I just picked up a Proporta Gadget Bag from Proporta.com (via ThinkGeek). I thought it would make a nice bag for keeping all my wireless equipment together. After I got it, it seemed a lot smaller then I had thought it would be. But as it turns out, it had plenty of room for my [...]
Well I finally received my atheros card from eBay. I had already patched the mac80211 and the ath5k drivers in preperation for the wireless card so in theory I could just plug it in and be ready to start some wireless fun…
However, as it turns out, the current ath5k driver does not support the ar2425 chipset. There is apparently a new version that I can try to compile but I haven’t had any luck with it yet.
I just picked up a Proporta Gadget Bag from Proporta.com (via ThinkGeek). I thought it would make a nice bag for keeping all my wireless equipment together. After I got it, it seemed a lot smaller then I had thought it would be. But as it turns out, it had plenty of room for my wireless equipment.
Currently the only problem that I have ran across is that there isn’t enough room to keep a usb cable plugged into my netbook. The solution was pretty simple, I picked up a left angle and a right angle USB extender off of eBay.
(see: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=320327324652#ebayphotohosting)
(see: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=320327323630#ebayphotohosting)
I’m waiting on my mini-pcie card off of eBay. It’s shipping from Hong Kong so it’ll take a week or so. The only other thing I’ll need after this is a panel antenna that will fit in the kit (ha ha ha). I’ve got a 17db antenna but it is a little to big to fit in any of the packs.
UPDATE: I’ve gotten the right and left angle usb extenders now I just need to get the mini-pcie card in. Once I do that I need to get bluetooth up and running and everything will be set.
What I’m planning on doing is controlling the Dell Mini from either my Nokia 770 or my G1 cell phone. Luckily both devices have an amazing development environment in case I do need to develop something. I haven’t done much research into this yet.
Earlier this week I was actually faced with my first challenging task at my new job. The QA department wanted to stress test a new database platform called “Cache” from a company called InterSystems. So around 9:30 am Tuesday, a mountainous project was more or less dumped into my lap… But its ok. This is the stuff that I enjoy/am good at.
My task was to take a IBM Blade Server that was not in use, and install Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard to each of the 14 blades. Well that might not seem like a difficult task. But after a laundry list of problems, I’ll get to those next, I was able to get about 2/3’s of the blades ready for the stress test.
First I was told that I had to use an IBM Resource disk to “partition” and setup the blade for the Server2k3 install… Well after three failed attempts at trying to use the “Resource Disk”, I decided to try an install with just the Server 2003 disk. It worked… Not a big surprise. Kinda caught a few people off guard who had been using the resource cd to setup the partitions forever. Oh and by the way… Tuesday just happened to be a Charity Dress Down day. This just means you can donate $3 to a charity and you can wear whatever you want. Just happens that in my ultimate wisdom, I decided to wear shorts.
Why is this a bad thing you ask? Well for those of you who have never worked in IT, all of the services that you connect to while you work, phone, fax, web sites, etc; are usually housed in a server room for that company or the particular location. The size of the room usually depends on the size of the company, but my works is about size of a small elementary school classroom. It is literally filed with hundreds of servers and thousands of hard drives. All these devices generate massive amounts of heat. That heat has to be removed, usually by some BIG ASS AIR CONDITIONERS…
It just so happens that the blade server that I would be setting up was directly in front of the two main vents to the server room. So I got to freeze my ass off for about 5 hours that day. Bye bye productivity…
I ended up getting two (out of 14) Blades setup with Server 2003 before I had to leave Tuesday. Before I left I started an install so one could run while I was away and it would be ready for the cd-key or whatever the next day. So I come in Wednesday morning, set the static ip and clicked next. Then I mozzied over to my cube and decided to start on my morning tasks… About 20 minutes later I decided to check on the server. Had a lovely Blue Screen of Death. I reset the blade and was going to try again. But somehow the BIOS was in some weird ass infinite loop… So I started on the next blade because I didn’t want to waste time. I got about three more blades successfully done when I started having another issue. The stupid ass cd-rom drive on the Blade Center decided that it was not going to be reading from any burned disks any more….
After an hour or so of fiddling with it, I was able to get it to install 2003 on one more blade before it completely gave out. I began some basic trouble shooting tasks and soon found out that it was still able to read factory imaged copies of disks. So I began the hunt of finding a factory copy of Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition. This may sound really easy, but its not… No one has an actual copy of 2003. Luckily, after a good hour of going through cd spindles, someone finally found one for me.
I got a couple more machines finished that day and headed home. I came to work the next day and started on another Blade. I got through another two blades before it completely crapped out on me. After an hour on the phone with IBM tech support I finally got another drive ordered. Next began the fun task of actually setting up the virtual machines.
But I’ll leave that pain for another day.
Well I guess I never really got around to posting anything after I got back from DefCon 16. It was a hell of a drive… Almost 2.000 miles to be exact. Something I plan on never doing again unless I absolutely have to. Overall it was a great conference. Had some amazy talks and from what I heard there where some crazy parties (only 19…). However next year I may have to get a “novelty” ID :D.
I decided to pickup a 500mw Alfa wireless card to add to my collection. It’s a pretty damn good wireless card. Ran me about $50-$60 from one of the vendors. It’s my first RP-SMA card and I do have to say that I sure as hell like it a lot more then MC and MMCX cards. Especially since I don’t have to worry about the damn connector breaking off. I also picked up a RP-SMA to N-Male so I could attach it to my 17DB omni-directional antenna on my roof and to my 14DB panel antenna.
While I’m on the topic of wireless security, I’ve got to mention Zero_Chaos’s and talk Mister_X’s talk. Both of them made some major breakthroughs. Mister_X is one of the main developers of the best wep/wpa cracking applications suites out, aircrack-ng. In his talk he went over a new method for attacking wireless networks, client based attacks via an application called “airbase-ng”. I have yet to test this application out but it appears that it is capable of some amazing things. Only time will tell.
Zero_Chaos’s talk revolved around a driver that was recently released for the Atheros A/B/G chipset. Atheros finally decided to get in the open source game and released the driver for their A/B/G cards to the community. Zero_Chaos took some time and dug the source of the driver and found something very very interesting.
A/B/G frequency unlocking
Apparently Atheros was soft locking the range of frequencies that there A/B/G cards could reach. After meddling with the driver, patching, and compiling it, he was able to easily receive data on the above frequencies. See http://www.ktinternationalconsulting.com/resources/defcon16-de_bouvette-farina.pdf
Well I recieved the amp today. Its of pretty good construction. For a while i thought that it may have been DOA because when I initially plugged it into the wall to try and get it to power up, the led wouldn’t do anything. Then I remembered I had a 802.11b Linksys pci card that sma on the board. I plugged it in and then was able to get some action on it. I guess it only uses power if wireless activitiy is present? I’m not sure exactly so I’ll find out.
The next task is getting pigtails for all of my different types of wireless cards and then creatting a battery pack for amplifier as well as possibly creating an additional one for the C760.
With my recent purchased of a shiny refurbed Sharp Zaurus sl-C760, I decided to get back into the wifi arena.
Since the C760 does not support on-board wifi, I’ve purchased an extremely cheap 802.11b compact flash wifi card for around $10. I could have gotten away with not purchasing another wifi card, I already have one for my zaurus sl-5500, however this cheap little guy has an antenna output. I’ve always wanted a cf wifi card with an antenna jack but haven’t seen on in years. Leave it to the Japanese to create something that only 1/10 of 1% of the market would purchase : >
Next I decided to purchase a 1W wifi amplifier. After shopping around I picked one up for around $65 on eBay.
Now I’m waiting for everything to come in the mail… Between this week and next week I’ll be getting about 4 packages from Japan and few from various parts of the US.
My next purchases for this project will no doubt be another 14db antenna and a signal splitter.
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/productfamily.aspx?id=302
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/item.aspx?id=2
Right now I’m not sure if I want to get a 2 way splitter or a 3 way. If I get a three way I will attach a 7db omni directional to it as well.
Well I recently started a position at a medical testing facility. I’m an operations assistant to two development teams. One of the questions asked during the interview was, “If given a C# book do you feel that you could learn it?”.
After doing some snooping around, I found a nice little community bookshelf with a jackpot of progamming books in a few dozen or so languages.
One slow morning, I wandered over to the book shelf to sneak it out of its hiding spot. After an hour or so of playing with VS2005, I couldn’t find 2008 any where on the network, I had the interface designed for my first application.
After a week of spending a few minutes a day with the book, I began to understand some of the basics of C#. I decided to show it to my co-worker. He loved it. The next day my Supervisor wandered over to my cube and started chatting me up about it. I went over some of the basic functions, yadda yadda yadda… Then half an hour later, the CIO walks into my cube asking me about this awesome program that I am apparently developing… Kinda surprised the hell out of me that they where all so shocked and awed that I either A. took the initiative to learn something or B. That I’m not a moron and can learn something on my own.
Either way, my first development project in C# has begun at a crawling pace, but at least its going!
Well its getting closer and closer to that special first weekend in August!
In the next few weeks I’ll be booking my airline tickets and reserveing my hotel room for my second stay in Las Vegas for DefCon. This years conference looks great with a wide variety of talks from Cable Modem hacking, yeah Robert (Moorer) will probably wet himself for missing this one ;), to JavaScript obfuscation.
As soon as the times are posted for each talk, I’ll make another post on what I’ll be attending and at what times.
See you there!
What is NetStat?
Netstat is a tool that has been included with windows ever since at least 95/NT 3.5 (UNIX/Linux has it also). It was designed to do a lot more then just monitor your connections, but that is what most people use it for, or to at least watch who has been established to your computer. That is why I am writing this article is for people who are curious on how to take that one step further and make the most out of it.
Why would I use NetStat?
Well, suppose you do not have a firewall, but you need something that can monitor your connectivity while you are away. Believe it or not, NetStat is the perfect command for you. Once you read up this article you will see just how powerful NetStat is. So, lets get started. I will include generic scenario for each use of NetStat.
Ever wonder how you can open up the command prompt on any computer and run “ipconfig” or “netstat” from any directory?
Ever wish you could run a program from any directory?
Well it was a mystery for me until I started getting involved with Linux. After I learned that it was just a simple variable that needed to be modified within the operating system, I felt pretty stupid.
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