Quite a while ago I have posted a gentoo ebuild for the devolo dlan cockpit software in the article devolo-dlan-cockpit-4.2.3 with gentoo. After having purchased some devolo Magic 2 PowerLan adapters to extend the existing Devolo dlan 1200 network, I have found out that the old version 4.3.3 of devolo-dlancopit does not support the new Magic 2 adapters. The Magic 2 adapters turned out to be incompatible with the dlan 1200 adapters anyway, but that is a different story. Looks like replacing the existing adapters is the next step. At least the newer version of devolo-dlan-cockpit supports both adapter types.

Devolo offers the application devolo-dlan-cockpit for download. The main purposes of devolo-dlan-cockpit are:

• Firmware upgrades for the network adapters
• Monitoring the performance
• Configuring the network adapters

Firmware upgrades are more or less plug and play. One has to click the Updates-Button and everything else happens automagically. Monitoring the network performance with devolo-dlan-cockpit is of major interest, since it allows one to try out different wall sockets for better performance with nearly zero effort. If one gets poor performance it can be of major impact just to use another wall socket in the same room.

Dlan-cockpit is available for most common operating systems. However, the only Linux distribution, Devolo supports right now is Ubuntu Linux. Most probably, the package will also work with Debian. Allthough these are binary packages, the application can also be used with Gentoo Linux. For this two binaries have to be executed /usr/bin/devolonetsvc, the service daemon and /opt/devolo/dlancockpit/bin/dlancockpit, the frontend application which depends on the service. Usually devolonetsvc is being started by an initrd script, but the one included in the package is not going to work with gentoo, so just start it manually as root user. If one really needs it that often, an own startup script or systemd configuration can be written. Below you can see a screenshot of the application.

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the updated devolo-dlan-cockpit ebuild: devolo-dlan-cockpit-5.1.6.2_overlay.tar.gz (4833 downloads ) . It also contains an adobe-air-runtime ebuild as necessary dependency. The adobe-air-runtime ebuild has been taken from steam-overlay. Download the overlay and extract it in /usr/local/portage. Be sure to include the following line in your /etc/make.conf:

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

Then emerge devolo-dlan-cockpit and configure your dlan adapters using your gentoo box.

Jürgen

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