of that, the card uses MMCX connectors, so you’ll have to get different pigtails as well. As for actually mounting the pigtails/antennas, the easiest way is to take the PCI bracket the adapter comes with, take the pieces that hold the card to the bracket, and bend them so that they’re parallel with the rest of the bracket. Then, you can secure it in place with whatever means necessary.

Quick script for controlling the arm/disarm LED, created from the info here. I took a quick stab at trying to make WGXepc run on Linux but didn’t have any luck, so I just created this instead.

#!/bin/sh

lport='dd of=/dev/port seek=1167 bs=1'
fport='dd of=/dev/port seek=1179 bs=1'

steady="\x00"
green="\x13"
red="\x0b"
flash="\x10"
off="\x03"

case $1 in
r|red)
 printf $red | $lport 2>/dev/null
 ;;
g|green)
 printf $green | $lport 2>/dev/null
 ;;
off)
 printf $off | $lport 2>/dev/null
 ;;
steady)
 printf $steady | $fport 2>/dev/null
 ;;
flash)
 printf $flash | $fport 2>/dev/null
 ;;
*)
 echo 'Usage: wgled (red|green|off|steady|flash)'
 ;;
esac

Unfortunately since it’s just a single bidirectional LED, there’s no way to get the green and red on at the same time.

These addresses and values are for the X-Core-e boxes. For other boxes, look in the WGXepc source (available here) to find values and addresses. The value that you printf is the value you want to write, while the seek value for dd is the address, converted to decimal.

Still not sure how to control the disk or expansion LED.

I bought this to replace a Wi-fi card in my laptop (Thinkpad X300) since the standard card had flaky Linux support. The 7260HMW is a half-length miniPCIe card with 2xU.FL connectors.

Good:

• 802.11ac support
• Good Linux drivers, works out of the box on Debian testing
• Built-in Bluetooth 4.0
• Supports AP Mode
• Low power usage

Bad:

• General signal strength is slightly on the poor side (happens on both Linux and Win7 so it’s not a driver issue)
• Only 2 spatial streams supported, only 2 antennae. If you currently have 3/4 spatial stream 802.11n APs, this card could possibly see worse performance than a 3/4 stream client.
• AP Mode is completely half-assed, only supports 2.4GHz band which means no 802.11ac Also it only supports 1 AP or STA at a time. See the dump below, section “valid interface combinations”.

Other:

• If your laptop has a Bluetooth LED in addition to Wi-fi like on many Thinkpads, this card won’t interact with it. In fact, having multiple BT cards (this card+builtin BT) can even cause the LED to not even work with the builtin BT if you choose to leave it installed (Easy enough to remove on my X300 but difficult on my W510).
• The Wi-fi LED will just be on solid, rather than on+blink on activity. Does this on Win7 and Linux, and none of the settings in /sys/class/leds/phy0-led/trigger seem to get the desired behavior. If you want this functionality, you’ll have to write a script to manually toggle the LED (There’s a netdev LED trigger out there, but it was very unstable for me).

Stuff:

Dump of phy info. Note the no-IR flags on the 5GHz frequencies, meaning 5GHz AP mode is not supported.

After not being able to get this card’s GPS to do anything, I forgot about it for a while. Now that I’ve had some time, I revisited it and was able to get it working. Read on to see how.

(more…)