A few days ago I had the opportunity to run an installation of Ubuntu 16.04 on a Dell E5570 with a 6th Generation i7 Intel Skylake processor and chipset for a couple of hours. This is pretty much the latest hardware that is available at the moment so I was curious how the current Ubuntu version would fare.
Author: Martin
The IoT Elevator Pitch
At the end of the 1990s I was working on embedded devices that monitored the wear of wind turbine gears and which could be accessed remotely via a dial-up circuit switched modem connection. This eventually evolved into using the dial-up modem of the device to let it connect to the Internet so it could be accessed more cheaply when deployed on the other side of the world. That was 20 years ago and a prime use case of what is called the “Internet of Things” (IoT) today. But IoT seems to be a rather overused term today as it describes so many other applications, devices and business processes from unidirectional Bluetooth Low Energy beacons to making whole cities and factories become a part of the Internet. So I was looking for a simple statement to better grasp the term IoT and its overarching use.
Ubuntu Has Regained Its Wifi Layer 2 Tracing Functionality
Back in February I noticed that layer 2 Wifi tracing on my Intel Centrino Core Duo based Toshiba notebook from 2009 stopped working after upgrading to Ubuntu 15.10. This had me a bit worried but it looks like it is back with Ubuntu 16.04!
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A Bluetooth Low Energy Layer 2 Wireshark Trace
In a previous post on Bluetooth Low Energy, I’ve shown how to do a Wireshark trace on the HCI interface without additional hardware and attached a sample trace. The downside of this approach is that the trace is made on the HCI interface between the PC and the Bluetooth hardware so layer 2 frames are unfortunately not included. It seems to be quite hard to get hold of Bluetooth layer 2 traces, but finally, I’ve come across from which one can gain interesting insights.
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Eduroam At Airports!
I’ve written a number of blog posts in the past on Eduroam, how to set it up in case you have access to the system and how cool it is to use it as secure Internet access at any supporting institution around the world without a login procedure. As I recently found out, Eduroam Wifi networks are not only deployed on University campuses but also train stations and airports!
LTE in Sweden – Part 4 – Carrier Aggregation
As I pointed out in previous posts on LTE in Sweden, using several different LTE channels (carriers) is now becoming the norm rather than the exception. Telenor/Tele2, for example, are on-air in 4 different bands at the same time. Good for you if you have a recent product that supports LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation. While CA is great for advertising top speeds, it is much more useful in practice for another purpose.
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A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Wireshark Trace
I recently wanted to dive a bit into how Bluetooth Low Energy, also referred to as BLE or Bluetooth Smart, works on the inside. One thing that is really helpful after looking at a lot of documentation and great resources on the web is to have a look at an actual trace. There are quite a number of good tools out there to make Wireshark traces but unfortunately it’s quite difficult to find downloadable BLE pcap files. Time to change this!
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LTE in Sweden – Part 3 – TD-LTE in Stockholm
TD-LTE is used extensively in China (China Mobile) and Sprint in the US today. In Europe, there are only few deployments so far and I haven’t come across one until recently when I was in Stockholm. And again, there was more deployed than I initially thought!
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Ubuntu And SSH File Access In the File Explorer
When it comes to file access over the Internet, Windows Shares (SMB) are a no-go as file transfers are not encrypted and the ports used by the protocol are often blocked by Internet providers. Webdav shares are often also not practical. Therefore I’ve used SCP in the past on the command line to transfer individual files from any place in the remote file system. The problem with this is that for many tasks the command line is way to cumbersome to use. But did you know that the Ubuntu file explorer can use SSH/SCP/SFTP to connect to a remote file system and bind it locally? Continue reading Ubuntu And SSH File Access In the File Explorer
LTE In Sweden – Part 2 – Stockholm
In a previous post I’ve taken a look at the current deployment of LTE in a more rural area of Sweden south of Göteborg. One of the interesting things I found there was that Telenor used 10 MHz in the 900 MHz band for LTE while only the remaining 5 MHz was used for GSM. At the time I expected that perhaps in a more urban area things might be different as there might still be more need for GSM when there are more people. So I had another look in Stockholm.