Tag: wireless

Mouse trap

On my way over to the park near where I work this lunchtime, I noticed something dart into the bushes. Stopping to look I noticed it was a mouse. Another mouse a few feet down was less self-concious and was gnawing on a nut or something. So I crouched down to watch. Living with four cats it’s rare to crouch down next to a mouse that hasn’t had all its limbs chewed off and its intestines spread around.

It was at this point, with me crouched next to the bushes close to the entrance at work, that my boss, and his boss, and some important visitors walked by. They later told me they just explained I did stuff with Linux security and the visitors understood completely.

They asked me later what I was up to, but I was worried that if I told them that they’d assume we had an infestation and call some professional rodent murders (as apposed to hobbyist rodent murders like our cats) so I lied. I told them I was checking for child wireless network hackers.

We put down pringle can traps.

3/8/2005 Add Comment

greenfly in my powerbook

I have greenfly crawling into the vents on my powerbook. This is because I am sat in the park and connected via wireless ethernet. My access point seems to waver in and and out of range, but a steady 30% signal seems to be maintained. With an external antennae on the house I could sit even further away. I’ll be fending the war-drivers off with sticks though. I need an EMP gun.

5/8/2003 Add Comment

Linux Access Point

Most 802.11g cards allow only Managed or Ad-Hoc modes. With the hostap Linux driver for Prism based wireless cards, the Master mode becomes available, allowing to run your own access point. I now have my central box (babaracus) as an access-point and the client laptops in Managed mode. This has severly increased throughput as I could usually only manage less than 1Mb but now can utilise the full 11. Using the userspace hostapd you can do clever things like Radius authentication and dynamic WEP keys, but I’ve not played with that yet. I’ve had a few problems (lock ups on an SMP and loss of clients after restarting the AP) but it’s early days yet.

4/7/2003 Add Comment

Remote wireless X clients

I’ve setup and old Pentium 100 Toshiba laptop with a wireless card and Debian as a “dumb-ish X terminal” at home over my 802.11b wireless network. It works rather well and very quiet. My girlfriend now has all the wonders that RedHat 9 brings, without having to lug a big heavy expensive power-hungry laptop around the house. Up until now I’d had a hacky ssh remote session thing running, but now I use XDMCP (X -probe IP) to login directly using gdm listening on the central box. A firewall attempts to protect the XDMCP and X11 services, with minimal privacy provided by WEP. I’ll have IPSEC implemented soon enough though.

I’m also working on a fail over redundant MySQL cluster setup at the moment and hope to write a quick HOWTO on it, covering Heartbeat and MySQL 4’s replication system. I’ll announce it here as usual.

23/6/2003 Add Comment