Recently I have started using Devolo dlan 1200 PowerLAN adapters. With these one can get a network with up to 1Gbps without having to install additional wires by using the power lines. Of course the 1Gbps are optimum values under perfect conditions. Practically one gets 100 Mbps to 600 Mbps, but this is enough for most purposes.

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 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 efforts. 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, they support 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 start 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.

Screenshot of devolo dlan-cockpit

The Gentoo way

For gentoo users here is my overlay including the devolo-dlan-cockpit ebuild: devolo-dlan-cockpit-4.2.3_overlay.tar.gz (5022 downloads ) . It also includes 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 monitor your network nodes using your gentoo box.

Jürgen

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