So. It never crossed my mind that the winmodems in the 570 and 600X were in MiniPCI slots. Thanks to Matt for pointing this out, and selling me some hardware at 12:30am via wireless out in the shadows. That has got to be the coolest sale ever, even if it was totally legit.

So the ThinkPad 600X has a CM9 in it with an N-type hanging out the side. It seems to work, even though I can’t get my own access point at the moment. Although I can hit someone elses. I’ve got two wireless cards in (didn’t think I’d ever do this) and it’s the same with the orinoco so something must be randomly wrong with the wrt54g. surprise.

I’ve got all this done on the fly to go do some testing first thing at a clients in the morning, so I really should sleep. It didn’t take too long as the minipci on the 600x is accessible through a panel on the bottom. I managed to push the wire out through the side by ripping a little piece of plasic out. now if I can make some mount right where the N connector sits so it won’t rip apart the pigtail, i’ll be all set.

Check out this photo too, from the columba tower. I haven’t got a chance to post it, but it reads: “Notice to the gentlemen: We appreciate your interest in the ladies room; however, please respect the privacy of our female guests. Should you wish a tour, contact a Club employee.” Yeah…

The soekris is still running strong and I haven’t had time to play with the queues again. Later this week for sure. For now, rest.

Someone brought a PC Card to the last Seattle Wireless hacknight. A few times since I’ve been stuck without internet. I do have a USB cable for my nokia phone, but my phone is without many features and even the “medianet” is broken, likely since I’ve moved and haven’t upgraded the service configuration since I lived in Maine, but kept the same phone. Getting the account switched was a hassle by the way and if you ever need to do this, stand in a cingular store (an offical one, not a reseller) until it’s complete.

Cingular says they have UMTS coverage in Seattle, and lists the following cards in their store:
Sierra Wireless Aircard 860
Novatel U730
Option GT Max
Sony Ericsson GC83 (Refurb)

There’s some information on Sierra Wireless’s website about hacking the earlier version of their card for Linux, but nothing about the new one. There is a note in this cingular forum where someone got the Aircard working in Linux (the forum is about getting these cards working in OSX however). Does anyone have UMTS experience with Cingular? If it just comes down to being a serial device that emulates AT commands and you use PPP, it should work with anything, but I’ve never touched one before.

Soekris firewall
Originally uploaded by btmspox.

The QoS Firewall is up. I don’t have a copy of my scripts right now. When I was testing it, some how and I don’t know how, pf got turned off. It’s turned on by default on startup using flashdist’s rc script. This took me a while to figure out when it wasn’t working. I still haven’t found any documentation about using altq/pf with a transparent bridge. Half the documentation out there on the net is about altq before it was merged with pf. I’ll try to post my configs later, as I think they’ll help. I swear that I read somewhere that you can only use altq when filtering in on a transparent bridge, but it appears to work either way for me. I don’t think random early detection / RED is working correctly, as the firebox’s bandwidth monitor still shows very spikey traffic. Maybe this isn’t avoidable. I have no idea if using ToS bits or explicit congestion notification / ECN will make any difference with the upstream to iron this out, or if I can justify the time spent on company time.

I configured the third port on the 4801 as a monitor port by adding it to the bridge as a span.(“brconfig bridge0 addspan sis2”, this is all in one line in my rc file “brconfig bridge0 add sis0 add sis1 addspan sis2”.) The manual says it can’t be a bridge member and a span at the same time. I couldn’t get it to be either. This sucks, as it seems like it doesn’t bridge when it’s a span, so your monitoring station will need to have another link if you expect it to perform dns resolution and stuff.

I also can’t find the modern equivalent of altqstat. I have no idea how to monitor the queues. I tried searching, but this is difficult as I earlier noted there’s lots of old docs. I tried asking in #pf on freenode and nobody said a thing all day. I’ve been using etherape on the monitoring station but at the moment trying to add other protocols to the protocol analyzer window doesn’t do anything and I haven’t discovered why.

But it’s working. I had to pull VoIP traffic out of the VPN for now, and remember that RTP is all over the place, but I got it into a queue. I need to really research pf some more. As much as I’ve played with it, I don’t really really get it, and I think it is about time I did.

Eric, Joel and I met at FreedomHEC this morning and saw some more presentations. I’ve never been to an “unconference” before, so it was very laid back, but interesting. I’m sure it will be more busy and popular next year, as this was the first. Unfortunately the wireless internet only worked outside of the room we were in, on the 76th floor (or 75th floor mezzaine or something) and my ubuntu installation lacked any sort of development tools so I had to keep leaving to get them installed. It’s STILL not working right, and I’m a little frustrated with it. And my netgear atheros card is giving me “ath_attach: unable to attach hardware: ‘Hardware self-test failed’ (HAL status 14)” errors. Which mades me think I broke it switching back and forth between it and the orinoco card playing around. That sucks. I need it for a client test on wednesday. I’ll probably have to go buy another and I get the feeling the boss doesn’t like these expenses. Which is weird. Since we run exchange and shit. But we’re Microsoft gold certified partners and all that, so it’s probably really free in the end.

Someone came up to me at freedomhec and asked what I did. I told them I was a trainer at a vocational type school and they said, “like Strategy?”. I was dumbfounded. Advertising works?

I’m test posting this through flickr. I’m sure this is a mistake. But here goes.

SWN hack night was tonight. We mostly met at vita but immediately moved to to Cal Anderson park due to the sun being out. Unfortunately the power solutions were lacking until Matt loaned me this crazy LiIon battery pack and that let me play a little until the rain posed some impending doom and we shut down and talked about cameras until half of us went up to a greek restaurant for dinner. I found power here and screwed with openbsd a little more.

Metrix is supposed to start selling the battery packs. I think its one of these B-5770s. Hopefully I’ll have cash, then Matt will stock a couple.

I finally got openbsd on the soekris 4801 I got to make a transparent qos bridge. I used linux fdisk to create the partition because openbsd insists on limiting the size of it’s user base by making you do CHS math to make partitions, got it installed, but then couldn’t get grub to boot it. I ended up chainloading instead of using the “kernel –type=openbsd /bsd” bit to try to load the driver directly using “root hd(disk,part,slice)” teqneq. I kept getting some error claiming the /boot was too old and I should upgrade. This works:

title OpenBSD
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1

So I got all the source together (including sys, but you only need base and etc to actually install to the soekris) and grabbed flashdist. The script automated almost everything. you just create a temp tree by extracting base and etc, compile the correct kernel using the config files provided by flashdist, and point flash dist at these and the cf card, and it does all the work. You can modify the rc sript before install to get some basic functionality in beforehand.

That’s all in and booting. I’ve got minicom installed and i’ll be setting up the transparent bridging sooner or later.

Interestingly, I’ve been playing with triple booting dos / win9x / xp (or 2003) lately at work, so I went and used bootpart to rip the openbsd bootsector on my desktop at work and now the ntldr will present openbsd as a boot option. This is kind of cool, having all of your bootsectors in files you can back up and restore, and I played a little with using dd to do the same recently as well. check out this guide for more info.

I also played with wpa_suppliant today and kept getting this error “WPA: drop TX EAPOL in non-IEEE 802.1X mode (type=1 len=0)”. I eventually got the atheros based netgear card to work using WPA-PSK / TKIP by forcing WPA using “proto=WPA” in the wpa_supplicant config file. I’ll be going back to that client next week to do some penetration testing on the wireless.

I haven’t gotten many responses in my search for an apartment. I’m not sure where that’s going, but I really should be paying attention to that rather than playing with these projects for work. or sleeping. but, hack on.

Yes. I hate the wrt54g. I bought the damn thing because it runs linux, thinking a hacked firmware would be cool to play with some day. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t really playing with computers. Time goes by, and my wrt54g v2 locks up all the time. It sucks, Eric agrees and has been pushing me to try to get some Soekris 4501 or newer model. I’d love to. And get a wireless model. And one of the ones with three network interfaces to try to implement a QoS solution at work. I installed dd-wrt on the wrt54g, and that didn’t help for shit. It’s still locking up. Linksys does suck.

However, I really need to pay attention to finding a new place to live. I’ve found a couple industrial loft leads, but I think I’m just going to have to grab a room somewhere. Anyone want to house a geek for a couple months? I was thinking taking a floor in a telco hotel and converting it to geek apartments would be the fucking coolest thing ever, but alas, I’m sure there’s business reasons not to and it’s not like I have the money. On the positive side of things:

[00:44] <topher> hey btm, if you find a warehouse that we can rent/renovate and sublet, im up for leasing the whole thing

So that’d be perfect if it could be pulled off. I don’t know how one finds warehouses around here though. Aparently it’s hard. It’d be great to have the concept of the loft on the mature/technically progressive level it was always meant to be. But, pipe dreams probably.

Maddocks sent me a new hdd for my laptop that I haven’t been able to use for something like six months now. It’s a PIII/633 or something, which seems incredibly fast to me but only underlines how severly disconnected I am from reality.

Oh and, “Over the Hedge” is funny. And the starter solenoid in the suburban is acting up again. *sigh*.

I’m sitting here posting on loftninjas.org… wonder if the concept of a geek loft isn’t as wide spread as I once thought. Did this exist outside of hancock, maine? aren’t there industrial lofts full of geeks out there anywhere? I mean, there’s plenty of lofts full of artists apparently, but who hasn’t realized that putting 10 computers on a row on desks in a loft is not only geek, but plain damn cool? seriously. I must inquire further about this, as it must just be that there are secret societies I am unaware of being new to the city.

Tron was awesome by the way, except for the dumb fuck yelling “ayeyeyeye” every ten minutes. They’re playing it again tonight in case anyone missed it.

<btm> so what’s going on tonight in 206 that’s exciting?
<fR> i think all the excitement was last night

So there.

People from maine are playing video games tonight, I don’t know if I feel like going home, trying to clean up my gaming computer turned everything else and trying to get a tunnel going. What I really want is a Metrix Mark II right now. I’ve got projects here at the school that need doing though.

Tron is playing at the egyptian this weekend at the midnight showing. A bunch of people from work are going with me tonight. Craig and Maria should be there too. I saw elsewhere on the net a bunch of people planning on attending. I wonder how early we should show? I’m excited though.

Caught a post on Matt Westervelt’s blog that appears to be replaced now regarding the Seattle Wireless hacknight now normally at 5pm I believe at Cafe Vita down the street actually at a park near by. I drove down to check it out in case I missed everyone, as blogs are, normally, so, you know, old. Like mine. Since I don’t post. But happened to find a whole group of geeks on “teletubby hill” just hanging out with a stack of hardware, talking mostly since there wasn’t any power. Everyone was really friendly and I hung around and chatted with a side group for a while and then went down town to eat with those left over after the meeting started to disperse. Great, inviting group of people, I’ll definately plan on regularly making the meetings.

Check out the planet for the combined blogs.

Maddocks is sending me a new laptop hard drive for my dead one soon, on the condition I promise to play with BeOS, so I’ll have a toy again shortly. I’ve setup what used to be LT or LT2, I don’t recall anymore, in my bedroom but haven’t taken the time to install an OS, and still need to bridge it out to the wireless in the living room since I can’t easily get a cable anywhere in this old building. Hardware costs money.

Phew…

Maria and I went out with Betsie and Allan to eat and watch Allan’s brother’s band play at an Irish Pub named the Dubliner in Fremont last night. Beforehand we ate at a Thai restaurant just up the road that was pretty good, I think, and had great service all around, as well as some vegan fare.

We bought Maria a bike on Ebay recently, we’re planning on taking a road trip down to Salem today to pick it up. My father had Bar Harbor Bike in Ellsworth ship my bike out here for my birthday, so I’m excited about that. It’s strangely one of the only things I can remember being excited about in a while.

I’ve been stupid busy at work, because I’m teaching a lot right now. So my other responsibilities seem to get to suffer and I feel like there isn’t enough time kicking around for that sleep bit.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about where I fit into the world. Considering the different social groups I’ve touched or I’m in here, and what I’m coming from, there’s quite a variety. They all clash, fairly strongly I think in the long run, and I realize my beliefs aren’t strong enough to anchor me down to the ground in one, as I keep floating around. Whoa, vague loftpost! See, things don’t change. It’s just, am I open to anything, or do I just don’t care? I don’t feel like I care anymore, if I ever did. Does that put me in a bubble that I should just enjoy and not flex? Or does the mere acknowledgement of that give me a path to the next level?

Computer. Door.