Fix – Tinkering with Technology

I have an old PC with what appears to be a broken implementation of USB. I cannot obtain a BIOS update and there is no BIOS setting to switch off USB either. Very old Linux distributions would run on this PC, but only on those with USB support as loadable modules. For later kernels with direct USB support I would get continuous error messages to the console.

After spending some time Googling, I found this useful post

For Ubuntu 10.04 LTS I used the advice to create rules to deactivate USB entirely on this host. The first file that I created was /etc/udev/rules.d/20-disable-ehci.rules which contained the following code:-

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", DRIVER=="ehci_hcd", \
        RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n %k > %S%p/driver/unbind'"

When I rebooted the PC, it disabled one of the troublesome USB hubs but I was still getting error messages for another but much more frequently now. I experimented by creating a similar file to deactivate ohci but this didn’t do anything. I tried again with uhci and that worked, USB completely disabled.
/etc/udev/rules.d/30-disable-uhci.rules

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", DRIVER=="uhci_hcd", \
        RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n %k > %S%p/driver/unbind'"

So if you have two or more USB hubs throwing enumeration errors, try disabling both EHCI and UHCI, it worked for me.

Obviously, if you have any USB devices that you need to use with this host, forget it. You will need a new motherboard.

The old Dell laptop that I use for packet sniffing was in need of a rebuild after I had been experimenting with Zabbix. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have used the laptop that has become my network toolkit. I had well and truly messed it up and I was desperate to get it operational again.

Ubuntu 10.10 had recently been released and I had already downloaded the ISO images overnight. With a freshly burned CDR in my hand, I set about installing the new version. This laptop is primarily a network analysis tool so Wireshark was naturally the first application to be installed. It wasn’t long before I found that 10.10 has the same missing interface problem that I had experienced with 10.04. “No problem” I thought. “I will just use the fix that I found for 10.04“. Well, that didn’t work either. I left it for a day to have a think, and came back to it with a solution that I found on Launchpad. The fix is as follows.
In a terminal session, execute these commands:-

sudo addgroup –quiet –system wireshark
sudo chown root:wireshark /usr/bin/dumpcap
sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/bin/dumpcap

Using your favourite text editor, add your user id to the wireshark group in /etc/group or use usermod instead:-

sudo usermod -a -G wireshark vince

Reconfigure the Wireshark Common package and answer ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Should non-superusers be able to capture packets?’ :-

sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common

Reboot, login and test Wireshark. The missing interfaces should be present now.