News archive August 2006 - Koos van den Hout

Wardrive results 14 - 22 August: 636 new networks with GPS locations. Wigle changed stuff and has a huge backlog at the moment, so I'm waiting for the next entries to get processed.

I played with Google Earth and it's fun and has lots of options. And lots of stuff you can play with, so after some websearches and looking at some samples I added google-earth links in Camp Wireless so you can lookup a campsite in Google Earth when it has a waypoint.

Moving at work to a new office with all the associated network reconnection problems, things getting lost and other issues. And a new view for my webcam.

My webcam is back generating fresh images. Still people visit it, so I might as well give them something to look at.

Wardriving results 6 - 13 August: 624 new networks with GPS locations. Rain isn't the ideal wardriving climate, but new networks can still show up.

The harddisk in my laptop went bad, leading to the state where it did not want to recognize the disk at all. But I wanted my carefully built Linux install copied. The old freezer trick helped: the disk was readable again. It just confused the SMART data: 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 43 (Lifetime Min/Max 65530/65).

I received spam (that's no news) with an invoice.doc attachment (that is a bit of news). Besides the usual rants about sending people word files, this has one interesting side effect: the company and author name are in the .doc file. Company: Phoenix Management Corporation author: William Esther.

While transplanting the Coffeecam to new hardware I made a copy of the entire system to a different (more silent) harddisk. The next problem was getting grub to install itself on that second harddisk. Which was easy, given the hints on a Software RAID Howto. Grub does not complain when I tell it /dev/hdc will be the future (hd0). This is something that would be a lot more trouble to get right in lilo.

Leukste SSID van vandaag: verboden_toegang_art_461wbsr. Dat netwerk had ook WEP beveiliging, dus het had zin om te beweren dat er geen toegang was voor onbevoegden.

Mijn document over draadloos netwerk uitleg en installatie bijgewerkt. WEP moet nu sterk afgeraden worden en naar aanleiding van een vraag van iemand een kort stukje over 'ad-hoc' draadloze netwerken.

Wardriving results 1 - 5 August: 206 new networks with GPS locations. I now configured kismet to show 802.11a networks too (the new card supports this standard), so maybe results will go up a little.

Using wpa_supplicant it should also be possible to log in to 802.1x secured (wireless) networks. The library network at work uses this but only documents usage with windows and macos X. I decided to give it a try and after some fiddling I had a working setup: Solis-air access under Linux.

After being unable to use the network at Mirjams' parents house because WPA is the default with their experiabox, I decided to upgrade my laptop and my home wireless network to WPA. I searched for a WPA supporting network card for my laptop. Based on the talk at the last sane conference on the madwifi driver project I chose a senao card with an atheros chipset. With a bit of fiddling I got it all working and now I have a secure network again at home.

De pagina wardriving in Nederland is aangepast met wat tips over niet opvallen tijdens het wardriven. Afgeleid van wat opmerkingen in een wigle.net forumthread over 'best practices' (engelstalig).

Wardriving results 25 - 31 July: 267 new networks with GPS locations. The heat last week kept me from going on interesting detours. The start of the new month at WiGLE gave me a very temporary high ranking for this month.