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.

Do we see a trend? Nah, just a lazy weekend. We saw “Thank you for smoking” in the theater. I had heard about this on NPR and really wanted to catch it. It was funny straight through, totally worth it. We saw “Pride and Prejudice” too, which we both also really enjoyed. We watch “Walk the Line” the movie about Johnny Cash. This was okay, seemed like it wasn’t really written that well, not really worth it even though I’m a poor fan. I watched “The Chronicles of Naria” the other night, and enjoyed that quite a bit. We saw “The Island” a week or so ago, that was an okay action movie, but a little flawed and I was dissapointed Steve Buscemi had to die so early on. Abner mentioned catching “V for Vendetta” in the theater, but we haven’t made it yet. So that’s still a plan. We’ve got an awesome array of theaters in Seattle. The Egyptian down the road likes to play old classics at midnight. We haven’t caught one yet, although we saw “Brokeback Mountain” and “Capote” there a while back. Capote was great, Brokeback not so much. But they play “Army of Darkness” and stuff there late at night, every time the title changes I’m wowed by how fortunate we are.

We went to Mashiko’s again. It turns out a bit of their menu is “typo’d” where items are marked as vegan. The Veggie Bento box is marked vegan, which contains vegetable tempura, but their vegetable tempura isn’t marked vegan. It turns out the veggie bento box is vegan, less the tempura, which is kind of a rip off. Also their house soup has two broths, and different fixings. The vege and tofu option is marked vegan, but the curry broth has chicken and the original broth, which I think is the same base as their unvegan miso, has skipjack flakes or something in it. Another “typo”. Dissapointing. But the vegan sushi options are still wonderfull.

We tracked down the Whole Foods Market in Bellevue tonight in search of dessert. We were going to get cinnamin sticks at Pizza Pi but they keep strange hours. Apparently they’re closed every monday, as well as the first and third sundays of the month. Anyways, the prepared foods at Whole Foods were a wonderfull selection, although all we picked up were some great cookies.

We’ve only gone hiking a few times since moving here, which seems insane since we’re surrounded by opportunity. There’s no end to hiking in the Puget Sound region. There’s more state and national parks than I could keep track of. Of note, is that the Cascade mountain range to the east and the Olympic mountain range to the southwest, both provide tons of hiking. There’s a number of parks in and around Seattle, outside the mountains, that still provide good views without much travel. But the mountains are within a couple hours.

We went to Wallace Falls with friends on Sunday. It turned out to be rainy, Saturday was much nicer, and we had expected the reverse, but the mist made the very mossy hike kind of fresh and almost more remote feeling. We ate at the top of the upper falls and had a nice time coming back down, running half the way mostly off and on.

We’ve walked around Discovery Park over by the sound when we first moved to Seattle. For being so close to the city, this was a nice escape. And Bellevue is home to Cougar Mountain which has steeper grades and a more hiking feeling, even though to get any distance you end up zigzagging around the mountain.

Strategy has been busy lately! I’ve been honing back up on HTML and CSS lately, and found myself asking an A+ student today what the difference between and “Absolute and relative URL” was. He looked at me quizzically wondering what a URL had to do with the command prompt. It’s mind bending explaining CSS in one lab, going to the next and working with batch files, and helping a student troubleshoot active directory replication across sites in yet another. I’m encouraging more students to come in and spend time in the labs, something the Strategy offers that noone else around Bellevue seems to. If they do, there’s certainly going to need to be more of us!

Pretty busy week. We ate at Mashiko in West Seattle this week on the recomendation of Mitch. Pretty good vegan options, the best sushi options I think we’ve seen so far. We went back to the indian restaurant in Bellevue across from Strategy the other night, we haven’t been there for a while. I think it’s called the Taj Palace or something, the owner is super nice. Last night we went out for sushi somewhere on 45th with friends. Had something there called a Bento Box which was really impressive. I think it was Kozue. Tonight we went out to the new Teapot location up the street on 15th. The new location is nice, but somehow we managed to find the same loud atmosphere I’ve been hating for a week. Just lots of loud people out lately I guess.

We’re going hiking with friends tomorrow, I’m looking forward to that a great deal. Maybe we’ll get to go by Pig’s Peace too.

I heard Maria talking on the telephone about it almost being Spring. It’s surprisingly cold here today, about 42 according to our back window thermometer, sitting trying to be usefull until the we’re off on another road trip, really needing it to decide how late to stay in the sleeping bag.

Maria had the flu this week, which made it really hectic. She had a fever Monday and Tuesday and could start really moving around again by Wednesday. We started cooking meals for one of her coworkers this week so Maria can try some more experimental recipies on someone with a more discerning palate than mine, so that kept things hectic as well!

I took two minutes to open up the case of my SFF box today, the fan on the new video card (since the cola lan accident) seems to not enjoy collecting dust. I guess I need to take care of that more often, but the pile of dishes in the kitchen that have been there all week cry for attention. Really working and commuting takes up so much time now. I’m up by 6, get to work between 7 and 8, and don’t get home until 4 on short days (or 8, on long days) and then stare at the pile of dishes and the litter box. This week, there’s been a lot of just going to bed.

We got up early this morning because I wanted to pop into the office to make sure the labs were going to be ready for a class today. Afterwards we went over to Globe for the first time in a while and picked up way too much food, as usual, but brought home a nice box of home fries to pick at over the next few days. With so much cooking recently, the fridge is full of leftovers. It’s the first time I’ve made lasanga that hasn’t dissapeared within three days.

We’re planning on going to the anti-war march today at 1pm, but it’s so cold and we’re so worn out we’ll see how far we get. I really need to get more exercise, I haven’t been for a few weeks and I can feel the fatigue building up again. It’s really weird feeling the motiviation changes that come with getting enough exercise. I’ve been really dismal this week and I’m sure it’s just because I’ve been sleeping too much. Chicken or the egg and all that.

I haven’t gotten any material up on the blog yet. I was thinking about doing it this weekend if I had time, but I actually ended up getting my boss, Mitch, to rant in front of one of the cameras we use for recording classes so I can transcribe an interview to the company blog, because he has so little time to sit down and write something up. He was in the office this week, and this morning when Maria and I stopped in this morning. We chatted about everything, but it’s been interesting mostly talking about health and nutrition. I picked up a copy of the food revolution for him recently, after he kept asking me how to solve world hunger. He was moved by the factual information. It’s fueled a bit of conversation since, as he and his wife have been been vegan for a week or two now.

Anyways, I’ve gotten distracted by conversations, how strange, familiar feelings from years past? Enjoy the third anniversary of the invasion.

Maria and I took a trip up north to the Pigs Peace Sanctuary today. We took 25lbs of carrots up with us, recommended by the flyer we pick up now and then at Madison Market, our super awesome neighborhood coop here on Capitol Hill. It seemed like a lot, but it went fast! Their website recommends bringing four 25lb bags of carrots to feed all the pigs. When we got there, we wandered around the farm for a while before we figured out who was in charge and asked what to do. Judy gave us a quick tour and upon bringing our carrots she took us into the “California” pigs pen. She threw a few carrots and then called the rest of the pigs and left us with them. It was amazing, around fifty pigs slowly trotted in from the fields to get carrots. We threw out all 25 pounds in a few minutes and sat, watching all the pigs around us, admiring the strange sheep and the horses as well. After a little while another pig came running up to us, but I couldn’t tell what it was at all as it came fast. It turned out to be a larger calico pig, who after wandering around us a bit proceeded to act just like a dog, but more friendly! It came up to us and rubbed against us, laying down on Maria’s feet looking for a belly rub. We must of scratched it for twenty minutes for wandering down into the field to look around a little more. The pig followed us and oinked as we walked away, squealing as we got further away until we’d stop, let it catch up, and pet it more.

Eventually we lost it and went back to look around the farm some more. Judy explained the situations with their recently burned educational center as we offered volunteer help. As usually they need help on the weekdays which is hard for us, being so far away, but they can always use help so we’ll probably try to go up on a couple Sundays to help out. They’re going to need help rebuilding the educational center after they get done with the red tape of insurance. She also mentioned that Side Car for Pigs Peace, a Vegan shop up in the University District that we’ve been to a few times, is having a hard time finding volunteers, so maybe we can help out there.

Yesterday we went to VegFest with Betsie and Alan, so it’s been a very vegan weekend. Unfortunately most of the good vegan wares we were already aware of and there wasn’t any labeling policy so we had to go and examine the ingredients at every table but it was nice to see some familiar vendors and get some free Ice Cream.

After Veg Fest we went out to a movie and wandered around Capitol Hill for while. It was very nice taking the bus around and hanging out in the park near Seattle Central. It’s great being in a diverse, accepting city, where there’s always something to do and the weather is almost always good enough to go out and do something. Seriously. Move to Seattle.

I’m testing out blogger, thinking about using it at my new job. I’m working at Strategy Computers, a training company that does the usual cross-selling and promotion but excels in the training, having been around here for 18 years. We provide mostly certification training but do everything from teaching people how to type through corporate training on Exchange and the likes. Lots of A+, Network+, CCNA, MCSE training though, as well as the programming tracks like MCSD, custom software testing and game testing programs (popular, being around Nintendo and all that). So I’m really busy lately. Maria and I are settled in Seattle, on Capitol Hill. We went to Chop Suey a couple nights ago with friends, which was fun although the lineup got ignored. It’s only a block away, because we’re in such a crazy neighborhood. Plus there’s places like Globe and Teapot right around the corner which are really, really good, although we cook at least 90% of our own food lately. I’ll try to communicate regularly, but like I said, busy…