News items for tag laptop - Koos van den Hout

The laptop I use can also run Windows XP when it is really necessary (every time this happens most of the time is spent waiting on windows updates). So I enabled IPv6 on Windows XP. IPv6 works nicely. I disabled the 'privacy extensions' directly because I want traceable addresses in use, even with IPv6.

The one application that goes horribly wrong now is the webbrowser Opera. When the laptop is in a non-IPv6 enabled network (like at work) and I visit an IPv6-enabled website like weather.idefix.net with it, it fails horribly: it just shows a 'network error' page after a long timeout. Disabling automatic 6to4 makes the 'network error' page just appear faster. I reported this as an bug with Opera. Other browsers (Internet explorer, Firefox) don't show this error (but I need to test them with IPv6 to make sure they don't avoid it completely).

I always used ssh-agent to remember keys for me, but lately I started adding a timeout to keys so they don't get remembered indefinitely. Especially on my laptop: what if it gets stolen, the keys are still valid when it comes out of suspend mode. So now I type ssh-add -t 3600 so they are only valid for one hour. But, that is still not ideal as I need to remember that keys might be forgotten when I click on a button or menuitem in fvwm to start a new xterm-with-ssh. Otherwise I may be thrown out directly from the session or asked for a password or passphrase, depending on the SSH security settings. So, fvwm functions to the rescue:
AddToFunc SSHUR4 "I" Exec if ! ssh-add -l > /dev/null; then ssh-add -t 600 .ssh/id_dsa <&- 2>/dev/null ; fi; uxterm -fg black -bg '#e0e0e0' -geom 80x40 -title 'slogin $0' -vb -e ssh -e none $0 &
Now I can just use SSHR4 host.name and it will ask for the ssh passphrase when needed. In an fvwm menu item: AddToMenu Remote-Logins "idefix.net%mini-freebsd.xpm%" SSHR4 idefix.net and in an fvwm button: *FvwmButtons(Title idefix, Icon mini-freebsd.xpm, Action 'SSHUR4 idefix.net' )

Yesterday evening I took my Dell Latitude C640 laptop apart to see if I could fix the USB connector and/or make some better connection for powering the GPS for wardriving. No luck: even with the mainboard removed from the case there still is no room for repairing the USB connector or fixing something to the remains of the keyboard connector. Today I took the wardrive setup with me but the last message from kismet was the dreaded: Didn't log any GPS coordinates, unlinking gps file.

Picture of the updated wardriving setup: laptop in the bag, external antenna and gps receiver on top .. the new setup is scoring a lot more networks.

Wardriving results 17 - 26 June: 639 new networks with gps locations. No big numbers of new networks found, just detours through Utrecht. But those numbers have made me steadily get up to position 25 in the WiGLE stats. Since that is a position with some active wardrivers around it, I guess that will keep changing. I also bought some extra wardriving hardware for advanced geekery: an external antenna which should score me extra networks on purpose wardriving tours, and the bits to get the results to the laptop. I will need some more work (soldering, mechanical work) before I can start biking around with the antenna on my bike.

The gps usb cable started going more and more flaky, which resulted in more networks found without location data.. which does not improve my score. Today I stopped twice on my way home to restart kismet so it synchronized with the gps again. Still, I scored 99 new networks today without gps locations, and 51 new networks with gps locations. I decided to modify an old usb cable together with an old keyboard extension cable to power the gps (power from the usb connector, data to serial) so I could revert to getting data in via the good old serial port. I considered soldering the keyboard cable to the mainboard but the service manual for this laptop makes this look like a very complicated thing to do.

Sometimes Debian makes me go "aaaargh" a bit. When I visited Paris and wanted Internet access, I found out the pairing between my phone and the laptop had gone bad (all errors). Trying to delete the pairing and setting it up again gave a problem: there is no working bluetooth-pin application at the moment. Due to the dbus package being in transition, an attempt to install bluez-pin results in bluez-utils being removed (which means there is no bluetooth stack left running to authenticate in the first place). Google-fu to the rescue: Impossible to do pairing in Kubuntu shows that ubuntu users have the same problem and Dan V posted a solution how to build the command-line passkey-agent from the bluez-utils sources and use that to get a pairing again. I'm not the only one frustrated, debian bug 382269 shows more frustrated users.

Wardriving results 7 December - 18 December: 738 new networks with GPS locations. And then the keyboard connector on my laptop broke, so I can't power the GPS puck. Only with the usb cable, and the usb connector on the laptop has always been flaky (usb hotplug manager makes interesting beeping noises when I touch the cables).

Wardrive results 2 - 12 September: 2508 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. New record accesspoints in one wardrive trip: 1317 found in Nieuwegein (see this WiGLE map of the Nieuwegein area). This is about the maximum I can do in one go: I started with a completely charged laptop and returned home with 13 minutes battery time left. I went from 35th to 32nd place in the WiGLE stats for a bit, but someone else scored a bunch of networks and I was back in 33rd place. The competition continues!

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).