Tag: WiFi

Using iwd for WiFi in Fedora

Fedora uses NetworkManager as the default for managing all the various different types of network. Underneath NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant to connect to 802.11 based, AKA WiFi, wireless networks. There is an alternative called iwd which in a number of use cases works better, it also has the advantage that it offloads a bunch of things like crypto to the kernel interfaces which makes it smaller, and it’s under active development. iwd has a nice straight forward interface as well as being supported as an alternative NetworkManager so it just works in Fedora whether via nmcli or your chosen desktop environment.

So how do you make use of it in Fedora? Well it’s been packaged and supported for some time so it’s quite straight forward and there’s two ways to use it with NetworkManager. You can either swap it out for wpa_supplicant, or they can be installed side by side and you can change the NetworkManager default in a config to enable easy testing/swapping.

Option 1 (side by side):

sudo dnf install -y iwd
sudo cat >> /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/iwd.conf << EOF
[device]
wifi.backend=iwd
EOF
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

Option 2 (swap):

sudo dnf swap -y wpa_supplicant iwd
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

You can now connect to WiFi networks a before with NetworkManager. Note it loses exciting configured WiFi networks.

Setting the wireless regulatory domain

Different regions around the world use slightly different frequencies for the various wireless interfaces available on your average Linux portable device such as WiFi, Bluetooth and other such interfaces. Overall they fit into larger categories such as 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz etc, but within each of these larger buckets countries have a subset of the frequencies, generally referred to as channels available. For example the 2.4Ghz range used by most WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces has potentially up to 14 channels available, the default is a generic “world” region which uses 11 channels that are available in all regions, but a lot of regions have 13 available for use, and some even have 14. The situation is similar on the 5Ghz range, and no doubt on the higher frequencies now becoming available too.

So to make best use of these while operating in the legal ranges for a country the regulatory domain needs to be set for the device. Linux handles this with three components, the kernel CRDA interface, a signed regulatory DB, which in Fedora is a package called wireless-regdb, but may also be called crda, and the iw tool. In some cases if an access point is using channels outside of the default “world” range you may not even be able to see/connect to the network.

There’s a two ways you can fix this. Firstly straight on the command line with the following command line options. The first shows you the current settings, the next sets the domain for the UK, but setting it this way isn’t persistent, but it’s useful for testing:

iw reg get
iw reg set GB

To make the setting persistent on every boot you just need to set a country in the /etc/sysconfig/regdomain file with a line that looks like this:

COUNTRY=GB

Of course use the code for your country of location based on the standard two letter country codes.

Thoughts on Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP)

In late December 2019 Google, Amazon, Apple and a number of other companies announced Project Connected Home over IP. Like all Internet of Things I thought I would dig into it and see what it’s made up of.

First thoughts before I even began to dig were basically “well they got there eventually!” as I’ve long believed that for IoT in the home to be successful as a whole there needs to be a single set of open standards that all devices speak so that the things can intercommunicate…. you know, just like the internet! But like so many of these things the big companies always attempt to see if they can control the entire market first, then realise they need to “compromise” and work with the other players on standards, which is when the market starts to actually mature and consumers start to win out!

If you look at the project’s web site there’s, at least at the time of writing, 16 company logos on the page, of which around six or seven I would consider household names. A standard such as this was always going to happen. If you look at the “Home IoT Market” it’s a mish-mash of competing and incompatible standards, none of which really have a lead and some of the big names, such as Apple with their HomeKit interface (I refuse to use the term “standard”), have been struggling to get any real level of foot hold in the market. Some of the more popular off the shelf devices have been things like Samsung’s “SmartThings” which implement a number of different radios etc as bridge/gateway devices to make other things work together, which in and of itself speaks volumes. If the companies themselves didn’t get themselves sorted out it would have ended up in governments mandating something. In short the whole category is a big mess!

So reading through the FAQ and various bits in the media about it what does it appear to do? It puts IP over stuff! Shocking right!? To quote the FAQ:

The goal of the first specification release will be Wi-Fi, up to and including 802.11ax (aka Wi-Fi 6), that is 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax; Thread over 802.15.4-2006 at 2.4 GHz; and IP implementations for Bluetooth Low Energy, versions 4.1, 4.2, and 5.0 for the network and physical wireless protocols.

So the technologies they’re using are WiFi, no real shock there, although there’s no mention of Wi-Fi HaLow AKA 802.11ah but for home use that’s nothing of note. Next up in Bluetooth LE, 4.1 – 5.0, again no real surprises here, there’s already a standard for IP over Bluetooth LE/mesh in the form of 6LoWPAN, the same as used by Thread and vanilla 802.15.4, slightly interesting they mentioned explicitly 3 versions of BT-LE and just didn’t say BT-LE in general as all versions support IP. The final option mentioned was 802.15.4, the bit that I find particularly interesting here is that Zigbee Alliance was one of the four companies in the original announcement, 802.15.4 is an open radio standard used by Zigbee, Thread, 6LoWPAN directly and a number of other protocols, Zigbee has their own Zigbee IP standard, which competes with Thread and others yet Thread, originally out of Google/Nest is the chosen one. I’ve also found Thread to not really be a completely open standard like TCP/IP, as while there is the OpenThread implementation, you need to be a paying member of the Thread Group organisation to have it certified!

So what else does the project offer? They mention the following but note the term “may include”.:

This may include a proposed standard for lifecycle events such as provisioning/onboarding, removal, error recovery, and software update.

I feel that the lifecycle events they mention are actually extremely important here, and standards in this area are just as important as connectivity standards such as IP for layer 3. If you look at components such as provisioning/onboarding there’s fairly new standards evolving such as the Intel/Arm FIDO secure device onboarding collaboration which are still quite new so I suspect they’re going to wait and watch these before making a decision which is actively a good thing in my opinion if it means one less new standard!

Overall there’s currently nothing actually new on offer here in terms of standards, what is new is a number of large companies committing to focusing on a single Layer 3 connectivity protocol. There’s already widely available hardware across WiFi/Bluetooth/802.15.4 as well as standard IP implementations for them all. This should actively replace Zigbee, Z-Wave and a number of other proprietary Layer 2/3 protocols and should be straight forward for adoption as there’s not actually a lot for anyone else to do.

I feel this is a move in the right direction and will make life easier for a lot of third parties who want their products to work with “the big three of Apple/Google/Amazon”, the move to more open standards is obviously good, but overall there’s really nothing particularly new other than another mechanism for closed companies to work together. I don’t think it’ll ultimately make much difference in general to the open source community as those companies will have their proprietary protocols/APIs sitting on top of IP, just like in other parts of the internet now. It’ll be interesting to see how open the process is once they release code and start to work on it.

Basically it’s a wait and watch so really I’m ¯\_(ツ)_/¯