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.